temper, lapses where he couldn’t find the word he wanted.” She shook her head. “Some of this isn’t easy to describe. But there were moments when I remembered my father in the first stages of dementia.”
“That seems odd for a healthy man in his midsixties.” Adam pointed at the silver trophy. “Last August, he was fit enough to snare that cup after a two-month racing season. The drunken or demented couldn’t do that.”
A note of reproof entered Clarice’s voice. “You weren’t here, Adam. By December, your father was a different man. For me, perhaps the oddest thing was that his writing habits completely changed. You remember how disciplined he was.”
“Sure. At his desk by seven-even hungover or sick as a dog-writing and rewriting until the cocktail hour. ‘Writers should have workdays,’ he used to say, ‘like bureaucrats or bankers.’”
“He lost that,” his mother said wearily. “His writing became frenzied, even nocturnal. I’d find him at his computer past midnight, a drink on his desk. He’d never written at night, or used alcohol as a spur.”
Another remark of his father’s sprung to Adam’s mind: “This myth of drunken writers is romantic bullshit-all drinking ever got them was vomit on the page.” It was disconcerting how much about his father came back to him now.
“None of this makes sense to me,” Adam said at length. “Including his death. He must have walked a thousand times to that promontory, but never that close to the edge. He could have gone there blindfolded and not fallen off the cliff.”
“Well, he did,” Jack said flatly. “The next morning I found him on the rocks below in a pool of dried blood, his skull crushed.”
Adam tried to envision this. “Has there been an autopsy?”
“In Boston. But we don’t know the results yet. The certificate of death we needed to bury him listed the cause of death as ‘Pending.’” Jack’s tone became sarcastic. “If it were me, I’d have written ‘Fell ninety feet before he hit a rock headfirst.’ One look at him resolved all doubt.”
Something was very wrong, Adam knew. Facing Teddy, he asked, “Have the police paid you a visit?”
His brother frowned. “Yup.”
“About what?”
“It was pretty much the same questions for all of us. When we last saw him. What he was wearing. What we were doing when Dad must have taken his swan dive. If anyone was with us.” Briefly Teddy looked at the others- Clarice with her brow knit, Jack watching Adam’s face. “One thing they asked me is if I noticed a button missing on his shirt.”
“Who was doing the asking-the locals or the state police?”
“The staties. The lead guy was a Sergeant Sean Mallory.”
“Did they take anything?”
Biting his lip, Teddy nodded. “The clothes and shoes we were wearing that night. Also samples of our DNA.”
“They like to do that in a homicide investigation,” Adam replied softly. “I remember it well from when I interned at the Manhattan DA’s office. Please tell me you have lawyers.”
The worry deepened in his mother’s eyes. In a voice both vulnerable and defensive she said, “Why would we? None of us knows what happened to him.”
“Come off it, Mom. These folks think someone gave Dad a shove-maybe one of you. At least they haven’t ruled it out. Were any of you with someone else that night?”
Jack spread his hands. “Turns out all of us were alone. I was at home, watching the Red Sox game.”
Adam looked at Teddy. “In my innocence,” his brother replied, “I was painting another unsalable landscape.”
“And I was reading,” Clarice said tautly.
Adam looked at her, obviously shaken now, her tenuous mask of calm stripped away by his questions. He had begun to understand the agonizing delicacy of the eulogy, her need to navigate the land mines of Ben’s death. A wave of sympathy overcame him-instead of a certain peace, Ben’s death had brought her fresh anguish. More gently, he asked, “Is George Hanley still the local DA?”
“Yes.” Clarice shook her head, as if she felt her world slipping away. “George has been polite, but very guarded. All he’ll say is that this is a police matter.”
Adam looked from one to the other. “Before my legal education was aborted, I picked up some rudiments here and there. I know this was a shock, and that you’ve had to deal with quite a lot in very little time. But each of you needs to see a lawyer before talking to Sergeant Mallory again.”
No one else spoke. Sitting back, Adam tried to read their expressions. Then he said, “I sense a very large elephant in the room, something else waiting to be said. At the church, I was hassled by a reporter from the Enquirer, of all places. Whatever else, my father wasn’t Michael Jackson. I can’t imagine that rag’s demographic gives a damn that he tumbled off a cliff.”
His mother turned away, face pinched. “The great man left a will,” Teddy said in a monotone. “A new one.”
Impassive, Adam waited. Teddy inhaled, then continued, “He disinherited Mom and me. The house, and most of Dad’s estate, goes to Carla Pacelli.”
Stunned, Adam tried to take this in. “The actress?”
“The very one. Catnip for people whose lips move when they read.”
Adam felt comprehension war with disbelief. “What on earth does a TV star have to do with Dad? The last I heard of her, she was coming out of rehab, her series canceled, her finances trashed, and her career in ashes.”
Clarice still looked down, a study in mute humiliation. “As you’ll remember,” Teddy responded, “every summer the Hollywood contingent graces us with their presence. Supposedly, this particular second-tier talent came to heal herself. Instead, she took refuge in the guesthouse at the Dane place, a convenient five-minute walk from here, then she found salvation in the arms of the Vineyard’s resident celebrity. Now she’s about to become the owner of this house, and everything that’s in it.”
Turning to Clarice, Adam said, “How can that be, Mom? I thought this house was yours.”
With effort, his mother looked up at him, a damp sheen in her eyes. “It would have been. But when my father went bankrupt, Ben bought it. As a favor to me, I thought.”
“Who knew?” Teddy remarked. “All these years, bro, we lived here at his sufferance.”
At once, Adam grasped the depth of his mother’s grief and betrayal. At the moment of her husband’s death, he had stripped her of everything-her past and her future. If nothing mattered to his father but his own desires, if years of loyalty and common enterprise were trifles to him, there was no way Clarice could compete with a woman barely older than Adam-an actress who, a mere two years ago, had been a stunning beauty, her aura so electric that she seemed to pop off the screen. The female embodiment of Ben Blaine’s self-concept, the ultimate mirror of his ego.
In a rough voice, Adam said, “Long ago I found out that my father was a monster of selfishness. But this suggests I thought too well of him.” Stopping himself, he finished quietly, “You don’t deserve this, Mom.”
Jack glanced at Clarice, his lined face graven with helplessness and frustration. Fighting back his anger, Adam realized that the will helped explain the interest of the state police in Ben’s wife and oldest son, his victims. If given a second chance, Adam would have killed his father without remorse. “Who knew about this will?” he asked.
“Not me,” Teddy answered. “And certainly not Mom. Needless to say, Jack didn’t.”
God, Adam wanted to say to his father, is there no end to you? Instead, he called upon the coldness of mind he had cultivated since leaving. “You said Pacelli gets most of the estate. Who gets the rest?”
In his driest tone, Teddy said, “There’s a million for Jenny Leigh, of course. I believe that particular bequest says, ‘So she can live the writer’s life her talent deserves.’”
Adam stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“Just another act of beneficence. Apparently, our father had more regard for struggling writers than starving painters-”
“It’s not Jenny’s fault,” Clarice interjected. “She’s as shocked by Ben as we were.”
At this, Jack shut his eyes, as though to distance himself from the fresh hatred he felt for his brother. “Too bad for Jenny,” Adam told his mother, “because I don’t think Dad can do this to you. You have property rights in his
