He’d have had every right to ask the same of me.
I started shaking. Everything so cold.
“Kenny?” I said. “I can’t.”
But I had to. Because it was my fault. I knew that even before I could inch one foot ahead of me, rasping against the floor because I didn’t have the strength to lift it.
I’d done this. I’d made it happen. And the flourishes were intended to let me know, rubbing in the guilt of it just like the note on Sembles’s door.
“I’m so sorry.”
I pushed my other foot forward, trying not to close my eyes. I didn’t deserve not to see it all—how pale he was. How his face still looked so kind.
Another sliding step. Another. Still so far from him, like he was drifting away at the end of some narrow cave and it would take me days to reach him, longer and longer no matter how much distance I could cover.
I shuddered again and wanted to throw up. Kept swallowing against it, moving my feet by inches, wanting to bring him back, wanting to be dead myself.
Shuffling, weak, gaining tiny increments of ground, until I was there beside him, long after I thought I’d given up hope of reaching his body.
His eyes were open, turning milky. I closed them as gently as I could.
I made myself examine him, move my eyes slowly down past the horror of his neck, to the split pomegranate he held to his chest, then the other hand, lying alongside his body, palm open.
At its center, six of the broken fruit’s seeds glowed red, ruby kernels laid out in a crooked row.
For Persephone. For me.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying to hang on.
Persephone had to live among the dead every winter, because the ruler of Hades had pulled her down to his kingdom and she’d eaten six seeds from the pomegranate he tried to console her with. After that, she was bound to him forever. Married to the lord of ghosts.
I felt a rush of hot acid coming up my throat. Blanked out because my skull couldn’t contain the enormity of what I had caused. Too painful. Too huge. Too much to bear.
Everything was sucked away—substance and perspective, the realness of it.
There was only cold, and silence, and this stupid girl standing next to a dead man, shaking, until she kissed both his cheeks and pulled a quarter from her pocket and headed for the jukebox. It took her ages and eons to walk that far, and two hands to steady the coin into the slot.
She didn’t need to flip through the rack of stiff pages to find what she wanted, just pushed B and then 17, because that was Kenny’s favorite, that was Ray Charles doing “America the Beautiful.”
And then it was me again.
I could hear the mechanism pick up the 45 and drop it, the rasp when the needle bit vinyl.
I leaned against the machine, closing my eyes at last. There was the snare drum, then the trumpets, and the touch of Wurlitzer, and, finally, that voice:
O beautiful for heroes prov’d in liberating strife
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life
America, America, may God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine.
It made my eyes hurt, thinking about what kind of man Kenny was to have loved those words so dearly.
Not some flip asshole like me. Not some cheap pompous cynic who should have been killed in his place.
I stood up straight and forced myself to look at him again, at the damage I’d done. And then whispered, “God shed his grace on thee. . . .”
There was one more quarter in my pocket.
I used it to call 911.
Didn’t give my name.
I took one last look around the room.
The doors to the back stairs were jammed shut—Kenny’s mop run through their looping handles. I left it in place so the cops would know this wasn’t done by the guys upstairs.
Ray was finished, so I pulled the street door toward me, spilling light onto linoleum worn down to black by decades of weary boots.
My vision got all blurry with leaking salty wet and I caved against the aperture’s frame, knowing the wrong person was alive. Knowing I had to make it right.
I pulled myself up, walked out onto the sidewalk, into the glare.
A front was rolling in. Snow.
Fall had lasted all of two days this year.
“You’re goddamn late,” Ted snapped from his office doorway.
I walked to my desk, rising howl of sirens as fanfare. “I just found another . . . someone. Dead.”
“That supposed to be funny?”
“My friend. Kenny.”
He listened, quiet but pissed, as the sirens slowed and stopped—one at a time and quite nearby.
Ted pointed at me, snarling, “Beginner’s luck.”
I spat, “Syphilitic psychosis,” and pointed right back.
He slammed the door. Good.
I turned sideways in my chair, hugged my knees up to my chest, shut my eyes, and worked really hard at not crying. I had to think. I wasn’t sure about Sembles, but Kenny’s death was laid squarely at my feet.
I felt a pair of hands come to rest gently on my shoulders. Wilt’s voice, quiet. “You were close to that guy, weren’t you?”
I nodded, couldn’t talk.
“Must have been horrible, finding him like that. Can I do anything for you? Get you coffee? Call Dean? I’m sorry, I feel so damn useless. . . .”
“You’re not useless. You didn’t get people killed,” I said, and then lost it.
He squatted down, wrapping me tight in his arms.
“Shhhh . . .” he said, while I sobbed into his tie. “You didn’t kill them, honey. Whoever did is sick . . . he hurts people because he wants to. This started practically before you were born. You’re not the reason, or the cause, you hip?”
“Maybe for Sembles. But Kenny . . . if he didn’t know me, he’d be alive.”
“And you always drop by the bar before work?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Guy was a cop,” Wilt said. “Knew what he was getting into.”
“But—”
“‘But’ my ass. You want to do something for Kenny? Get angry. Get righteously pissed and find out who did this to him, and to you. Nail the fucker.”
