All Monday evening, I struggled to tell Alex that I wanted to hire a criminal defense lawyer, but the words kept dying in my throat. The pleasant weekend at Spring Lake had relaxed some of the tension between us, and I was coward enough to want that good feeling to last a little while longer.
On the way home from the riding lesson, I had of necessity gone food shopping. Kathleen, my adoptive mother, is the kind of cook who can concoct a feast out of whatever she finds in the refrigerator. I can’t compete with her, but I do enjoy cooking, and I actually find it calming.
Jack and his babysitter, Sue, had gotten along splendidly while I was gone. She had taken him for a long walk on his pony, and he excitedly told me about the kids he’d met on the next street, one of whom was in his class. “The Billy who doesn’t cry. And remember, Mom, you have to call his mother to say I can go over for a play date tomorrow after school.”
Jack helped me mix the flour and butter and milk for biscuits, and turn the salad spinner to dry the lettuce, and make a mustard sauce to coat the salmon, and by himself he put the asparagus in the poacher.
When Alex got home at six thirty, we all sat together in the living room. Alex and I had a glass of wine and Jack a soft drink. Then we had dinner in the dining room, our first meal there. Alex told me about his aging client who finally did make it in to change her will. “This time the grandniece gets the house in the Hamptons, which is going to start the third world war in the family,” he said. “I really think that old gal gets her jollies torturing her relatives. But if she doesn’t mind running up billable time, I’m happy to help her play her game.”
Alex had changed into a sport shirt and chinos. As usual, I found myself thinking what an absolutely great-looking guy he is. I love the shape of his hands and his long, sensitive fingers. If I were asked to sketch how I envision a surgeon’s hands, I would sketch his. Still, I know how strong they are. If he’s in the kitchen when I’m struggling to open a jar, all I have to do is to hand it to him. With one easy motion of his hands, the lid begins to turn.
It was a pleasant dinner, a normal family dinner. Then, when Alex said he had to go to Chicago tomorrow afternoon to take a deposition in a case he was handling, and would be there for at least one night, possibly two, I almost was relieved. If any more of those terrible calls came in, he wouldn’t be around to answer the phone and hear them. I wanted to call Dr. Moran, who had treated me when I was young. He’s retired now, but I have his number. I needed his advice. I spoke to him last when I decided to marry Alex. He warned me that I was taking a terrible risk by not being truthful about my past. “Larry had no right to demand that of you, Celia,” he had said.
Now, if I called Dr. Moran and didn’t reach him, I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving a message for him to call me back. I could ask his advice also on how to tell Alex that I felt I needed a lawyer.
All this I was thinking while I was getting Jack ready for bed. I read him a story, then left him to read one himself before it was time to turn off the light.
The room that once was mine, and is now Jack’s, at least for now, is big, but there is really only one place for the bed—the long wall between the windows. When the movers went to set up the bed there, I had asked them to try positioning it on the opposite wall, but it was out of place.
As a child, I had white furniture, perfect for a little girl’s room, and a blue and white bed coverlet and window treatments. Jack’s furniture is more suitable for a boy, maple and sturdy. On his bed is a patchwork quilt that I made while I was expecting him. The colors are vivid, red and yellow and green and blue. When I tuck it around him after he has fallen asleep, I think of the joy with which I stitched it, how at that time I really thought I could go through life as Celia Kellogg Foster.
Before I went downstairs, I lingered in the doorway, looking back into the room, remembering myself at that age, in this room, reading my book, secure and happy, unaware of what the future had in store for me.
What did the future hold for Jack? I wondered. In my wildest dreams, could I have imagined myself at his age, thinking that in a few years I would be the instrument, if not the cause, of my own mother’s death? It was an accident, but still, I have killed, and I know what it is like to experience the moment in which a life ends. My mother’s eyes began to stare. Her body sagged. She gasped, making a small gurgling sound. And then, while the gun continued to go off, while Ted was crawling, trying to reach me, she slid down onto the carpet, her hand resting on my foot.
These were crazy, dark thoughts. But as I start down the stairs, I am filled with the sense that Jack needs to be protected. He loves to answer the phone. He runs for it at the first ring. Suppose he heard that shadowy voice talking about Little Lizzie. Because of the pony episode, he has been told that Lizzie was a very bad girl. I know he sensed the evil that is implied in that statement. The vandalism, the excitement of the police arriving, and the media and the ambulance—all that has got to have made an impression on him. He seems to be all right, but I have to wonder what is going on in that intelligent little mind.
