A Lamentation of Swans

by Valerie Bronwen

  I leaned my head against the glass. There were lights on in the yard, so that it wasn’t completely dark out there.

  I wanted to believe her, oh, God, how I wanted to believe her! But I couldn’t trust Peggy. She would do whatever she had to, say whatever she felt she needed, for Bast and Charlotte. If she thought lying to me about having a chance of working things out with my wife was the best thing for Charlotte, then she would say anything she could think of to get me to stay here. She’d admitted there was a concern about control of the company, a shareholder fight to come that sounded like it would be ugly and nasty.

  But she hadn’t said who was behind it. Lindsay hadn’t either, nor had Kayla. No one seemed to know who it was. I wasn’t sure how that was possible, but when it came to that sort of thing I didn’t have any idea.

  But Hollis, my boss, might.

  I grabbed my phone and pulled up her number. The call went straight to voicemail. “Hollis, it’s Ariel. I’m probably heading into the city tomorrow but I had a question I thought you could answer for me, about stocks and hostile takeovers. Can you call me if you get this”—I started to say at a decent hour but Hollis often was up until three in the morning—“before midnight. Thanks, call me on my cell. Hope all’s well in my absence.” I hung up, feeling only slightly idiotic.

  I looked around the room again. With order restored, no one could tell what a mess I’d walked in on less than an hour earlier.

  But who could have done this to my room?

  I sat down on the windowsill again, looking out over the darkened lawn. I’d been so worried about the pictures being deleted, and my room being trashed, that I’d only thought about the killer. But who could have gotten into my room? It couldn’t have been someone from the outside.

  It had to have been someone staying at Sea Oats.

  But who? Bast and Kayla had been with me at Lindsay’s—although either one of them could have slipped into my room and tossed it while I was downstairs waiting for them, deleting the pictures from my laptop—

  But if deleting the pictures was the reason for getting into my room, why had someone searched it and tossed it? Had someone been looking for something, or were they just sending me a message?

  My reaction had been to plan an immediate return to the city.

  Which was exactly what someone wanted me to do.

  So the obvious answer was for me to stay, figure out what was going on around here, figure out who I could trust and who I couldn’t.

  I’d run away from Sea Oats once before. I wasn’t going to do it again until it was on my own terms.

  And if the Swanns sweated out whether I was going to want some shares in the company as part of my divorce settlement, well, I could use that fear to get Charlotte to sit down and talk to me, couldn’t I?

  A light flashed out on the lawn.

  At first I thought I’d imagined it, since I only saw it out of the corner of my eye and I wasn’t paying any attention, but then the light flashed again. It was a signal of some sort, like someone was using the flashlight app on their cell phone and covering the lens quickly with one hand. It came a third time. I could barely make out the figure standing out there on the lawn. The moon wasn’t full and it was a cloudy night, so visibility was poor, but someone was definitely out there.

  I carefully unlocked my window and slid it up, so the glass wasn’t interfering with my ability to see. I squinted, then realized whoever it was could see me in the window. I walked over to the door and flipped the light switch. Other than the glow from my laptop screen, my room was completely dark now. I crept back over to the window and looked out again.

  The lights on the gallery weren’t on, so it was obvious when someone opened the front door to the house and went out; an enormous rectangle of light appeared on the driveway and someone’s shadow—a shadow I couldn’t make out—moved across it before the door shut again and the light was gone. I could see a figure moving quickly across the drive and through the trees and heading across the lawn, but again, I couldn’t tell who it was.

  I debated going out there, but I was up on the third floor and they could both be gone by the time I reached the front door.

  The light flashed on the lawn again, and this time I could tell it was a woman out there, and it might have been my imagination but it looked like Lindsay.

  Why would Lindsay be out there, and who would be going to meet her at this hour?

  I glanced at my Fitbit and pressed the button. It was past eleven. The rest of the house was quiet, and most of the lights were out.

  Maybe it was the same person who’d searched my room.

