Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

My eye caught a movement at one of the front windows. Ruth waiting for me to leave. I found a bottle of water in the backseat and drank it down. Not the pint of rye Philip Marlowe would have used, but it steadied me just the same.

I drove slowly down Coverdale Lane. At Larchmont Hall, I pulled in through the gates, trying to regain my composure. In the twilight, the whitewashed brick looked more than ever like the prop to a Gothic novel. But my Gothic ideas about why Renee Bayard had dug a moat around her husband were wrong: she merely didn’t want people to know he had Alzheimer’s.

Maybe Calvin really had somehow gotten hold of a key to Larchmont Hall. Maybe he did wander over there, and Catherine really did follow him-and was protecting him and the family secret. But why keep it a secret? Was it Renee’s own pain he couldn’t bear her husband’s diminishment and

didn’t want the world to know? Or were there majority publishers at Bayard who only let Renee hold the CEO spot because they thought Calvin was guiding the reins behind scenes? I couldn’t make sense of it.

I got out of the car and walked up the drive to the pond. I couldn’t see much in the growing dusk, but the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t treated this like a crime scene. No tape, no signs of any investigation. Only the scarring along the grass where I’d dragged Marcus Whitby’s body showed that anyone had been here.

I looked at the water in distaste. The dead carp was starting to bloat. I’d come back tomorrow with a wet suit and crawl along the bottom, in case Whitby’s keys, or some other personal item, had fallen out of his pockets, but I wouldn’t enjoy doing it.

I got in my car and continued down Coverdale to Dirksen. It wasn’t until I found myself staring at the pink brick of Geraldine Graham’s condo that I realized I’d headed away from the tollway. Darraugh had asked me to drop the investigation, so I was dropping it-but it would be rude not to pay a farewell visit to his mother.

The guard at Anodyne Park’s entrance approved my admittance. This time, the maid Ms. Graham had imported from Larchmont Hall let me into the apartment. She took my jacket, then asked me to wait in the entryway while she checked with “Madam.” A comedown from my wait at the Bayard mansion-not even a chair, let alone a view of the woods. There was a painting, a small piece, soft pinks and greens that resolved itself into a mountainscape as I examined it.

The maid returned and escorted me out to the sitting room, where Ms. Graham sat drinking coffee from an elaborate service. Perhaps when her maid was with her she couldn’t escape her mother’s rituals. I began to understand why she might relish living alone in her great age.

“That will be all, Lisa.” Ms. Graham dismissed the maid and looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “So, young woman, you won’t come when I send for you, but you do show up unannounced on your own whim?”

“Darraugh told me to stop the investigation into your old home. Did you know that?”

“He phoned this morning to tell me.” She bit off the words.

“Did he explain why?” I walked over to the sideboard and poured myself a cup from the Crown Derby pot.

“He’s always disliked Larchmont enough not to want to invest energy in its care. I think he suspects I made up lights in the attic as a way of forcing him to pay attention to the place. Or maybe to force him to attend to me.”

The bitterness in her fluty voice made me ask, “Why didn’t Darraugh want to keep it? Was it unpleasant for him, growing up there?”

She gave me what I was starting to think of as her Queen Victoria look: subjects will remember that they cannot interrogate the monarch. After a moment, she said stiffly, “Darraugh has never enjoyed country life.”

My eyebrows went up. “He had to spend his boyhood getting up to slop the pigs, which gave him a lasting disgust for the sights and smells of the country?”

“You’re impertinent, young woman.”

“So I’ve been told.” I pulled up a chair and faced her across the piecrust table. “I have this idea about people who live with enormous wealth and great position-that because they get exactly what they want when and how they want it, they believe they’re entitled to privilege. And I imagine such people think the rest of us exist only at their pleasure. That means it’s all right to summon us in the middle of the night, or lie to us, or do whatever else takes their fancy at the moment, because to them our lives have no existence away from their orbit.”

I heard a gasp in the background and realized the maid was listening. Geraldine Graham herself produced a blistering look from her clouded eyes. “Do you truly imagine, young woman, that I have had exactly what I wanted when and how I wanted it? If so, you have shockingly little understanding of family life.”

I was startled: I had braced myself for a diatribe that would end with her ordering Darraugh never to work with me again. Now I remembered the unhappy faces in the newspaper photos of her wedding.

“Your parents bullied you into marrying MacKenzie Graham,” I said calmly. “You didn’t feel able to stand up to them.”

Her lips trembled with more than the uncertainty of old age. “My mother was not the kind of person one stood up to easily”

I looked at the frosty blue eyes in the portrait behind her head. They could have wilted ferns in the Amazon.

“You and your husband didn’t want to start a life together in a house away from your mother? Was Larchmont that important to you?” Geraldine Graham paused. When she spoke again, it was more to herself than to me. “My husband and I had so little in common that it was easier for us to stay with Mother than to try to live alone someplace else.”

“Do you keep her portrait up there to remind yourself every day that she humiliated you?” I asked.

“You are impertinent, young woman,” Geraldine Graham repeated, but this time with a touch of wry humor. “You may pour me more coffee before you leave. Rinse the cup with hot water first,” she added, as I picked up the coffeepot.

I looked at her through narrowed eyes: what she wanted when she wanted it. Before I pushed my luck by uttering the thought aloud, Lisa bustled around the corner into the room and took the cup from me. She poured hot water from a small pot into the cup, swirled it, and emptied the slop into a bowl before refilling Geraldine’s cup.

Ignoring Geraldine’s implied command to leave, I refilled my own cup-without going through the rinse cycle-and leaned against the sideboard. “I’m still trying to figure out what brought Marcus Whitby to New Solway. I thought he might have gone to see Calvin Bayard, not realizing how ill Mr. Bayard is.”

Her hand stopped with the cup midway to her lips. “How ill is he? Renee has discouraged visitors.”

“He seems to have Alzheimer’s. He knows who he is, but not who he’s talking to.”

“Alzheimer’s,” Geraldine repeated slowly. “So the neighborhood gossip has been correct, for once.”

“Why would Ms. Bayard keep his condition so secret?” I asked.

“With Renee Bayard, one never knows why she does what she does, but it is always safe to assume she is enjoying her power over all our lives-over Calvin’s, in keeping him locked away-over his old friends, keeping us from visiting-probably over all the employees at the publishing company.” She pressed her lips together in resentment.

“Calvin and I were friends from earliest childhood, and she has kept me from him most successfully all these years. So if your Negro writer was hoping to see Calvin, Renee would have made sure he wasn’t able to do so. Why do you imagine your Negro wanted to talk to Calvin?”

I recited my piece on Whitby’s interest in Kylie Ballantine and her contract with Bayard. To my surprise, Geraldine knew Ballantine.