New England White (50 page)

“That’s correct.” Now to the point. “I’m here tonight because I have to confirm, urgently, whether what I have said is true. I’m not at liberty to tell you why, but the game has turned dangerous. There are some new players. We have to dispel the lie once and for all, or…well, people could get hurt.”

Trevor Land’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be calculating: this much advantage with this choice, that much with that choice. Campus politics shifted and swirled, but the secretary was a survivor. He had served four university presidents, two of whom had left involuntarily. He had never even stumbled.

“Very well, Chief Vallely,” he said at last. “Let us assume that I believe you. Have you such an individual in mind? An individual with the proper motives and the proper…connections?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary, I do. And I believe you know exactly who I’m thinking of.”

Grinning now, more sardonic than amused. Plainly, Trevor Land had decided. “Why not tell me anyway?”

“Lemaster Carlyle.”

“Fascinating notion, Chief Vallely. And why, pray, would the president of the—”

Bruce’s cell phone rang.

He ignored it.

“That reminds me,” said the secretary. He was on his feet but waved Bruce to sit still. He took an envelope from his desk. “The phone records you asked for.” Handing them over. “And now, if you will excuse me, Chief Vallely, I believe this meeting is at an end. One must return to one’s dinner before it gets cold. Just keep up the good work, Chief. Keep along your present path.”

On his way back to the car, Bruce returned the call from his deputy, Turian.

A professor had been badly injured, she said, voice shaky. Another hit-and-run, at an office park in Langford, not far from the border with Tyler’s Landing.

“Who was it?”

“The chief of adolescent psychiatry at the medical school. A man named Brady, Vincent Brady.”

CHAPTER 55

IMPERFECT INFORMATION

(I)

“H
OW’S
V
ANESSA TAKING IT
?” said Mary Mallard.

“I’m not entirely sure.” Julia stirred her coffee. They were sitting in the bagel shop on the corner of King and Hudson, where, as Mary had pointed out at the White House, Julia used to get together with Kellen for a quick bite. “She’s very…inward. She doesn’t let people know what she’s thinking. She has so many faces, so many layers, no matter how many you peel down, you’re never all the way to the core.”

“Maybe her core’s her own business. Maybe the world should keep out.”

“Maybe so.”

“Children need plenty of space,” said Mary, with the authority of a woman who has never raised one.

“Maybe.”

“And the police say it’s an accident?”

Julia nodded, more uneasy than ever. It was Tuesday. She had a luncheon meeting at Lombard Hall, which was why she and Mary were limited to coffee. She wanted to skip it. She had told Mary nothing about the Empyreals. “His secretary says his briefcase is missing, but the police seem to think he was robbed after he was hit.”

“A lot of hit-and-run accidents around the campus these days.” Mary drummed her fingers, squirmed around on the bench, and in several other ways signaled that she was ready for a cigarette. Outside, the sun beat brightly down but the temperature was in the teens, and the wind chill was worse. “Julia, look. You’re not in any danger. Your family’s not in any danger. If they wanted to get you, they’d have gotten you.” She let this sink in. “If Brady was an accident, hooray. If they wanted his briefcase, then they must have wanted something
in
his briefcase, and I’m willing to bet it was his files on Vanessa. They want to know what she told her psychiatrist, because they want to know what Kellen told her.”

“I don’t think Kellen told her anything. She didn’t know what he was working on.”

“They’re keeping their distance, Julia. They’re worried. Whoever really did it—whoever really killed Gina—is scared that it’s going to come out.” A quick smile, then the brisk look Julia had come to know so well. “But back to business.” She tapped the envelope. “I agree with Lemaster. This confession is awfully convenient.”

“I suppose.”

“Notice that it’s a photocopy?”

“So?”

“I’m wondering how many copies are around.” Drumming those fingers. “And why your mother had one lying around to give you.” Drumming, drumming. “It could be some kind of device to use when somebody gets too close to what’s really going on.” The fingers mercifully stopped. “The question is, how many people have copies? And why did your mother give you one?”