I blew my nose. “Can I give Ted a good kick in the balls first?”
He curled his lip like Elvis. “Be my guest. When you’re done, Simon wants to talk to you.”
I shivered. “Come with me?”
“Course I will,” he said.
Simon had eight-by-tens spread out all over the big table. He looked up when Wilt and I came in. I tried not to think about what he might have had to do with Kenny’s death.
I needed him to believe I didn’t suspect him of that. Of anything.
The phone rang. Simon picked up, listened, said, “Yes, Amy . . . Maddie’s right here.”
He handed me the receiver. “Your mother. Line two.”
I pushed the blinking cube of Lucite, right below the dial.
“Mom?”
“Madeline. Dodie’s dead.”
CHAPTER 43
I collapsed into the nearest chair.
Mom’s voice came through the line brisk and efficient. “Maria found her this morning. She died in her sleep.”
“Jesus.”
“Of course she wanted to be cremated, and not in the cemetery since Jake isn’t there. There’s a lunch at her place tomorrow and then Saturday we’ll scatter the ashes on the lake at Camp, so I guess we’ll all head up. It’s not far from you, so that’s easy. Or do you want to come down for the thing here? It’s mostly everybody local, but Julie and Bill are coming from Boston.”
She could have been talking about pillowcases, or demitasse spoons. Offhand, if breathless, logistics.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll drive down there first.”
“Then Friday, June and Ogden will fly in to Albany and rent a car. It’s about halfway between Albany and
Montreal, so flying never makes sense to me, because of course by the time you get through the airport on both ends you might as well just have driven straight through and then there’s the parking and everything so I’d rather drive—”
“Mom, I’m at work and there’s kind of stuff going on—”
“Well,” she rattled on, “we’re not sure yet whether Alice and Godfrey will come in from Northeast Harbor. Binty’s just home from Europe with Kit but they’ll go. I haven’t called the other kids yet. Of course it doesn’t make sense for your sister to come home from Florence, but since I knew you’d go I thought you should know first. Will you bring Dean? Do you want her shoes?”
“Her shoes?” I said. Simon and Wilt were staring at me.
“Must be a dozen pairs of Belgians in Dodie’s closet. You’re the only one with feet that big.”
“Jesus, Mom, she’s not even cold yet.”
“Oh, she was. Absolutely. Stiff as a board, too.”
“You touched her?”
“Sure, you know, just before they wheeled her out to the hearse. Never felt anybody dead before. Always wondered.”
I didn’t want to compare notes.
“Well, do you want the Belgians?”
“Fine,” I said, giving up.
“And Dean?” asked Mom, moving down her list of priorities.
I looked at Simon. Didn’t want him to know I was in town alone. “Don’t think so.”
“Oh well, good-oh anyway. Be at Dodie’s by eleven. Help with the chairs. Told you there’s lunch afterwards? Turkey Tetrazzini from Piping. Typical.”
“Mom? I’ll come tonight.”
“Must go,” she said, and the line clicked dead.
I hung up and pushed the accursed implement back toward Simon.
“Bad news?” asked Wilt.
“My great-grandmother died, which makes her my third dead person in the last forty-eight hours.”
I slouched down in the chair. “Can’t believe this.”
“Your third?” asked Simon.
Like he didn’t know.
Wilt said, “She found Kenny this morning.”
“That guy from the Crown?”
I nodded.
Simon moved closer and it was all I could do not to scoot the chair back against the wall, to get away from him.
“Um, Maddie?” said Wilt.
“What?”
“Don’t you think you should, like, go home now?”
“Why, so the guy can kill me?”
“Oh, man,” said Simon.
Yeah, right.
“Have you told Dean?” asked Wilt.
I drew my knees up again. Didn’t answer.
It was cold—like Simon’d turned up the air conditioning even higher than usual down in his little crypt.
There was a short, wide window at the edge of the ceiling. It opened into a well, just below street level. There was an inch of snow piled against the glass, with more blowing in.
“I hate this town,” I said.
“Want me to call Dean?” asked Wilt. “I can drive you out . . .”
I said I had to let him know in person. I didn’t want them to know where he was, and I wanted my gun.
“I have to go to the Adirondacks,” I said. “Will you guys tell Ted?”
From behind me, Ted said, “Tell him yourself.”
I turned around to find him leaning against the doorway.
“Fine,” I said. “Ted, I have to go to the Adirondacks.”
“What, now you’re going to work on the piece?”
“No. Now I’m going to attend a funeral.”
“Always something,” he said.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, man?” said Wilt. “The poor kid . . .”
Ted pursed his lips. “Take Simon.”
Even for him that was bullshit. Even if I didn’t suspect Simon of anything. “To my great-grandmother’s funeral? You’re fucking kidding.”
“So, he can meet you up there,” he said, “get some shots afterwards.”
“Ted, that’s appalling,” said Simon. “I can’t believe you’re asking her to do that. I can’t believe you’re asking me.”
“The camp doesn’t belong to me, Ted,” I said. “I’m going to be there on my relatives’ sufferance.”
“And you work here on my sufferance,” he said. “I want those damn pictures.”
