month of her life. The sense of admiration that I’d always seen in her eyes was entirely gone. It had been replaced by something deeper and far grimmer.
“She seemed very disappointed in him,” I said. “It was as if she’d come to despise him.”
Rebecca said nothing.
“Maybe that was what my father couldn’t bear,” I added after a time, “the fact that he’d lost Laura.”
“Or that she’d simply come to love someone else,” Rebecca added cautiously, “the way teenage girls inevitably do.”
I saw my sister again in the long green reeds, the arch of her white back in the moonlight.
“You mean Teddy Lawford?”
“He wrote quite a few letters to Laura,” Rebecca told me. “Swenson found them in one of the drawers of her dressing table.” She reached into the briefcase and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “Laura wrote him back, too,” she said, as she handed me the paper. “This is a copy of the last letter she wrote to him.”
“Where did you get it?” I asked as I took it from her hand.
“Swenson got it from Teddy when he went up to Boston to interview him about the murders.”
“Swenson interviewed Teddy? Why?”
“He considered him a suspect for a while,” Rebecca said. “But Teddy had been at the University of Michigan on the day of the murders.” She nodded toward the letter. “It’s dated November 15.”
While Rebecca looked on, I read what was probably the last letter my sister ever wrote:
Dear Teddy:
Hi, I hope you are okay, and that everything is still going well at college. I wish I could say things are better here, but they’re not. They’re worse than ever. Jamie’s a bastard, like always, and Stevie’s just a kid. My father stays in the basement, but I don’t go down there anymore. If I ever see you, I’ll tell .you what he did. I don’t want to say it in a letter. Someone might see it, and I don’t know what he would do if that happened. He’s such a fake, Teddy, such a cheat.
Teddy, sometimes I get really scared. I feel like something’s going to happen, but I don’t know what.
Damn, this is a depressing letter. I’m sorry, but it’s just the way I feel. Maybe something will brighten me up in the next few days. If it does, I promise to write and let you know.
Love,
Laura
Once I’d finished reading, I handed the letter back to Rebecca. She kept it in her hand, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she repeated the line that had struck her as the most important: “‘If I ever see you, I’ll tell you what he did.’” Her eyes bore down upon me. “What do you think Laura meant by that?”
“I have no idea.”
“‘Fake.’ ‘Cheat.’ Why would she use those words?”
I realized that Rebecca had gone full circle, returning to her original point. “Another woman, you mean,” I said. “You think it’s possible that he was cheating on my mother, and that Laura found out, and somewhere in all that, he decided to kill us?”
Rebecca didn’t answer, but I could tell that her earlier questions had been generated by more than speculation.
“If your father had a lover,” she said, “then he can’t be included in my study.”
“Yes, I know, Rebecca,” I said. “But is there some reason why you think he might have had another woman other than Laura’s letter?”
She hesitated a moment, looking at me with an expression which always signaled the fact that she was about to reveal something she had previously kept hidden. “Well, there’s a detail that always bothered Swenson,” she said. “He was never able to track it down exactly, and I think you’re the only person who might know what it means.”
“What detail?”
“The fact that almost five months before the murders your father bought two tickets on a flight to Mexico City,” Rebecca answered, the revelation completed. She glanced down at her notebook. “He made the reservation on June 15, 1959. The flight was scheduled to leave from Idlewild Airport in New York City.”
“On what day?”
She looked up at me. “November 19.”
I felt a sharp pang. “The day of the murders,” I said.
“But he canceled those same tickets over a month before the murders,” Rebecca added. “On October 10. So, on November 19, as far as we know, he had no travel plans.”
I repeated the most relevant aspect of what she’d told me. “But the main thing is that before that, he’d reserved two tickets, not just one.”
“He made the reservation in his own name,” Rebecca said pointedly, “One for him and one …” She stopped for a beat, “… for someone else.”
“And this ‘someone else,’” I said, “there was no name?”
Rebecca shook her head. “He made the reservation by phone, and he never gave a name for the second person.”
“For his lover, you mean.”