Trying to recapture the warmth we had shared at the dinner table, I gave myself a mental shake, hoping to clear my head of all the darkness. Then I went into the kitchen. Alex had volunteered to clear the table and to put the dishes in the dishwasher, while I put Jack to bed.
“Just in time,” he said with a smile. “Espresso’s ready. Let’s have it in the living room.” We sat opposite each other in the fireside chairs. By then, I had a feeling he was picking the right moment to bring up something. “What time did you tell Jack he has to turn out the light?” Alex asked.
“Eight thirty. But you know the routine. He’ll be asleep before that.”
“I’m still getting used to the way a kid begs for more time, then falls asleep the minute his head hits the pillow.” Then Alex looked at me, and I knew something was up. “Ceil, my piano is being delivered on Saturday,” he said.
He raised a hand before I could protest. “Ceil, I miss having the piano. It’s been six months since I gave up my apartment and put it in storage. You may find a different house tomorrow, or it could be a year from tomorrow. Even if you do find one, the odds are that it’s not going to be available immediately.”
“You want to stay here in this house, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yes, I do, Ceil. I know that with your talent, if you decorated it, this would be a showplace, as well as a very comfortable home. We can put up a security fence to be sure we never have a vandalism episode again.”
“But it will still be ‘Little Lizzie’s Place’ in people’s minds,” I protested.
“Ceil, I know a way to put a stop to that. I’ve been going through some of the books written about the history of this area. A lot of the owners of the larger country homes used to name their houses. This house was originally called Knollcrest. Let’s call it that again, and have a sign made to put at the gate. Then, when we’re ready, we could have a cocktail party, have a picture of the house on the invitation, and welcome people to Knollcrest. I believe the name would begin to stick. How about it?”
The look on my face must have conveyed my answer. “Well, never mind,” Alex said. “It was probably a lousy idea.” Then as he stood up, he added, “But I am going to have the piano delivered on Saturday.”
* * *
The next morning Alex gave me a hurried kiss on his way out. “I’m going for a ride. I’ll shower and dress at the club. I’ll call you tonight from Chicago.”
I don’t know if he suspected that I had been awake most of the night. He came to bed about an hour after me, moving very quietly, assuming, I guess, that I was asleep, and settling on his side of the bed without even the perfunctory kiss that was becoming our nightly routine.
After I dropped Jack at school, I went to the coffee shop again. Cynthia Granger, the woman who had chatted with me last week, was seated at a nearby table with another lady. When she saw me come in, she got up and asked me to join them. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I did instinctively like Cynthia, and thought that it might be a chance to get a sense of what the local people were saying about Georgette’s death—and the fact that I had been the one to find her body.
After expressing concern for me at the shock I had experienced on Holland Road, Cynthia told me the general feeling in the community was that Ted Cartwright was involved in Georgette’s death.
“Ted’s always been considered a Mafia-type,” Cynthia explained to me. “Not that I mean he’s in the Mafia, but with all his surface charm, you sense that underneath you’re dealing with one very tough cookie. I understand that somebody from the prosecutor’s office was in Ted’s office Friday afternoon.”
For what turned out to be a very short interval, I felt as if everything might be all right. If the prosecutor thought Ted Cartwright was connected to Georgette’s death, I might have been wrong about Detective Walsh zeroing in on me. Maybe, after all, in their eyes I was only the victim of the vandalism, the lady from New York who had the incredibly bad luck to buy a stigmatized house and then to find a murder victim.
Lee Woods, the woman seated with Cynthia, had moved to Mendham last year from Manhattan. It turned out that she had a friend, Jean Simons, whose apartment I had decorated before I married Larry, and she was effusive in her praise of it. “Then you’re Celia Kellogg,” she said. “I loved what you did for Jean, and she’s been loving it ever since. Talk about coincidence. I was redoing our apartment and asked her for your name. I called your number, but your assistant said that you recently had a baby and wouldn’t be taking on any new clients. Is that still true?”
“It won’t be much longer,” I said. “Sooner or later, I do plan to hang out my shingle around here.”
It felt so good to be Celia Kellogg, the interior designer, again. Cynthia and Lee even had a suggestion for a housekeeper whose longtime employer was moving to North Carolina. Gratefully, I took her name. But as we got up to leave, I had a sudden sense of being watched. I turned around and saw the man who was sitting at a nearby table.
It was Detective Paul Walsh.