“Jesus H. Christ,” he said to the empty dining room. “He’s playing the fucking piano.”
The widower was playing the piano.
Chapter 14
Gwen closed the door to the breakfast room and leaned against the wall. The men in the dining room began talking the instant she left, and while she hadn’t been able to make out actual words or sentences, she could guess the subject.
What was Gwen Amiel doing at the scene?
Why was she the only one who heard the baby crying?
Who had brought Tess to her house?
She wasn’t even tempted to go back in to reargue her innocence. Because she wasn’t innocent. If she’d stayed away, if she’d minded her own fucking business, Priscilla might well be alive.
She sat on one of the twelve chairs neatly arranged around the glass-topped table. The Lawrences ate most of their meals in the sunny breakfast room, with its framed botanical prints and built-in cupboard displaying a complete set of never-used china. She sat there for several minutes, unable to move.
The music finally roused her. The Beethoven sonata again, the one that started out so lyrically, then accelerated to near-frantic intensity. She left the breakfast room and walked slowly to the library. Tess sat on the floor by the piano, watching her father play, uncommonly still, as if she, too, was mesmerized by the sonata. Nick stared up at the ceiling as he played, rather than hunching over the keyboard in the usual way.
Even the music sounded different, at once more passionate and melancholy. She listened for a few minutes. No, not more melancholy, for the wistfulness was written into the music. The sonata—the Farewell, Priscilla had called it—sounded riper, more mature, fuller and richer in every way. It struck her, suddenly, the cruelty of the situation:
This was Nick Lawrence’s greatest performance.
“Gen! Gen!”
She blinked, looked down, and saw Tess toddling toward her. She put a finger to her lips, but too late.
“Gen!”
The playing ceased, saturating the room in brutal silence.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she scooped up Tess.
He sat there, his back to her, not moving.
“I’ll take Tess…” She started to leave.
“Wait.” He turned. His face was flushed, beads of perspiration clung to his hairline. His eyes were a deeper, fiercer blue than before, and though his cheeks looked dry, his eyes glistened with tears.
“I thought I’d take Tess for a while,” she said. Although she should get home right away to oversee the FBI’s search of her house.
“I’d like to be with her,” he said quietly. He got up from the piano bench and walked toward her, extending his hands. Tess jumped from Gwen to her father, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“I’m…sorry.” It was all she could say; what she wanted to do was flee.
He shook his head. “I’ll have plenty of time to practice.”
“I meant about your wife.”
The watery gleam drained from his eyes. “Of course,” he said, “thank you very much.”
He sounded stiff, as if forcing out the words with great effort, but then he always spoke in formal cadences, avoiding contractions, slang, verbal shortcuts of any kind. He talked the way he played piano, with precise and practiced control.
“I’m sorry I got involved,” she said, wishing she could quit while ahead, but wanting him to hear it. “If I hadn’t been there, at the ravine, maybe things would have turned out differently.”
He nodded slowly, staring intently into her eyes, the most attractive man she’d ever known. In spite of everything, in spite of Tess squirming in his arms, the child’s mother lying in a morgue somewhere nearby, detectives at Gwen’s house dusting for fingerprints…In spite of all that and much more, at that moment she was thinking that Nick Lawrence was the most attractive man she’d ever known.
“We’ll have the rest of our lives for recriminations,” he was saying. “Why didn’t we bring in the police at the outset? Why did I open fire on the kidnapper the way I did? I think we’d all do well to look at this whole episode as somehow inevitable, preordained.”
This whole episode? His daughter’s kidnapping, his wife’s murder—an episode?
“If I hadn’t come—”
He put a finger to her lips and she felt a hot tension grip her body at his touch.
“But you did come,” he said softly, still looking into her eyes. “The only people who should feel responsible for what happened are the people who took Tess from us.”
She swallowed and wished like hell he’d show some grief about his wife, some anger, something other than the serene, almost decorous melancholy she’d heard in the Beethoven piece just then.
“I need to go home now, I…” Better to leave out the part about the FBI searching her house, though she doubted he’d much care.
“Of course.”
She headed across the hallway.
“Say bye-bye, Tess,” he said behind her.
“Bye-bye.”
“Can you say, ‘See you tomorrow’?”
Gwen stopped, slowly turned. “Tomorrow?”
“Nine o’clock, as usual,” he said.
“But…”
“I’ll need you more than ever, now, Gwen. We both will, won’t we, Tess?”
He kissed his daughter’s neck, forehead, both cheeks, the tip of her nose. Tess squealed happily as he carried her back into the library.
She was interrupted in the foyer by a mousy young man wearing a white shirt and khaki pants.
“Miss Amiel? Charlie Nevins, FBI?” He pushed thick tortoise-shell glasses up his nose. “We need to do a trace metal test. Would you follow me into the kitchen, please?”
“What’s a trace metal test?”
“What’s a—” He adjusted his glasses again, but they were already in place. “A trace metal tells us whether you’ve held a firearm in the past twenty-four hours.”
