“Grow up,” I snapped. “I don’t know where Benji is, nor Catherine. Stop casting around for who to blame for her disappearance and tell me what you’re doing to find her.”
“Edwards is using his private security connections,” his mother said bitingly. “They’re likely to shoot her if they see her. If you were looking for her, where would you start?”
“Nowhere I’d tell either of you,” I said nastily, and closed my phone. “They have a private security force out looking for her,” I turned to Father Lou. “That really scares me.”
“Girl adored her grandfather, isn’t that what you told me the other day? Maybe they had some special place. Everyone goes to ground where they feel secure; place connected to her grandfather would feel secure to her.”
“He’s got advanced Alzheimer’s. He won’t be able to tell me-never mind. I know who can. I’ll call you from the car.”
I ran from the school.
CHAPTER 50
North of Madison, Wisconsin, a freezing rain began to fall. The interstate turned glassy on the overpasses; I had to keep my speed down to stay in control. Except for the occasional giant rig charging through the slush at eighty, we had the road pretty much to ourselves.
Geraldine Graham was snoring lightly in the seat next to me. She had insisted on coming: she still had keys to the cottage-she had found them easily, in a drawer in her bedroom, and put them into a black Hermes bag that rested now at her feet. I tried to force her to stay home, but she said she knew the route, which I didn’t, and more important, at least to her, she needed to make sure Benji and Catherine were all right. “If I’d told you these things last week, they might not be in danger now.”
When I’d reached Anodyne Park, Lisa had answered the bell-bustling, officious: you can’t come in, Madam is resting. I pushed her aside and strode down the hall, opening doors. I found Geraldine dozing on her bed with a reading light on and a book open beneath her fingers.
Lisa darted in under my arm. “Oh, madam, this detective is here, breaking in. Shall I call Mr. Darraugh or Mr. Julius?”
Geraldine sat up with a start. “Lisa! Stop dithering. The detective? Mr. Darraugh’s detective is here? Oh, there you are, young woman. Wait while I collect myself.”
I knelt next to her. “Something urgent has come up. I need your help; I don’t need you to put your clothes on.”
“Grant me the foibles of my upbringing, young woman. I think better while dressed than naked. I will be with you directly.”
I walked impatiently up and down the hall outside her room, but she was, in fact, remarkably quick, despite her age and Lisa’s interference, and in a few minutes was talking to me in her alcove in the sitting room. I told her I was going to tell her things that were utterly confidential and that Lisa could not be a party to them. After a look at my face, Geraldine summarily dismissed her maid. Lisa gave me the kind of expression that makes you glad a handgun isn’t backing it up, but she retreated.
When I heard the door close-and made sure Lisa was on the far side of it-I told Geraldine about Catherine and Benji.
“I know you and Calvin were lovers all those years ago. It was you he meant when he called for Deenie last week, wasn’t it?”
Her fingers clenched on the arms of her chair, but she nodded. “How did you know? Was it the key to Larchmont that he had kept?”
“That, and some other things. Armand Pelletier left an unfinished manuscript among his papers that pretty well spelled it out.”
“Ah, Armand. I wondered if he would come back to haunt me. He was so passionate about workers’ rights, and for a time I reflected that passionbecause I was passionate and needed some object for my ardor. He was bitter when I left him for Calvin; he accused me of being too fastidious, of needing the fleshpots of Egypt. I told him clean sheets would suffice. But it had more to do with-Calvin was a generous lover, and Armand… took more than he gave. His passions ultimately were for himself alone. With Calvin, too, it was only a way of getting what he himself desired, but I didn’t see that until much later.”
“There was never a question that you would leave your husband?” Involuntarily, I let myself be sidetracked.
“I thought-I had the notion that if I divorced MacKenzie, Calvin and I might marry. But however much Mother hated MacKenzie, she couldn’t stand the scandal a divorce would cause, and before I’d nerved myself to stand up to her-Calvin had married Renee.” She twisted the great diamond on her right hand. “I had gone to Washington when he was called
before the committee. I was in the hearing room. I was one of the spectators. I had gone with the idea that I would surprise him. I loved him; I thought he loved me and that if I declared myself it would be a help to his spirit during those difficult days.”
“And he turned you down?”
She turned her head so I couldn’t see her face. “I never made the offer. He left the room surrounded by lawyers and reporters. I looked for him in his club at the end of the day and they told me where he was dining. When I got to the restaurant, I saw him sitting with Renee-as he had often sat with me-so close the clothes themselves might melt from our bodies. I walked away, walked blindly, walked through the night, thinking only that I must never let anyone know how humiliated I had been. I walked for hours, until I ended up weary in some district I didn’t know. I went into a bar, thinking I would have a brandy and get them to call me a cab.”
She stopped, her fingers still working on her ring. “And saw my husband. With Olin Taverner. As close as Renee had been to Calvin. It was that kind of bar. MacKenzie looked up and recognized me.”
“Your husband was gay? Not impotent? Was that the night you found out?”
“‘Gay’? What a strange word for a man whose homosexuality weighed on him like a Druid’s stone. No, I had known for years. My only surprise was seeing him with Olin. When we married, MacKenzie was often in New York, it was an open secret between him and his parents that he went there to visit homosexual bars. Marriage was supposed to cure him of that as it was supposed to cure me of-lovers and unwanted pregnancies. I suppose I took lovers in the hopes of shocking my mother away from me, but she was far more tenacious than I; she would take me to Europe, to those Swiss sanitoria. After she and Blair Graham married MacKenzie to me, he and I tried for a few years; my daughter Laura was his child. But MacKenzie was miserable in my arms, in any woman’s arms, so we arrived at a tacit understanding: we would present a bland united front to the world and seek our pleasures privately. We were both discreet, and we came to be good friends for a time.”
After another pause, when I thought she would slice her finger to the bone with her diamonds, she said, “And then I met Armand, at a party
Calvin gave for him, a triumphant party, when Armand’s Tale of Two Countries had been on the Times best- seller list for twenty weeks. I started going to organizing meetings with him-but you know that part.”
“Yes,” I said gently. “I know that part. Was Calvin Darraugh’s father?” “I’ve never been sure.” She turned bitter eyes back to me. “It might have been Armand, but I think it was Calvin. It doesn’t matter. Darraugh and MacKenzie loved one another, oh, I think better than most fathers and sons do, even though MacKenzie knew the boy couldn’t possibly be his, and Mother suspected as much. And when MacKenzie died-when I killed him-“
“No!” the exclamation came out, involuntary.
“Oh, I didn’t pull the noose tight. But I let Calvin know what I saw in that Washington bar. My last gift to him as a lover. I thought-it would give him leverage with Olin. And it did.”
My eye was on the clock. I tried to hurry her, to get to the point where she’d tell me a place Calvin might have taken his granddaughter. Geraldine wouldn’t be rushed. She was telling me a tale she had rehearsed so many times in her mind it had worn a groove there. Now, her first chance to say it all out loud after all those years of silence,
