Pursued by Shadows (21 page)

“You have to admit that I gave you the absolute truth,” said Amos modestly. “I did know about it. Sit down. I'll get you some coffee.” He retreated to the kitchen area and began to arrange mugs, cream, and sugar on a tray.

“Now,” said Harriet, dropping down on the couch and turning toward Jane. “What in hell happened yesterday? And what in hell is going on?”

“Going on?” said Jane, sitting down in the other corner of the couch and drawing her legs up to rest her chin on her knees. “Uh—”

“Come on, Jane. Explanation time. What's been happening? And are you all right?”

Jane stared ahead of her out the window in the direction of the lake for a moment and then shifted her body in Harriet's direction. She glanced first at Amos and then at John before taking a deep breath and beginning to speak. “What's been happening? Well—I guess it all started in London . . .” she began slowly.

John broke in impatiently. “The man who attacked you,” he said, grabbing a chair from beside the dining room table, turning it around, and sitting down with his arms resting on the back.

“Yes?” Jane watched his antics with a controlled and steady gaze.

“You didn't know who he was?”

She shook her head. “I've never seen him in my life before.”

“Are you sure?”

She did not bother to reply.

“He's been identified now as Dean Smithson, Nina Smithson's son. You still say you've never met him?”

“Smithson?” she said, startled and discomposed for a moment. “I had no idea. He doesn't look at all like his brother. But absolutely. I met Nina in London several times and she brought Christopher with her once or twice, but not Dean. I assumed that he was always needed to take care of the gallery.”

“And you never met him before you left for London? While you were working for Miss Jeffries?”

She shook her head. “I was never invited to Nina's parties. As far as she was concerned, I was just one of the hired help. You know, like the cleaning woman or the gardener. Not worth cultivating.”

Harriet nodded. “That's true. You had to be rich or trendy to get invited to her house. I'm afraid Jane never qualified as either, as far as Nina was concerned. Not while she was working for me.”

“Miss Sinclair—why should Dean Smithson try to kill you? I know that the local police have accepted your story that he was trying to kill you—and I can guess why they believe you,” he added, glancing over his shoulder at Amos, who was leaning impassively on the kitchen counter. “But what possible reason could he have?”

“He wanted the map,” said Jane simply. “Do you know about the map?” She stood up, walked over to the closet beside the bathroom, and pulled out an attaché case. She took a key chain from her pocket and unlocked it. “Here it is,” she said. “In the envelope. It doesn't look like much.”

Sanders opened up the attaché case and looked oddly at Jane. “In fact, it doesn't look like anything,” he said. “There's nothing in here.”

“Were you looking for the manila envelope?” Amos's voice emerged from the kitchen, shyly quiet. Everyone turned in his direction and he smiled. “So many people seemed to be looking for it that I tucked it away in a safe-deposit box. I'll be glad to give it up in return for a court order. From the state of New York, that is. Since at the moment no one seems to know who owns it, do they?”

Jane looked at Amos and shrugged her shoulders. “It was Guy's, I thought, but maybe Nina put up the money to buy it—or maybe Dean did. I don't know. I assumed it was Guy's, let's say. I took it because he owed us at least that,” she said stubbornly. “Agnes and me. And I figured that taking something that belongs to your husband isn't the same as breaking into someone else's house and stealing it.”

“Your husband?” said Harriet. “Well I'll be damned. He actually
married
you? Age must have mellowed him beyond recognition.”

Jane shook her head somberly. “We got married in London. I don't know why. He suddenly decided it would be a good thing. So I figured that the map was my share of community property.”

“Do they have community property in the UK?” asked Harriet.

“I don't know,” said Jane. “But they must have something. Child support or something. I heard him tell Peter that they were going to have to give Malcolm Whiteside an extra five thousand to get it—extra on top of what, I don't know, or whether it was dollars or pounds—and so he must have known he could sell it for at least ten or fifteen. I figured that all I had to do was take it to the dealers who had said they were interested in it.”

“What were you going to do about provenance?” asked Harriet.

