If Caroline’s father saw her now, he would be disgraced.
“Carolina”—he always called her Carolina in honor of South Carolina where her mother had been born, the diva of Charleston and purveyor of too many mint juleps—“Carolina, why did you let that young man shame us?” he would ask. But her father had died two years ago, having outlasted her mother by a dozen.
Still, he was dead and couldn’t know, could he?
Her neck was stiff and tears teased her eyes as she climbed into the limo that had dutifully remained halted at the curb.
The driver shut the door behind her, then circled around and got behind the wheel.
He cracked the privacy window. “Home, Mrs. Meacham?” to which she uttered a small “Yes,” then he closed the window and she leaned her head back and let the tears drizzle down her flawlessly made-up cheeks.
The car glided into traffic, just another rich folks’ limo, transporting another problem-free life of privilege. Surely no one on the outside would guess the last place Caroline wanted to go was back to New Falls, back to the whispers of everyone who now knew about Chloe, back to rearranging the seating for the goddamn hospital gala on the goddamn Windsor Castle-inspired goddamn velveteen-covered plywood.
Out of habit, Caroline reached into her purse, took out her cell phone, and checked her messages.
Rhonda Gagne wanted a gratis seat at the gala for her nephew who’d be in from Miami.
Jack said he’d be late getting home tonight in case she wondered. Sadly, she wouldn’t have.
Chloe said, “Mom, you might not believe this, but Dana’s son told me that the gun that killed Mr. DeLano wasn’t Kitty’s.”
Reference to Vincent, to Kitty, only made Caroline think about Elise.
Argh.
Could she see her just one more time? Could she explain why she’d ended their affair?
Then Caroline reminded herself that Vincent had been Elise’s father. Elise would not want to believe he was capable of blackmail, or, God forbid, that he wasn’t without flaws.
With a small sigh of resignation, Caroline started to return Chloe’s call. Then she thought of her own father, how she’d idolized him, how she’d thought he was perfect, how screwed up her life had been—maybe still was—because of it.
Then she thought, Maybe if we want to be happy, all we must do is grow up. Grow up and live our own lives.
Without another thought, she snapped the cell phone shut, leaned forward, and slid open the window.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she told Gerald. “Take me to the Upper East Side.”
If she could see Elise, if she could touch her again, maybe Caroline might make it after all.
“Are you feeling better?” Dory’s soft voice asked now as she stood in the bedroom, next to the window seat where Lauren sat. Liam was in her arms.
After Lauren had passed out at the hospital, she’d been rescued by Detective Johnson, of all people, who’d heard the thud as she’d hit the floor. She’d been rescued, revived, then checked out by a doctor and proclaimed able to go home.
“Yes,” Lauren replied now. “For the first time in years I feel as if I’m free.”
“Of my suffocating father.”
“Yes.”
“Thank God. I thought it would never happen.”
Lauren closed her eyes. “All the way home from the hospital he wouldn’t speak to me. I said I was sorry. I asked him to forgive me. Still, he wouldn’t speak.”
“No one ever defied him, Lauren. No one ever dared.”
“He will divorce me.”
“Did he say that?”
“No. I told you. He wouldn’t speak.”
“Maybe he’ll get over it.”
“Not if his buddies find out. Not if they find out at the club.”
“Men. They’re more pigheaded than women.”
“Much more.” She didn’t tell Dory she thought it was Dana who’d told the police. It no longer mattered. Lauren no longer needed to pretend that living with Bob Halliday was grand. If Dana was responsible for that, she should be thanked, not condemned. “I’m thinking of going to Nantucket. To get away from New Falls for a while.”
The baby gurgled. Dory smiled and touched his sweet face. At least she seemed to like being a mother, if not a wife. “You’ll be gone for the hallowed hospital gala?”
Lauren looked away. “I hardly think I’ll be missed.”
“Then I’ll run away with you,” Dory said suddenly. “The baby and I will run away with you.”
“You can’t! What about Jeffrey?”
“Jeffrey—and my father—can go to hell,” Dory said. “And you and I will go to Nantucket.”
“In that case,” none other than Jeffrey said from the doorway where he suddenly appeared, “you might want this along for protection from the sharks.” From his thumb and forefinger, he dangled a hefty-looking gun.
“Jeffffrey!” Dory shrieked.
“Get away! Get away!” Lauren cried, snatching up all the pillows on the window seat and barricading them around her as if the downy innards could stave off the explosion from a thirty-eight.
“For godssake,” Jeffrey said, lowering the gun, “Take it easy, will you?”
