The Pact

by Jennifer Sturman

  “I tried to, but then I got distracted when you seemed so ill.”

  “How did you know?” asked Matthew.

  “I didn’t know for sure,” said Peter. “It came to me at lunch, actually, right before the police showed up. When Emma and her mother came down.”

  “What came to you?” I asked, curious as to how he’d gotten to the answer before I had.

  “I did see someone out by the pool with Richard. I swear I did, Rachel. But here’s the thing. I think it may have been Mrs. Furlong I saw, not Emma.” He continued. “Last night, I ran into her in the hallway. It was dark, and when I first saw her, I thought she was Emma. If there’s not much light, and you’re far away, and you don’t get a good look—it wouldn’t be hard to confuse the two of them. They’re the same size. They have the same hair, and the same build. It could easily have been her that I saw from the window, and I mistook her for Emma.”

  “That’s what just occurred to me, too,” I explained. “I was looking at the picture of the two of them on the table, and it’s an easy mistake to make. They do look a lot alike. You saw Lily and thought it was Emma. You’re not the only one, either. Luisa and Hilary saw someone coming back from the pool that night. They only saw a reflection in a mirror, and it was dark, but they also thought it was Emma. So Luisa and Hilary can testify that they saw her, too.”

  “Luisa and Hilary can do what?” asked Hilary. She tossed me a can of soda from the doorway. I did what I usually do when somebody throws something my direction and ducked. Peter neatly caught the can with one hand and set it on the nightstand.

  Sean, Jane, and Luisa were behind her carrying steaming coffee mugs, two of which they handed to Matthew and Peter.

  “You and Luisa saw the murderer,” I said to answer Hilary’s question, “on her way back from killing Richard.”

  “So now you think it was Emma, too?” asked Luisa, horrified. “Rachel—you’re out of your mind. First Matthew, now Emma. I thought we’d already agreed that it wasn’t Emma.”

  “We’re not talking about Emma,” Matthew explained.

  “We’re talking about Lily. Peter, and then you and Hilary all thought you saw Emma. But you simply mixed her up with her mother.”

  “Incredible,” said Luisa. “Lily?”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that Lily killed Richard?” said Jane.

  “But, why?” asked Sean. “Richard—well, we all know what Richard was, and, while I don’t understand why Emma would want to marry him in the first place, I can completely understand why she’d want to kill him. But, Lily was the only one who didn’t seem thoroughly traumatized at the prospect of a wedding. Why, she and Richard even seemed to get along.”

  “Maybe she’s just very good at hiding what she’s feeling,” I said.

  “So that’s what they teach you in charm school,” said Hilary.

  “But, what about what happened to you, Rachel?” asked Jane.

  “Yes? Are you saying that Lily attacked you, and then, when that didn’t work, she tried to poison you?” pressed Luisa.

  “She poisoned Richard,” I pointed out. “And, now that I think about it, she was the one keeping everyone’s glasses full at brunch—including mine.”

  “And she was up and about last night,” Peter added. “I saw her. I should have figured it out, then,” he reflected.

  “And she was wearing a white bathrobe!” I exclaimed.

  “Matthew, are you sure Rachel doesn’t have a concussion?” Jane asked. “She’s not making sense.”

  “I saw something from the corner of my eye, last night, right before I was hit. It was a flash of white, and then I thought it was Peter’s T-shirt, but it wasn’t, it was Lily’s bathrobe.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” said Peter. “Why would Lily attack you?”

  “Maybe she thought Rachel knew something,” said Matthew. “Do you, Rach?”

  They all looked at me expectantly.

  “Me? I think it’s pretty clear that I know nothing. I turned in Peter, then I thought it was Matthew.”

  “Yes, Rachel’s obviously clueless,” said Hilary. I flipped a finger in her direction.

  “I’m just relieved that it wasn’t Emma,” confided Jane. “I thought, just for a moment, that she…I don’t even want to say it out loud. Sean told me I was crazy to even consider such a thing.”