“Provenance?” She raised an indecisive hand. “I was playing that by ear. I did think about it and it seemed to me that Guy hadn't acquired it in any very legit way either. The dealers on his list can't have been the most honest and upright characters in the world, and so I thought if I sort of intimated to them that it had been lifted from a museum somewhere . . .” She shook her head and grimaced slightly. “Now I don't know what's going to happen. I was counting on that map to get me established somewhere with Agnes . . .”

“What's going to happen,” said John, “is that you're going to get it all. Beaumont left his entire estate to you and the baby. Split fifty-fifty. And that includes the map—unless it turns out to be stolen property, of course.”

“Big deal,” said Jane. “You expect me to jump up and down? Everyone seemed to think it
was
stolen. And anyway, I don't want his goddamn estate.”

“Why not?”

“Because for one thing, I already took most of the money there was. All he had to leave anyone would be his debts. If anyone was stupid enough to lend him anything. I have no idea what he did with the money he got from his painting—I suppose Nina screwed him out of most of it, and he blew the rest on God knows what. Booze, other women, gambling. I have no idea. He did keep a secret stash at home. Or he thought it was secret. Twelve thousand in dollars and one thousand in pounds hidden away. Otherwise he just carried small change. He never seemed to own a thing except for his clothes, and they always looked as if he stole them from a Salvation Army collection box. And his paints and empty canvases. He resented every penny we sent my mother for Agnes—I went back to working in hamburger joints to shut him up about it. Thank God, we didn't have to pay rent or the bastard would have tried to shove me out on the streets to cover it. Anyway, when I left, I took ten thousand dollars from the stash. I left him the rest for plane fare and stuff like that. And I took the map. I figured I was going to need every penny—and I knew I could whistle for it once I left England.”

“Why didn't you take the baby to England with you?” asked Harriet. “I mean if Guy wanted to marry you and all that, surely—”

“Why? Because two weeks after she was born he gave me a choice. I could stay in Canada with Agnes and starve, or I could leave her behind and follow him to London for a few months. I left when she was three months old and I figured we would be back in no time. As soon as we ran out of money. Only those few months kept stretching out longer and longer.”

“So you took the money and the map,” said Sanders, trying to get her back on the track of her story.

She nodded. “There had to be something a bit fishy about it, but I wasn't sure what it was. I thought maybe they had found it somewhere and paid someone practically nothing for it—Guy was always dreaming about that kind of thing. You know, stumbling across an unknown Constable or Gainsborough hiding in a little out-of-the-way junk shop. The way people dream about winning the lottery. And they had to keep it quiet, because it's not quite legal to do that, is it? Pay five pounds for something that you know is worth a lot more than that. Or if it's legal, it's not ethical. Anyway, I took it and when people began following me and threatening me and ripping my luggage up, I got scared. Really scared. You wouldn't think it was worth enough to get people that excited. I wondered if it had been owned by someone in the mob.”

“It was worth a bit more than five thousand pounds, that was all.”

“How much?”

“To the right buyer, maybe three or four million. Dollars.”

“God almighty,” said Jane. “Three or four million? If I had known that, I wouldn't have laid a finger on the damned thing. Or let my sister—” She paused a moment and shivered. “I've been thinking about this, and I figured they must have been using the same list of dealers, of course, and so no matter where I went to get rid of it, they could be there ahead of me. Before I realized about the list, I thought that with my sister helping, we could outfox them. That way, I could stay here, and while they were watching me, Lesley could go down to New York and sell the map. I figured I'd be safe here. Only it didn't work. Instead of sticking with me, they must have figured I'd passed it on and went down to the next couple of dealers in New York to wait for one of us to show up. She got attacked in New York. And then he followed us up here. I'll never forgive myself for that,” she said, very quietly.

“Someone here could well have been keeping an eye on you,” said Sanders dryly. “I doubt if they were following you. More like waiting for you to walk into their arms.”

Jane turned her attention back to the window and an uneasy silence fell over the room. “Does this mean that I get charged with theft? Of something worth three million bucks?” she said at last, looking at Sanders again. “I'll give it back to whoever. But you can't charge my sister. She never knew what she was doing. I told her that Guy had given me the map and then decided he wanted it back again.”