“That’s not one question, it’s two.”

Quite appropriately, the writer ignored this dig. But she walked right into the next one. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Most of the details of my life,” said Julia, with brio.

Mary did not even crack a smile. “Let me tell you something. I have another book project I could be working on. A very nice little exposé of lobbyists and slush funds on Capitol Hill.”

“Maybe that’s what you should do, then.”

“Seriously?”

“Lemmie thinks I should stop.”

“But you don’t.” She lifted the envelope. “You don’t fool me, Julia. You’re planning something nefarious and maybe illegal. I want in on it.”

“I’m going back into the archives.”

“Why?”

“In case the confession is a lie. Like you said, it’s awfully convenient.” She drummed her fingers. Now Mary had her doing it. “I only have a few diary pages. Not enough to pay for. Or kill for. There has to be more. I’m betting that’s what Kellen hid in the library.”

“When are you going?”

Julia shrugged.

Mary said, “You’ve figured out some of Kellen’s clues, haven’t you?”

Another shrug.

The writer was sanguine. “You don’t trust me yet, do you?”

“I don’t know when I’m going.” A pause. “But I don’t think I need your permission.”

“So—what are you saying? I’m a cheerleader again?”

“Rah-rah,” said Julia.

(II)

J
ULIA WAS HOME IN TIME
to meet the school buses, Jeannie tumbling into the house with her usual perfect energy, Vanessa trudging upstairs as if she carried the weight of history on her narrow shoulders: over the weekend the anniversary of Gina’s death had passed unnoticed, and this morning over breakfast Vanessa had made a fuss about it. Jeremy Flew, still rearranging Lemaster’s study, had taken over the kitchen to make a special dinner, and Julia decided to let him.

Jeannie insisted on helping, and Julia decided to let her.

She waited until she heard Jeremy’s patient instruction and Jeannie’s insouciant giggling and then, with the two of them fully occupied, went up to Vanessa’s bedroom for a chat. Vanessa was lying flat on her back on the bed, eyes closed and earphones in place, silently weeping as she listened to her funeral dirges. Julia rolled the chair from the desk and sat, worried eyes on the recumbent figure. She could not imagine how it must feel to have your therapist injured and nearly killed. Gently, she tapped her daughter on the shoulder. Vanessa’s eyes flew open, the fearful, startled look frightening to see, until it melted into a smooth smile. She slipped off the earphones and sat up, pulling a book from somewhere, but Julia could see the tracks of the tears.

“I was just resting my eyes,” said Vanessa. “Homework.”

“Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

A long few seconds passed.

“Honey?”

Nose in her book. “Hmmm?”

“May I ask you a question?”

“I think you just did.”

“Very funny.” Julia inched closer. “Listen, honey. Did Kellen ever mention to you…somebody he called the Black Lady?”

Vanessa turned a page and, quite leisurely, reached for her Perrier bottle. Swallowing seemed to take her a very long time. “I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about this stuff any more.”

Julia bit her lip. She was trespassing on foreign territory, and did not even know whose forces patrolled the border. “And I thought we decided that Veazie women aren’t interested in other people’s rules.” Pause. “Like Elphaba.”

“No.”

“Not like Elphaba?”

“No, Kellen never mentioned the Black Lady. Sorry, Moms.”

About to creep out of the room in disappointment, Julia caught the ghost of a smile on Vanessa’s winsome face, and realized that the teen had placed the ghost of an emphasis on Kellen’s name. She glanced over her shoulder but the door was still closed.

“What are you trying to tell me, honey?”

“That Kellen never mentioned the Black Lady.”

“Kellen never mentioned her.” She had it. “Somebody else did.”

Turning another page. “Uh-huh.”

Again she and her clever daughter had reached the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. She forced a gentle patience into her tone. “Who, honey? Who mentioned the Black Lady?”

“At Kellen’s funeral.”

