There’s a knock on Greer’s bedroom door and she stands.
“Yes?”
Elida, the housekeeper, enters the room. It’s way past time for Elida to leave. Even with the wedding, she was supposed to be gone by three so she could attend the ceremony at four. But here she is, quietly and steadfastly doing her job.
“Elida,” Greer says, and tears rise in her eyes. What does it say that in her household she can only trust two people: her younger son and her housekeeper?
From behind her back, Elida produces Greer’s pillbox.
“What?” Greer says. Her novelist mind immediately wonders if Elida had anything to do with Merritt’s death. Perhaps Elida learned about the affair and the baby and poisoned the girl out of fealty to Greer. That would be an unexpected upstairs-downstairs twist. “Where did you find this?”
Elida says, “In Mr. Thomas’s room. In the trash.”
In Thomas’s room, in the trash. In the trash? Thomas knows how much Greer cherishes this pillbox. She can’t believe he would throw it away. Greer takes the box from Elida. There are still pills inside; she can hear them.
“Thank you, Elida,” Greer says. “You can go home.”
Elida slips out of the room. Greer returns the pillbox to its rightful place in the medicine cabinet. Then she marches upstairs.
As Greer approaches Thomas’s bedroom door, she hears yelling. This is hardly surprising; Greer would very much like to yell herself. She quickly realizes the voices she’s hearing belong to Thomas and Abby.
Greer’s first thought is that yelling can’t be good for the baby, but then she recalls that her greatest rows with Tag were when she was pregnant. Her hormones had turned her into a lunatic with pendulum swings between elation and despair. The worst row—when Greer was bored out of her mind, pregnant with Thomas, and Tag was at work every night until ten and on business trips across Europe every weekend—had actually resulted in Greer picking up a pen and writing her first novel, Prey in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Greer sighs. Thoughts of her first novel lead her to thoughts of her twenty-first novel, due in thirteen days. Well, it won’t get done now, and no one will blame her. Her husband’s pregnant mistress was found dead outside her house on the morning of her son’s wedding. Greer gets a pass.
Greer stands just outside the bedroom door, where she can hear distinct words and phrases. She loathes eavesdropping; she’s going to insist they pipe down. The last thing anyone else in this house needs to hear is Thomas and Abby’s marital squabbling.
But then Greer hears Abby say, “I’ve known about you and Featherleigh for years, since Virgin Gorda, since Tony Berkus’s graduation party at the Carlyle Hotel! Amy Lackey told me she saw you with a trashy-looking woman at L’Entrecôte in Paris on a weekend you told me you were visiting your parents in London. I’ve read all your texts and e-mails and picked through your credit card bills, including the British Airways Visa Signature card you think I know nothing about!”
Greer stops herself from knocking just in time. Thomas and Featherleigh? Thomas? Featherleigh is fifteen years his senior. Surely that can’t be right?
“I told you, I broke it off,” Thomas says. “I broke it off for good in May, as soon as we found out about the baby.”
Wait! Greer thinks. Featherleigh told Greer that she had broken up with a married man in May.
It’s a disheartening discovery indeed that Thomas seems to have inherited Tag’s questionable morals, setting Abby up to be just like Greer, a generation later.
Thank God Benji is a Garrison, through and through.
“There is no breaking it off for good when it comes to you and Featherleigh,” Abby says. “Look at last night! I saw you with her under the tent. I saw you! And I knew what was going to happen. You were going to appease me by coming upstairs, and then as soon as I was asleep, you were going to screw her in the pool house!”
“You’re crazy,” Thomas says. “I came upstairs and Featherleigh left, Abby. She left for her inn or her guesthouse. I don’t even know where she was staying, that’s how little I cared—”
“She did not leave!” Abby says. “I sneaked downstairs while you were in the bathroom brushing your teeth and I heard her in the powder room humming ‘The Lady in Red.’ She wasn’t going anywhere. She was lying in wait for you.”
At that instant, Greer figures it out.
She hurries back down to her bedroom and finds her cell phone.
She sends a text to both Thomas and Abby. It says: Lower your voices. Everyone can hear you.
Thomas has been having a years-long affair with Featherleigh, and Elida found the pillbox in Thomas’s bedroom. In the trash.
Well.
Tag is the plotter, not Greer, but after twenty-one murder mysteries, she has learned a thing or two about motivation. Greer saw Abby last night when she went to the kitchen to pour herself the final glass of Veuve and left her pills on the counter. Abby had either snatched the pills up then or noted their existence. Much later, she went down to see if Featherleigh had left. She overheard Featherleigh humming in the powder room and must have decided to put the old girl to sleep… to keep her from fooling around with Thomas.
And who could blame her?
Abby dropped a pill in Featherleigh’s drink, only the drink had gone to the wrong person. It had somehow gone to Merritt.
The police have ruled Merritt’s death accidental—and an accident it indeed was. Abby may not even realize she’s to blame, and Thomas will never put two and two together. The secret resides with Greer, and with Greer it will remain until her death.
The future of the Winbury family depends on it.