Skeleton Key (3 page)

“Did she have a regular lover?” Bennis asked. “I've never heard of one.”

“She was part of Natalie Barney's set. Natalie had a house with a garden in the back where she used to hold pagan rituals of some sort. Goddess worship. It's odd to think that all kinds of perfectly respectable young women want to worship the Goddess now.”

“I don't think it's anything very serious.”

Margaret put her demitasse cup down and smoothed the
skirt of her dress. “Quite frankly, if it were up to me, I would turn down this request. I know Abigail means well, but I do think she's encouraging a cultural vogue that could turn out to be very dangerous. It doesn't do any of us any good when women run off and chuck their responsibilities, all for the sake of becoming artists. In spite of the fashions, Miss Hannaford, I don't really think any woman has ever been an artist. At least not a great artist, like Michelangelo or Raphael.”

“Well,” Bennis Hannaford said, “of course, you're entitled to your opinion. But Abigail will be very disappointed.”

“Abigail will not be disappointed,” Margaret said. “The decision is not, as it happens, up to me. It's up to my daughter. Have you met my daughter?”

“Once or twice. I saw her picture in
Town and Country.”

“Quite. I was debutante of the year when I came out, too. Not that it's an official designation. Did you—?”

“At the Assemblies.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I should have known. Your mother was presented at the Assemblies. Kayla is of a different mind about almost everything from me. I think she's only coming out because she had to postpone college for a year and she has nothing else to do. Kayla is very interested in Abigail's project, and of course Kayla is the one who owns Julia Anson's paintings. Kayla is the one who owns everything, including this house. The papers aren't exaggerating when they say she was Robert's only heir.”

“I thought that sort of thing could be set aside,” Bennis said. “If you went to court about it and worked it out with a judge.”

“I'm of a generation that does not resort to courtrooms except from necessity, and there is no necessity. I'm not destitute. I'm merely very angry. Does that surprise you?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“Good.” Margaret stood up. “Kayla's gone to Waterbury to buy a few things. She's put you in the front guest room that looks over the porte cochere. I've always thought it
was very noisy there, but Kayla likes the view.”

“I'm sure it will be fine.”

“Kayla can show you the paintings tomorrow, if you want to see them. Or she can give Abigail a call and arrange a meeting in Philadelphia. She has some papers, too, diaries and address books that belonged to Julia Anson. I'm sure it will all come in for good use when Abigail gets hold of it. From what I've seen, however, the diaries are rather explicit.”

“I don't think Abigail wants to do anything explicit”

“There will be a publisher out there who does. Did I tell you that one of the reasons that Kayla is so excited about this project is that she thinks she can talk someone into letting her write a book? Kayla is very ambitious. And very bright, I might add. She's much more like her father than she ever has been like me.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

“I'm going to go to bed now. I'm very tired.”

“Oh,” Bennis said again.

Margaret waited. A woman of her own generation would have made a protest, or looked angry, or given some indication that this sort of behavior was highly irregular. Bennis Hannaford did none of these things. She simply sat where she was, holding a demitasse cup and looking polite.

Margaret inclined her head, turned away, and went out of the living room into the hall. She paused at the bottom of the stairs to see if she could hear Bennis getting up to move around, but it didn't happen. She went up the stairs slowly, making sure to let them creak. This house was over two hundred years old at its core, and over a hundred at least in both its extensions. It was the oldest and most historically important house in all of Litchfield County. Margaret had picked it out when she was pregnant with Kayla, at a time when Robert was disposed to give her anything she asked for. Later, he made no secret of the fact that he hated the place without reservation. The rooms were small. The floors creaked. The walls bulged in odd places, even
after thousands of dollars had been spent to make them straight.