“The problem is,” said John, “that no one knows who to give it back to. No one has laid claim to it officially. People have told various other people that the map is theirs, but that's not evidence. And we don't know if it's real. There's a possibility that it's been forged.”

“Great,” said Jane, clutching her knees tightly to her chest. “Forged. There goes my little fortune, up in smoke.” She grinned suddenly. “Still, I can always get a job.”

“But Jane,” protested Harriet. “You get Guy's money. He left a hundred thousand bucks or more. That'll keep you for a while.”

“A hundred thousand?” She looked over at Amos, whose slightly lopsided eyebrows rose a millimeter or two. “I'll be damned,” she added softly.

Jane stopped dead in the doorway of her sister's empty hospital room. The bed was made with antiseptic precision, and not a chair was out of place. Lesley's roommate had left the day before, remarking as she packed up that she had had livelier conversations with a rutabaga, but that her two days in the same room with Lesley had enabled her to appreciate her husband and kids. “I mean they don't say much,” she had added, “but you can at least get them to fight, if you know what I mean.”

And now there was nothing but silence. Jane whipped around and ran to the nurse's station. “What's happened to my sister?” she whispered, white-faced with fear, to the woman behind the counter.

“Your sister? Is she the one in one-twelve?”

“I saw her in the patients' lounge about ten minutes ago,” said another nurse, looking up from the charts she was working on. “Maybe she's still there.”

“The lounge?” muttered Jane, only slightly reassured. At least Lesley hadn't died of pure despair since yesterday, she thought, as she headed in the direction of the pointing finger. Had they dragged her out of bed and forced her to put one foot in front of the other until they got her down there? Because yesterday and Saturday she had still been in that blank stupor that had enveloped her on Friday.

The patients' lounge had been designed more as a conservatory than a sitting room. It was filled with trees in pots, tropical shrubs, and lush green plants. Lesley was curled up in the corner of a large and comfortable-looking chesterfield, half-hidden in the jungle; the sun poured through the curved glass onto her damp hair. She had one eye on a game show repeat on the communal television set and the other on a hand of solitaire laid out in front of her. As Jane watched, she leaned forward, laid down a card, shifted a long row, turned up another, and paused to contemplate the result.

“Lesley?” said Jane tentatively, but without much hope. As far as she knew, her sister had shown no reaction to anyone or anything, nor had she spoken a word since Dean Smithson had died in a pool of blood on the polished wood floor of Amos's loft apartment.

“Jane!” Lesley turned, saw her, unwound her legs, and jumped up. For a second or two, she stood where she was, leaning heavily with one hand against the arm of the couch, then shook her head and grinned. “I'm a bit dizzy. I have to watch that.” She threw her arms around her sister's neck and clung tightly for a moment. “What in hell is going on?” she asked, as she released her grip. “Would you mind sitting down and explaining it all to me? In words of one syllable?” She dropped back on the chesterfield and dragged Jane with her. “I wake up this morning in a hospital bed with someone dumping a tray of unspeakable breakfast on my lap. And, so help me, I haven't the faintest idea what I'm doing here. I find a nurse out in the hall and ask her and of course she just looks at me in that way they have and says that the doctor will be in later. Big help. So I come down here. That room I'm in is like a morgue. There isn't even a copy of
Vogue
in it.” She stopped, breathless with exhaustion after all that unaccustomed speech.

“You don't remember anything?” asked Jane incredulously.

“Obviously not, or I wouldn't be asking you.” A frown of anxiety formed itself on her face. “Look, Jane. You might start with where I am. This seems to be a nice hospital, as hospitals go, but where is it?”

“What's the last thing you remember?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “When you called me. You asked me to drive down and you sounded scared. Are you in some sort of trouble? It's Guy, isn't it?”

“No—I'm not in trouble,” said Jane hastily. “A lot has happened, that's all. It was really stupid of me to drag you down here. I realize that now.”

“Why not? That's what sisters are for, aren't they? Anyway. . .” She frowned and rubbed her forehead. “I guess I must have packed. I remember getting the suitcase out and I remember putting it in the car and driving somewhere and after that—I just don't know. I've been sitting here playing cards, trying to remember, but it's pretty hard. I have a lot of disconnected memories of things happening, some of them pretty bizarre, but I might have been dreaming them all.”