  There was no need for either Charlotte or Peggy to search my room. That left Kayla, Bast, Roger, and Justin.

  But Kayla and Bast hadn’t been here when Angus was killed. And if the pictures were what they’d come into my room for, to get rid of potential evidence that would identify Angus’s killer—that let Kayla and Bast out.

  Could it have been Charlotte or Peggy? I couldn’t believe Angus would ever do anything that would cause trouble for the Swanns; he’d been working for them so long that he seemed like part of the family, in that way rich people always said their staff were members of the family. But from what I remembered, he was devoted to them—except for Bast, whom he’d never forgiven for that trick he’d played with the maze as a teenager.

  I shivered. Angus’s killer had been right there with us both.

  The center of the maze is where the truth lies. Those were his last words to me, trying to signal me that he was in danger, trying to tell me something in code, something he thought I’d understand, be able to pass along to someone else.

  But it didn’t make any sense to me. I’d always hated the maze, and Angus had known that I never wanted to go inside there.

  So what did he mean?

  The light flashed again. The woman—whoever she was—was leaving.

  The person who’d met her out there was coming back to the house.

  I watched until he disappeared out of sight, my view cut off by the gallery roof.

  Chapter Ten

  I was too keyed up to go to sleep without taking a sleeping pill—and I was too nervous to do that, so I decided to go back to my usual fallback: wine.

  Wine never disappointed.

  It took me longer than usual to go down the back staircase to the kitchen to get a bottle. I was nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Every sound stood my hair on end, and I was constantly looking back over my shoulder to the point I almost missed a step once. If I hadn’t had a firm hold of the railing I would have fallen all the way down to the first floor.

  The kitchen was empty when I finally made it there. I flipped on the lights and headed for the wine refrigerator. I picked out a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc and was working on the cork when Charlotte said from behind me, “You know what they say about people who drink alone.”

  I almost dropped the bottle. “You really shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. I could have dropped this bottle and what a waste would that have been?” I pulled on the corkscrew and the cork came out with a satisfying pop. I put the cork down on the counter and poured a glass before turning to look at her. “Then maybe you should join me, so I won’t be drinking alone. I’d hate for people to talk about me.”

  She laughed. “Sure. Just don’t poison me.”

  She looked tired. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced than usual. Maybe it was a combination of being tired and stressed out. I wanted to take her in my arms, somehow make her feel like everything was going to be okay, but it wasn’t my place anymore.

  It was late for her to be up, now that I thought about it. She usually was up by five every morning for her commute into the office, and almost always tried to be in bed asleep by ten. That had been yet another one of our problems. She would come home late from the city, exhausted from her day, and just want to have dinner and go to bed. I’d spent my days lonely and bored
, waiting for her at Sea Oats to come home. When she finally did get home, we would have dinner with the family, and when I finally had her all to myself, she was so tired all I would get from her would be one-syllable words in response. She never initiated conversations—and sex during the week was out of the question.

  But my boredom hadn’t been her fault. She hadn’t asked me to quit my job, I’d done that on my own. And I didn’t have to be so hard on myself, either. I’d worked all the way through college waiting tables at night, studying when I wasn’t in class or at work, and barely averaging five hours of sleep per night. After interning with Hollis that last year, and then putting in ten to twelve hours a day when she’d hired me, I’d thought being a lady of leisure would be fun.

  What it was, though, was boring. I wasn’t cut out to be a housewife any more than Charlotte was. I couldn’t remember when I’d had days to myself since high school. I’d even worked when I was in high school, cashiering at the McDonald’s a couple of blocks from our house. At first, it was nice—sleeping late and not worrying about doing laundry or how the house was going to get cleaned or doing any grocery shopping. The first week had been lovely, but by the second week I felt like my mind was turning to mush.

  I should have found a job, volunteered, done something, anything, to keep myself occupied during the days while she was at work. But young and bored and rebellious—and prodded, in no small part, by a troublemaking Bast—I blamed everything on Charlotte. She didn’t have time for me, she didn’t pay enough attention to me, whine, whine, whine.