“Kellen’s funeral,” Julia repeated, thinking, Mary Mallard, which would mean talking to Vanessa had only led her in a circle. A second later, she remembered that Mary and Vanessa had never been alone together at the funeral. “Somebody mentioned the Black Lady at Kellen’s funeral.” In her head she reviewed the players: Kellen’s ex-wife, Nadia; Kellen’s uncle Seth; the crowd at Seth’s house—

“Uh-huh. Remember how I hung out with the kids and they told me the old stories about Arkadelphia? You got mad when I told you the one about the Civil War? Well, they have this legend down there. They have these colleges, really pretty, we saw them, remember? Well, there’s this legend about one of them. There was a student whose boyfriend kind of dropped her for another chick.” She rolled her tongue around in her mouth, face momentarily rippling, as she thought, perhaps, of Casey, who had not called in a while. “And, anyway, the legend is that she threw herself off the bell tower, and her ghost has haunted the campus ever since.”

“And that’s the Black Lady?”

“Right. They call her the Black Lady of Arkadelphia.”

“Part of his past,” Julia whispered, mostly to herself, wondering how she could have missed something so obvious. Had one of his women actually succeeded in doing herself in? She would have to arrange an excuse to travel back to Arkadelphia, although how she would know what to look for—

“Oh, and, Moms?” Vanessa, still reading, had rolled onto her stomach, a signal of dismissal every bit as unmistakable as Lemaster’s habit of swiveling to face his computer. “There’s one other thing.”

“What’s that, honey?”

“The Black Lady? She’s white.”

(III)

S
HE STOOD
in the living room window, beside the Steinway, watching the nightly parade of headlights along Hunter’s Meadow Road, far more cars than could ever be justified by the still relatively small number of homes on the hill. She had always imagined that not a few carried curious townspeople wanting to see the grand house the black family had built, perhaps to gawk, perhaps to mock, perhaps simply to try to understand this strange new phenomenon of African-American wealth: because, as far as white America knew, nobody black ever had money or education before, say, affirmative action.

And maybe some of the cars were keeping an eye on her. Julia knew somebody was out there, watching and watching, waiting for her to come up with Kellen’s surplus, ready to snatch it from her hands and spirit it off to—well, to somebody else. She knew because Mary had told her, and because of what had happened in Paris, but she also knew because she could sense it, the way New Englanders can sense, in the sudden soft change in the direction of the winter wind, the faint whisper of clouds unseen because they are over the horizon, and the rising storm to follow, although the sky is crisp, gorgeous blue.

She was trying, with what resources she possessed, to work out a way around the surveillance that she sensed but never saw. Borrowing Smith’s little device, now safely in the glove box of the Escalade, was a part of her plan.

Now she had to plan afresh.

The Black Lady was white.

Julia felt like a fool.

For weeks now, she had been trying to track down Kellen’s partner in crime, the woman he had called the Black Lady, not realizing that the Black Lady was busily tracking her. Thinking herself clever, Julia had been out-thought by her white shadow, fooled by her assumption that the Black Lady was black, and a Sister Lady; and that the Black Lady would never be so sneaky as to throw off suspicion by mentioning the phrase.

Steeling herself, she went down to the basement guest room.

Little Jeremy Flew, fully dressed and wide awake, had the door open before she knocked.

“Good evening, Mrs. Carlyle,” he said, utterly unperturbed.

“May I talk to you for a moment?”

“About what?”

“It’s more a who than a what.”

“Consider my inquiry suitably corrected.” Not quite smiling.

“Remember how you kept Mr. Huebner away from me that time on Main Street?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there’s somebody else I want you to keep away from me.”

“I think you may misunderstand precisely what I—”

“Please, Jeremy. I know why you’re here. I don’t think I like it, but I do understand it.”

“I see,” he said after a moment.

“Now, will you help me? Please?”

“Perhaps.” Careful eyes glittered pale and guileless. He meant the word literally. She wondered if he had to check with somebody first. “Who is it that you wish kept away from you?”

“A woman named Mary Mallard.”

