“I do it personally.” Genevra gave Gillian a direct look. “If you want a job done right . . .” Calmly, she put a forkful of duck in her mouth. It was deftly done, graceful and dainty. Her mouth closed around it, and she chewed. Swallowed. Laid the fork down. “I thought you’d like to know that the art auction is going well. We’ve had a wonderful response and hope to raise quite a lot of money for the new hospital wing.”
Gotta admire the way she declined to rise to Gillian’s bait.
Ray did some mental dancing. The art auction was the charity event at the end of next week.
“Genevra’s the event chair,” Chip explained to Ray. “She’s done a remarkable job, too.”
“Even I donated something,” Gillian said. “
Big Date.
Have you seen it?”
Ray thought back to the coffee table book. Couldn’t place it.
“Blonde in a tub of bloody water. Lots of lotions and soaps lying around.”
Oh, yeah. That one.
A beat. The two Grays looked momentarily horror-struck.
“Just kidding.” Gillian smirked.
“I asked for the flowers,” Genevra said.
“And that’s what I sent.”
Chip cleared his throat. “Where are you from, Ray?”
Here it came. Deflection time. “Originally? Long Island.”
Genevra asked, “Do you still have family there?”
“My mother died when I was in college.”
“And your father?” Leave it to Gillian to ask the question he didn’t want to answer.
“Out of the picture,” Ray said at last. “The less said the better.”
Gillian brightened. “Really? I had no idea we had so much in common.”
Ray sensed another level of tension in the room. It intrigued him. In all the file information Ray had read, Gillian’s father had never been mentioned. Not even his identity. Briefly he pondered using the short silence to ask his questions, but it felt like piling on. And Genevra spoke first.
“How long have you been in Nashville?”
Her effort to change the subject did not go unchallenged. “We all have fathers,” Gillian said. “Not everyone has a father no one talks about.”
“There’s little to say,” Genevra snapped. “Your father is dead.”
“How convenient for me,” Gillian said.
Ray looked between the two women. Clearly a sore subject.
“More club soda?” Chip asked Ray, whose glass was already full.
“I’m fine.”
Chip held up his own glass. “You don’t drink?”
“No, sir.” He didn’t explain. These people were already burdened with their own pasts. They didn’t need his as well. “I went to college in Birmingham,” Ray said instead. “Played hockey for the Chargers. You played football, didn’t you? Vanderbilt?”
“Quarterback.” Chip beamed. He plunged into a story about being selected SEC Player of the Year, and the conversation moved to safer ground.
Dessert was served in the library, a room with polished wood and studded leather. Shelves of books lined one wall. An ancient globe sat on a stand in one corner, a grandfather clock in another. In the shuffle between locations, Ray excused himself to talk to Landowe.
The night appeared quiet, the estate as well. “Some of the protesters have drifted off,” Landowe told him. “But a few of the ’razzi are still there.”
“Everything else set?”
“Just give the word.”
Gillian appeared and glided over to Landowe. “Can I get you anything? Cigarette? Scotch?” She put her arm through his and leaned in. “A little weed?”
Landowe shot Ray a fast glance. “No, thank you.”
“Good.” She grinned and let him go. “Because I was kidding about the weed.”
Ray ignored her shenanigans. “Need a break?” he asked Landowe.
“I’m fine.”
He took Gillian by the arm and escorted her back to the library. “Leave Landowe alone.”
“He’s a grown-up. He can take care of himself.” She thrust a coffee cup at him. One of those dainty china things that feel like they’d break in your hand. “Black as coal,” she said, “and tastes the same. Just the way you like it.”
He sampled the hot liquid. It was good and strong.
A maid was serving some kind of cake. He refused a piece. Wondered how many times the Grays had sat down to dinner in their own home with the help.
In deference to that rarity, and to the fact that he felt more in control, he remained standing. The room was quiet, the tick of the grandfather clock filling the silence. Gillian’s grandparents were braced on matching leather armchairs that were deep enough to have been thrones. They appeared armored and protected, and that was the best position they’d been in all night. He took his shot.
“I went for a ride today,” he said to no one in particular. “Out Highway 100.”
Three pairs of eyes suddenly focused on him.
“I saw the house.” No one asked what house he was talking about. “If Holland moved there today, she would be in the middle of suburban sprawl. But back then, she was in the middle of nowhere. Remote. Cut off. Made me wonder.”
“We aren’t going to talk about this.” Genevra’s face was sharp enough to kill.
“Wonder what?” Gillian asked.
He turned to her. “Wonder why she left this beautiful house. Her family. The safety net she had right here.”
“Safety net?” Gillian muttered. “Cage more likely.”
Gillian was focused on him, so she didn’t see the tiny flinch in her grandmother’s face.
Genevra set her coffee cup on the arm of her chair. “Holland was always wild. Never listened to anyone.”
“But she came here to get away from the wild side,” Ray said. “At least, that’s what the press reported.” He ignored the scowl on Gillian’s face, the dagger stares from Chip and Genevra. He shrugged. “The media rarely gets anything right, so . . .” Ray lifted his free hand. “I wondered if there was some other reason she came home.”
“She came home for me.” Gillian’s eyes glittered. “To give me something better than a drugged-out party life.”
Ray sipped his coffee again. “Well, she’d had you for, what—six, seven years? She didn’t seem to care about her celebrity lifestyle in all that time. Why the sudden change of heart?”
Genevra rose, overturning her cup and saucer. The cup landed on the rug, but the saucer hit the strip between the rug and the hardwood floor, and shattered.
A moment of silence, as if the broken china represented everything wrong in the room. One violent act that smashed the world into pieces.
