agreed upon,’ that kind of thing. He thought Napoleon had been misunderstood in many ways.” This was all very interesting. It didn’t surprise Faith in the least to discover that Fox had had a Napoleon fixation. And about the Met—she had heard both the show and the opening were spectacular, but she had more questions. More pertinent questions.
Emma’s prints were spread over the apartment, what with the tea making and all, but the police wouldn’t have had anything to connect her with them. And surely the killer hadn’t left any. But getting back to the
business of the book—Emma
“Did he show you a finished manuscript?”
“No, he must have put it somewhere. In his file cabinet, probably.”
A logical deduction.
Emma continued. “I told you before that he never actually said what it was about. I merely assumed it was like the other books. Political. The masses being oppressed. That kind of thing.”
Had it occurred to Emma that Nathan Fox the revo-lutionary regarded her as a class enemy? Probably not, since it was Nathan Fox, the radical chic darling of the Upper East Side, who was pumping her week after week for details of the life he obviously very much missed. It was all going on without him—the repartee, the gossip, the affairs, the beluga.
“And then you left?”
“Then I left.” Somehow the three words uttered in this completely flat tone sounded more tragic than all of Emma’s earlier outcries put together. There was very little to say after this, and during one of the silences Emma dozed off, exhausted by the surfeit of emotion.
Faith stood up and went to the window. The Christmas tree sellers, in bright red stocking caps and down parkas, were doing a brisk business. She’d planned to get a small tree herself. It was her first Christmas in her very own place. Maybe next year. She was going to be too busy. Emma’s latest revelation brought several parts of the picture into sharp focus. Faith now knew that Fox’s murder and Emma’s blackmail were the work of the same hands. It was highly unlikely that the blackmail operation had just happened upon the mur-136
der, which just happened to occur the day and time of Emma’s habitual visits. Which upped the ante consid- erably. Before, Emma had been in danger. Now that Faith knew they were dealing with a killer or killers, it was mortal danger.
A family was looking at trees. The kids kept dragging out Rockefeller Center–size pines; the parents, tabletop versions. Somewhere on that lot, they’d find the perfect one, something in between—and each side would feel victorious.
Emma, Emma. Faith looked at her friend—oblivious in sleep’s sweet escape. She’d been right all along. Of course she couldn’t go to the police. Once they discovered she’d been at Fox’s apartment so close to the time of death—the newspaper had said 4:00 P.M.—she would immediately become a suspect.
Could even be charged. It would all make very good sense to the district attorney’s office. Discovering her father’s whereabouts, Emma kills him and fakes a burglary to protect her husband’s political future. And the blackmail? She could have written the notes herself. The only hard piece of evidence was a tape—
which she’d destroyed. And her motive? That was easy. Faith had known from the start Emma would do anything for Michael. Do anything to keep him from leaving her once he found out who she really was—
and she’d managed to convince herself that was what he’d do, be forced to do to save his career . . . and face. No, this was not one of those times when your friend Mr. Policeman would be of much help. This was one of those times when the only person who could help was, unfortunately, you—or rather, your nearest and dearest friend.
And Faith had to move quickly. Before Emma lost
all her money, was arrested, made the tabloids, cracked up, or all four.
Outside, the family had tied their purchase on top of a child’s red wagon and started off, the father pulling, one of the kids holding the precariously balanced tree steady. Faith sighed. She wouldn’t be stringing any popcorn and cranberries herself this year.
Instead, as soon as Emma woke up and left, Faith would continue her investigation. Although, with this latest revelation, it seemed as if she was starting from the beginning. She decided to take a ride out to Long Island. Garden City, Long Island. People looked for houses on the weekends—and Todd Hartley was a real estate agent. Wasn’t it Dorothy L. Sayers who said,
“Suspect everybody?”
Faith knew how to get to Long Island. It wasn’t like New Jersey. She
There was a tunnel underneath you could take to go there. But it wasn’t like Long Island. She could find her way around the island—or rather, across the island from west to east to the Hamptons—with no stops in between. I’m not going anywhere near as far today, she thought with some relief, remembering the traffic back to the city on Sunday summer nights, exit names—
Eastport, Patchogue, Islip, Amityville—passing at a snail’s pace.
Garden City was at the near end of the island, close to Queens. She’d studied the map while Emma slept and planned her route. There weren’t any of those little black dots AAA uses to mark the scenic roads.
Those dots started at Hampton Bays, started where the
money started—Southampton, East Hampton, Ama-gansett. It might be fun to move the business to the island during the summers. Fun and profitable.
She popped a cassette of Christmas carols into the tape deck and began singing along. “God bless the master of this house.” Faith was under no illusions as to her vocal ability. A Jessye Norman, she was not. Yet, she wasn’t bad in a chorus, and she certainly knew how to belt out hymns. Her father, if he did not exist, would have to have been invented. He actually got his jaded, weary Manhattan congregation to turn out for hymn sings—just for the fun of it—where he would joyfully accompany them on a very ancient and always slightly out of tune guitar.
“Let every man with cheerfulness embrace his lov-ing wife.” Verse three. Always the afterthought. If Emma didn’t care so much about the master of her house, all of this would be a much more manageable problem. Not that Michael didn’t seem to care about his wife, too. Whenever Faith had seen them together, and that once without, he seemed genuinely to adore her. Faith had intercepted a look he gave Emma at the party the other night. She had been greeting someone and as Michael walked over to join them, he gazed on her with something more than love, more than appreciation. It was a “Could I possibly be this lucky?” look; a “Could this amazing, beautiful creature actually be mine?” look. Faith recalled hearing when the engagement was announced how he’d pursued his intended, wooing and winning her with extravagantly romantic gestures. Can’t go wrong with romantic gestures, she thought, as the flowers at Delia’s and Richard slipped into her thoughts.
She came out of the Queens Midtown Tunnel into
the bright afternoon sunshine. It sparkled on the mounds of dirty snow. She had thought it best not to drive the van from work with HAVE FAITH, the address, and the phone number emblazoned on the side. So, she’d borrowed her parents’ car, a sedate black Volvo—
her mother’s choice. Lawrence had probably driven it only once or twice, if that much. Things like borrowing the car were easy with them. They were not the kind of parents who would have to know where she was going, with whom, and why. Lawrence never asked this kind of question, period. Jane saved up her queries, hitting you on big stuff like what you were planning to do with your life, rather than day-to-day minutiae in which she wasn’t really interested—or didn’t want to know about.
Today, however, did fall into the “big stuff” category.
Yes, she was helping a friend—both parents would ap-plaud that—but the rest was way beyond “Can you look me straight in the eye and say that?”—and she had no intention of their ever finding out. Not her parents. Not anyone. She’d sworn to Emma she wouldn’t—and besides, at this point, knowledge was becoming an increasingly
