'Til Death Do Us Part (40 page)

As much as I tried to dismiss this new theory, it seemed to make sense. Jamie must have blackmailed Peyton—that would explain not only the falling-out between Peyton and Jamie last summer, but also the sudden funding for Jamie’s gourmet shop. Jamie might have reasoned that Peyton was a fatter pigeon than Trip, and revenge on the woman she envied would certainly have been sweeter. Had she confided her nasty little plan to Robin? Probably not, because Robin didn’t seem to have any grudge against Peyton. But she gave her the photos for safekeeping, and after Jamie’s death, Robin suspected there was something sinister at play related to the wedding. I stopped in front of the mantel again and stared at the shot of Peyton and David one more time. Such a tiny detail, a boutonniere, yet I felt furious with myself that I’d missed it.

“
Here
you are!”

I whirled around like someone who’d just been tapped on the shoulder in a cemetery. Peyton was standing in the entrance of the library, still wearing her mink coat.

“Aren’t you—I thought you were going to be at the farm for a while,” I said, feeling fear gush through every limb.

“Mary’s got it under control,” Peyton said. “Plus, with everything that’s happened, I thought it would be nice to just hang with you.” She smiled broadly at me, as if this were the happiest day of her life.

“Thanks. I—I was just having some tea. Clara made it for me.” I felt completely at a loss for words. I saw her eyes fall to the coffee table.

“Oh, are those the photos?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, quickly stepping toward the table and scooping up the pictures in my hand. “There’s no urgency, though. They may mean nothing at all, actually. Didn’t you want to take a walk?” I now had as much interest in a hike around the property with her as I would in hanging on to the back of a Manhattan bus while riding a skateboard, but I needed to discourage her from reviewing the photos.

“It can wait a sec,” she said, holding out her right hand emphatically. “Here, let me see them.”

There seemed to be no choice but to relinquish the pictures. She would clearly be suspicious if I didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said, and handed them over with a weak smile. “I didn’t see anything odd myself, but maybe you will.” I wondered if she could pick up on my lie—and/or my anxiety.

She flicked through the pictures at a fast clip, the way someone would sort through a stack of mail after work when what they really wanted to do was rip off their panty hose and mix a cocktail. I saw her hesitate for a split second and her face darken. I knew she had spotted the one of her and the mystery man. But she composed herself again quickly.

“No, nothing,” she said, her voice too loud. “But I’ll take a longer look later. You ready for the walk? I asked Clara to dig up a pair of my hiking boots for you. We’re the same size.”

I searched frantically through my mind for some way to get out of the walk but couldn’t find one. I’d informed her just a few minutes ago that I was game. I couldn’t very well change my mind without making her realize that something was up.

“Um, sure,” I said. “But let’s not make it too long—it’s going to get dark in an hour or so.”

“I’ll be down in about two minutes,” she said, beaming. “I’m just going to slip into some jeans.”

I reached out my hand for the photographs.

“I’ll keep these for now,” she declared, stuffing them into their envelope. “I want to look through them more carefully after we get back.”

I watched her leave, the envelope grasped in her hand. Without the pictures, I had nothing. But short of tackling her to the ground, there’d been no way to pry them loose from her. My only hope was that rather than torching them with a match in her bedroom, she really would hang on to them long enough to go through them again—and I could somehow extract them from her.

I didn’t relish the idea of being out in the woods with Peyton, yet it would be smart to keep her in my sights. The only question: Was I in any danger? I didn’t think so. Up until ten minutes ago I hadn’t a clue she was the killer, and she’d clearly sensed my ignorance. I just prayed she hadn’t picked up any vibe from me just now. She’d seemed wired, but that was probably from coming face-to-face with the incriminating photo. I rifled through my bag for my cell phone and wedged it into my jeans pocket, just to be on the safe side.

She was back in less than five minutes and motioned for me to follow her. She led me through the kitchen into a large mud room. Two pairs of hiking boots stood at attention there, waiting for us. I stuck my feet in the pair she pointed to and laced them tightly, and she did the same with hers. Once we were finished she slipped into a weatherproof jacket and then pulled another one off the hook for me.

“What’s the terrain like out there?” I asked, trying to sound chatty and normal.

“You’ll see. It’s a little woody, but there’s a path. And it’s so pretty. I find it always relaxes me.”

I followed Peyton through the mud room door out into the backyard. The sky was overcast, and the ground was steaming with fog.

As we started across the yard, a man in a navy barn jacket emerged from behind the garage. He was about forty, with skin that was lined from the sun and wavy blond hair just long enough to tuck behind his ears. It wasn’t until he spoke that I realized he was the Australian caretaker.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Slavin,” he said, offering a warm smile.

“Where are you off to, Brian?” Peyton asked impatiently.

“One of the workers said the snow took down a tree in the northwest corner,” he said, falling into step beside us. “I wanted to check it out before dark.”

“You can do that tomorrow. I need you to take a look at my car. The seat belt on the driver’s side seems stuck.”

He stopped in his tracks, a perplexed expression on his face. For a second I thought he was going to protest, but he clearly thought better of it.

“Sure,” was all he said, and turned to retrace his steps.

Peyton and I traversed the wide expanse of snow-covered lawn past a rectangular indentation that was obviously a swimming pool and patio. At the far end we entered a cluster of trees. The snow was still at least a foot high in places, but wet and beating a fast retreat. Every so often you could hear a clump of snow fall from the trees and plop onto the ground.

