GROUT PULLED HIS cruiser up to the Pratt estate’s admission gate and waited as the attendant spoke to the driver of a silver Volvo on the other side. The Pratt estate was legally deemed a non-profit agricultural center that admitted guests and school filed trips to observe cheese making and cow milking. What a ruse, Grout thought. The driver of the Volvo, who sported aviator shades and a Magnum P.I. mustache, was yapping at the guard, giving him grief. Finally, the driver shook his head with a scowl, and the Volvo shot off in a spit of gravel.
The attendant wheeled over on his chair to address Grout. He was surprisingly young. A kid. Maybe seventeen years old. The skin of his narrow face was pink and raw from Retin-A.
“One ticket?” the guard said, glancing in Grout’s car’s backseat. The whites of the kid’s eyes spiderwebbed pink with burst capillaries.
Grout showed him his badge. “I’m here to see Mr. Pratt.”
“Which?”
“Boyd,” Grout said.
“Which?”
“The third.”
The kid looked at a clipboard. Then nodded to Grout, and said, “I guess you don’t need a ticket.” He pressed a button, and the gate’s arm rose.
The road wound tranquilly through undulating hills of impressive oak stands, dipped between vast, sprawling fields. Grout had read on the Web site that in the 1920s, the family had hired so-called geniuses to create carriage trails of crushed pink marble, doze earth to mold the rolling hills, and strategically plant thousands of red oaks to replicate some sort of Victorian pastoral aesthetic. These hills had been designed and sculpted by a supposedly famous landscape engineer named Frederick Law Olmsted Senior. The original land had been flat as a beaver tail, scraped smooth by glaciers. The hills and oaks had all been purchased, were a manufactured deception.
Cars of foreign make with out-of-state plates passed Grout going the other way, kicking up powdered marble that settled as fine as ocean silt on the hood of the cruiser Grout drove to impress upon Pratt the official capacity of his visit.
Grout drove up the swell of a hill and into the shadows of mature oak trees. Squirrels scampered in the road, performing their neurotic jig of indecision. Grout tapped his brakes warily, so he wouldn’t crush one with a tire. He hated that sickening thwump.
He came out of the trees and to a vista of the estate. The imposing enormity of the inn and mansion and dairy barn left Grout feeling exposed and dwarfed, as perhaps the buildings were meant to do to folks who did not belong among the privileged class. To those who did belong, the buildings likely inflated their dreamy sense of entitlement.
Grout pulled into the lot opposite the carriage house, which, relative to the other buildings, seemed modest, though it was three times that of Grout’s cape. He got out, and a gust of wind off Lake Champlain knocked him so full on he had to put his arms out for balance. The day was bright and cold. Out on the choppy lake, a skein of Canadian geese flew low over the water, making slow progress.
Grout crossed the road to stand in front of the old carriage house. He peered up at the widow’s watch. The curtains were drawn over the windows. The carriage house still had the classic double doors that had once allowed access for actual carriages but now likely garaged Pratt’s Land Rovers and Bentleys. The doors were windowless and not intended for a guest’s foot passage.
Grout went to the side of the place and found a door. It had a window, the pane of glass thin and warped. Old. Antique would be the word preferred by the Pratts. The glazing was crumbling. A shade was down inside. Grout was about to rap on the door when a shadow fell across him. As he turned, his hand instinctively went inside his jacket to the butt of his 9mm in his side holster.
The man who’d come up behind him stood a head taller than Grout, his fine blond hair whipped across his forehead by a blast of wind. “I doubt you’ll need that,” Boyd Pratt said, nodding at Grout’s hand inside his jacket. Pratt smiled, or attempted a smile, one corner of his mouth pulled tightly upward anyway, like that of a hooked fish.
He was dressed in a checked olive-and-tan shirt that sported a finely corduroyed shoulder shooting patch, over which was a vest of dense, heavily brushed moleskin in the same drab olive color as his moleskin trousers. It was the kind of blueblood ensemble an Orvis catalog would twaddle on about being distinctive and refined, made of the finest materials for the sporting gentleman afield or about the town. In a word: ghastly.
Pratt didn’t wear the $600 Le Chameau boots you’d expect with such garb, however. Instead, he wore ratty sneakers.
“You’re either the cop who called, or I should call the cops,” Boyd said without a hint of humor.
Grout retrieved his hand from his jacket and held it out, and said, “I’m the cop.”
Boyd didn’t acknowledge Grout’s hand. “Follow me,” he said, and walked off, shouting over his shoulder in the screaming wind, “I’m on my morning stroll before I brunch with my wife at the inn.”