CHAPTER 56

AGAIN NORPORT

(I)

“R
ICK
C
HREBET IS ON VACATION
,” said Bruce Vallely. “He’ll be back next week. I trust your question can wait until then.”

In Ruby Tuesday again, Julia being demanding and mysterious at the same time. She wanted him to persuade his former partner Lieutenant Chrebet to answer a single question for her. Although she refused to tell Bruce what the question was, she plainly thought the answer would blow the top off of…well, pretty much everything.

“You’ll still arrange the meeting?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“All right, then,” said Julia, as if everything was settled. “Now, tell me about Dr. Brady.”

“What’s there to tell? It was a hit-and-run. An accident. Except you obviously don’t believe it. Neither do I.” A beat. “So maybe you’d like to tell me what they were looking for?”

Julia hesitated, obviously torn, then let slip a small nugget. “Vanessa doesn’t know anything about what’s going on. I want to make that clear. She doesn’t know a thing. But some people think she does. A file was stolen from my office, and, well, maybe—”

“You’re saying somebody tried to kill Vincent Brady to get a look at his files?”

Julia shrugged and took a bite of her burger. She was endorsing no theory.

“But why try to kill him? Why not just break into his office?”

“Vanessa has a new therapist. Sara Jacobstein is her name. We filled out all the paperwork to get her files opened for Sara, only to discover, according to Dr. Brady’s office, that a lot of the files are missing. No sign of burglary, nobody tripped the alarms.”

“You’re saying Brady had the files with him. In the briefcase.”

“Maybe.”

“Why would he be carrying them around?”

She grinned that crooked grin. “That’s why there’s cops. To answer questions like that. Maybe he was studying them. Maybe he was selling them. Maybe anything.”

Saying goodbye in the parking lot, Bruce tried again. “You can’t do this by yourself, Julia.”

“Do what?”

“Please don’t play games. There are issues here you don’t know about. There are interested parties. Kellen Zant set off a firestorm. Not just politics. Much more. I would hate for you to—”

He stopped.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and then, coloring, both looked elsewhere.

“Bruce?” she said, as they parted.

“Yes, Julia?”

“Who was that man? The one who bothered me at the Exxon station?”

“A reporter. I told you.” He seemed suddenly in a hurry to be free of her.

“For what publication?”

“One of the tabloids. I don’t remember.”

“Well, thank you.” A friendly hug. “For everything.” She looked up into his eyes. Hers, he realized, were more gray than brown. “I need you to do me one more favor.” A crooked grin. “It’s a big one.”

“What’s that?”

“Stop following me.”

“What?”

“I want you to stop following me, Bruce. I’m perfectly safe.” Stepping back, fully in charge. “Just wait for my call.”

(II)

B
RUCE WATCHED HER
from a distance as she climbed into the Escalade, a small, smart, competent woman, fiercely protecting her family. She did not want anybody looking into Vanessa’s connection with Kellen Zant. That was why she insisted on doing it all herself. That was why she wanted Bruce to keep his distance. At least he hoped that secret was all Julia was protecting. The alternative was that she was protecting whatever Zant had discovered; or, worse, protecting whomever he had discovered it about.

He wondered if she knew that Jeremy Flew was dogging her tail rather more often than Bruce himself; and whether she knew as much about Flew’s background as he did.

And whether she knew that nobody seemed to know where the little man had been the night Kellen Zant was shot.

“Be careful,” Bruce called, very softly.

It was plain to him, although Trevor Land had never directly admitted it, that Lemaster was the author of the absurd story that Nathaniel Knowland had told him, with embellishments, about the night Zant was killed. The president of the university had somehow managed to get the official investigation shut down, and then maneuvered Bruce onto the trail instead of Rick Chrebet and his team. Why get the inquiry dropped only to have it started up again? Why did Lemaster want his director of campus safety following his wife around, searching for evidence of a link? The questions baffled him, and yet he sensed that the answer was right in front of him, hidden in the information he had already collected, and that if he could just stir things up a bit, the truth might fall into his lap.