'Til Death Do Us Part (4 page)

“Was it a problem for you—when Peyton started using you less?”

“No. My business has really taken off—in part because of the work I did initially for Peyton.” It was said without gratitude but also unbegrudgingly, as if she had come to accept the fact that Peyton giveth and Peyton taketh away.

I turned back to the desk and pulled open the single drawer. Inside were some art postcards, a bunch of pens in a rubber band, an emery board, and sheets of stationery. I lifted the paper to see what was underneath. There was an envelope from a photo development lab. I flicked the flap up with my thumb and slid out the stack of photos. There were about two dozen shots from Peyton’s wedding. I started to glance at them, one by one.

“I gave a box of Robin’s photographs to her brother, but I didn’t notice these,” Ashley said. “Maybe she took them with one of those disposable cameras they had on the tables that night. You were supposed to turn those in at the end of the reception, but I guess Robin decided she wanted the pictures for herself.”

“Yeah, except . . .”

“Except
what
?” she asked anxiously. She sounded ready to freak at the slightest provocation.

“I don’t think Robin took these pictures,” I said. “See, she’s
in
so many of them. And they’re not posed pictures, so it doesn’t appear as if she asked someone to take some shots of her.”

I thumbed through the stack again. There were two photos of Peyton alone, looking spectacular in her gown, and one of David and Peyton outside, kissing passionately under a trellis. There were also quite a few shots of guests mingling and talking and dancing and a few more of all the bridesmaids. All the bridesmaids, that is, except for one.

“I think
Jamie
took these photos, not Robin,” I said. “She’s the only bridesmaid not in any of the shots. And I remember she had her own camera that day. It was one of those baby Nikons—I asked to take a look at it.”

“But what—? Omigod, Jamie asked Robin to keep these pictures for her, didn’t she. You see, there
was
something strange about the wedding. Maybe Jamie discovered it and told Robin.”

She went all nervous Nellie on me, whipping her head from side to side like a dog with a shoe in its mouth. But I had to admit there was something weird about the fact that Jamie’s photos were tucked away in Robin’s drawer.

I turned over the envelope and saw by the name and address stamped on the back that the photo shop was in lower Manhattan—where Jamie had lived. That meant Jamie probably had the photos developed, then brought them out to Greenwich for some reason.

“Maybe Jamie didn’t want the pictures in the end and passed them along to Robin,” I volunteered.

Ashley shook her head again, as if my words had done nothing to mollify her. “No, there’s definitely more to it than that. Jamie saw something that day, and she gave Robin these pictures for safekeeping.”

“Please try to stay calm, Ashley,” I said, slipping the photos into my purse. “I’m going to look into this, okay? Now tell me. Do you know how to get in touch with Peyton’s other two attendants?”

“Prudence is living in London—her husband took a job there. Of course, she was the maid of honor, and I have no idea whether that
excludes
her from all of this. And Maverick’s in New York. She’s the one who handles Peyton’s PR. I have no clue where she lives, but we could get her number from Peyton—or it would be in the book under Maverick PR.”

I suggested we go back downstairs and then head over to Ivy Hill Farm. Though I’d tried to reassure Ashley, finding the photos disturbed me. Maybe Jamie
had
seen something odd at the wedding, something she’d captured in one of the pictures. Then she’d hinted at it to Robin. But I still had a hard time imagining someone killing her—and later Robin. The question I kept coming back to was
why
? Plus, there was apparently absolutely no evidence of foul play.

We agreed that I would follow Ashley in her car, which was parked not far from mine behind the town house. I slipped into my Jeep and waited as she set several shopping bags of fabric samples into the backseat of her red Mercedes coupé. Seemingly out of nowhere, a tall blond guy in his early to mid-thirties strode over to her car and spoke to her. In his navy blue wool coat and plaid scarf, he was clearly some sort of business type. Ashley listened to him with a haughty gaze and then shook her head vehemently. Maybe it was a neighbor, claiming she’d hijacked his parking spot. She brushed past him to get into the front seat of her car. He turned, trudged across the parking lot, his feet clad in a pair of those floppy black totable snow boots, and climbed into a car of his own.

The farm was north, in an area known as the “backcountry”—where there were numerous multimillion-dollar estates and horse farms. Owing to a combination of poor road conditions and heavy suburban traffic, the trip took longer than it should have—about twenty minutes. I’d been to the farm before, but I’d forgotten how truly lovely it was. Covered in snow, it looked like a Christmas card. Though the original farm had been huge, most of the land had been sold off years ago and was now spotted with mammoth houses. Peyton’s property amounted to about five acres. The main buildings were an old white clapboard farmhouse, used for offices, a big red barn where the catering was done and the cooking classes were taught, a smaller gray barn that housed the gourmet shop, and a wooden-shingled silo. Past the farmhouse I saw a new building under construction—the TV studio perhaps.

The parking lot was only a quarter full, and I ended up pulling into a spot right alongside Ashley’s. After she’d extracted her shopping bags from the back of her Mercedes, she pointed in the direction of the silo.

“I’m going over there,” she said, her face still furrowed with stress. “It doesn’t call for much decorating, but I want the walls to look nice—plus I’ve pulled some great fabrics for the bench cushions.”

“Would you like me to meet you over there when I’m finished?”

“No,” she said, “it’s really messy. The workers are almost done but there’s junk all over. I’m just going to double-check some fabrics against the wall colors and then I’ll come to the kitchen. Being in the silo alone gives me the creeps.”

As she turned to go, I asked who the guy was who had stopped her by the car.

“That was Robin’s ex, Brace Atkins,” she said. “He had the nerve to ask me where her things were. He was irritated when I told him that her brother had taken them.”

