'Til Death Do Us Part (3 page)

When the wedding weekend was winding down, the other bridesmaids seemed willing to let bygones be bygones. They blamed Peyton’s behavior on a kind of “perfect storm” stress situation: getting married, marrying one of the richest men in town, and catering your own reception. Several of the bridesmaids worked for Peyton, so I guess they had to forgive her or forgo their paychecks. But I had no such conflict, and all the bluepoint oysters, Beluga caviar, and Veuve Clicquot champagne in the world couldn’t make up for her bad behavior. So I decided just to avoid Peyton for a while. When she called in August to ask me to a special event at her cooking school, I politely declined. I think she could tell I was ticked—or maybe not. By then I’d become convinced the only mood Peyton Cross had any interest in monitoring was her own.

None of this, however, prevented me from phoning Peyton’s home as soon as I fixed myself coffee Wednesday morning. Someone sounding like a housekeeper answered the phone and said Peyton had already left for the farm. The switchboard there put me through to her.

“Oh, Bailey, it’s so nice of you to call,” she said after I told her that I’d heard about the tragedies. “As you can imagine, it’s been perfectly dreadful here.”

I told her that I was thinking of driving up to Greenwich around lunchtime and was hoping I could stop by the farm and speak with her. I explained I was concerned about the deaths and would like the chance to talk to her about them. She hesitated for a few seconds, perhaps either caught off guard by my request or not keen on a visit from me—I couldn’t tell. But then she announced that by all means I should come.

Next I phoned Ashley, who answered on the first ring. We agreed that I would first stop by the town house that she and Robin had shared, and then we would head over to the farm together. She provided some sketchy directions to her place; people who live in swanky neighborhoods always seem to assume others will know how to get there. So I augmented my scribbles by checking out a couple of Internet map sites.

I ordered my Jeep from the garage for an eleven o’clock departure and then made a few phone calls, hoping to flesh out the little bit of information Ashley had provided about Robin’s and Jamie’s deaths. My first call was to Paul Petrocelli, an ER doctor I use occasionally as a resource. I’d interviewed him once for a story, and since then he’s always been happy to field basic medical questions from me. As luck would have it, he wasn’t in the middle of suturing a gash or pumping someone’s stomach and said he had time to talk. I asked if he was familiar with any antidepressants that interacted badly with food.

“Must be an MAO inhibitor,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Explain, please.”

“Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are a type of antidepressant. They’re used as a last resort for people who don’t respond to the new drugs like Prozac. They were pretty popular at one point, but then it turned out there’s a big downside. If you mix them with certain foods, they can spike your blood pressure—in some cases fatally.”

“What kinds of food?”

“It’s a fairly long list. Any fermented or aged foods. Preserved or smoked meats—you know, salami, sausage, that sort of thing. Soy sauce, caviar, chicken livers, I think. Beer. And cheese. You gotta stay away from the cheese. In fact, the hypertensive crisis that can occur is sometimes called a cheese reaction.”

“What happens exactly?”

“Okay, stop me if I get too technical. All the foods I mentioned contain tyramine, a molecule that affects blood pressure. MAO enzymes in your brain get rid of any excess tyramine. But if you’re taking an MAO inhibitor, it eases depression but can’t stop tyramine from building up. You can end up with a brain hemorrhage.

“So you’d be really stupid to eat any of that stuff intentionally.”

“Yeah, but some people can’t resist cheating—just like on any diet. They sample a little bit and discover nothing bad happens. That’s because foods don’t always contain the same amount of tyramine. You may get away with cheating once or twice, but then it’s the third or fourth time when you have a reaction.”

“How long would it take for the reaction to occur?”

“A few hours, I’d say. It wouldn’t be instant.”

“One more question: Could you murder someone on a MAO inhibitor by making certain they ate these foods?”

“It’s always murder with you, isn’t it, Bailey,” he said, chuckling. “Well, I suppose you could sneak it into a person’s meal somehow. But what happens in most cases when there’s a problem is that people just go off their diets. They just give in to the temptation of a nice, runny Brie, and it proves to be a fatal mistake.”

I thanked him for the info and signed off. Next I called
Gloss
’s food editor, who I figured might have crossed paths with Jamie and would have heard details about her death. No one picked up in her office. I left a message but knew from past experience calling her for recipes that it might be several days before she checked her voice mail.

When I left my apartment building just after eleven, the streets had been thoroughly plowed, but the city still looked like a wonderland. The snow was the kind that twinkles in the sun, and it was still in pristine condition. There wasn’t enough traffic to have turned the piles of it along the road into giant black cinder blocks.

The first half of the trip to Greenwich was easier than I’d expected. The highways were mostly clear, and traffic was light. But Greenwich itself was another story. Greenwich Avenue, a main street lined with impeccably maintained little shops, was clogged with cars. Obviously people had decided not to let the snow prevent them from shopping for expensive wines and cashmere sweater sets.

My ex-husband had once suggested we look at the suburbs, and I’d nearly had a panic attack at the thought. I’d fallen in love with New York and couldn’t imagine leaving. Of course, this was before I’d figured out he had a hopeless gambling addiction. It would soon become apparent we wouldn’t be living
anywhere
together for the rest of our lives.

When I finally reached Ashley’s town house, not far from the center of Greenwich, she answered the door as quickly as she had the phone. She was dressed in pale peach today and was holding a lit cigarette, one of those superlong ones that made it appear as if she were smoking part of the Alaska pipeline.