They thought she’d held a gun? That she’d fired one?
“But I washed my hands earlier, back at my house,” she said.
“Not a problem. Soap and water can’t completely remove the metal molecules.”
“I was wearing gloves when I fired,” she said, making no effort to disguise her bitterness.
“You were—oh, I get it.” He giggled nervously. “It’s just an aerosol spray,” he said as he followed her to the kitchen. “A couple of squirts, then we examine your hands under an ultraviolet light. We’ll know the results right away.”
There were two cars parked in front of her house when Gwen’s taxi pulled up. Four men were shouting at the front door when she got out.
“What the hell is going on?” she yelled as she ran up the front walk.
All four turned. Dark jackets, plain ties, white-bread faces with grim expressions.
“Who are you?” one of them asked.
“Gwen Amiel. And who are you?” Though she could easily guess.
“FBI,” said the same agent. “We have permission to search the premises in the matter of—”
“I know why you’re here.”
“Some kid won’t let us in,” another agent said.
“Some—oh, Christ!” She stepped up to the door. “Jimmy? Jimmy, it’s me.”
“Mom?”
His voice through the closed door was muted, but she heard the panic loud and clear.
“Open up, Jimmy.”
The door moved a crack and Jimmy peered out. Then he flung it open and threw himself at her.
“They…wanted to come in but you said…you said don’t…don’t let strangers in the house and then they said they were going to break down the door and Mrs. Pearson had already left because your car was here and she forgot you left it here and she thought you were inside and I called your name and…and…”
“It’s okay, Jimmy, it’s okay, you did the right thing.”
She stroked the back of his head and turned to the four agents.
&nbs
p; “You sons of bitches. He’s six years old, for chrissake. Were you really going to break down the door?” She was almost shouting.
“Now calm down, miss, we were only—”
“Calm down? This is my son. He was home by himself…”
She’d kill Mrs. Pearson. The drop-off policy was written in stone: Jimmy wasn’t to be left until Gwen waved from the front door, even if the Honda was in the driveway.
“May we take a look inside?” one of the agents said.
She waited before answering. If she said no, they’d get a warrant. They began to shift around, clearing their throats, glancing about. Finally, she moved aside to let them in.
“Sorry about that,” she told Jimmy when they were alone on the front stoop.
“What’s going on?”
“Well, someone took Tess Lawrence and left her here. The police—and the FBI—want to find out who might have done that.”
“Why did somebody take her?”
“That’s what they’re trying to find out.” She ran her fingers though his fear-dampened hair. “Come on, let’s make sure these guys take good care of our house.”
They watched as two agents in the living room dusted for fingerprints. Jimmy was rapt, mouth and eyes wide open, as the agents used flashlights, blue powder, and tape to collect prints. Gwen left him in the living room and went upstairs to her bedroom, where a third agent was riffling though her underwear drawer.
“Is that necessary?”
“Yep,” he answered without turning around.
“I said you guys could look inside. I didn’t realize that meant pawing through my underwear.”
“We could get a warrant, Mrs. Amiel.” He squatted and opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. “This is a kidnapping case, ma’am, and the child was…”
She found the fourth agent in Jimmy’s room, searching through the few toys they’d acquired since moving to Sohegan. He held up a big plastic water gun.
“Don’t worry, my son has a permit for that,” she said.
He turned and started to say something. She quickly left the room and headed back downstairs. They were gone in an hour, leaving the house, though not her nerves, pretty much intact. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink to get rid of the chemical smell left over from the trace metal test. She’d passed, of course, much to the obvious disappointment of the three thousand FBI men observing the procedure in the kitchen at Penaquoit. She popped a frozen macaroni and cheese into the oven for Jimmy and poured herself a tumbler of scotch.
Sheila Stewart rapped on the kitchen door as Gwen was doing the dinner dishes. She’d finally managed to coax a still-excited Jimmy to bed just a few minutes earlier with an extra story and the ultimate bribe: chocolate chip cookies. He’d eaten them as they studied the almost-full moon from his bedroom window. His face shimmered in the moonlight, but he looked fragile and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. Times like these she was tempted to let him sleep in the bed with her, for her sake as much as his, but she was afraid it would screw him up in some way. He’d been through enough with his father.
“What in the name of God has been going on?” Sheila said as she stepped into the kitchen. She wore a tiny black tank top and denim cut-offs. From buttoned-down banker to biker chick in just a few hours.
“You heard,” Gwen said.
“The whole town’s heard. Got a drink?”
“I have some orange juice, maybe soda.”
“Scotch, please.”
The events at the Devil’s Ravine must really have been stirring things up; Sheila rarely drank anything stronger than light beer. Gwen poured them both scotch over ice and brought the glasses into the living room, where she collapsed on the sofa. Sheila sat next to her.
“So, tell.”
Gwen filled her in, leaving nothing out. Just talking to someone who presumed her innocence was bracing.
“Here? They found the kid here?”
