Maybe it’s true what they say about revenge. That it’s a meal best eaten cold. But you can plan the menu anytime.
As Annie’s head rocked against my chest I rummaged through the possibilities of violence.
It had to be Lime. Lime could have put together a Russian team with a phone call. Russians bring a special viciousness to their work. But the streaming. I understood its purpose—terror—yet it came at a price. Even if they’d engineered the traffic jam and arranged to divert the state police, which we now knew they had, they should have scouted the school first to assess security. They might have spotted the twins. And anyway, a straight attack on the school, without warning: That would have accomplished the aim of throwing me off balance without the mayhem.
Unless they wanted mayhem.
Tuxedo Park, where Pierrette lived, is a private village for rich people. Mansions dot the wooded hills around three lakes. A private police force keeps out non-residents. A state trooper was parked in front of the stone gatehouse when we drove in.
The property Pierrette inherited from her grandmother was a 4,000-square-foot cedar-shingled house. It had big verandas and an English garden that took a gardener two full days a week to keep in shape, but her grandmother had left enough to cover that too.
Pierrette was waiting in front of the house. Beside her stood a Ralph Lauren ad in dark brown cords and a beige turtle neck. His hair was short and neatly parted at the side. He looked like what he was: a soldier trying to look like a civilian. Those aren’t good reasons to hate a man, but you have to start somewhere.
Pierrette clasped her hands tightly when I climbed from the back seat with Annie limp in my arms. A single wrinkle cracked the porcelain smoothness of her forehead. She was holding herself in check by sheer willpower.
She kissed Annie gently and put the back of her hand against her daughter’s forehead and said we’d better get her upstairs right away.
“Alex, Tim Vanderloo,” she said distractedly. He put his hand gently on her shoulder.
“I think I’d better leave you and Alex alone with Annie,” he murmured.
“Please don’t leave,” she said.
“Of course not. I’ll be here as long as you need me.”
“On the other hand,” I snapped, “we might be a while.”
“Oh, Alex,” Pierrette said, in a voice that really did sound heartbroken. Shaken awake by my hard voice, Annie started to heave as if she were fighting for breath, and then broke down into awful, rasping sobs. I carried her into the house and upstairs.
Her bedroom occupied a corner with a view of Tuxedo Lake. It had been her grandmother’s room. French doors led to a terrace that faced across a side lawn to the water and the forested hill beyond. A sofa and two chairs huddled before a fieldstone fireplace. Annie’s desk with her laptop sat in a bay window bathed in sunshine. The feature of the room that Annie liked best as a child was a door concealed in the paneling. It opened to a servants’ staircase connected to the kitchen at the back of the house. The summer weekends we’d spent there as a family were punctuated by endless ambushes when Annie, having crept from her room and made her way downstairs, would spring out at us, shrieking and laughing as we feigned surprise.
“They had a TV in the hospital that showed the inside of my brain,” Annie said as I tucked her in. The familiar surroundings had calmed her.
“Try to rest now, darling,” Pierrette said.
“Dad, are you going to catch them?”
“Try to be quiet,” Pierrette said, sitting beside her and putting her hand on Annie’s cheek.
Annie lay back but didn’t take her eyes from me.
“Don’t go, Dad.”
Pierrette stroked Annie’s hair. “Now, sweetheart,” she began. “You know Mom and Dad love you very much.”
“He can stay,” Annie said vehemently, squeezing my fingers with all her strength. “He can sleep in my room. On the couch!”
She put her head back then, but kept my hand firmly in her grip. After a few minutes I felt her fingers loosen. Her breathing was even.
“They picked me, Dad,” she mumbled.
That dagger stayed firmly embedded in my heart as Pierrette and I sat there on either side of Annie. Finally I gave her a pill. Screw the habituation. Five minutes later she was fast asleep.
Pierrette and I went onto the balcony and sat on the wicker sofa.