Actually, Margaret thought, as she came to the top of the stairs and paused again—there were still no sounds coming from the living room—there was still no indication that Bennis Hannaford had gotten off her chair and started to snoop. Actually, the real problem was that Robert had hated her without reservation, as she had come to hate him. They had had year after year of each other, and year after year of angry sex, and the point of it all had never been anything but Kayla. If it hadn't been for Kayla, they would have been divorced and gotten it over with. If it hadn't been for Kayla, they would have seen nothing of each other at all.

Margaret had a very distinct memory of sitting up in bed next to Robert sleeping, right here in the master bedroom of this house. She sat there and stared down at his neck, wondering what it would be like to get her hands around the bones there. She imagined the bones breaking, fragile and small, like bird bones in a stone vise. Then she blinked, and the face on the body beside her changed. It was Kayla's face, wide awake, laughing at her so hard that tears streamed out of the corners of her eyes. Then the face changed to Robert's again, the features thickened with age and wrong experience. Margaret got up and went into the master bathroom and closed the door.

Now she went into the bedroom and closed
that
door. Bennis Hannaford wasn't moving around down there, poking into all the private things. She wasn't even taking out a cigarette and lighting up, although Margaret had it on good authority that Bennis smoked, like some half-witted factory worker with no self-discipline at all. There were times when you went right to the edge of the universe and looked over the side. You found out that there was nothing there but darkness and fear, so deep and so wide and so pure that you couldn't even move in it.

Down in the living room, Bennis Hannaford coughed, long and hard and chokingly.

Margaret locked the bedroom door and went to sit down on her bed—and that was when it struck her, for the first time, that she should not have let Bennis Hannaford come here.

Annabel Crawford had bought a lot of fake IDs in her life, but this one—with its State of Ohio logo and bright-colored picture—was the best one yet. It was so good that the bartender of the Lucky Eight barely looked at it before setting her up with a St. Pauli Girl Light, and that in spite of the fact that Annabel knew she looked nowhere near twentyone. She barely looked eighteen. It was a kind of curse that had happened to her and to no one else in her family. She was very short and very fine-boned and very small. She was also very flat-chested. All of the slightness taken together made her look like a child, and year after year, in one boarding school after another, Annabel's teachers had called her out and rechecked her records just to make sure she was old enough to be there. It was Annabel Crawford's boast that she had been expelled from more boarding schools than anybody else in the history of American private education, and she may have been right.

At the moment, all she was being right about was the beer, and the attention of a boy named Tommy Haggerty, who had just graduated from Choate. Unlike Annabel—who had so few high school credits she couldn't qualify for Quinipiac Junior College—Tommy was just back for the weekend from Princeton, and until Annabel had brought up the story of her last expulsion, Princeton was all he had wanted to talk about. Annabel was beginning to think she had made a mistake in picking him out from all the other boys at the club this afternoon. He was giving every indication of wanting to get as drunk as possible as quickly as he could, and that always ended up being boring as hell for Annabel. What Annabel liked to do was have a couple of
beers and a couple of joints and then drive out to Bantam Lake to neck. If you knew what to look for, you could find a place out there that was totally hidden in the trees. Annabel had lost her virginity at Bantam Lake on the day after she turned sixteen, and she had never looked back. It seemed incredible to her that anybody would ever do anything else when they were out with a boy.

The Lucky Eight was a roadhouse, freestanding and made of wood out on Route 209. The lake was only half a mile away, driving toward Washington Depot. Tommy had brought them out here in his brand-new bright red Corvette, which was what his father had given him to congratulate him on getting into Princeton. All the kids Annabel knew had gotten their cars as congratulatory presents on getting into the Ivy League.

Annabel poured beer into her glass, very carefully. She was trying to make it last. She was trying to will Tommy into making his last, too, but she wasn't getting anywhere. His glass and his bottle sat in front of him, empty, for the third time already that night.

“So,” he said. “First there was a horse—”

“No, no.” Annabel waved her glass in the air. “It was Kayla, you see. You can't just do anything with Kayla. She gets suspicious.”