“What are you doing here?” Dory asked, her voice still pitched in a shout. “What are you doing with that gun? There’s a baby here, in case you forgot.”
As if on cue, little Liam began to cry.
“I haven’t forgotten. I‘ve hardly even seen him, Dory. Christ. Can’t I at least see him?” He tried to step into the room, but Dory raised her hand like a school crossing guard in traffic.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
He stopped. “Why are you going to Nantucket?”
“Why are you carrying a gun?”
Lauren shrank back against the window, watching the chess match unfold in front of her: queen; rook; little Liam, pawn.
“I found it in Caroline Meacham’s water garden.”
Lauren eased the pillows back. “What?”
“Gardeners find all kinds of things. Golf balls, winter gloves, snakes sometimes. Never dreamed I’d find a gun. It was caught up in a lily pad, like someone tossed it there.”
“Dear God,” Lauren said. “Did you show Caroline?”
“No one was home except for the maid. I didn’t think I should tell her.”
“What about the police?” Lauren asked. “You have to take it to them.”
“Yeah, I planned to, as soon as I was finished with your lawn.” He did theirs after the Meachams. Despite being “family,” even Jeffrey knew that in New Falls, Jack and Caroline came first.
“Take it now, Jeffrey,” Lauren demanded. “It could be a murder weapon.”
He jerked up straight, looked at the gun with new respect. “Do you think it got Mr. DeLano?”
For a man with a college education, even one in landscape engineering, Jeffrey sometimes seemed a little vague. “It’s possible,” Lauren said.
The three of them stared at the gun as if it knew the answer.
“Do you think,” Dory asked, momentarily forgetting she wasn’t speaking to her husband, “that someone threw it into Caroline’s water garden on her way into the luncheon?”
“Someone,” Lauren agreed. “Or Caroline herself.”
Caroline crossed the atrium of the apartment building as she’d done countless times, aware that Elise had never wanted a doorman—a “watchdog,” she called it—who announced everyone’s visitors and made covert notes of their personal lives.
A doorman, however, might know if Caroline would be welcomed, or if Elise had another lover by now.
Her gait slowed at the thought.
Caroline, after all, had been the one who’d broken things off—had been forced to break things off, thanks to that slime Paul Tobin and the two hundred thousand dollars she’d given him that he’d supposedly given to Vincent. (“He’ll be pleased to know you’re a lesbo,” Tobin had told her. “The cash will keep him from spreading the word.” An extra hundred thousand for Tobin was to “reassure her” that he wouldn’t tell Vincent her lover was Elise.)
So she’d broken up with Elise to protect her—from scandal, from Tobin, from Vincent—and from having Elise learn the kind of man Vincent had become.
She stepped into the elevator, pushed the “up” arrow, and told herself to not think about it now, because Vincent was dead and could no longer hurt them.
The ride to the penthouse was swift and unnerving. Caroline tiptoed toward the door marked “B” and nervously rang the bell.
She waited.
No one came.
She knocked.
Elise was usually home at this time, having worked three or four hours in the morning, then returned for a nap that would allow for an evening shoot—or, better, for a nightlife, a trolling of the sex clubs if she so desired.
Caroline stood there, pondering the words “Elise” and “desire” in the same sentence, when the door suddenly jerked open.
They stood there a moment, eye to eye, breath to breath.
“Caroline.”
“Elise.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come for a visit.”
“A visit.”
“Perhaps I should have called.”
“Yes, you should have called.”
A thin ridge of moisture formed on Caroline’s forehead, under her arms, between her thighs. “I had business downtown. I took a chance.” So it was true. Elise had another lover, someone younger, no doubt, someone more sultry. Perhaps someone she’d met in the clubs.
“But you and I have no further business together,” Elise said. “You’re the one who wanted it that way.”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“Too late. The glow is gone. That’s what happens when things are only about lust.”
She started to protest, but a woman’s voice suddenly came from down the hall.
“Elise? Do you have a guest?”
The voice sounded familiar.
Oh God, it was Yolanda.
“Mrs. Meacham?” the young woman asked after she came around the corner and practically stopped dead, a most apt description.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Caroline said, her brain starting to stutter, her words clipped in staccato. “I’m bringing good news for Elise. The police have confirmed that her mother’s gun did not kill her father.”
With that, she smiled a perfunctory smile, gave a quick bow (A bow? Oh God, had she really done that?), swooped her cape over her shoulder, and traipsed back to the elevator as if her mission were complete.