14

Macy and I went a few rounds until finally I said, “Macy, was Barry another reason you and Anna stopped running together?”

“What exactly do you mean?” She wasn’t making it easy. I didn’t think she was stalling: it was more that she seemed genuinely perplexed.

“I mean, whose idea was it that you drop your daily runs?”

She thought some more, staring into space, her face a picture of pretty concentration. In an old Victorian print, the image would be titled Beauty Bewildered or some such.

“I guess it was hers.”

“She wanted to be free to meet up with someone.” It was not a question.

“You think so, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “Knowing her, I do.”

Macy examined the silver sheen of her manicure, in case something in the conversation was causing it to tarnish. With a visible struggle, she said, “You don’t think it was Barry she was running to meet? In Riverside Park, maybe?” She wanted to know, and yet she didn’t want her suspicions confirmed. They should issue a permit for this kind of denial with the marriage license.

“Maybe,” I said. I was a bit surprised to have my own hunch confirmed by such a noodlehead. But truly, I thought if Anna was meeting up with Barry, it was more likely some financial skullduggery was afoot, not romance. Barry would have to be crazy to jeopardize his relationship with Macy. He’d never again get that lucky. “If it helps put your mind at ease, Macy, I think it could have been anyone she was meeting. Any number of people.”

“I hope you’re right. There could be a thousand reasons … Maybe she just didn’t want my company.”

And maybe I was looking at this the wrong way up. Had Macy dropped Anna? Somehow I didn’t think so. By Macy’s standards, Anna was royalty. Besides, Macy needed some friends, even in her new exalted state, and Anna had played that role for a very long time. She had nearly stepped in as matron of honor at the wedding when it looked like Macy’s sister was going to go into labor right about then. What Anna and Macy ever found in common I wasn’t certain, but a fondness for clothes and makeup and apple cider slimming regimens and discussing those things at length probably passed for a close sisterhood in those parts, in those circles. I wouldn’t know.

“It’s just that,” I said, following up the thought, “she had once been so close she had nearly been part of your wedding party.”

Macy nodded. “Krista’s timing was always bad. The baby ended up being so late they had to induce. Whatever was I was going to do with a matron-of-honor dress, size elephant, for heaven’s sake?”

Krista at the altar had been a sight to see. No one in the pews could take their eyes off of her, in case she doubled over in pain behind the baptismal font. She looked like Exhibit A in some medieval pageant on the wages of sin.

“There would barely have been time to cut it down to Anna’s size,” Macy continued. “Even though she was no gazelle, mind.”

“This is true.”

“And her coloring was all wrong, with that dark hair. She’d have been the only brunette on the altar, apart from Barry.”

“Mmm. Yes.”

“You have to think of the photos. For pos—pos—posterior?”

“Posterity.”

“Right. You are so smart. I wish I’d gone further in school.”

It was a snarky comment on its face but with Macy, you never felt that snark was in her repertoire. Along with “posterity,” it just wasn’t in the database.

I smiled. “I still have the student loan debt to prove it. Anyway, I did not get the sense from Anna that there had been a rift. You know, living next door to her as I did, I picked up on a lot. Still … ”

I let Macy’s mind drift over the possibilities of what I might have picked up on. Which was not much about the Rideouts, truth be told. But from the stricken look in Macy’s eyes, I might have been Anna’s closest confidant, engaging in soul-baring conversations over hot cups of cocoa before the fire, just us two girls in our footie pajamas. After the slightest hesitation, Macy seemed to opt for admitting to the truth of what I might already know.

People are funny that way. It was something I learned in my time as a reporter: they always assume you know more than you do. And they are so anxious to get their side of the story out, they end up revealing more than would ever have come out on its own.

She looked at me, assessing me for—what? My ability to be discreet?

“Would you like something to eat?” she asked. “C’mon, let’s have a bite. Like old times. It’s almost time for lunch. Bonita does a mean tuna salad.”

“Bonita?”

“Her grandmother was Spanish.”

So we continued our conversation over a staggeringly good salade niçoise. We sat at a round table in a warm pool of sunlight before a picture window overlooking the back garden.

“She, well. Hmm,” began Macy, taking a sip of Veen and replacing the bottle with care. “It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But Anna was not what she seemed.”

I wanted to say she seemed to be an evil, double-dealing, bloody-minded slut, but instead I shoveled in a forkful of tuna and waited.

“She set her sights on Barry. Well. You can see for yourself what an attractive man he is. But I wasn’t having any of that.”

Again I was left wondering, this time at Macy’s view of her husband. I supposed he was attractive to women with Neanderthal DNA, which on the surface fair Macy did not seem to possess. Still, we’re talking more than three hundred thousand years ago. A lot could happen.

“It’s the reason we moved out of Weycombe Court so suddenly, you know,” she offered. “We had planned to stay longer, take our time finding and renovating the perfect place, wait and see what the market did. We weren’t in any rush.”

“I thought Anna was the broker on the sale of your house. And the purchase of this one.”

“Yes, she was, and it was right about then the trouble started.” Macy had a trace of salad dressing at one corner of her lips, marring her lip gloss. At my signal she dabbed it away. “We were playing it safe and cautious. Wanting her to get us the best deal. You know. But then … ”

“Trouble?” I asked silkily. I could see she was ready to spill and I didn’t want to spook her. I took a swig of my drink to mask any signs of too-avid interest.