“I’ll never forget how Tess looked, so helpless and tiny, sitting in the middle of this room like a toy someone had left behind.”
“McGillicuddy at the bank is just about busting at the seams with the part he played. Old man Cunningham had him fetch the five million from a bunch of money-center banks in Manhattan. It arrived by Brinks truck this morning. McGillicuddy ran out personally to meet it. That’s what passes for high finance in these parts—cash arriving by truck.”
“Is it traceable?”
She shook her head. “Nobody asked us to record the serial numbers, and even if they had, there wasn’t enough time to do it. We had to have the cash first thing this morning. It appears that there’s a newly minted multimillionaire running around here someplace.”
“Probably running as far from Sohegan as he can,” Gwen said.
“Well, you wouldn’t catch me here five minutes after I came into that kind of money.”
Gwen smiled again. Sheila would probably stick around Sohegan with a billion dollars. She relished the role of town dyke, though she’d never admit it; she savored the stares and tsk-tsks she elicited when she and Betsy strolled through town. Not that they held hands—they weren’t out to flaunt anything. But you knew they were a couple the moment you saw them—it was in their eyes and body language as much as their tight Levis and clunky hiking boots.
“How’s the old man taking it?”
Gwen told her about Russell Cunningham crouching over the body, unwilling to let go.
“Later, at the house, he seemed more confused than anything else. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look in his eyes.”
“Losing your second child…” Sheila said. “I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”
“Did you know his son?”
“Everyone did. The old man sent him away to boarding school, same one he’d gone to. The Cunninghams don’t like their young mixing with the local riffraff. But Russ went native anyway. He was killed with a local girl, you know, the night the cops chased him over the embankment.”
“Well, there’s nothing ‘local’ about Nick Lawrence.”
“Amen. Priscilla was always a daddy’s girl—I went to school with her, right through junior high. She did just what her daddy wanted her to do. Went downstate and found herself an out-of-town prince, then dragged him up here on a leash.”
“You talk about them as if they were royalty.”
“Well? The Cunninghams may owe their fortune to this town, but they’re not going to get their blood mixed up with the intermarried half-wits who live here, and I don’t blame them. You know the way royalty from one European country only marries royalty from another country, since no one in their own land is highborn enough? That’s the way it is with the Cunninghams.”
“They find their princes elsewhere.”
“Exactly. Except Nick Lawrence wasn’t exactly a blue blood. He looks the part, I suppose, the genes are probably good. But he’s flat broke, they say.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“They? They is…us, I guess. Sohegan’s a small town. If you haven’t learned that already, you’re about to.”
“All I wanted to do was blend in.”
“Not anymore. You’re about to be notorious.”
Gwen sighed. “Sheila, I hope you don’t think—”
“Don’t start.” Sheila drained her glass and put it on the coffee table. “You had nothing to do with this, okay?”
Gwen reached over and hugged her friend, inhaling deeply as Sheila gently patted her back. If only she could stay there in Sheila’s arms, feeling trusted and safe. But the gentle pats were beginning to feel more like not-so-gentle caresses—or was she imagining it? It had been so long since anyone had held her. She pulled away and felt loneliness return like a chill.
“Thanks,” she said. “I forgot how good a hug can feel.”
“You need to get a life, my dear. Painting walls only goes so far.”
“Do you think the trim is too bright?” She pointed to the front window.
Sheila sigh
ed and shook her head. “I know it’s slim pickings up here, but even a fling with one of our local hill apes would do you some good.”
“I’m happy with things the way they are.”
Sheila studied her a beat. “That husband of yours must have been a real winner.” She stood up. “I can’t wait until you’re ready to tell me all about him. I thrive on that kind of story.”
“Barry’s the past,” Gwen said. “He’s out of our lives, permanently.”
They embraced again at the kitchen door.
“Thanks for the inside scoop,” Sheila said.
“Thanks for listening.”
Sheila was halfway down the concrete steps when Gwen called her.
“He was playing piano this evening.” Sheila looked puzzled. “Nick Lawrence. He was playing Beethoven, like nothing had happened.”
Sheila shrugged. “The rich are different. Even the nouveau rich.”
Later, trying to sleep, Gwen heard a car drive down the street, stop in front of the house, then continue toward the dead end. The headlights briefly illuminated her bedroom as the car headed back toward Union Avenue. Fifteen minutes later another car turned onto the street. She hurried to the window and pushed back the curtains. A dark minivan slowly drove past the house, with two people in the front, at least one more passenger in back. She saw the driver lean over and point to her house.
She closed the curtain and jumped back into bed, but for the next hour she was tormented by the sound of cars entering and leaving the short dead-end street, the sudden flash of light as they drove by on their way out.
Sohegan’s a small town. If you haven’t learned that already, you’re about to.
Gwen pulled the covers over her head, tried unsuccessfully to sleep. She’d come to this jerkwater town to become anonymous, to blend in where Barry could never find them. Now her house was a local shrine.
Disillusions Page 10