A hawk was riding a thermal along the chain of hills. On the lake, a canoe with a single paddler dragged a widening V of ripples across the glassy surface.
Some women stake out real estate in your heart and own it forever. It didn’t matter how bitter the breakup. Pierrette could still freeze me solid with a glance, and maybe that’s what made her moments of tenderness so devastating. Her eyes could express a warmth that melted me, and that only changed to pity at the end. Now, with our broken daughter sleeping in her bed behind us, I longed to take her hand and hold her and press my face against her fragrant skin. I made that thought go away.
“I’m not going to blame you,” she said. She was wearing a sapphire ring that she kept twisting, the only sign of how upset she was. “I know that can’t have been your fault.”
“Of course it was my fault,” I said harshly. “Who else’s fault would it be?”
She put her hand on my knee to remind me to keep my voice down.
“Please, tell me what’s going on. What does this mean for us? Are we safe? I have to know, Alex. Who is behind this? What have you gotten into?”
“It’s an attack on me.”
“Obviously,” she said, suddenly bitter. “But why not you directly? Isn’t that part of your job, to be attacked?”
“I can only say that it won’t happen again,” I told her, a promise as feeble as it was ridiculous. Pierrette shook her head.
“You look terrible. Your face—it looks so, I don’t know, ravaged. Maybe that’s because you know that you can’t really promise anything. But that’s the life you chose to lead. You never would give it up for us.”
“Let’s not go there, Pierrette.”
The canoeist had reached a wooded point and was disappearing out of sight around it.
“That’s Miss Harrington,” Pierrette said. “She does that every day, and she’s done it every day for eighty years. Am I going to be here when I’m old, too? Doing the same things that I do now for no better reason than that I’ve always done them?”
“Yes,” I said.
She gave her head a brisk shake. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“I won’t keep you,” she said, standing up and leading the way out. We went down the stairs into the main hall.
“State police are putting a permanent detail here until further notice,” I said.
We stopped on the veranda. She cocked her head at me.
“You know, you’re very clever and tough, Alex, but I often wonder how much you really understand about the world.”
I doubted that Pierrette wondered about me at all, never mind often.
“Your world view is cynical because the people you have to deal with are criminals,” she said. “But not everyone is a criminal just because they have money. Being rich is not inevitably bad.”
“Now you tell me,” I said. She shook her head sadly and opened the front door.
Vanderloo was waiting on the porch. He gave Pierrette’s hand a squeeze. She repeated the introduction, this time adding Vanderloo’s rank and referring to him as “our friend.” Annie had used the word “boyfriend,” but I wasn’t sure he’d been hired for the position. He looked like a candidate still in the application phase. The XKE would help, black and polished to a gleam.
“And you’re from West Point,” I said.
“That’s where I’m posted at the moment.”
“What do you teach?”
“I’m not really what you’d call a teacher.”
“Is that right. What would I call you?”
“Colonel,” he said.
And you know, fair enough. I didn’t like him, but in the circumstances, who would I like?
Tabitha was waiting by the Mini. Pierrette looked at her and arranged her face into one of those smiles women learn in combat training. I thought she was at least going to come off the porch and say hello, but she turned and walked back into the house. Vanderloo lifted his eyebrows at me, then followed her inside.
Tabitha and I stood there for a few minutes, looking at the lake and the hills and the mansions peeking from the trees. We got into the car. The Jag was at the top of the circular drive, and I snapped a shot as we rolled by.
“I’m forwarding this to you,” I said. “When you get back to the office, run the plates.”
Tabitha pulled up in front of my apartment. I’d just put my hand on the door handle when she reached across and held me by the arm.
“Would you like to talk?”
“No,” I said.
She didn’t let go of my arm.
“We can sit here for a minute.”
“Why?”
She looked at me with a grave expression. “You’re crying.”
I moved her hand from my arm. I got out and shut the door and went inside with nothing to console me but the murder in my heart.