She hurried down the path, not seeming to care that her thousand-dollar brown leather boots were plunging into the snow. I headed up the shorter path to the barns. I felt something wet touch my nose and realized that snow had started falling lightly.

The smaller of the two barns, the gray one, was the shop, and through the window I could see a young female salesclerk ringing up a customer. Just beyond was the large barn, freshly painted red, and inside I found half a dozen people bustling around. It was a big, gorgeous space with pine cupboards, a brick fireplace, massive stainless-steel stoves, and several huge stainless-steel refrigerators—kind of Colonial Williamsburg meets
The Jetsons
. Peyton was working at a large butcher block island with several women, but she raised her hand in greeting as soon as she saw me. I crossed the room toward her.

“Hi there,” she said, putting down a utensil I didn’t recognize and giving me a hug. Her long, lank, strawberry-blond hair was pinned up in a French twist, a signature look she’d adopted in the past few years on her way to being a media star. She was wearing a green Diane von Furstenberg-style wrap dress—not exactly cutting-edge, but fashion had been one of the few things Peyton had never quite mastered. To my surprise, she looked as if she had gained about ten to fifteen pounds since the wedding. I wondered suddenly if she might be pregnant.

“Do you remember Bailey Weggins?” she asked the two women closest to her. “This is my cousin Phillipa—you probably met at the wedding. And Mary, my executive director. We’ve got a party tomorrow night, and we’re doing the prep work.”

I shook hands with both women. Mary was probably around forty, one of those preppy types you see around Greenwich who seem vaguely asexual—blondish brown hair cut in a bob, no makeup, skin lined from the sun. I
did
remember Peyton’s cousin from the wedding, in large part because she had seemed so self-conscious and sour that day. She was green-eyed like Peyton and had blond hair, too, but hers was almost platinum and very brassy. She was no more than five feet four, and my guess was that she weighed close to two hundred pounds.

“I talked to Ashley this morning and she said she was coming with you,” Peyton said, looking around.

“She went over to the silo with some fabric swatches,” I explained. “She’s going to meet me here later.”

“It’s going to be fabulous over there when we finish. How about a piece of lemon tart?” she asked.

“Sounds good. I’m famished.”

As Mary and Phillipa returned to their work, Peyton turned and swung open the door of one of the Sub-Zeros. It looked morgue sized, big enough to hold four or five cadavers. She emerged, instead, with a tart covered with plastic wrap, and she cut a wedge for each of us. Then she led me to a wooden farm table at the far side of the room, away from the kitchen staff and near the fireplace, where a stack of logs burned and crackled. There was a coffeepot already on the table, and after we sat down, she poured us both a mugful, adding a smidgen of milk to mine. That was Peyton. As self-absorbed as she seemed, she always remembered little details about you, like how you took your coffee and the nicknames of your siblings.

“So how are you doing?” I asked once I’d slipped off my coat and taken a sip of coffee. Despite the extra pounds she was as pretty as ever—the pale, flawless skin lightly dusted with freckles, the pink cheeks, the perfect small nose.

“Like I said on the phone, it’s been a big mess,” she said, digging into her tart. “I threw my back out, which always happens when I’m stressed. We thought about closing the shop for a few days, but that seemed fairly pointless.”

“Ashley thinks the two deaths could be connected somehow. What do
you
think?”

“Not simply connected. She thinks someone
killed
Robin and Jamie. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? She wanted you to investigate things.”

“She’s pretty upset, so I said I would make a few inquiries.”

“Well, I know Jamie and Robin had become friends, but it all seems like an awful coincidence to me. Robin apparently ate food she wasn’t supposed to. She was on some kind of medication that required a restricted diet, and she ignored the rules. Jamie had some senseless accident. I don’t know as much about her situation, though—we’d had a bit of a falling-out in the summer. I hadn’t spoken to her for weeks before she died.”

Had Jamie reached her limit with Peyton, just as I had? I also wondered if a falling-out might explain why Jamie had decided to give the wedding photos to Robin.

“Why?” I asked.

“She was hoping to open her own gourmet food store in New York—in the East Village. She was having trouble finding investors and getting things off the ground, so I offered her some advice. And she acted indignant, as if I were totally out of line. To be perfectly honest, I think she was jealous of me. I hate to say it, but that’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem for me these days.”

She glanced toward the kitchen work area.

“Could you excuse me for a couple of minutes, Bailey? I need to make sure they’re not destroying anything over there.”

After she walked away, I took a black-and-white composition notebook out of my tote bag and opened it. Whenever I write an article, I make notes in a composition book—tidbits of information, observations and impressions, questions to myself. I do the actual writing on my computer, of course, but I find that jotting down notes with a number 2 pencil gets my brain working in a new way, helps me see the facts from a different angle. And sometimes when I’m rereading my notes I’ll see a connection or something significant that wasn’t apparent when I first put pencil to paper. I’d used this tactic with the murder investigations I’d been involved in, and I was going to do the same thing with my research now. It all might amount to nothing, but I liked the ritual of tracking my findings and impressions in a clean, no-frills notebook, and I harbored the vague hope that it would impose clarity and order on a puzzling situation. As I worked, I kept one ear partially cocked toward the kitchen. Watching Peyton’s staff interact with her—asking questions about ingredients and cooking times and garnishes—I realized that they moved around her as if they were walking on eggshells.

Suddenly I heard Peyton’s voice rise in anger. “You never use
aged
goat cheese with this, you idiot,” she shouted, at the same decibel level someone might utilize to announce that the barn was in flames. “It crumbles too much.”

I glanced over to see Phillipa storm off through the swinging door at the end of the room, followed a moment later by Mary. The others, who had frozen in position momentarily, resumed their work with lowered heads, somber as restroom attendants.