“I think that's natural.” Tommy sounded drunk. “I mean, a girl in her position. All that money. I bet she has to be suspicious.”

“Maybe. But I didn't mean she was suspicious of people. I meant she was suspicious of me.”

“For good reason, I bet.”

“Well, I've known her all my life, for God's sake. It's not as if I have anything to hide. I knew her for years and years before Daddy bought our house out here.”

“In New York,” Tommy said helpfully. “At Brearley.”

Annabel took a long sucking swallow of beer. This was really hopeless. Tommy was already beyond the point where he was going to be of any use to her, and then what was she going to do? He'd end up passing out in the bathroom
and she would have to drive him home, in spite of the fact that she didn't have a legitimate license from any state. She rubbed the side of her face with the flat of her hand and tried to think. Tommy was snaking his hand up under the skirt of her metallic green minidress, but he seemed to have lost his sense of direction, or his focus, or something.

“So,” he said finally, having lost the thread of whatever it was that had started his caressing her leg. “You were going to elope.”

“No,” Annabel said patiently. “I only said I was going to elope. Because I had to. Because the guy I wanted to neck with was a Christian.”

“Oh.”

“People think of Virginia as this very sophisticated place where senators live, but it isn't really. It's full of rednecks. And this guy belonged to one of those churches where, you know, they speak in tongues. And sex is evil unless you're married. Do you think sex is evil?”

“I think it must be weird. Being someone like Kayla Anson. Being, you know, set apart like that.”

“Set apart?”

“Well, you know,” Tommy said. “That's what happens. We had a guy at Choate who was a Rockefeller. I mean, you know, that wasn't his name, because it was his mother who was the Rockefeller, but everybody knew who he was, and so he was—well—set apart.”

“I've always thought of Kayla as a perfectly ordinary person. With money.”

“Maybe. But she gets to go back and finish the year come January, and you don't.”

Annabel's St. Pauli Girl Light was finished. She'd taken nearly an hour to drink it, but now there it was. The bartender caught her eye and she nodded, slightly. Then the bartender looked at Tommy and shook his head.

“The thing about people like Kayla Anson,” Tommy said—and he was slurring his words, too, close to losing it; it had to be all that stuff that he'd had out at the club—
“is that you can't help hating them. No matter what kind of person they are. If they're shits, you hate them for being able to get away with it. And if they're not, you hate them for being perfect. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Annabel said.

“I bet you do see what I mean. I bet you do. And every time Kayla Anson complains about anything, I bet you just about erupt, you hate it so much. Because people like that don't have any right to complain.”

“I don't think you ought to drink any more of that,” Annabel said. “I think you're going to end up passing out.”

Tommy smiled politely. Then he put his head down on the bar and closed his eyes. He wasn't going to pass out. He was just going to go to sleep. The bartender put her new St. Pauli Girl Light down and waited. Annabel opened her purse and got out a five-dollar bill.

“You're going to have to do something about him,” the bartender said.

“I know,” Annabel replied.

“It's college boys,” the bartender said. “You see it all the time. They don't know the difference between getting high and getting stewed. Most of them don't know the difference between getting high and getting sick. At least he isn't sick.”

“No,” Annabel said. “He isn't sick.”

The bartender made change. Annabel put the change down on the bar next to her glass.

“You're going to have to do something about him eventually,” the bartender said, again, and then he moved away down the bar.

Annabel poured beer into her glass and swung her legs. It wasn't true that she hated Kayla Anson—at least, it wasn't true exactly. It was just that it sometimes seemed as if she'd gotten the wrong end of some cosmic bargain. Kayla didn't even care about acting out and having fun. Rules didn't faze her. She never felt suffocated by the things everybody expected of her. Even that last night at school, when she was helping Annabel down the sheet rope
from their dorm window and onto that idiotic old horse, she had only been in it out of general good nature. She was helping Annabel. It didn't even occur to her that she could come into town herself and find a boy of her own.