Still she refused to back down. “Excuse me, Sheriff. Exactly what kind of silly questions is Deputy Mundy asking?”
Garvey ignored her. He turned to Audrey. “How is your father, Miss Ainsley?”
“He’s having a good day. Thank you, Sheriff.” She looked at Beck. “Is there some kind of trouble?”
“Not at all. Miss DeForde and I are just shooting the breeze. Oh, but listen. I have a message for your father.”
“I’ll see that he gets it.”
“Please tell him”—a wary glance at Rebecca—“please tell him that I spoke to my friend, and he is aware of the, ah, the problem. He’s going to take every precaution.”
Audrey nodded as though this made perfect sense, which, to her anyway, perhaps it did. “I’ll tell him. Thank you, Sheriff Garvey”
He turned to Beck. “Remember what we said.”
The nun walked the sheriff to the door. Tony Frias followed. He winked at Rebecca as he sauntered out.
When the door was closed, an anxious Audrey turned to Beck. “What was that all about?”
“Nothing. I think I got on his nerves.”
“His nerves are easy to get on.” Her tone was somber.
“And the message for your father?” said Beck. “What was that all about?”
“I wish I knew,” said the nun, turning away and heading for the kitchen. Beck watched her go, puzzling. She had known Audrey almost as long as she had known Jericho.
The woman had always been a poor liar.
(ii)
Fifteen minutes later, by a mercy, Pamela relinquished the house phone. Beck immediately called Sarasota, where her mother denied having been on the telephone in the middle of the night, but wanted to know why Beck had called so late in the first place. “You might not need your sleep, but you should think about the rest of us now and then. I’ve never known a girl as willful as you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t sulk. I’m just saying, you should try to be a little more thoughtful of others. That’s all.” A pause. “And how is your gentleman doing?” she asked politely:
your gentleman
being what Jacqueline had called him back when she was busy calling her daughter his concubine.
“He’s hanging in there.”
“You hang in there, too.” A small laugh. “I can tell when my little girl’s upset about something. But don’t you worry, Rebecca. You’ll come out fine. You were always the kind who wouldn’t let anybody stop you from landing on your feet.”
Not sure whether she had been complimented or insulted, Rebecca chose to sidestep. “Speaking of little girls—”
“I’ll get her.”
From Nina, Beck learned that Grandma had indeed bought her a gift, and it did indeed start with the letter “d,” but, bubbling over with delight that her mother had not heard the whole message, Nina refused absolutely to say whether the “d” stood for “dog” or “dominoes” or “dinosaur.” She asked the child to put Grandma back on the phone, who hemmed and hawed and finally confessed to having bought her granddaughter a doll: the latest in the American Girl series, priced at something north of one hundred dollars.
A doll. Not a dog.
“I know you don’t approve of spending that kind of money on toys, but it’s my money, dear, and, frankly, if a woman my age can’t spoil her grandchild now and then, what’s the money for? She can leave the doll down here, if that’ll make you feel better, and maybe that way you’ll let her visit more often—”
“Mom.”
“—and—who knows?—my own daughter might grace an old lady’s doorway every now and then—”
“Mom!”
“—and, besides, it’s just a doll. You don’t have to get all bent out of shape. Just because a girl plays with a pretty little doll doesn’t mean she won’t grow up to be a good feminist, or whatever you people call yourselves these days—”
“Mom, I love you,” she blurted.
Silence from Sarasota. For a mad moment Beck expected Jericho’s chuckling voice to intercede.
“You be careful out there,” her mother finally said. “Sorry, dear. Have to go. We’re taking a ride on a glass-bottom boat.”
Me, too.
That was what it felt like: a glass-bottom boat, because when she looked down she would see the occasional darting creature, but mostly just inky depths she could not seem to fathom.
(iii)
Around mid-morning, the sensors announced that another car had entered the forecourt. Beck was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading, and went to look at the monitor in the security room next door. She saw a dark late-model Mercedes—a bit muddy, as if from a long drive. A man of some years and a woman who could have been his daughter climbed out. Both were wearing business suits, and it occurred to her that they could be something federal, but over the past thirty-six hours she had learned not to trust what people appeared to be. She stepped into the foyer in time to see Pamela admitting them without any fuss, and was grabbed by Audrey, who was heading upstairs.