Jane looked anxiously into her sister's face, at a loss where to start. The date seemed easiest. She could scarcely conceal the passage of time from her, anyway. As soon as Lesley picked up a newspaper she'd realize something was wrong. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “First things first. It wasn't yesterday that I called you—”

“Omigod,” she said, zeroing in at once on the implications. “How long was I out? And why?” She grabbed Jane by the wrist. “Tell me the truth. I wrecked the car, didn't I? And hit my head. I wrecked the goddamn car and Dad's going to be furious.”

“No, sweetheart, you didn't wreck the car. It's in the hospital parking lot. You drove down here in your car, took my rental car down to New York, turned it in, and I came down and got you in your car.”

“Then what happened?”

“You were—hurt. In New York.” She saw her sister's eyes spread in panic. “No, no—you were mugged. Attempted robbery. It's New York City, remember. It could happen to anyone,” she said soothingly. “But he had a knife, and you were injured. Not badly. Look at your arm. Your left arm.”

Lesley looked down at the red line of fresh scar tissue on her left forearm. She ran a finger along it and looked up in amazement. “I don't remember a thing about it.”

“They told me at the hospital in New York that being mugged is a terrible shock for anyone, but it's much worse for someone who's been attacked before. It took a week or so for you to snap out of it. Actually you just blanked out everything leading up to it as well, so it's more like two weeks that you can't really remember.”

“Two weeks? My God. And you've been hanging around looking after me all this time? Oh, Jane, I'm sorry to have been such a nuisance.”

“Don't even think about it. Being down here hasn't been all bad.”

“Then to get back to where we started from, where is here?”

“What do you mean, can't remember?” Amos was encircling each leg of the table with corrugated cardboard and tying it firmly in place as he talked.

“The last thing she remembers is getting out her suitcase to come down here.” Jane handed him the knife to cut the twine.

“Before throwing her handy complete knife kit in the car?” he said, giving the twine and knife back, and picking up the next piece of cardboard.

Jane nodded somberly. “I'm afraid so.”

“Did you tell her?”

“What she did? Not a chance. I'm leaving that in the hands of the professionals.” She handed the ball of twine over once more.

“Professionals,” he said flatly. “You know, Jane—I think it's time you explained your sister to me.” He picked up his coffee cup. “Come on out on the dock.”

“Explain her?” Jane followed him into the warm sun, and settled herself at the end of the dock with her toes dangling in the water.

“That's right. Like—what's wrong with her. And is she going to try to stab me some day? I can understand why she's so good with a knife—it runs in the family—but the rest puzzles me. You seem so normal, somehow, in spite of all the crazy things happening around you.”

“I am normal, and we both had a relatively normal upbringing.” She stopped. “It's hard to know where to start,” she said, moving her toes in opposing circles in the water and studying the swirling patterns that resulted while she considered the problem. “Okay. I'll start at the beginning. Lesley and I are full sisters. Our father was this long-haired, good-looking, no-talent folk musician—you know, the sixties, with guitars and flowers and all that sort of thing—that Mum got mixed up with. She claims he married her, but there's no evidence of it. And, by the way, we were damned lucky. We almost got called Starshine and Moonglow. My grandmother talked Mum out of it. I break into a cold sweat every time I think about the possibility. Another thing is that Mum swears Lesley is Dad's kid. Something to do with being embarrassed at getting married just before Lesley was born, I think, to someone who wasn't her baby's father. But you only have to look at the two of us to realize that Jack Sinclair—my dad—isn't our father. You'll see when you meet him and my brother, Jeff.”

“She's upset because she isn't sure who her father is?”

