Skeleton Key (2 page)

“Crap,” Kayla said out loud. She pressed her foot down on the gas and felt the car underneath her speed up. It was a good car, and it could be fast: a BMW two-door with a German engine, imported, literally. Her lawyers had had it shipped over from Frankfurt in May. She streaked on up the hill in the direction of Litchfield and thought about her mother, who had been so very opposed to the whole idea of Kayla's buying a car.

 

“You could always get someone to drive you,” Margaret Anson had said, in that pinched-face, salt-of-New-England way of hers. “A car like that would only be calling attention to yourself.”

Some men marry for love, and some men marry for position. In Kayla's father's case, it had definitely been for position. Margaret was the last living descendant of two signers of the Declaration of Independence and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, as well. She had roots in Boston and Connecticut and Philadelphia and social connections everywhere. Kayla had always thought that if her father had lived long enough, he would have divorced and married again, this time for sex. God only knew there was
never much to do with sex around Margaret Bell Anson.

Kayla looked in the rearview mirror again, but the vehicle was still there. In fact, it was closer than ever. She was really beyond it now, on that long stretch past White Flowers Farms with nothing in the way of buildings on it at all. Even the Halloween decorations were missing. No one had thought to come out here to scatter straw corpses on the grass. No one had thought to use this empty place to play a practical joke. No one was walking by the side of the road, hoping for a ride. Kayla felt a thin line of sweat make its way across her neck and swiped at it. She tried looking in the side mirror and got only the vehicle's headlights. She thought of the way her mother was always trying to get her to carry a cell phone and how she always refused, because she hated cell phones, and because they seemed like such a rich-snot thing to have.

The Beach Boys had become the Supremes, singing “You Can't Hurry Love.” Kayla pressed down even harder on the accelerator. She heard the vehicle come up even closer behind her, its unmuffled engine making a sound like spitting nails. This was beginning to feel crazy. If he wanted to pass her, he should pass her. The road was empty. There was nothing holding him back. She tried to pull over a little to the right-hand side of the road, without actually stopping. It didn't work. He came closer still, and then he bumped her from behind.

Kayla's little BMW did a shudder and a jerk. It was incredible that she'd never realized how dark it got out here. Every once in a while there were streetlights, but they seemed to do more harm than good. Mostly there were trees and grass and bits of rock littering the edges of the blacktop. Kayla was sure it couldn't be all that far to Litchfield from where she was. In Litchfield, there would be lights and people and restaurants that stayed open into the night, so that she would be able to get to a phone.

The vehicle came up behind her and bumped her again. This time the bump was hard and deliberate. The force of it made Kayla's back wheels sway as if she had hit an ice
patch. She tried to put her foot on the gas again, but when she did the car seemed to go out of control. The vehicle stayed right behind her anyway. Then suddenly it swerved out to her left and came up on her side. Kayla thought it was going to pass. Whoever it was would turn out to be just some local yokel, all pissed off because the rich girl hadn't been going fast enough on the Litchfield Road. When he got in front of her, she would get his license plate number and be sure to remember it. Tomorrow or the next day she would go into the Department of Motor Vehicles and have his ass.

The vehicle drifted closer and closer to her on her left. It bumped against her sideways and made the BMW rock madly. Kayla thought she was going to turn over. The vehicle got its nose a little ahead of hers and began to edge into her lane—except that he didn't have enough room to go there. Kayla couldn't just slow down and let him in. She couldn't go sideways in either direction. To her right there was a ditch. To her left there was still the vehicle, flanking her, boxing her in.

Kayla pumped the horn.

The vehicle got closer.

Kayla pumper her horn again, long and loud.

Up ahead there was a side road, on her right. She had never noticed it before. There was no sign on the road and no lights to light it. It looked like one of those town access things where the paving only went a few feet from the main blacktop and then stopped. Kayla put the flat of her hand on her horn and held it there, letting out a long, wailing shriek. There had to be someone around to hear this. There had to be. This wasn't the middle of nowhere. This was Connecticut.

