THEY HAD AN ESPECIALLY good dinner that evening: Seth had found some lobsters, and his wife had steamed them perfectly. There were clams, too, and corn on the cob, dripping with butter, and two bottles of a Beringer reserve chardonnay from Dick’s cellar.
After dinner they moved into the study, where Arrington found a Scrabble board in a bookcase, and they played game after game until they were all sleepy. Arrington sent Peter to bed, and after a while, the adults drifted upstairs.
Stone and Arrington made wonderful love for nearly an hour, fueled by the good wine and good feeling from their evening, then they lay in each other’s arms, getting their breath back.
Stone stroked her hair and kissed her on the forehead. “You know,” he said, “we really ought to start thinking about making this a more permanent relationship.”
Arrington sat up in bed and tucked her legs under her. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” she said, “and it wouldn’t work.”
Stone said nothing, just waited for her to continue.
“First of all, I love you, Stone, and I always will, and I know you love me in the same way.”
“That’s perfectly true,” Stone said, “but somehow I don’t see that as an impediment to a relationship.”
“Think about our lives,” she said. “They’re completely incompatible.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Then I’ll explain it to you. Peter and I live in Virginia, and we both love it there. You wouldn’t last a month in Virginia. You need New York: You need Elaine’s and you need to earn a living, and New York is the only place you can do that. Sure, you could hang out a shingle in Virginia, but you’d hate the work, and although I’m certainly rich enough to support you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed, you’d never let me do that, and I’d have a lot less respect for you if you did.
“Peter is in a wonderful school that will take him right through high school, and when he’s ready for college he’ll be able to choose between the Ivy League and the University of Virginia, which is right down the road, in Charlottesville. I know you can raise children in New York, but I would never subject him to the things we’d have to do to keep him safe: limos to school, organized play groups, security guards. In Virginia he’ll be able to ride his horse every day, ride it to school in a couple of years. He has the fields and woods to roam and plenty of great, unspoiled kids his own age.”
“You don’t want to get married again, do you?” Stone asked.
“There’s that, too. I’ve been married, I’ve had my child and I enjoy my freedom. There isn’t a single thing that being married could do for me that I can’t do anyway. Then there’s you: You’ve been following your cock around since you were fifteen, and you’re not going to stop now.”
“You don’t think I could be faithful?”
“I’d give you three months, tops,” she said, laughing. “Then you’d meet some girl at Elaine’s, and you’d be in the sack in the blink of an eye. Look, I don’t mind that about you, at least not in our present relationship, but if we were married, it would piss me off royally, and we’d be divorced in no time.”
“I think we could make it work,” Stone said.
Arrington sighed. “There’s something else,” she said.
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to bring this up, at least not on this trip, but it would have come up eventually, so we’d better face it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re still not sure that I didn’t kill Vance.” Arrington’s husband had been shot dead in their home; Arrington had been suspected, but Stone had gotten her cleared. Another woman had been tried for the crime, but acquitted. The murder was still unsolved.
Stone knew he had to choose his words carefully. “Arrington, is there something you want to tell me?”
“That’s just the point, I don’t want to tell you anything, but maybe I should. It’s just that you are a very moral person, and if you thought I had killed Vance you’d never look at me the same way again.”
“You’re starting to worry me, Arrington.”
“I don’t want you to worry. Let’s just say that, if I had killed Vance, I would have done it for very good reasons and to protect myself and Peter. Could you believe that of me?”
“I believe that you would not murder your husband, but that if you did, there would have been some justifiable reason, yes.”
“More than justifiable,” she said. “Imperative. And if I had done that and the facts had been presented in court, I would very likely have been acquitted, but it would have destroyed Peter’s life. So my decision would have been between that and keeping quiet and risking conviction. That would have been an impossible situation.”
“What are you saying, Arrington?”
“I’m not saying anything, Stone. This is all hypothetical, don’t you see?”
“All right.”
“Then let’s leave it at that,” Arrington said. “It would not improve our relationship to go any further, and I don’t want anything to change.”
Stone thought about that. “As you wish,” he said finally. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Arrington crawled under the covers, snuggled close to Stone and rested her head on his shoulder. “Then let’s never speak of it again,” she said, fondling him.
The phone rang.
“Shit,” Stone said.
“Who could that be at this hour?”
Stone reached over her and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Ed Rawls. They found Janey.”
“Is she all right?”
“She was floating facedown in Dark Harbor.”
“Oh, God,” Stone breathed.
“She’d been beaten, raped and strangled.”
“Are the state cops on top of this?”
“They’re all over it. They’ve taken the body back to Augusta for autopsy.”
“When did they find her?”
“At sundown. They kept it as quiet as they could until they told the parents and got the body off the island.”
“And you think this is connected to Don?”
“I think Janey knew something about somebody, and she told Don, and that person killed them both. I just can’t see it any other way. I think all this Kirov horseshit is just that, and we ought to forget about it.”
“I’ll let Lance know in the morning.”
“I’m sorry I called you so late.”
“It’s all right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Stone hung up.
Arrington was staring at him intently. “Who’s dead?”
“A seventeen-year-old girl,” Stone said. “Her name was Janey. She was kidnapped, raped and murdered.”
“Peter and I are flying back to New York tomorrow.” She reached for the phone.
“Don’t bother calling Centurion; I’ll fly you back myself.”
“All right.” She turned her back to him and pulled her knees up into the fetal position.
“I’m sorry about this,” Stone said.
“It’s not your fault, Stone.”
They didn’t speak again until morning.