Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“You assume, or want to believe, that I followed Catherine home last week.”

Elsbetta entered with a trolley holding another ornate china service. When she’d served us and left, Renee continued as if there had been no interruption.

“I know Catherine didn’t get your name from Darraugh Graham. How did you meet her?”

I told her about finding Marcus Whitby, about my investigation into his death, and why I wanted to talk to Catherine in the first place-it seemed pointless to cover up Catherine’s presence at Larchmont on Sunday night. I even told Renee about being in the pond on Friday, but not that I’d heard her and Catherine talking. And I stuck to my story about finding the kitchen door open at Larchmont Hall: I didn’t want competing versions of my activities floating around.

“I was startled when the sheriff’s police suddenly arrived,” I said. “And I did wonder if it was you who’d alerted them to the notion that there really was someone in the house.”

Renee’s hand didn’t pause as she lifted her eggshell cup to her lips. She drank and set it down. “And what made you wonder that?”

“You knew Catherine was wandering around Larchmont in the dark;

she wouldn’t tell you why. She’s an ardent spirit, but she’s very youngperhaps you thought she might not recognize as dangerous someone she’d agreed to help. Perhaps you thought she had some outlaw holed up, someone she’d romanticized into a Robin Hood. I don’t know how you would have imagined this person, but you knew she valued her oath to protect him more even than the very strong bond between you and her. You wanted him found and moved off the Larchmont property.”

“So you did know she was wandering around there,” Edwards said to his mother. “And you did nothing to stop her!”

“I only learned on Friday.” For once, Renee was on the defensive. “I called Rick Salvi to tell him someone was hiding in the house; o? course I didn’t tell him it was someone Catherine was meeting.”

“Even so,” Edwards burst out, “you should have-“

“I thought I had Catherine well under my eye,” Renee said. “I looked in on her at midnight, right before I phoned Rick, and she was-she seemed to be -sleeping. I thought I’d have the problem solved before she woke up in the morning. Instead, she apparently waited for me to check on her, then went out her window onto the veranda roof and slid down a column to the ground. When I heard shots coming from the woods, I went back to her room-and found her gone. I don’t think anyone ever covered that ground to Larchmont faster than I did that night. Which was fortunate, since when I got there they were staring down at Catherine as if she were a movie they were watching. They hadn’t even sent for an ambulance.”

Edwards’s eyes flashed. “I’m sure your organizational skills saved her life. It’s a pity you didn’t apply them to keeping her from risking it.”

“She’s your daughter, Eds, she’ll do what she wants to do no matter how much I try to engineer a different outcome.” Renee spoke with the kind of saintly resignation that makes the hearer long to belt the speaker.

Edwards took a breath and turned to me. “How deep is her involvement with the kid, with Sadawi?”

“I’ve only met your daughter a few times, but I think she was in love with the romance of the situation, not with the young man himself. What did your buddies in Washington learn about him? Is he a serious security threat?”

“We don’t know anything about him, per se, but he’s connected to a

suspect group. The mosque that he frequents puts out some pretty fiery rhetoric, and he’s been renting a room from one of their members, a guy who’s sent money to the Brothers in Harmony Foundation.”

“I take it these Brothers aren’t in harmony with American interests?” I pursued.

“Oh, they’re murky, like all these groups. We know they’ve sent an X-ray machine to the Chechen rebels; they’ve bought food for Egyptian families, but we believe other funds get funneled through honey sales into AlQaeda hands.”

The Spadona Foundation has a direct pipeline to the current administration. As I’d hoped, taking for granted that Edwards had spoken to the attorney general got him to answer without realizing he was being pumped. The fact that anger with his mother had knocked him off balance helped.

“An X-ray machine hardly sounds very dangerous, Eds,” Renee remarked. “You’re surely not imagining it can be used to make nuclear weapons.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mother, don’t let your hostility to the attorney general and his methods blind you to the reality of how dangerous our enemies are.”

“You’re right,” she said. “His methods make it hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.”

“The most dangerous people at home are the ones refusing to cooperate with the government’s efforts to root out terror, either out of real loyalty to AlQaeda, or ignorance, or through misguided ideas about the legal rights of America’s sworn enemies.” Edwards set his coffee cup down so hard that the delicate handle snapped off.

“Just because you express your anger more violently than I do doesn’t mean you’re right-it doesn’t even mean you’re angrier than I am,” his mother said. “Don’t you see that Catherine was shot because people like Rick Salvi believe they’ve been given a green light to use any means at their disposal if they think they have a terrorist in view? It was your daughter they had in view. And they acted literally on the old saw, `Shoot first, ask questions later.”’

Edwards’s eyes were angry slits in his face. “They knew they had a terrorist who’d fled the house; they didn’t know my daughter was there. It was a shocking mistake, but if you’d been looking after her properly, it wouldn’t have happened.”

He turned to me. “As for you, if you were in Larchmont Hall Friday night, you fled the scene. You could have had Sadawi with you.” “Tucked under my arm like Anne Boleyn’s head,” I agreed.

When he exclaimed “What the-” I said, “You know, that old Bert Lee song-’The sentries shout is Army going to win/They think that it’s Red Grange instead of poor old Anne Boleyn! What did you tell the police when they asked about Mr. Bayard’s books?”

“Mr. Bayard’s books?” Edwards repeated uncertainly, looking from me to his mother.

“Your father’s childhood books. Maybe the police don’t ask people like you the same questions they ask people like me. They wanted to know why his book about the boy attacked by the giant clam was in the attic next to an Arab-English dictionary. I told them I thought Mr. Calvin Bayard was coming over in the middle of the night to translate the story into Arabic. At the time, I didn’t know there was an Arab-speaking kid in the house.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them: it was a ghastly mockery of a man with Alzheimer’s, to joke that he was studying a foreign language.

Renee frowned at me, her heavy brows almost meeting across her nose. “I think we all know why the books were there. And I can see that you are agile at dancing away from questions you don’t want to answer. Did you see Benjamin Sadawi? Or talk to him? Or help him escape?”

“No, ma’am.” The lie got easier every time I told it. “And I am most eager to talk to him.”

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Because he had a chair set up in the attic where he stood looking out into the back garden. He was lonely; he probably stood up there watching, hoping Catherine would appear. So I think he saw what happened the night that Marcus Whitby died in that pond.”