“You can help me,” the nun said.
“Help do what?” Hide the evidence? Establish an alibi?
“With Dad. He wants to meet them in the study. We have to get him ready.”
The visitors were lawyers, said Audrey. From one of the big Denver firms. They had driven up at Jericho’s request. The two women were on the landing. Rebecca peered down at the lawyers. Their four eyes watched her with calm calculation. Dak had a gaze like that.
“What are they doing here?” she asked, automatically.
“He’s their client. They came to pick up that big document he’s been working on.” The two women stood on the landing. “It’s his will.”
(iv)
Once more, Jericho had lied to her: another hard-earned medal for the private wall where she kept the grief he caused her. She remembered
the time, a bit more than a year into their mad relationship, when he went to town to play poker with his cronies and returned reeking of a perfume considerably less expensive than the scents he made her wear. He insisted that it was just from hugging a waitress, and Beck never doubted him for a moment. She simply disbelieved his denial that the hug took place while they were prone. She threw a few things and broke a few things, and he accused her of jealousy and delusion and ordered her roughly to clean up the mess. She suggested that he get his girlfriend to do it, then stomped upstairs and locked herself in her suite for half a day. Upon emerging the following afternoon, Beck told him that she was leaving for good this time, but Jericho had already pulled one of his magic acts. A messenger arrived from Denver that very moment, and the diamond earrings in the beautiful box must have cost considerably more than the median family income.
She never wore them, but she owned them still.
For investment purposes, she always told herself.
The story that the pages constituted his autobiography had been, as she suspected last night, a test: as Phil Agadakos would have put it, a wisp. She supposed that she had half betrayed her onetime lover, by telling Dak of the manuscript’s existence; but she hoped she had held the middle ground by never actually opening it to look; or maybe even won the latest round with Jericho by not allowing him to badger her into saying she would help.
Especially when there turned out to be nothing to help with.
His will.
And yet another part of her was persuaded that matters were never as simple as they appeared, not where Jericho was concerned. In Jericho’s world, every word had about sixteen motives, as did every action. The papers in the folder might not be his autobiography, but the Former Everything had not gone to all the trouble of lying simply to test her devotion. There was a deeper meaning to it all. Not just one of Jericho’s games. Something more.
Today was Tuesday. She was leaving on Thursday. That left her forty-eight hours to figure it out.
(v)
The lawyers were nervous, perhaps because they were attending the death of a madman. Jericho insisted on meeting them in his study, not in the sickroom. He proposed to seem strong. Audrey propped him up to keep him from slouching, while Beck slid the oxygen tank out of the way beneath the desk. She noticed a holster fastened to the bottom of the drawer and supposed that Jericho had hidden a gun here. She wondered what had become of it.
“I think we’re ready,” said Jericho.
The folder was sitting on the blotter. The will peeked out, complete with Jericho’s blood-red emendations.
“Are you sure?” said Rebecca. “Do you need anything else?”
“I want to give you one last chance,” he said, not looking up.
“Chance to do what?”
“I’m quite annoyed at you,” he said, tone as affectionately correcting as she remembered from the old days. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night to see other men. If I were five years younger, I’d tan your lovely hide.”
She tried to work out who could possibly have peached that fast, how word could have climbed the mountain. But Jericho, she reminded herself, just knew things.
“I was getting cabin fever.”
“After twenty-four hours. Imagine.” He adjusted his spectacles. “Audrey tells me Sheriff Garvey was giving you a lecture. He does that.”
“Yes, well—”
“Don’t worry. Garvey’s all bark and no bite. He can’t lay a finger on you, whatever he thinks you’ve done. I pretty much paid for both of his election campaigns.” A hard stare. “Remember, Beck. Garvey’s not your friend. Got it? That deputy of his isn’t your friend. And neither is Dak. This is my mountain. I know these people. You don’t. I love you, and I’m telling you. The only people up here you can trust are the people in this house. Got it?” He turned to his daughter. “Let’s do this.” He coughed. “But let’s keep it short.”