  “Of course you were,” said Luisa.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” asked Jane.

  “What can we do?” asked Luisa. “Denounce Emma’s mother to the police as a murderer? Besides, what proof is there? Hilary and I didn’t even realize it was Lily we saw and not Emma. And we got rid of whatever evidence the glasses might have provided.”

  “Crap,” said Hilary.

  “Mierda,” echoed Luisa.

  The men looked at them in surprise. I’d forgotten that they hadn’t yet heard that part of the story. Luisa filled them in, reddening slightly with embarrassment as she related her and Hilary’s adventure in the wee hours of the previous morning. In hindsight, their rash actions were all the more unfortunate.

  “So, there may have been evidence that would have cleared Emma, but it’s gone now,” said Luisa. “If only we’d known what had really happened.”

  “It was pretty stupid of Lily to leave the glasses there in the first place,” grumbled Hilary.

  “So, it looks like we’re back at the beginning,” said Sean. “The police still don’t have any reason to think Emma’s not guilty. And we can’t prove to them she’s not.”

  “I wish there were some way I could take back my testimony,” said Peter.

  “The good news is that what you told them is still not much to go on,” said Luisa. “Talk about circumstantial evidence—it will never hold up in court. And if this lawyer knows what he’s doing, and I hope he does, it will never even get that far. He’ll rip your testimony—and Emma’s false confession, to shreds.”

  “But does it really work that way?” asked Sean. “If you have a confession, do you need to worry about a lack of evidence?”

  “Well, no,” Luisa admitted. “Although a good lawyer would be able to mitigate that.”

  “Jesus. Even if she doesn’t end up being convicted of murder, I don’t want Emma to have that shadow hanging over her for the rest of her life,” said Matthew. “We need to do something. We all know that she didn’t do it. And I think we’re all convinced that Lily did. Lord knows, her mental state has been pretty fragile the last couple of years and she’s had breakdowns in the past. I tried to get Emma to tell me what was going on, why Lily did it, but she wouldn’t tell me. Maybe she just couldn’t stand the thought of Emma marrying Richard.” His usually ruddy cheeks looked gray.

  “What a mess,” said Jane. “Why doesn’t Lily just confess that she did it? I mean, what kind of mother would let her own daughter take the rap for such a thing?” What kind of mother would murder her daughter’s fiancé, I wanted to ask, even if he was a nefarious troll? But that didn’t seem like a very productive direction in which to take the conversation.

  “Maybe Lily was counting on the police not being able to figure it out,” I ventured. “She couldn’t have imagined that they’d go after Emma instead. And after Jacob’s false confession, O’Donnell would probably think that a confession from Lily was just another attempt to protect Emma.” We were all silent, thinking. I had the odd feeling that I was missing something. There was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  “There must be some evidence, somewhere, that would point to Lily and clear Emma,” said Jane, who firmly believed that every problem had a solution.

  “Wait a second!” said Luisa, excitedly. While the rest of us had been spinning our wheels, she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor. She had the document I’d found earlier, the prenuptial agreement, open in her hands. She looked up, her eyes wide. “You’re never going to believe this.”

  “I’d believe anything at this point,�
�� I said.

  “Would you believe that Richard was blackmailing Emma?”

  “What?” We couldn’t have spoken more in unison if we’d been rehearsing the line all weekend.

  “How could anybody blackmail Emma?” cried Hilary. “She’s practically a saint.”

  “I can’t tell,” said Luisa. “There’re a lot of references to Exhibit A and Exhibit B, but the exhibits aren’t actually in here. This document says that should Emma not comply with the terms of the agreement or initiate divorce proceedings, Richard automatically gets full control over ‘the materials itemized in Exhibits A through L’ and can publicize them as he sees fit. There’s also language in here giving Richard access to the Furlongs’ assets and saying that the Furlongs have to do everything possible to further Richard’s business and social interests. Wow—they sure didn’t teach us anything like this in law school.”

