Skeleton Key (6 page)

She went into her office and turned on the lights. She punched at the keyboard of her computer and waited for it to boot up. Then she sat down in the little chair and punched at her keyboard some more, until she brought up the file she had to have to do what she wanted to do. It was only then that her fear came back to her, and it came back in a wave. Mallory thought she did this without a qualm, but it wasn't true. Sometimes she lay awake in the night, imagining all the worst things happening to her, getting caught, going to jail, watching Mallory move to New York to live with Frank. Except, of course, that Frank wouldn't take Mallory. The last thing Frank wanted was a fat, sullen, unattractive daughter hanging around the apartment
letting all his perky little girlfriends know exactly how old he was.

Sally scrolled up the page, looking for the names she liked the best. It was not a good idea to take money out of the same accounts two weeks in a row, even small sums of money, like one or two hundred dollars, which was all Sally ever took. She didn't want to turn into a real-life embezzler. She just wanted enough to get by, to keep the phone and the gas on, to make sure she didn't have too many calls from the people she had her credit cards with, wondering where their money was going to come from this month. In the past six months, Sally had been threatened with law suits twice, both by out-of-town banks where she had Visa cards. When she and Frank had been together and she had been working for Deloitte, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to run up huge balances and pay them off only sporadically. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to drop a thousand dollars in a single afternoon at the West Farms Mall, just because she was bored.

The problem was, not every member of the club kept significant amounts of money in their club account. Sally couldn't always alter the list of people she was taking fifty dollars from here and twenty-five dollars from there. She kept coming back to the same names over and over and over again, and that was dangerous.

Actually, if she was honest about it, she kept coming back to the same name over and over again—name singular, not plural. She looked down at the screen and bit her lip.

“Anson, Kayla,” it said, the letters pulsing a little on their dark blue background. Kayla's club account had over fifteen hundred dollars in it. It was the largest of any account kept at the club. Even other very rich women, like Penny Harrison or Dee Marie Colt, rarely kept more than a couple of hundred on account at any one time.

Sally punched at her keyboard again. Kayla Anson's fifteen hundred dollars became thirteen hundred dollars. Sally
punched at her keyboard again and Kayla's name disappeared. All Sally had to do now was wait for the morning, when she picked up the club's weekend cash at the bank. She could take the two hundred dollars off the top right in the car. All anybody would know if they checked was that Kayla Anson had spent two hundred dollars at the club on Friday, October 27, and that the spending had been done on food and liquor. The club was not supposed to serve liquor to minors, but it had been doing it for decades, and it wasn't going to stop now.

Sally exited the program and put her screen saver up. Then she stood and got her purse from the floor. Kayla Anson wasn't in the club tonight. Her little BMW was not in the parking lot. As far as Sally knew, Kayla hadn't been in the club all day. When Sally had first started doing this, she had been much more careful about making sure that the dates of her withdrawals matched the dates on which the account holders were really here. After a few months, it had been impossible to keep that up. It was incredible how fast money went, and how much there was to spend it on. It was incredible how completely broke a person could get and not be dead.

Sally turned off the lights and went back into the hall. Nobody was around. The club manager went home on weekend evenings, in spite of the fact that they were often the busiest nights of the week. The very busiest night of the week was Thursday. That was the night the maids traditionally had off, and nobody wanted to stay home and cook.

Sally went into the main lobby again and then through to the dining room. Mallory was sitting alone at a table near the kitchen door, reading a ragged copy of
Field and Stream.
At a table in the center of the room, three girls from Mallory's coming-out class—including one Vanderbilt connection and a girl whose mother was related to Jacqueline Onassis on the Bouvier side—were huddled over gin and tonics, giggling.

If Sally Martindale could have done anything at all right
that minute, she would have strangled her daughter and thrown the body in the duck pond beyond the terrace. Maybe the ducks would be able to get through to Mallory where she could not. Maybe the ducks would come up with a reason why Sally should go on living.

It was almost 11:30 by the time Peter Greer got home, and he was tense as hell about it until he came through his garage and into the main room of his Adirondack-style house. That was when he heard the giggling coming from his sunroom, where the hot tub was—giggling that meant that Deirdre had waited for him after all, and gotten herself fairly drunk on champagne in the process. That was almost too perfect to believe: a drunk and naked Deirdre, in a good mood. Peter had been jumpy all night. It was impossible not to think of all the things that could go wrong if he didn't keep an eye on his life every single moment. He had so many balls in the air right now, he wasn't even juggling anymore. He was just flailing, pinwheeling his arms and living on hope. One of these days it was all going to come crashing down on his head, and then what was he going to do with himself?

He went past the massive stone fireplace with its framed poster on the mantel: the cover of the first Goldenrod catalogue he had ever produced. He dropped his scarf and his down vest on a black leather love seat and kept moving toward the sunroom. Almost everything he owned had appeared in one Goldenrod catalogue or another over the years. When he really liked something, he tried to get a franchise to sell it. Goldenrod was all about his personal taste. No, that wasn't it. It was all about his personal
identity.
Either that, or the kind of identity other people thought he had. Everybody was looking for an image these day. Everybody wanted to see themselves living out their lives on a big screen. Peter had no idea what people had done
in other eras, when there hadn't been so much media around, or so many opportunities to appear in public. He had always thought anonymity was a little like death, or maybe something worse. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really make a sound? If a person lives a life that nobody else notices, was he ever really alive? The trick was to call as much attention to yourself as possible. That way you could be sure you wouldn't just disappear.

Peter ducked his head into the sunroom. Deirdre was lying in the hot water, letting her body float to the surface every once in a while and then forcing it back down. She really was naked. When Kayla came here—and Peter brought her here often; it was the most sensible thing he could do—she always wore a bathing suit.