  Just thinking about it made me wince inwardly. It was a wonder she hadn’t asked me to leave. But she hadn’t. She’d put up with my tantrums and my pouting and my bullshit, tolerated it, tried to help me find something to fill my days. Her rational responses to my emotional outbursts only fanned the flames of my immaturity. “Why didn’t you tell me to get a job when I lived here?” I handed her the glass and put the bottle down on the table.

  She toasted me with the glass and took a drink. She grinned at me. “Excellent taste, Ariel, that’s a good wine.” She put the glass down and looked at me. “I should have, you know. I did a lot of things wrong.”

  I clinked my glass against hers. “You’re not the only one,” I replied. “I knew how hard you worked when I married you. I shouldn’t have expected, or wanted, that to change after we got married.”

  “You’ve done really well since you went back to work for Hollis,” she observed. “I was proud of you when I saw that piece in the Times.”

  Butterflies started fluttering in my stomach, and I could feel my face redden at her praise. “Thank you,” I managed to get out, taking another drink to hide my embarrassment. “Peggy told me what’s going on with Swann’s. I’m sorry, Charlotte. I know how much the company means to you.”

  Her face tightened. “Control of the company will be taken away from me when they pry it out of my cold dead hands,” she said grimly. “Bast was a fool. I warned him about that investment.” She shook her head. “It stank to high heaven, and if I’d known he’d be fool enough to put his stock up as collateral…” Her voice trailed off. “It would have been better had he lost the money from the trust than this.”

  “If you’re worried about me causing trouble, don’t be.”

  She laughed, brushing a lock of reddish-gold hair from her forehead. “So this is what our marriage has come to, is it?” She locked her eyes on mine. “I knew I never had to worry about you, Ariel. No matter what is going on between us, I knew you’d never side with outsiders against the family.”

  “You don’t have any idea who’s behind the takeover?”

  “All we know is a holding company called Malone Holdings is buying up our stock. They’re incorporated in the Caymans, so…” She shrugged. “But I’ve got people on it, Ariel. No need for you to worry about it.”

  “Malone? Where have I heard that name lately?” I took another drink of the wine. It was excellent—but there was never bad wine at Sea Oats. “Oh, yes, Dustin mentioned it to me. Some maid one of Arabella’s sons got pregnant—Arabella bought her off and sent her away.”

  “Brigid Malone?” Charlotte laughed. “You can’t be serious? I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I replied, trying to not get upset and not entirely succeeding. “It’s a possibility.”

  “You think one of Brigid Malone’s descendants is trying to punish the family for old misdeeds?” She laughed again. “I’d forgotten what a fan of melodrama you are.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to track her descendants down,” I pointed out, keeping my voice level, trying not to let her see how insulting she was being again.

  “Oh, don’t get your feelings hurt. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Same old Charlotte—always so dismissive of my feelings and opinions! Some things never changed. “My feelings aren’t hurt.”

  “I know that look on your face. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Well, enjoy it while you can. I’m leaving in the morning.” I resisted the urge to add, and finding a lawyer as soon as I can.

  It wouldn’t accomplish anything.

  “It’s probably for the best, all things considered. Peggy said your room was searched?” She frowned, her eyebrows meeting over her nose.

  “Yeah.” I took another big gulp of wine, not wanting to say anything else because I was afraid I might start shaking again. I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction.

  “Lock your door tonight,” she said. “I’ve asked one of the guards to stay in the house tonight, make sure everyone’s safe. I’m sorry that happened.”

  “No kidding.” I shivered. “I have to say I never thought I’d ever feel unsafe at Sea Oats but now…” I took my phone out of my pocket and opened the photo app, scrolled through till I found the pictures of Angus, and passed it across the table to her. “You can’t really see anything in the pictures, but I’m going to stop by the police station on my way into the city tomorrow. I guess they can maybe enhance them somehow, clear up the blurring and shadows, maybe identify whoever that is.”