  “They didn’t even teach us anything like that at business school,” I said. “So what are these ‘materials’? It sounds like whatever they are would affect not just Emma but her entire family.”

  “I wish I knew. It would sure answer a lot of questions,” answered Luisa.

  Matthew was sitting next to me on the bed, and I couldn’t help but sneak a look at him. It must have been a relief to understand that Emma had been marrying Richard under duress, and not out of love. And I thought I could see a trace of relief on his face, mixed with anger that Richard could have treated Emma so badly.

  He’d sat through all of this, not saying much. Now he spoke up. “This all explains a lot. But it doesn’t help Emma. She’ll never let her mother take the blame, even if she is responsible. Trust me—I spent hours yesterday trying to convince her to either talk to Lily about it or even to the police, but she wouldn’t have any of it. That’s why she gave her false confession—she was trying to spare her mother.”

  “But why didn’t Lily say something?”

  Matthew shrugged. “Rachel had a point—maybe she thought the police would think she was trying to protect Emma, just like Jacob tried to do. It’s hard to say. And the fact that Lily’s not that stable doesn’t help. Her version of reality doesn’t always mesh with everyone else’s.”

  “It’s so unfair,” said Hilary, frustrated. “Richard completely had it coming, and now he’s going to end up destroying the Furlongs anyhow, one way or another.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We need a plan. And not just any plan. A good one.”

  “Gee, thank you, Rach,” said Hilary. “We would never have figured that out.”

  “Look, you can be as snide as you want after we’ve decided what to do.”

  “It would probably help to know what the blackmail was about,” said Jane.

  “I have an idea about that,” I said. “There’s something I need to check out, though, before I know for sure.”

  “Good,” said Matthew. “That’s a start. But—and it’s hard to say this about my own godmother—it would be even better to find some direct evidence tying Lily to the crime.” There was a new forcefulness in his voice. I wished Emma could see it.

  “There is no evidence,” said Jane, sounding dejected for the first time that day. She didn’t add in the “thanks to you” that I would have tacked on, with a nod to Hilary and Luisa.

  “There’s no evidence,” I said instead. “At least, there’s not any now.”

  Peter finished my thought. “But maybe we could make some.”

  CHAPTER 33

  I curled up on the sofa in Jacob’s study, the retrospective of his work open in my lap. I knew what I was looking for now, and the book didn’t fail me. In fact, I was surprised that others hadn’t figured it out before me. Jacob was world famous—more than a few art experts had followed his long career; there must have been dozens of published monographs dissecting each series of his paintings.

  I’d heard the stories about how Jacob was instantly recognized as a boy genius, immediately upon setting foot in New York. It seemed unlikely, given the early work hanging on the wall, that the international art world would throw itself at his feet based on paintings like that one. But, when I looked at the retrospective, it was hard not to notice that the paintings that had launched his career were dramatically different from anything that came before or after. I was the last person to claim any knowledge of art, but now that my suspicions had been awakened, it was difficult to believe that he actually painted the initial works himself that made his reputation. I wondered whom he stole them from.

  I worked in a business where you were only as good as your last deal. Reputation was everything in banking. Reputation and connections. But at least the standards by which bankers were judged were largely objective—you couldn’t argue with a person’s ability to analyze numbers and generate fees. For the very foundation of an artist’s career to come under public scrutiny—that was an altogether different situation. If it got out that Mr. Furlong had passed off someone else’s work as his own, it would no doubt forever blemish his reputation, regardless of the excellence of the years of work that had ensued. It would be quite a scandal if it ever did come to light.