“Nice place,” I said as I stepped inside. The living room was decorated within an inch of its life in reds and golds, and there seemed to be a monkey theme happening—monkeys dancing on fabric, monkey lamps, a monkey on its back holding up a bowl of potpourri. “Did you do it yourself?”

“Of course,”
she said in an impressive mix of exasperation and condescension. “I’m a
decorator
. Would you like something to drink?”

“I’d kill for some coffee,” I said. She seemed to wince at my poor choice of words.

“I only have those teabaglike things,” she informed me. I was desperate enough that I accepted the offer.

She led me back to a small kitchen with a black-and-green granite countertop and shiny new appliances. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or grease anywhere, and nothing was out of place. It appeared that the only food that had been consumed there recently might have been a single Carr’s Table Water cracker.

Ashley stubbed out her cigarette and filled a teakettle with water. Her movements as she lit the stove were jerky, and she seemed as wired today as she had been last night.

“Ashley, you’ve got to try to calm down,” I said.

“Last night, before I got together with you, I actually thought that if I talked to someone about my fears, they might suddenly seem silly to me. But that didn’t happen. I feel even more scared now than I did before.”

“But this really could just be a coincidence.”

“But what about that question Robin asked me—about whether anything had seemed strange at the wedding?”

“She might not have even been thinking of Jamie’s death when she said it. Maybe something else was on her mind. Tell me, how is it that the two of them struck up a friendship?”

“From what she told me, they just started talking,” she said. “You know, at the rehearsal dinner or the wedding. Jamie had recently broken up with someone, I guess, and Robin had just split with her husband. Robin indicated that they talked a lot about their situations. I guess you could say they bonded over bad men.”

The teakettle whistled shrilly, making Ashley jump. She poured hot water into a bright red mug and then dipped the coffee bag into it several times with a squeamish expression on her face—you would have thought she was dunking a mouse.

“Milk?” she asked.

“Yes, please. Was that why Robin was taking MAO inhibitors? Because of her divorce?”

“Excuse me?”

“MAO inhibitors. They’re the type of antidepressant I believe she was taking.”

“Robin had a depression problem since high school. She’d tried stuff like Prozac and Paxil, but nothing ever seemed to work for her—there were always these awful side effects. Last summer the doctor put her on this other drug—whatever you called it—and she really started to feel great.”

“Was it hard for her to stay on the diet? I did a little research yesterday, and apparently an awful lot of foods are off-limits when you take this type of drug.”

“I’m sure it
was
hard. Robin loved food. In fact, Peyton got furious with her because she gained a few pounds before the wedding. But none of that means she cheated. Like I told you yesterday, she was extremely careful about the foods she needed to avoid.”

“Do you know who her psychiatrist was?”

“No, but . . .” She strode jerkily across the kitchen and yanked open a drawer. From inside she took a wrinkled yellow Post-it note and handed it to me. The initials
C.B.
were written on it in pen, along with a phone number with an area code I didn’t recognize.

“Robin had this on the refrigerator. When I asked her what it was, she said it was her
lifeline
.”

“Is any of her other stuff still here?” I asked, copying down the phone number on a pad in my purse.

“Very little. Her parents are both dead, but she’s got a brother in town. A few days after the funeral, he and his wife just dropped by out of the blue and took the clothes and jewelry and any papers that seemed important. They were borderline rude about it—I almost had the feeling they thought I was going to
take
some of her things.”

I asked if I could see what was left, and she led me upstairs to the second floor. The bedroom was shockingly bare. Cream-colored walls, simple white Roman shades, and, except for a double bed, dresser, and desk, no furniture or decoration.

“Pretty picked over,” I said.

“It didn’t look much different when Robin lived here—she never got around to fixing the place up. I think she was taking a while to get used to the fact that she was now single.”

“Why’d they split up?”

“Brace is a Wall Street trader and a real maniac about his job. When they were married he was out practically every night with clients, and he was always getting calls from places like Japan in the middle of the night. He never had any time for Robin, and it was making her depression worse. Of course, the minute she splits, he’s all sorry and keeps calling, saying he’ll be different. She talked to him a few times about getting back together, but eventually she realized he wasn’t going to change. He finally got the message and backed off.”

I walked over to the small desk and let my eyes roam over the top of it. Nothing seemed significant: empty file folders, envelopes, a stack of catalogs filled with kitchen supplies.

“What did Robin’s job with Peyton entail, exactly?”

“She was the manager of the shop and also the buyer. She ordered all the kitchenware and the gourmet food they sell. Peyton had this idea for a line of her own products, and Robin was looking into that, too.”

“She and Peyton were pretty close?”

“Relatively so. I mean, they met in
grade
school. But I think their relationship had more to do with how far back they went than any special thing they had in common. The work arrangement served both their purposes. Robin never felt she could handle some big office job, and running the shop was perfect for her. And Peyton has always preferred to be surrounded by a posse of people she knows. To be honest, I’d been encouraging Robin to start thinking about moving on—especially since she was feeling so much better. Peyton—well, you’ve seen her in action. She’s gotten very demanding in the last year, and working for her is no picnic.”

“What about you? You work for her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, followed by a sniff. “But only sporadically. Peyton developed a taste for decorating when she did her house, and she likes supervising most of the big projects herself now. If something small or unappealing comes up, she’ll include me. In fact, I’m involved in a project there now—turning the silo into a gallery. Peyton couldn’t be bothered with it.”