“Crap,” Kayla said again, but this time it was a whisper. She was so frightened, she could barely breathe. The vehicle was coming closer and closer on her left. It hit her broadside again and again. Its wheels were bigger and thicker than ordinary wheels. It didn't even rock when it hit. The BMW did dances all over the road.

“Son of a bitch,” Kayla said, and then, because there was nothing else she could do unless she wanted to die right there, she pulled off to her right, onto the dark side road.

As soon as she had done it, she knew she had made a mistake. It was what he had wanted her to do. He was coming right up behind her. The BMW was not suited for this kind of road. The ruts were too deep and the weeds were too high. She was jouncing and shaking over the un-paved surface. She had lost all semblance of control over the wheel. She tried to remember what it was she had gone to Waterbury for, but all that came to mind was the Barnes & Noble near the new Brass Mill Center Mall, and she hadn't even gone inside it. She wasn't thinking straight. She wasn't thinking. Everything inside her seemed to have frozen up.

Kayla put her foot on the accelerator to give it one more try, but she was stuck in a rut. Her wheels wouldn't move. She even thought she heard the sound of a puncture.

Then the vehicle came up behind her, fast, and smashed into her back end. She was thrown forward in a rush. Her seat belt locked into place. Her horn went off, and only seconds later did she realize she was pressing it.

“Now what?” Kayla asked the air—and then she turned around and tried to see who was coming for her, in the dark.

Margaret Bell Anson had always believed that life had rules, and one of the most important of those rules had to do with the duty a person owed her friends. Cordelia Day Hannaford had been a good friend of Margaret's until the day she died. They had gone to boarding school together and come out together in Philadelphia, too, because Margaret had been doing a national season. It wasn't Cordelia's fault that she had married That Man and been shut away
from everybody in Bryn Mawr for decades. It wasn't Cordelia's fault that so many of her children had grown up to be psychopaths, either—although, Margaret admitted to herself, you had to wonder about that one. There were two children in jail, from what Margaret had heard, and another one who was some kind of failed academic. The two in jail had both been part of really enormous scandals. It went around and around, in spite of the fact that Cordelia's husband had been far better off in the family department than Margaret's. One of the rules Margaret had been brought up with was the one that said Blood Will Out, and it bothered her no end when something made it seem as if it weren't true.

At the moment, it was after nine o'clock at night and Margaret wanted to be in bed. What she was doing instead was sitting in her own living room, dressed in a good shirtwaist and a pair of heels, making small talk with Cordelia's third-oldest daughter. That was the other thing about Cordelia that Margaret had never been able to get used to. She bred like a nineteenth-century matriarch or a welfare queen. She had baby after baby, seven of them in all, so that it wasn't strange that some of them had turned out badly. Margaret had had exactly one child, Kayla, and she had never wanted to have another. The idea of being weighed down by pregnancy and bloodied by delivery sickened her. She was sure it sickened all decent women everywhere, and that they only put up with it for the survival of the species.

The young woman sitting across from her in the yellow wing chair was perhaps not so young, and she had a bad cough, the kind of thing Margaret herself would have had a doctor look after. The age was questionable. Margaret's best guess would have been around forty. On the other hand, she was truly one of the most astonishingly beautiful women Margaret had ever seen, with the sort of face that existed nowhere else on earth and worked perfectly. It gave her authority in spite of the fact that she was actually rather short, which Margaret always thought made people look ridiculous. Margaret was five-foot-nine herself. There were
people who said that when Kayla finished growing, she would be something over six feet.

Unless, of course, Kayla had already finished growing. Margaret couldn't remember when that stopped. She couldn't remember exactly how old Kayla was, either, although she could make a good guess at eighteen or nineteen, because that was when girls came out. This was the year that Kayla was coming out. Margaret didn't think Bennis Day Hannaford had ever come out, but she might have, in a small way, and Margaret might have missed it. There was something un-debutantelike about Bennis. Margaret couldn't put her finger on what.