  She squinted at the screen for a couple of moments, then scrolled to the next. I finished my wine while she went through the pictures and refilled the glass. I topped off hers, noting that she didn’t stop me. She usually didn’t drink on work nights, either. Alcohol always made her groggy the next morning, and it didn’t take much for her to have a hangover.

  Maybe she needed wine to deal with me.

  She finally handed the phone back to me. “I can’t tell who that is, if it’s even a person or just some weird effect from the camera,” she admitted, tiredly pushing the errant lock of hair away from her forehead again. “I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that someone killed poor old Angus.” She cracked another smile. “I mean, if anyone around here was going to be killed, my money would have been on Bast.”

  “Mine, too.” I hesitated. “Speaking of Bast, Charlotte…I just want you to know you don’t have to worry about me and a divorce—I don’t want anything from you, so if the stock is an issue for you, or if you’re worried about that, you don’t have to be. I don’t want anything from you.” My voice was shaking, so I gripped the arms of my chair.

  “So you do want a divorce?” She stiffened a bit, but then relaxed.

  “Don’t you?” I replied. “You made it clear to me you didn’t trust me two years ago, and if you don’t trust me, there’s really not any point in staying married anymore, is there?” Why didn’t you come after me? I wanted to scream the words at her, but that wouldn’t be fair to either one of us. It was over.

  She picked up her glass. “I don’t know what I want anymore.” Her voice was bitter. “With everything going on at Swann’s, do you mind waiting a while longer? I know it’s a lot to ask, but I just can’t deal with anything else right now.”

  She is worried about you wanting some of her stock, despite her protestations to the contrary, a little voice whi
spered inside my head, and it sounded like Lindsay Moore’s. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s anything else.

  I exhaled. “It won’t hurt me to wait a little longer.” Part of me wanted to beg her to take me back, to tell her I would do anything she wanted me to for this to all work out. But I shut that down. I wasn’t going to humiliate myself in front of her any more than I already had. “But we can’t go on forever like this.”

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  She wasn’t looking at me, her eyes focused on her wine. At first I was touched that she cared, that she wanted to know, but then I remembered she was seeing Lindsay again. She was just making polite conversation with me, but this…this was better than us not being able to be in the same room together, wasn’t it?

  “No,” I replied finally. “I’ve been too busy, focusing on my work.”

  “That really was a great piece in the Times.” She was still staring into her wine like she could see the future in the golden liquid. “I was proud of you, Ariel. You’re making a name for yourself.”

  “It’s nice to have my hard work pay off.” It was like we were total strangers talking, chatting about careers and work and things, like we’d never been intimate, shared a bed and a life and plans for the future together. “Hollis has more or less promised to make me a full partner later this year. I do like working.” I laughed. “Maybe if I hadn’t—oh, at this point there’s not really any point to Monday-morning quarterbacking, is there?”

  “Maybe…” She hesitated, still not looking up. “Maybe you’ll have another client fall for you.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, probably not my most professional moment. I was terrified that would be in the article.”

  Redecorating the executive offices of Swann’s had been my first big job as lead designer. I’d been working for Hollis Allman since I graduated after interning for her while I was in college. An associate designer at Hollis’s firm was only slightly higher than an intern on the food chain. I didn’t get to contribute much to any of the work the lead designers were doing on any project I was assigned to; many times I bounced from one job to another before they were finished. I got coffee, made sure supplies were ordered and paint was available, rode herd on contractors, made copies, and was pretty much required to keep track of multiple different projects at one time. I also got some small jobs—apartments or houses too small for the attentions of the more experienced designers—and I was proud of those jobs. I’d just redone a small apartment for the daughter of one of Hollis’s friends from her college days, and that was the key to getting the gig from Swann’s. But first I had to land the account. That was the real test; if I was able to sell Charlotte Swann on my designs and our firm, that would be a big step up the ladder to being a lead designer—and eventually, as my original career plan had run, own my own firm.