Blacklist (44 page)

When I’d shoved him into the back of the Mustang, I drove the short distance around Coverdale Lane to Anodyne Park. Geraldine Graham was home, the guard at the gate told me; I could go right up.

Geraldine answered the door herself, as she had when I first came to visit her. Her left foot was still in a cast, she was using a walker, but she was managing on her own. She did ask me to get down her Coalport mugs for tea, but she handled the boiling water and the tea bags without my assistance.

I carried the cups to her alcove, burning my fingers on the thin china as I had on my first visit. The space looked bigger and lighter. At first I couldn’t figure out what was different, and put it down to the greater light in the room from the coming of spring. When Geraldine clumped in behind me on her walker and sat, though, I realized she had taken down her mother’s portrait. The small mountainscape hung there instead.

She saw me looking at the wall and smiled in satisfaction. “When I hit Renee with Kylie’s mask, it brought me a sense of pleasure I don’t believe I ever experienced before, not even in Calvin’s arms. Certainly not in Armand’s, or any of the others.”

She paused, then added, “I loved Calvin, you know. I knew his weaknesses, but I loved him nonetheless. I didn’t think I could forgive Renee, for sweeping in and taking him over, for queening it over me or for setting him up on a pedestal and indulging his weaknesses. But when I brought that mask down on her head-I felt an extraordinary lightness. I am ninety-one now; I have not now the strength to move heaven and earth, but I am grateful for a freer spirit for whatever remains in life to me. I decided you were right: I didn’t need Mother up there reminding me of past humiliations.”

I stayed with Geraldine for an hour, rehashing the case, her life, Darraugh’s life. She had finally told him this week that Calvin was (probably) his father. That explained why Darraugh had invited Catherine to live with him, I supposed-the startling realization that she was his niece. How did it feel to know Edwards Bayard was his brother, I wondered.

“It upset Darraugh, of course,” Geraldine was saying in her high, tremulous voice. “He loved MacKenzie. I told Darraugh it didn’t matter, that he did right to love MacKenzie as a father: MacKenzie was the man who stood beside Darraugh’s nursery bed when he had chicken pox. MacKenzie, not the nurse, certainly not 1, bathed his face to keep him from scratching the pustules. MacKenzie read Darraugh nursery rhymes and put him up on his first pony. MacKenzie did all those things a father does. And some that a mother who wasn’t fleeing the torments of her home might have done.”

“Darraugh should tell his son, his own MacKenzie,” I said. “You guys live such an incestuous life out here-it would never do for young MacKenzie to fall in love with Catherine Bayard”

She looked at me with a momentary return of hauteur, then relaxed and said she would suggest it to him. “What is happening with Renee? They have not yet arrested her.”

I grimaced. “I don’t know if they ever will. The evidence is there, but

it’s all circumstantial, in a way. So what that her prints are on Theresa Jakes’s phenobarb bottle-why shouldn’t Renee have picked it up, wondering what medication her husband’s nurse was taking? And the rest of it-the cab she took from the corner near Marcus Whitby’s house, the valet at the golf club who saw her climb into a golf cart and ride off, she’s taking a firm hand with that and claiming they must be mistaken. The police tread warily when it comes to arresting people from places like New Solway.”

She caught the bitterness in my tone. “Don’t make that the only way you think of us, Victoria. We do some good as well. Without us, there wouldn’t be money for symphonies and theaters, after all.”

I rubbed my fingers wearily through my hair. “I don’t think there’s a ledger of good and evil, this much good offsets that much evil. It’s just; oh, you know, there was that popular book a few years back, when bad things happen to good people, or whatever it was? That’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, to keep all us working stiffs from rising up in fury at the inequities in the world. No one ever writes about all the good things that happen to bad people, how the rich and powerful walk away from the messes they make, and people like me, like my neighbor, like my parents, pay for the clean up.

“I get tired of it. I’ve been pampering a confused rich girl all week. I like Catherine, but she put Benji at risk when she ran off with him. She can take time off from school to focus her life, while Benji’s mother and sisters can’t even come to America to mourn at his grave, and who knows what they’ll live on.”

“Yes, that’s very wrong,” Geraldine said. “To leave them wanting. I will talk to Catherine when she’s with Darraugh and remind her that she must look after Benji’s family.”

She pushed herself upright with her walker to escort me to the door. “I hope you will visit me again, despite your misgivings about our New Solway morality.”

I walked slowly along the winding paths, trying to shake a sense of melancholy the conversation had given me. The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

I finally dragged myself back to my car. The stink of rotting carp filled the Mustang. I indulged in a moment of melodrama and imagined it as the stink of New Solway riding with me to Chicago. But it was just Mitch,

after all, doing what dogs love to do. I opened all the windows and drove along the tollway at a fast clip.

When I got home, I dragged Mitch up the back stairs and chained him to the porch rail. I fetched a bucket and a scrub brush from the kitchen. He was covered in lather when the phone rang; I almost let it go, but just before it kicked over to my answering service, I sprinted in to pick up the kitchen extension.

A man with an Italian accent answered. He was looking for Victoria Warshawski. That was me? He was Giulio Carrera with Humane Medicine. My heart stood still. The scrub brush clattered to the floor.

“Morrell?”

“Yes. We have Morrell. He was shot, out in the Afghan countryside. We don’t quite know what happened yet, but local women found him and took care of him. We traced him through rumors and airlifted him to Zurich early this morning.”

“He’s alive?”

“He’s alive. The women saved his life. He is weak, but he gave us your telephone number and told us to ring you. He said to tell you it was not the Khyber Pass where he was shot. Do you understand that?”

I laughed shakily: my worry about his being shot and left to die in the Khyber Pass-he was alert, he could remember that, he remembered my phone number. He remembered me. “Where is he?”

Carrera gave me the name of the hospital. I sent messages to Morrell, I babbled in Italian and English. Long after Carrera hung up, I still clutched the phone to my chest, my face wet. Once in a blue moon, in the midst of pain and helplessness, life hands us a reprieve.

END:genew