“You look like you're in a good mood,” Peter said. “I take it there haven't been any interruptions.”

“Your Kayla called,” Deirdre said. “It's on tape.”

“What did she say?”

“I didn't pay much attention. And it was hours ago. It was before seven o'clock.”

“She was supposed to go into Waterbury and do some shopping. Whatever she said didn't get your nose out of joint, for once.”

“I was hoping she'd show up. I was hoping she'd find me in the hot tub.”

“And?”

Deirdre's eyes narrowed. They were small eyes to begin with. They turned into slits. It reminded Peter of how dangerous she was. He needed to be reminded. He found it far too easy to think of Deirdre as a kind of classic bimbo, all oversized breasts and no brain, instead of as the mercenary little whore she really was. Mercenary little whores could be something worse than dangerous. They could be fatal.

Peter backed out of the sunroom and took the stairs up to the loft where he slept. He saw the light blinking on his message machine and pushed the buttons he needed to play the message back.

“Hello, Peter, this is Kayla,” Kayla's voice said. “I'd ask you where you've gone, but I wouldn't get an answer. It's six-fifteen. I'm on my way back any minute now. Maybe I'll stop by and see if you've wandered in. One way or the other, I'll talk to you later.”

Peter turned the machine off. Kayla must have decided not to wander in. Either that, or she had come to the door and knocked, and Deirdre hadn't let her in. Peter thought Deirdre would have said something about that, if it had happened. Kayla Anson drove Deirdre crazy.

Peter dropped his shirt and trousers on the floor. He stepped out of his boxer shorts and admired himself in the mirror. He was very careful about working out, and it had paid off. His stomach was flatter than it had been when he was a jock at Brown. Even women like Deirdre were attracted to him, and women like Deirdre weren't attracted to anything, except money.

Peter went downstairs again. One wall of his living room was nothing but windows, but it didn't matter, because the windows looked out on a thickly treed wood that went on for miles. He went back into the sunroom and found that Deirdre had managed to get herself a brand-new bottle of champagne. It was the kind she liked best, that he bought only for her: cheap, pink, and very sweet. He got a glass from the bar and poured himself two full shots of unblended scotch. It looked as clear as water, but it tasted better.

“So,” he said, getting into the water next to Deirdre's impossible blondeness. Everything about Deirdre was impossible. It was what he liked best about her. In spite of the fact that her accent was a nasal mid-Connecticut whine, she reminded him of the low-rent town he had grown up in, where women tried as hard as they could to “beautify” themselves, even when they were only running out to the corner store.

Peter anchored himself to the bench—he hated floating in the hot tub—and took a long sip of scotch. “You're in a remarkably good mood for a night when Kayla called.
What did you do, catch her trying to get in the front door and throw her out?'

“No,” Deirdre said. “I couldn't throw her out if I wanted to. She has a key.”

“You have a key,” Peter said.

“Maybe half of Litchfield County has a key. The female half.”

Peter didn't answer. Deirdre slugged back pink champagne.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “About you. And about me. And about Kayla-rich-as-shit-Anson.”

“And?”

“And I was thinking I wouldn't complain about her so much if I was going to do something about her. Only I couldn't think of what to do about her. You don't see her because you like the way she is in bed.”

“Maybe I do.”

Deirdre made a face. “She's got money, that's what it is, lots and lots of money and there isn't anybody on earth who can compete with that. All those old movies about how men don't want to marry an heiress because she'll end up taking their balls away is just so much crap. Men don't care what happens to their balls at all.”

“I don't think that's entirely accurate. Besides, I don't see what it is you think you're—”

Deirdre's champagne glass was empty. The bottle was on the tub collar next to her elbow. She got it and filled up again, squinting at the glass as the liquid went into it, as if she were measuring something and the measurement had to be precise. Her blonde hair was so close to white, it looked like light. Her eyelashes were at least half an inch thick, plumped out by mink strips.

“Somebody else called while you were out,” she said. “Except this time I picked up.”

“While the message was still running on the machine? How did you know who it was?”

“I didn't.”

“That was stupid, Deirdre.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Do you want to know who it was?”

“I take it it wasn't Kayla.”

“It might have been. It might have been anybody.”

“Whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“It's supposed to
mean,”
Deirdre said, “that there wasn't any voice after I answered the phone. There was breathing. There wasn't any voice. But I don't think it was Kayla Anson's breathing.”

He should have brought the bottle of scotch to the tub with him, instead of leaving it on the bar. Now, if he wanted to fill his glass, he would have to get up and walk across the sunroom to do it. He would have to walk out there in the open, as naked as the day he was born.

“Well,” he said, very carefully, “that could have been anything. That could have been a telephone solicitation.”

“Funny time of night for a telephone solicitation.”

Peter's glass was empty. It was so empty, it looked as if it had never been used. He stood up carefully and began to climb out of the tub.

He could not possibly know who that call was from. It didn't make any sense. There was no such thing as telepathy. It could have been a phone call from Santa Claus at the North Pole as easily as it could have been a phone call from anybody else.

“So,” he said, “you mean this person just called up and breathed in your ear.”

“For a long time.”

“Maybe it was a random obscene caller. Dial the first number that comes into your head. Get a woman. Hit the jackpot.”

“It wasn't that kind of breathing.”

“That must have been bizarre. I'm surprised you didn't hang up on him.”

“I thought it was a woman I'd be hanging up on. It was a woman's breathing. If you know the kind of thing I mean.”

Peter knew nothing at all about the kind of thing she meant. He got to the bar and started pouring scotch. He
would have ditched his drink glass for a tumbler, but he thought it would be too obvious. He hoped Deirdre would think he was sweating because of the water in the hot tub. He hoped he wasn't breathing too hard.