He stomped up the stairs.
“Ignore him,” said Wilt. “Just get the hell out of here. Do what you need.”
Simon nodded in agreement. “We’ll talk to him.”
He seemed so mellow, so sympathetic. Not the raver of yesterday, but he had to be the killer or the killer’s little helper. He laid a hand on my shoulder and I flinched.
“Okay,” I said, desperate to start driving downstate, away from him, from this shit. But first I wanted to run home and throw my gun in the back of the Volkswagen.
I wished to hell Dean were there, so I could tell him he’d been right, and that Kenny was dead because I hadn’t listened.
I walked outside. All the leaves were brown, and the sky was gray.
PART IV
CENTRE ISLAND
You are a poor girl . . . and if you can’t make up your mind to being that, you’ll become one of those terrible girls that don’t know whether they are millionairesses or paupers.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
IN A LETTER TO HIS DAUGHTER SCOTTIE
CHAPTER 44
The next morning I left Bonwit’s and walked up to Dodie’s through the woods, following an old path that wound between archipelagoes of Queen Anne’s lace and thickets of wineberry. The trees thinned, and I was at the top of Dodie’s driveway.
They must have sent Egon up to cut the grass out front for the occasion. As I came inside the final pale brick bulwark, it looked as though each blade had been scythed to perfect bluntness, scattered drops of water prisming fall sunlight into flaming bijou points of intense orange, lemon, scarlet, gas-blue.
The trimmed lawn was a last-minute attempt to conceal massive and catastrophic entropy, ineffectual trompe l’oeil. There wasn’t the time or inclination to pull the thick beard of ivy from the twenty visible window sashes, to replace the broken, coffin-shaped panes of glass in the great bronze lantern. It was just another rotting pre-FDR palace that had started as an homage to Monticello and ended as a second-act Gone With the Wind set—forty acres, no mule.
I stepped through an arched doorframe and into the cool, boxwood-scented darkness of the arcade leading to the front door. There were no sounds but the last of the Canada geese, honking as they abandoned the place, and the heels of my loafers ringing off slate in the few spots that weren’t choked with fallen leaves.
More leaves had blown inside, skirling around the thirty-foot diameter of dark marble floor as I came through the front door. The entry was a circular, gossamer-railed staircase sweeping up to a viewing balcony, light slanting in through high windows.
Bronzes of my great-grandparents’ heads rested in a niche halfway up the stairs. Dodie’s hair was shingled flapper-style, Jake’s brilliantined straight back off his forehead. The room would have been imposing, had the pale-mint wallpaper not been hanging down in broad sheets, only occasionally stuck back up to the plaster with ragged lengths of packing tape.
Considering how badly I’d fucked things up in the last week, it seemed entirely appropriate that I was back here at Chateau Failure to mark the occasion.
“Hello?” I said, my voice echoing until a pair of yipping, rheumy-eyed shih tzus came barreling around the corner, nails clattering on stone, yellowed hair held off their faces with tiny pink and blue plastic barrettes.
I waded through the dogs and into the dining room, where the table was set for twenty. Dodie’s portrait condescended from above the sideboard, emeralds sparkling from her cocked hip.
I touched the bottom of the frame, thought of the painting’s nickname and whispered, “Nice to see your back again,” then du
cked through the pantry and into the kitchen itself.
Maria the cook, in jeans and a big plaid flannel shirt, looked up from the broad black stove and grinned at me, gold tooth flashing.
“Hola, Madalena! Cerveza?”
She wouldn’t take no for an answer, pulling a chair out from the table, clapping me on the back, and handing me a cold can from her personal stash of Budweiser in what seemed like one bustling motion, her long black braids swinging in the wake of her perfectly square body.
“Is good to see you. You doin’ okay?” she said, sitting down next to me and patting my arm.
“Shitty week,” I said, looking around the kitchen, more deeply familiar to me than the front rooms. Children were raised in purdah, here, sequestered with the help. “How are you?”
“Two nights ago, I have a dream about a dog digging a hole,” she said. “So I know this is coming. In Bolivia, that is a dream for death. I am packed everything, next morning.”
“What will you do?” I asked, worried for her here with no papers, and now no job.
“Well, now you great-grandmommy is dead, I go home—one more month. Is okay, you know? I save some money, so now I see my family. Life is good for me. Death is not good, but okay, it happens. Everybody go with God someday.”
“That’s right,” I said, taking a vaya-con-Dios pull of the beer.
“You look tired,” Maria said. “You come see me before I go home. We party!” She shimmied her shoulders like Charo, threw her head back, and cackled.
“Sounds perfect,” I said, smiling for the first time in days. When I finished the beer, we moved several dozen chairs into the living room, cleaned the fireplace, and swept out leaves from everywhere while the caterers brought in tubs of Tetrazzini and Egon set up the bar.
When the first of my relatives began to trickle in the front door, Maria took me aside. “When you pray for you great-grandmommy today, ask her you wish, and she must do. Promise you no forget, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, “thank you.”
She looked both ways and then hugged me, hard. “You good girl. No forget this also,” she whispered, then pushed me out into the fray and vanished back to the kitchen.
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