  Still, I couldn’t believe that Jacob would sell out his own daughter to avoid a scandal. And the bitter conversation Peter and I had overheard the night of the rehearsal dinner indicated that he was willing to face exposure. But, I realized, Emma didn’t give her father the choice. He might have been able to withstand having his reputation torn to shreds, but Emma was probably worried that her mother wouldn’t have been able to deal with it. With Lily’s overdeveloped sense of what was and what was not appropriate, for her husband to be revealed publicly as a fraud—Emma probably worried that her mother would have imploded. So much of who Lily was and what she was about was how she thought people perceived her and her family. And a big part of that was her husband and his accomplishments. She’d taken quite a leap when she married Jacob. Perhaps she thought people were just waiting for their marriage to fail, and she wanted to prove them wrong, to prove that the blue-blooded aristocrat and the dashing artist created a perfect life from unlikely beginnings. It was bad enough to have to contend with Jacob’s clandestine affairs, but fraud would have cast a new level of shame on the family.

  I shivered with the stark realization that Emma would rather be married to a man she hated than for the world to know that her father was a fake and for her mother to have to deal with the consequences. But part of me felt an overwhelming sense of relief finally to understand why Emma had been willing to go through with the marriage, why she had been so intent on her path, like a prisoner being forced to walk the plank on a pirate ship, knowing that there was no other option.

  I wondered how Richard had discovered this secret. It didn’t surprise me that Richard, being Richard, didn’t just ask for money, like a normal blackmailer. He wanted more than money. He was smart enough and slimy enough that he’d always be able to make his own way. But he didn’t have the connections and the prestige that the Furlongs had. He needed their stamp of approval. People gave a lot of lip service to meritocracy, but fundamentally the right names and the right background and the right connections were still incredibly important if he wanted to climb to the pinnacle in New York. At the core of the city was still an entrenched Old Guard establishment, and Emma and her family could have given Richard access to that in a way he could never have hoped for otherwise. I wondered if part of it, too, was about how much he just wanted to be part of a family. It was an incredibly warped way to go about it, but Richard was pretty warped.

  Lily gave me more credit than I deserved, however. She’d seen me sitting here with this book, and then I’d started asking questions about Jacob’s early career and how they’d met. She’d thought I figured it all out long before I did.

  “Rachel, darling. Jane told me you were up here. How are you feeling? I heard you were ill.” I looked up. Lily was standing in the doorway, her dark gold hair swept neatly into a French twist. In her crisp linen blouse and slacks and her discreet jewel
ry, she looked every bit the Upper East Side matron.

  “Hi, Mrs. Furlong. I’m feeling much better, thank you. Still a bit nauseated.”

  “Well, I’ve brought you some ginger ale. That always helps to settle the stomach.” She handed me a brimming glass and sat down on the sofa beside me. “Drink up,” she encouraged me.

  I obediently drained the glass and waited for its contents to begin their work.

  “Good,” she said. “You’ll be better in no time.” Somehow I doubted that, but I gave her a small smile and let my heavy eyelids droop. My grip on the book loosened and it started to fall to the floor. Lily caught it. “I’ll just put this away.”

  I didn’t have much time, so I launched right in. “Jacob didn’t do those first paintings, did he?” I asked. “The ones that launched his career.”

  Lily slipped the retrospective back into its slot on the bookshelf and turned to face me. “I had a feeling you’d figured that out. No, of course, he didn’t. It’s fairly obvious when you look closely.”

  “How did you find out? Did he tell you?”

  “No, darling, of course not. When Jacob and I became engaged, my parents hired a private detective to investigate him. They were concerned that he was only interested in my money and status. Gracious. If only I’d listened to them.” A distracted look came over her face. She crossed to the desk and took a seat behind it.

  “And the detective found out about the fraud?” I prompted. My voice sounded weak.

  “It wasn’t really fraud, darling. That’s such an unattractive word. The paintings were by Jacob Furlong, all right. Just not Jacob Furlong, Jr. Jacob’s father did them. Jacob Furlong, Sr. They were too avant-garde for Louisiana in the forties, but they made quite a splash in New York in the sixties. Apparently Jacob’s father, when he wasn’t busy sharecropping or tenant farming or whatever it was, was quite a painter in his own right. I guess there’s a long family tradition of creating art in barns.” She straightened the blotter on the desk and began untangling the phone cord.