“Uh huh,” said Jane, with a negative shake to her head. “She knows who her father is. And anyway, that whole thing isn't what did in Lesley. When she was fourteen she was grabbed by a gang of boys from her school and beaten and raped and dumped by the side of the road, badly injured. I'd left home a couple of months before it happened, and the case was tried in juvenile court, so I never found out the circumstances. I know it happened after school, and I'm pretty sure it happened in a car—because she won't ride in a car with a man driving. She can't even take cabs. I suppose someone she knew and trusted offered her a ride home from school. And at least one of the boys must have been old enough to have a license—and maybe old enough to stand trial in adult court. But there wasn't much of an investigation into it. A couple of fifteen-year-olds got their wrists slapped and all the girls at the high school got lectures on self-defense. A big help. But I'm guessing about most of this,” she repeated. “No one would tell me. They were too upset and ashamed—everyone thought it was partly Lesley's fault for not being more cautious—and they were still furious at me for leaving home. And Lesley has never been able to talk about it, except, I suppose, to her psychiatrist. Anyway, she seemed to recover and be okay until she left home to go to college, and then she just fell apart. Depressed, terrified of men, thinking she was being followed. That still hits every once in a while, but her psychiatrist thought she had pretty well recovered. God only knows what I've done to her by dragging her into this.” Jane stared gloomily into the water.

“You may not have changed anything at all. After all, this time she wasn't the helpless victim, was she? Maybe it even helped her.”

Jane blinked and looked doubtfully at him. “You're trying to cheer me up, aren't you?”

“Of course I am. And to manipulate you and everything else you can think of.” He put an arm around her shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “Because now that you're a rich widow, instead of a starving single woman, I think we should get married before some other guy grabs you off. And then I think we should go and find your little girl and introduce ourselves to her—”

“—introduce ourselves?”

“You can't expect a baby to remember someone who hasn't been around for a while. And then repossess her, so to speak. Gradually.” He smiled lazily. “When can we get your sister,” he added in one of his lightning shifts of tone, “and take her back to your parents?”

“Tomorrow, unless she gets worse again.”

“Have you seen the baby?” asked Harriet, once she had poured out coffee and sliced up a Chelsea bun.

“Yes,” said Jane, suddenly transported to an entirely different word. “Oh, Harriet—she's beautiful. And very sweet. It took her a little while to get used to us, but she cried when we left this morning,” she added, as if this event over-shadowed everything else that had happened in the past months.

“How is your mother taking it?”

“Oh, God,” said Jane with tears starting up in her eyes. “That's something else. She's absolutely crushed—”

“Bullshit,” said Amos, abruptly. “She's relieved as hell, but wants you to suffer for all those diapers she's changed, and lies she's had to tell for you.” He laughed. “She's also very keen to know about the money. Apparently the cops were around hinting that you were going to inherit big bucks.”

“Do you really think she won't mind? Amos seems to be able to read my mother after three days more accurately than I can after twenty-seven years,” she said, turning to Harriet. “But he has an eye for people. And it is obscene how interested everyone is in the money. We'll have to go see the lawyer tomorrow morning and find out. And Nina, too, I suppose.”

“Nina?”

“On her last trip Nina picked up all Guy's London paintings and mounted a huge show here in town. This morning I was talking to someone who told me that almost everything went in the first few days—at good prices. I know she can be a bitch, but she is a good agent.”

Harriet smiled noncommittally. Amos stood up, stretched, and wandered out onto the deck.

“He gets sick of people talking about Guy, I think,” said Jane apologetically. “But I won't have to, soon. Once I collect that stack of money she's holding it'll be over with.”

“Where did Peter fit into all this?” asked Harriet, glancing out at the deck to make sure that Amos was still outside.

“Peter? Do you mean Peter Bellingham? Fit into what? All he ever did was leave underwear and wet towels all over the bathroom floor and have hangovers—loud, moaning, irritating hangovers. He didn't fit into anything.”

“He told us you were having an affair with him, and that's why you left Guy.”

Jane looked at Harriet in astonishment. Her eyes widened and then crinkled into almost nothing and she began to howl with laughter. Free, honest, genuine mirth. “Me? An affair with that pig? Are you kidding? I'd as soon go to bed with a vampire. Or a toad.”

“So you weren't—” began Harriet.

“No. Absolutely and definitely no. I cannot imagine why he would have said that, but I assure you it'll be for some slimy purpose of his own. Come on, love—time we were moving on,” called Jane, still laughing.

The door opened with a clatter and John Sanders's familiar footsteps reverberated up the stairwell. “Are you leaving?” asked Sanders as he walked into the room.