There were little demitasse cups on the coffee table between them, and a silver serving set just for demitasse that Margaret had gotten as a gift for her wedding. All of Margaret's really good pieces had come to her as wedding gifts or been inherited from her mother. Her husband's taste had run to the obviously expensive, and—as he had told her, time and time again—he was the one with the money.

Margaret crossed her legs carefully at the knee—when she was growing up, ladies crossed their legs only at the ankles, but now it was considered much more sophisticated to do it this way, even in the Northwest Hills—and folded her hands in her lap.

“So,” she said. “Abigail van Dern sent you. But you could have come on your own, you know. Because of your mother.”

Bennis Hannaford was wearing a pair of canvas jeans and a cotton rollneck sweater, as if she were about to model for the cover of the J. Crew catalogue. She had her legs crossed like a man's, and she was leaning forward to get at the demitasse. She turned her head sideways and coughed twice into her hand.

“I think my mother was part of Abigail's thinking,” Bennis said. “Although, of course, I had no idea if the two of you had been in touch. And mother has been dead now for several years.”

“Yes. Yes, I heard about that. It's terrible when someone
we love has an illness like that. Incurable. And debilitating.”

“Yes. Right. At any rate, Abigail was feeling a little diffident about it, you see, because it had to do with your husband's family instead of yours. I'm not entirely sure what kind of difference that was supposed to make—”

“I am.”

“—but she kept stressing that I was to tell you that she didn't mean any offense of any kind, and that it was just because Julia Anson's paintings are having a vogue at the moment. I feel as if I've been left out of the loop here a little, if you know what I mean. I think it's wonderful if Julia Anson's paintings are having a vogue.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. “So do I. So do I. Abigail really has nothing to worry about.”

“Anyway, Abigail just wants to know if you'll lend the ones you've got, so that she can hang a show in Philadelphia. The museum would be very grateful, you know, and it would be for a good cause. It would bring people in to look. Because of the publicity value, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,!” Margaret said. She picked up her own demitasse cup and put it down again. She really did not like this young woman, with her straight gray eyes and too-straight spine. She didn't like her at all. It was just too bad that she couldn't do anything about it, instead of just sitting here being polite.

“You know,” Margaret said, “I think what Abigail is worried about is Viveca Bell. Have you ever heard of Viveca Bell?”

“No.”

“She was a painter, too. In Paris. In the late twenties and early thirties. She was my great aunt. Of course, she wasn't like Julia Anson. She didn't know those people.”

“Those people?”

“Yes, you know. Hemingway and those people. Gertrude Stein. Picasso. Viveca was really quite a great lady in her time, and she didn't see the point of walking away
from everything she had ever known just to call herself an artist. It's really a twentieth-century idea, don't you think, this business about the artist as an outsider. It came in with existentialism.”

“I think existentialism came later, after the war.”

“Did it? Well, Viveca was a lot like Edith Wharton, if you know who that is. Edith went to Paris to be a writer, you know, but she was true to her class. She lived among her own people. She was a friend of Henry James's.”

“I think it's all fashion anyway,” Bennis said. “Who gets hung and who gets reviewed and all the rest of it. There's a tremendous vogue now for all the women who were working in Paris at the time that Julia Anson was. For all the women in that group of people.”

“For all the lesbians, you mean.”

“Were they lesbians?”

Bennis Hannaford seemed to swallow hard. No, Margaret thought, I do not like this woman. I do not like anything about her. Margaret had a sudden vision of something terrible happening here—of Bennis choking until she died and lying in a heap on the floor, of Bennis struck down by an aneurism or a stroke and rendered unreal, but the vision passed.

“They were all lesbians,” Margaret said, “all the women in that group, and I'm not just saying it the way some people do, to make them illegitimate. But it was an organized thing, the lesbianism of that time. It included Stein and Toklas, of course, and Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. And it included Julia Anson.”