The Pact (28 page)

I
opened my eyes just in time to see Hilary step out from behind the drapes, brandishing her tape recorder in one hand. Her endless tales of political intrigue in far-off countries could be dull at times, but for once she and her journalist’s bag of tricks came in handy.

Lily’s calm reaction seemed to demonstrate just how far gone she was. There was no panic at being caught in the middle of confessing to one crime and trying to commit another. “Why, Hilary, dear. What were you doing back there?” she asked mildly.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Furlong. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. Well, that’s not true. But I only did it to help Emma.”

I glanced at the door, where Luisa and Jane were blocking the way out.

“Did you get it all?” Luisa asked.

“I think so,” Hilary answered.

“Well done,” said Jane.

I leapt up from the sofa, and Lily gave me a confused look. “Rachel, you shouldn’t get up, darling. Why, you should be—”

“Practically dead by now?” I finished her thought for her.

“Well, yes, darling.”

“Sorry. Matthew switched the pills in your bottle of sedatives with aspirin. You laced my ginger ale with Bayer. And I do feel much better, thank you.” I didn’t point out that the aspirin helped mitigate the pain from the lump on my head, the lump that she’d given me. I should have felt triumphant that we’d outwitted her, but I felt devious and slimy. This is for Emma, I reminded myself, but that reminder didn’t seem to help.

“Oh, that’s good, darling. I mean, that’s too bad.” The calm expression on her face was giving way to confusion. “I wonder what I should do now?” She began to hum to herself, softly. I didn’t recognize the melody.

The men were waiting in the foyer as we escorted Lily downstairs. Matthew had explained everything to Jacob, who gazed at his wife with such pain in his eyes that I had to look away. Matthew didn’t look much better. No doubt he was thinking of the promise that Emma had extracted from him the previous day, that he wouldn’t say or do anything that would jeopardize her mother and his godmother.

“You’ve got the tape?” Matthew asked Hilary. She tossed it to him. “Okay, let’s get going,” he said to Jacob.

The rest of us gathered on the front step and watched as Matthew and Jacob led Lily to the old Volvo. They were going to take her into town and try to clear things up with O’Donnell. She hadn’t said a word since we’d left the study. If all went well, the lawyer Luisa had found for Emma could be engaged to help Lily instead.

Peter stood behind me, and I leaned back against his chest, letting him wrap his arms around me, appreciating their warm comfort.

“What do you think will happen?” asked Hilary. “Will she go to prison?”

“I don’t know,” said Luisa. “I mean, she’s clearly not well. Perhaps an insanity plea of some sort?”

“Poor woman,” said Jane.

“Poor Emma,” I said. “I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive us. I can’t believe we just entrapped her mother.”

“Emma will understand,” said Jane.

“Will she?” I asked. “Even worse, how will she be able to forgive Matthew…and her father? It’s like we all ganged up against Lily, and by ganging up against her, we were ganging up against Emma.”

“It wasn’t ganging up,” said Luisa. “It was helping her.”

“You said it yourself, in your toast at the rehearsal,” said Hilary. “Sometimes she’s selfless to the point where she actually does harm to herself. And if she doesn’t understand now, one day she will.”

“We did the right thing. Really we did,” said Jane in a firm tone.

She was right, I knew. We’d taken matters into our own hands, true to the spirit, if not the letter of our long-ago pact.

I just wished it didn’t feel so empty.

I
wish I could say that we all lived happily ever after, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Lily had the best criminal defense attorney money could buy, but even he couldn’t get her completely off the hook. In a rare turn of legal proceedings, the local DA allowed her to plead guilty by reason of insanity, and she was packed off to a state mental institution that was likely far less cushy than the various euphemistically named spas she’d visited during previous breakdowns.

The plea prevented the ordeal of a jury trial, but there was still an immense amount of publicity surrounding the tangle of events. After a couple of weeks, the tabloids turned to a fresh scandal, but I heard a rumor recently that Alan Dershowitz was planning a book on the topic. I doubted that Lily would be pleased to hear that she was soon to take her seat in history next to O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, although she probably wouldn’t mind the von Bulow connection. Somehow, the Furlongs managed to keep the blackmail plot out of the papers, and Jacob’s reputation remained intact—or as intact as it could be when his wife was publicly identified as mentally ill and inspired by his philandering to commit murder and frame him for the crime.