The lawyers were waiting downstairs, watched over by Pamela. Audrey wanted to stay for the meeting, but Jericho said he would be fine. So she pulled Beck aside, and proposed to listen in from the guest room next door.
“Why?”
“Just in case.”
“In case what?”
The nun gave that eerie, floating smile. “He can be funny.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Beck proposed.
“You can’t. You’re meeting Pamela.”
“Meeting her?”
Quick nod. “After Jimmy Lobb’s accident, Dad is sure they’re after him. So he told my sister to show you the basement.”
“What about the basement?”
“Just go,” said Audrey, and actually gave her a shove, only half playful. Beck could not remember when she had seen Audrey so assertive; she wondered what the Ainsleys did not want her to overhear.
CHAPTER 12
The Basement
(i)
“I was thinking I might leave early,” said Rebecca, who found herself missing her daughter more than ever. “I was thinking I might go to Florida.”
“Don’t let me stop you.” Pamela was flicking on the lights to illuminate the basement. One by one, additional sections opened up. Beck was surprised. The space went on and on. She remembered the basement as smaller, and unfinished, just concrete blocks and the heating system and a few garden tools. Now there was a bright playroom, complete with pool table, bar, and the only television set in the house. According to Sean, Jericho watched little other than
24
and DVDs of
The Sopranos
. Farther along, a hallway led to a phalanx of other rooms. “If you need to go, go.”
“I don’t need to,” said Beck, arguing the other side because she found it impossible to agree with Pamela. “I was just thinking about it.” She realized that she was whining. “So—we’re here. What did Jericho want you to show me? He’s not kicking me out of the grandchildren’s suite, is he? I hope he doesn’t expect me to move down here.”
“Only in an emergency,” said Pamela, with her just-so smile. She fondled a pool cue, and seemed ready to challenge her nemesis to a quick game of nine-ball. “And then we’d all be moving down here.”
“What kind of emergency? Rockslides?”
“Breach of the house security.”
“Breach
of what?
”
Pamela was still playing with the cue. “Why are you here, Rebecca? You don’t like us. You don’t like me. You don’t like Dad. You pretend to like Audrey, but I don’t think you like her, either. You don’t like us, you think you’re better than we are, smarter, too, but here you are, dropping in for a few days to join the deathwatch. Before we go any further, I’d like to know why.”
“I told you—”
“That he asked for you. I remember. But the two of you haven’t spent much time together, have you? Half an hour here and there.” She used the cue as a pointer, aimed it at Beck’s chest. “Still. You can’t leave. Dad wants you here. I’m not sure why. Has he told you?”
Beck shook her head. “I haven’t talked to him today,” she said.
“I know. He said he’s getting a proposal ready for you. He’ll see you when it’s done.” A sardonic smile. “Not a marriage proposal, I trust.”
“Afraid I’m out to steal his money?”
“Doesn’t matter. There’s hardly enough of it to go around.”
“Come on, Pamela. Even Jericho couldn’t have gone through the entire Ainsley fortune.”
That hooting laugh that Beck hated. “See? He fooled you, just like he fools everybody. There isn’t any Ainsley fortune. Never was. My grandmother—Dad’s stepmother—was a Hilliman. There’s the Hilliman fortune, but Dad doesn’t get to touch much of that.”
“But his father was an investment banker—”
“His father was a nobody. A political hack. He became Secretary of Commerce after the war and then went into banking. And, yes, he made some money. And he married my grandmother after his wife died. But the Hilliman trusts aren’t open to people who marry into the family, and they’re not open to stepchildren. Only to blood relations. The money Grandpa made, well, it was enough to keep him comfortable, but that’s all. And, yes, after he left government, Dad went into private equity. But, the truth is, he blew a lot of his money on Stone Heights and the land around it.” Pamela let this sink in. “And, yes, the property is valuable, but it’s also heavily mortgaged. Most of the rest
Dad lost when Scondell Bloom collapsed. I’m sure he has five million salted away. Ten maybe, fifteen at most. But after inheritance taxes and the meltdown—the point is, it’s money, but it’s not a grand fortune.” The golden eyes, so like her father’s, became hard again, as if Pamela feared that her tone of sad reminiscence was drawing the two women together. “So. Happy now? Or are you angry, because he misled you?”