Chip leaped to his feet and called for the maid. The uniformed woman who’d served dinner scurried in, threw up her hands, and scurried back out again. She ran back with a dish towel and proceeded to mop up the mess while everyone looked on stoically.
The subject of Holland Gray was lost in the commotion, and when Ray looked up, Gillian was gone.
He found her upstairs in her bedroom, Landowe at the door. “It’s okay,” Ray told him. “I’ll take it from here. Get the limo ready.”
Landowe left, and Ray slipped into the room. Gillian was bending over a thick scrapbook. He leaned against the door and watched her ignore him.
“You ever go back to your mother’s house?”
“No.”
He quirked his brows skeptically. “Not like you not to confront your demons head-on.”
Her head snapped up. She scowled at him. “I don’t need to go back to remember it. To see it.” She held his glance a moment. “Okay, so I’m chicken. Everyone’s allowed one small yellow streak.”
But he wouldn’t call her reticence cowardice. It was a way of keeping her distance so she could re-create the reality in her photographs. Manipulate the memories. Objectify them, maybe. Dull the impact and make them easier to live with.
He moved into the room, sat on the edge of the bed. “I wouldn’t call it small. I’d call it barely visible.”
He’d spoken gently but her eyes glared. “Why all the questions about my mother anyway?”
“Just wondering,” he said mildly, not a little surprised at her disapproval.
“It upset my grandparents.” Not to mention her.
“So let me get this straight. It’s okay for you to upset them, but they’re off-limits to anyone else?”
“Maybe,” she said grudgingly. “Something like that.”
“Why, Gillian Gray.” He clapped a hand to his chest in mock astonishment. “You do have a heart.”
“Very funny.”
He nodded toward the scrapbook. “What’s this?”
She opened the book. The top of the spine had separated from the binding because the book was so fat. “My grandmother still thinks she kept this from me, but I’ve known about it since I was eleven.” Slowly, she turned the pages.
Articles about Holland mixed with magazine pages and photographs. Holland as a teenager in sale circulars for local department stores that no longer existed. Later, in catalogs for Bergdorf and Neiman Marcus. And still later, in the
New York Times
style section and
Women’s Wear Daily.
He’d seen some of the covers in the file, the public stuff, but the book contained private things as well. Keepsakes. A broken bra strap from a Valentino show in Rome. An invitation to Fashion Week in Paris. Photographs of friends and colleagues.
“See what a liar my grandmother is?” Gillian said. “She pretends she hated my mother, but she kept every last scrap Holland saved.”
Ray fingered the yellowed newspaper articles, the faded pictures of Fashion Week and the old Polaroids of photo shoots. “How many times have you looked through this?”
“Thousands?” She gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “A lot. I used to go through the book and pick my father out from the pictures.”
She showed him a behind-the-scene photo of a fashion shoot. Holland was in front of a glittery backdrop. A sandy-haired man straddled a camera on a tripod. “I liked his long hair.”
She flipped another few pages, came to another candid shot of Holland, this one with her hair in rollers, laughing in a chair in front of a makeup mirror. A man with a hair-dryer stood over her. “Or maybe it’s the hairdresser.”
“You know who they are?”
She shook her head. “Not their names.”
“How about your father?”
“Oh, his name I know. It’s dead.”
“Your father’s name is—”
“Dead. At least, that’s all I ever got from anyone about him. Mommy, who’s my daddy? Your daddy’s dead, sweetie. Grandmother, who’s my daddy? Your daddy’s dead, dear.” She shrugged.
“Didn’t you ever try to find out?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t? But after several tens of thousands, I decided dead was as good a name as any. I mean, what’s the point? He couldn’t sweep in and take me away anyway.” Wistfully, she ran her finger over her mother’s face in the photograph. “I like her like this. No makeup, hair in curlers. Laughing. She was so pretty.”
Ray watched the sadness seep into her face. Gently, he reached over and closed the book. “We should go.”
“Yeah. Enough wallowing.” Hauling the overstuffed book into her arms, Gillian crept down to her grandmother’s room.
Inside the room, the rose smell invaded her senses. It was strongest here, where her grandmother kept her
Jar-din de la Vie
cream on a vanity in one corner.
Left of the vanity a closet covered the wall. She opened it, stretched on tiptoes to stow the book high on a shelf behind a row of hatboxes Genevra rarely opened. “Wasn’t easy doing this when I was eleven.”
An arm reached over her head and pushed the book easily into place.
She came down from the balls of her feet. “You’re a handy guy to have around.”
“You’re welcome.”
They walked toward the stairs. Gillian shot him a curious glance, then looked away. “So . . . your father’s dead, too?”
“Probably not. Cockroaches never die.”
She was taken aback by the strong words. “Whoa. What’d he do?”
“Stole money from the company he worked for. Got arrested. Blew town while he was on bail. Never called. Never wrote. Never caught.”
“Ah. Not much.”
While Gillian was saying good-bye, Ray checked his phone. Landowe had sent a text message that he was on his way, and Burke had asked him to call. He punched in his former brother-in-law’s number.
“We traced the last Web site message,” Jimmy said. “It was sent from the first victim’s machine—a computer in the H&R Block office.” So, not Maddie. “And we found a new one. Text messaged from Dawn Farrell’s cell phone.” He repeated the content, and Ray’s stomach clenched.
“Prints?”
“No.”
Nothing to track back to the killer. “He’s not taking any chances, is he?”
“You keep a close watch on her,” Burke said, and disconnected.
A few minutes later, Gillian came out of the library. She looked around. “Where’s Landowe?”
“With the limo.” Ray nodded to the back of the house. “Come on.”
“Uh—the door’s the other way.” She pointed to the front. “Where are we going?”
“You’re big on adventure. Wait and see.”