“How much of the land out here is yours?” I called out. Peyton was just ahead of me, and I had to shout at the back of her French twist.

“About fifteen acres,” she said. “It’s amazing to have this amount of land in Greenwich. The lots are big out here, but rarely this big.”

I was sorry to hear this—I would have liked knowing neighbors were closer by.

We walked for about ten minutes, trudging along a snow-covered path that was already scarred with footprints—someone had obviously been along the path earlier in the day. We came to a small stream that must have recently thawed because it ran with the abandon of water that had just been freed. There was a large stone in the middle of it that Peyton placed one foot on and used to spring to the other side. I tried to do the same, but I slipped on the wet stone and one foot landed in six inches of water.

“Careful,” Peyton called out, and reached for my hand. She grabbed it and pulled me across to the other side. Despite the fact that my jacket was unzipped, I could feel myself beginning to sweat.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it,” she said, “how everything is melting all of a sudden?”

“The legendary January thaw,” I said. I was finding it nearly impossible to make light conversation with her. Everything I said came out stilted.

We continued along the path, down a slope through a more wooded area, thick with fir trees and bare oaks and maples. There wasn’t another house in sight, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, I couldn’t see any portion of Peyton’s massive home. It was far more secluded than I’d imagined. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to get the heck out of there.

“Shouldn’t we think of turning back?” I asked.

“Turn back? You’ve never been known for turning back, have you, Bailey?”

“Not when it makes sense to stay. But it’s so wet—and it’s getting dark.”

“Just a bit farther. I want you to see the clearing.”

At the bottom of the slope we emerged into a small clearing. Off to the right was an immense flat area ringed with trees. A meadow obviously lay beneath the snow there.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Peyton asked, halting on the trail.

“Hmm, sure. Look, I’d like to get back to the house. It’s been a tough twenty-four hours for me.”

“But don’t you want to know why I did it?” she asked.

She was just ahead of me on the little trail, and she turned toward me with a smile as she spoke. I froze in place.

“What are you talking about?” I asked weakly.

“Oh, come now, Bailey. I know you know. I saw it in your eyes when you were standing in the library. You must have just figured it all out.”

I swallowed and glanced up at the sky. It looked as if it had been smudged with soot.

“I knew there were pictures, you know,” she continued. “Jamie told me she had proof. But I couldn’t find them at her place.”

“Is that why you went to Jamie’s that night—to find the pictures?” I asked. It seemed pointless to pretend.

“She actually
asked
me to her place. That bitch wanted to talk about her pathetic little store, the one where she was going to sell white bean dip to winos. She blackmailed me into giving her the money for it, but she honestly believed it was a shrewd business move for me. Plus, she loved seeing me sweat. Jamie just couldn’t bear that I had everything. She left me with no choice but to kill her.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

She laughed and zipped up her jacket a few more inches. The unseen sun had begun to drop, lowering the temperature.

“What harm does it do to tell you?” she asked, shrugging. “You have no proof. No one would believe a word you said. I mean, the Greenwich police already think you’re insane. Every day you’ve got a different theory.”

She was a sociopath—self-focused, incapable of seeing other people as real or worthy of respect, in love with risk, convinced she was not only smarter than anyone else, but invulnerable. The early warning signs had been there since college, but I’d never picked up on them.

“How did you do it?”

“It?”

“Kill Jamie.”

“It was easy. She’d already had half a bottle of wine when I got there, and then she had more. When she was done talking to me, she suggested that I see myself to the door while she ran her bath—as if I were the fucking cleaning lady. I just stood in this little entranceway of hers, trying to make a plan. After I heard the water stop running, I went into the bathroom. And then I just dumped the CD player into the tub.”

“And Robin?”

“I really didn’t want to hurt Robin. But she wouldn’t shut the fuck up about Jamie’s death. She kept saying it might have to do with the wedding, and finally she let it slip that Jamie had given her some pictures. I asked to see them, but she kept putting it off. I think she was worried I might be involved somehow. It was clear that the pictures didn’t mean anything to her—but I was afraid she’d eventually figure it out.”

“How did you get the tyramine into her food?”

She laughed, as if I’d just amused her to death. “Give me a little credit, Bailey, will you? Despite what my enemies say, I
do
develop my own recipes. I heard Robin ask one of the kitchen workers to make her a smoothie for the trip to Vermont. I just added the Brewer’s yeast when no one was looking. It’s loaded with tyramine.”

“And—and Ashley? You didn’t have anything to do with her death?”

“I have no fucking clue what happened to her. Maybe it
was
Trip. Oh, she was starting to get on my nerves big-time, too. She had this whole conspiracy theory going, like something out of that movie
JFK
. I knew the pictures might still be around, so I had Robin’s brother come and get everything.”

“So it was you who told him that Ashley was picking over Robin’s stuff?”

She laughed. “Yes. Ashley would have freaked if she knew that. She was so damn proper. But I didn’t realize until we talked on the phone today that Robin’s moron of a brother had left the pictures behind. So, see, you can’t hold me responsible for Ashley. That’s why I let you be the detective. I needed to know what had happened, if someone was somehow on to me and trying to damage my business or threaten me. Weren’t you sweet to point the finger at Trip.”