Emma remained shell-shocked for a while. She’d loathed Richard, but she still felt tremendously guilty about his death. And accepting that one’s own mother, however unstable, had killed one’s fiancé required a level of maturity that I most definitely didn’t possess. She spent the rest of the summer in her loft in New York, hiding out from the paparazzi who camped out by her door when the murder was still making headlines. I called her daily, sometimes even more, concerned about how she was doing and ashamed by my own part in proving her mother’s guilt. She’d accepted all of our apologies with an understanding grace, and for that I was grateful, but I was more anxious about her welfare than anything else. Early on, she sounded sad and dazed. As the weeks passed, however, she started to sound distracted instead. Finally, she agreed to let me come by with a picnic dinner one evening just after Labor Day.

New York City in early September was still all but unbearable. To step outside was to be sunk into a slow-moving smog of humidity and pollution that bounced off the pavements, ricocheted off the buildings, and then slowly wound its way around any life on the streets. I climbed up the four flights of stairs to Emma’s top-floor loft to find her covered with paint and surrounded by the debris of an artistic binge—empty paint tubes, soiled brushes, discarded pizza boxes and the like. The trouble she’d been having with her work since Richard appeared on the scene seemed to have disappeared when he did. And the paintings she created in the aftermath of his death were nothing short of extraordinary. She had ventured into abstraction for the first time, and while the comparisons to the best of her father’s work were obvious, there was also something distinctively her own displayed on the canvases.

I was searching for a couple of clean glasses to use for the bottle of chilled pinot grigio I’d brought when I noticed that among the clutter on her kitchen table was not one but four different boarding passes for the New York-Boston air shuttle, all bearing different dates and times but all with her name on them. I breathed a sigh of relief. Much as I’d worried that she wouldn’t be able to forgive her friends for their actions that weekend, I’d been even more worried that she wouldn’t be able to forgive Matthew. I was glad to accept that I’d underestimated her talent for empathy. I handed her a glass of wine and settled comfortably onto the sofa in front of the industrial-strength fan. I was looking forward to hearing how things were progressing.

Luisa returned directly to South America after the fateful weekend ended. According to her e-mails, things with Isobel were good, although the pressure from her family to marry was mounting. Apparently she’d arrived at her parents’ house one evening for a family dinner to find three eligible bachelors at the table from whom, her father explained to her during private predinner drinks, she would be expected to choose a mate. Luisa was the youngest and had her father wrapped around her little finger, but I was interested to see how this situation would play itself out.

Hilary, with her usual talent for finding the most dangerous place on the globe, had removed herself to Cairo to work on her article about Islamic fundamentalism and oil. I could only wonder how the veiled women in long black robes would react to the six-foot blonde in spandex.

I spent a weekend with Jane and Sean on the Cape before school started, and I noticed a bottle of prenatal vitamins sitting by the kitchen sink. Jane blushed violently when I asked her about them and admitted that she and Sean had decided to start trying to have a baby. We spent the rest of the weekend carefully monitoring her folic acid intake.

As for me, there wasn’t much to tell. Stan took the news about Smitty Hamilton’s thwarted takeover surprisingly well. Perhaps because he was excited about my ideas for creating a new corporate finance practice based on emerging technology companies. When the NASDAQ had crashed, most major investment banks had decimated their technology divisions, including Winslow, Brown. Now was the time, I argued, to reengage, when a bunch of tomorrow’s Microsofts were still flying under the radar screen and none of the major players were stepping up to meet their needs in the capital markets.

So, now I, too, had begun logging some air miles, albeit New York to San Francisco, and it looked like Winslow, Brown would be taking Peter’s company public by year-end. Of course, Peter and I managed to squeeze in some personal time amid all this banking talk. And even if he did tease me every so often about turning him in to the cops, he also did a superb breakfast in bed, which was more than adequate compensation.