Boyd brought Grout to a teakwood bench perched atop a shale cliff that dropped twenty feet to the lake below. He sat with his knees wide apart, plucked dead grass at his sneakers, tossed the grass in the air, and watched it flutter away, like a golfer testing the wind before a long approach shot, except in this case it seemed to have no purpose whatsoever.
Grout sat beside him, which felt odd, not being able to look him square in the eye. But it would have felt stranger to stand in front of him, looking down on him, Boyd’s face about zipper high on Grout.
“Hurry up with whatever you want to say, I’m quite pressed.” Boyd stared out at a lake the color of lead, spotted by frothy whitecaps. The string of Canadian geese had made no ground, and though the lake was some twenty feet down the bank from them, the crashing waves and the fierce blow misted water against Grout’s face as if he were oceanside. He licked his lips and was half surprised not to taste salt.
“Well, what is it?” Pratt said, squeezing his own kneecaps.
Prig, Grout thought. Genuine prig.
“I’ll come right out with it,” Grout said.
“Do.”
“Why were you at the Double Black Diamond when I saw you on the twenty-third?”
Pratt rotated his head on his neck much like an owl and peered at Grout. “I thought you looked familiar.” He turned back to the lake.
“Why were you there?” Grout asked. He stood and looked down on Pratt, blocking Pratt’s view. Fuck it.
“I don’t believe that’s your business,” Pratt said, staring ahead as if Grout weren’t there.
“I’ll decide that,” Grout said.
“No,” Pratt said flatly. “I don’t believe you will.”
“I’ll subpoena you. How’d that be?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you. I said it was none of your business. Meaning it won’t help you with anything, whatever it is you are up to.”
“I am up to the investigation of a missing girl and a murdered girl.”
Pratt lifted his eyes slowly to meet Grout’s. They were the palest of green, nearly transparent, nearly as white as the whites of his eye.
“So?” Grout said.
“I was there to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“A woman.”
Who’d have thought this pasty weed of a man could attract a lover? Grout guessed money compensated for a lot, with certain women anyway.
“Who?” Grout said.
“That will require you get me under oath. What is all this fuss about?” He patted his knees.
Grout showed him Mandy’s photo. “Have you ever seen this girl?” he said.
Pratt took the photo and looked at it, handed it back. “No.”
“It wasn’t her you visited at the resort that day, or any other day?”
“She’s twenty-five years younger than I. At least. She could be my child.” He pulled a tuft of grass from the ground and tossed it in the air, watching it. He was nervous. He was hiding something. Lying.
“Money makes up for a lot,” Grout said.
“You’re saying this girl was a prostitute?”
Maybe Mandy had been working at the resort. Is that how she got pregnant? A john? It would explain no apparent boyfriend but the use of birth control.
“You’d testify to never seeing her?” Grout said.
“If made to.”
“But you were there to see . . . a woman.”
Pratt wedged a blade of grass between his thumb and index finger and blew a high, sharp note, as if a child. “It’s a private matter. My wife and I— well, marriage isn’t easy.”
No, Grout thought, it isn’t.
“Though I do all I can to make her happy,” Pratt added.
“I’m sure. You’re hosting an upcoming fund-raiser for Senator Renstrom. Yes?”
Pratt leaned back and spread his arms over the back of the bench, trying to strike a confident, casual air but trying too hard. Covering.
“So?” Pratt said.
“He’s quite the lightning rod.”
“A person who has unwavering beliefs contrary to the masses often is.”
“You support him, personally?”
“I believe in much of what he represents. Solid American principles. Tradition. Family.”
“Do you know Betty Malroy personally?” Grout asked, dropping her name without warning to watch Pratt’s reaction.
Pratt’s eyes glided toward the lake. “I’ve never met the woman.”
“Do you know her?”
“No.”
“Are you involved with The Better Society in any way beyond this fund-raiser?”
“Hardly.” Grout was cold, freezing, out there in the fucking wind but dared not show it. His nose was leaking. His toes ice. Pratt seemed unfazed, sitting out there in his dandy duds. “I’m no good at being involved,” Pratt said. “I’m good at giving money away. That’s about all I’m good for.”
Ah, poor lad, Grout thought. Douche.
A gust blew a fine spray from the lake, ice crystals now, that stung his face.
“What does this have to do with the girl?” Pratt raised his voice over the wind so it squealed.
Grout shrugged. His feet ached. He blew in his cupped hands. “There are some loose ends. It’s my job to tie them all up.”
“Have you?” Pratt said.
“Time will tell.” Grout held out his cold hand in departure, but Pratt ignored it.
“We’ll be in touch,” Grout said.