“Barry. Well. Barry’s meetings over the state of the housing market were taking a little longer than I thought they should. And they were running late into the night.” She ducked her head, and the impeccable hair swung forward to hide her expression. It was a handy hairstyle if you were easily embarrassed. “If you know what I mean.”

I could guess. But I had no idea why she was confiding in me like this. None. We had gone from being—not enemies, but very distant acquaintances to confidants in a heartbeat. I guessed that life at the Petit Trianon was a bit isolating, especially if you’d excised almost everyone in the village from your guest list in some desperate social-climbing attempt to separate yourself from the herd.

“I can guess,” I admitted. “But surely Barry—well, I mean, you’re so beautiful, Macy. And he’s besotted with you. Everyone knows that.”

“Do you think so?”

God. How pathetic. How could she not know—really know—the impact she had on men? On everyone?

“Yes, Macy, I think so. What makes you think Anna would make any headway there? Even assuming she would dare.”

“Dare? I think she’d do it on a dare. For Anna, that was half the fun. She and I were friends—were friends, before all this started. Once we’d hired her to represent us, we had a business relationship that we really couldn’t call off, as much as it galled me to pay that woman a commission. Barry said we’d lose too much in penalties to just walk away. There was a lot on the line. I think in some perverted way knowing we were stuck just added to the thrill for her.”

I knew people like that. Don’t look for the logic or you’ll go crazy. They do it because it’s there, because they can, just to see what will happen. What kind of chaos they can create. I was starting to believe Macy’s view of things. “So you confronted Barry.”

Again she hung her head, letting the hair shield her expression. “I just said I wasn’t comfortable with Anna. I made up some story about how I questioned her honesty. Well, I did, but in a business sense I guess she was being honest with us. It was everything else she was dishonest about. Like other people’s fiancés.”

“And what did Barry say?”

“He blew up—went completely crazy. Without my even asking, he denied anything was happening, or had happened between them. He got so angry with me for doubting him, I just dropped it.”

A classic legal tactic. The good offense being the best defense. In other words, he bullied her into silence. Macy didn’t dare anger the rich fish she had angled so hard to catch. Jesus, did this woman own a mirror? Of course she did, but she had somehow convinced herself that at the ripe old age of forty, the best she could do was Barry.

My best guess was that Barry and Anna had been in cahoots over a deal that was in some way illegitimate. If I had to choose in which direction Barry would stray, it would be that; he would be fiscally unfaithful, unscrupulous in his dealings. He was famous for it already, in a quiet way.

Anna had been beautiful, yes, but Macy was the bomb. For a man who assessed his womenfolk according to their marketplace value, that would have tipped the scales. Besides, he had just put a ring the size of a grape on Macy’s finger. Would he really screw it all up so soon?

Macy asked Bonita to open a bottle of rosé and began pouring with an open hand. She honestly seemed glad of my company and especially thankful for my tribute to her looks. This was taking candy from a baby.

We lingered over the meal, staring out the window at the flagstone patio and the manicured garden beyond which colorful Chinese lanterns were nearing the end of their season. I may have solved the mystery of where Heather got her berries, although it was news to me she and Macy were close. Perhaps Heather had climbed over the fence to sneak some. But Chinese lanterns grew everywhere in the village; I had heard people complain they grew like weeds and once they took hold, they couldn’t get rid of them.

In the vast distance of the Rideout estate a man could be seen riding a mower. Twirling the stem of my wineglass, I thought how best to approach the subject of exactly what uses Barry might have found for Anna. Macy saved me the trouble.

“You know,” she said, “at one time I thought Barry had some sort of agreement with Anna. Something to do with property titles.”

“Really?” I said. “To be honest, I never heard Anna was anything but straight in her business dealings.”

“Well, maybe I was wrong. Can people be dishonest in just one area of their lives? Can they compar—compart—?”

“Compartmentalize?”

“Right. Maybe it’s dishonest in one way, dishonest in all ways.”

It was an interesting philosophical point. God, the money I had wasted on higher education, not to mention self-help books. People like Macy seemed so shielded from the world. They spent their days happy, sitting in huge mansions having splendid wines with lunch, with nothing to do with their time but decide what to wear next, and whether that nail polish really went with that day’s outfit. I suspected Macy’s real value to Barry, apart from the obvious, was her groundedness—her warm-heartedness, and her common sense, and the fact that there were so few edges to her generous personality. Her general cluelessness probably helped with someone who sailed as close to the wind as Barry. I decided to forgive her for shutting me out for a while, realizing it probably had more to do with cutting ties with Anna and anyone in near physical proximity to Anna. Macy had been fighting to save her marriage, or so she thought. And before that, her engagement. It was not rare in these cases for other people to be jettisoned like so much ballast. I’ve seen the same thing happen when the grandchildren come along. Everything suddenly has to be perfect, perfect, perfect. It’s a control thing.

I guessed the police might wonder how far Macy was willing to go to save her marriage. If I’d been tempted to wonder the same thing, a few hours in her company had ended my doubts.

Macy was if anything too nice for her own good.