So Pretty It Hurts (19 page)

After I signed off, I finally called the precinct in Brooklyn and reported the incident with the gypsy cab driver. Just talking about the experience made my stomach tighten so hard it hurt. Later, I fixed a late lunch, puttered, and thought miserably of Beau.

Finally it was time to meet up with Richard. I made it to Ninety-sixth Street in thirty minutes, bundled up in a down jacket, scarf, and old cloche hat. After ascending the subway station steps, I hurried west on 96th, my hands stuffed in my pockets as I fought a mean, dry wind that blew west from Central Park toward the East River. The street was crowded with grocery shoppers and people hurrying home from work. I passed three different places on the street selling Christmas trees, makeshift wood structures hung with colored Christmas lights. At one a woman about my age stood waiting as her tree was bound with mesh. Her little boy looked on in pure delight.

After crossing Fifth Avenue, I turned north, walking along the cracked sidewalk that bordered Central Park. The wind was less brutal there because the trees formed a barricade. It was less crowded there, too, though periodically someone entered or exited the park, mostly dog walkers with their pets in stupid little coats. Though I’d heard about the Central Park Conservatory, I’d never been up there and didn’t know what to expect. After passing the statue of some New Yorker long forgotten, I saw a large black gate on my left. A sign indicated that I was standing in front of the conservatory.

It appeared to be a park within a park, though instead of grassy spaces it was all gardens, or what would be gardens come spring again. There were several dog walkers and an elderly couple out for a frigid stroll. I spotted Richard immediately, just as he’d predicted. He had his back to me, but I knew it was him. I’d stared at that shaggy head of hair for two hours on a trek through the woods.

The wind was up again, overriding the sound of my booted footsteps, but Richard turned suddenly, as if I’d just opened the door to a quiet room he was standing in.

“Is this place one of your secret pleasures?” I asked, approaching him.

He was wearing an extra-long gray overcoat with a tattered Burberry scarf that had either come from the first batch the company had ever made or been run over years ago by a lorry on the streets of London. His face was already red from the cold, and his eyes were watering.

“Actually, yes,” he said over the wind. “I come here all the time. You know how we Brits love a good shrub or a cluster of foxgloves.”

“Not many foxgloves at
this
time of year.”

“No, but after a day at my desk, I find a walk around the grounds gets my blood pumping. But enough about me. You said you had something to talk about.”

“Yes, a few details have emerged as I’ve been researching Devon’s story, and there’s one I’d like to discuss with you. I know you’re not pursuing the story yourself, but—”

“Excuse me for mixing negatives, but I never said for sure that I wasn’t pursuing it,” Richard said. “I haven’t decided yet. I’m still keeping a toe in the water. In fact, I’m thinking of going to the funeral tomorrow.”

That was interesting. What was he up to now? I wondered.

“Okay, fair enough,” I said.

“Aren’t you going too?” he asked, beginning to stroll. I moved along with him.

“I’m not doing a profile of Devon. I’m interested in how she
died
. Attending her funeral isn’t going to advance my story at all.”

“Oh, come, come, Bailey. Don’t be a tease. You’ve probably got your little roadster all fired up.”

“Since
you’re
going, why don’t I just call you later for the details?”

“Happy to oblige.”

Casually I glanced around the area just to see how many people were still around. The elderly couple was still strolling, gloved hand in gloved hand, but one of the dog walkers was now beating a retreat, trying to urge a resistant poodle up the steps.

“I thought the funeral was private,” I said. “Just for family and close friends.”

“I won’t be in the church. I’ll be outside, as an observer with all the hoi polloi.”

“Of course. You didn’t really know Devon, did you? You told me you’d never met her before last weekend.”

Even through his long, heavy coat, I could see his body tense.

“That’s right,” he said stiffly. “As I mentioned before, Scott was hoping for an article. I had no idea if I could sell it—or even wanted to—but I was hardly going to pass up a weekend with a man whose wine cellar is as legendary as Scott Cohen’s.”

We rounded the end of a section of the conservatory and moved into the next, this one with small pocket gardens. A man with a bulldog was walking the perimeter. Please don’t leave, I silently pleaded. I was ready to go for broke, and I didn’t want to be alone in the dark with Richard when I did it.

“
Really
?” I said, letting the disingenuousness seep through. “You see, I thought maybe you
had
known Devon—from your London days.”

“My London days?” he asked, turning and looking hard at me. He sensed I was up to something—and he didn’t like it.

“I thought you might have crossed paths with Devon in London. She used to live there. I figured she knew your sister.”

He stopped, his body completely rigid now.

“My, my, aren’t you the dogged little researcher,” he said meanly. “I hope they’re paying you the big bucks at
Buzz
.”

“This isn’t about money,” I said. “I want to know the truth.”

“The truth?” he said. “About what exactly?”

“About Devon’s death. I think she was murdered.”

I let my eyes wander, as if I was processing a thought, but it was really to survey my surroundings. The dog walker was tugging the bulldog, anxious to leave. I would soon be alone in the gardens with Richard Parkin.

“Well, if you’re so damn interested, I’ll share one piece of the truth with you—off the record,” he said fiercely. “My
sister
is the one who was murdered. And Devon Barr killed her.”

Chapter 18

I
shivered—from both the cold and the words I’d just heard.

“Murdered?” I asked. “But how? I was told Fiona died from anorexia.”

“To understand how Devon murdered my sister, you first have to understand their relationship,” he said. “Devon befriended Fiona—in part, I believe, because she knew Fiona could never come close to her in terms of success. Devon derived her strength from having
more
of something than anyone in her immediate universe. It was almost like a game for her, watching her own star rise while Fiona’s simply stalled.”

“Did they become estranged for some reason?”

“No, no. The games simply intensified. Devon enticed my sister into a partnership of starvation.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“They became anorexia buddies, enabling and empowering each other not to eat. Fiona died of malnutrition, and Devon survived. Proof once again that Devon always came out on top.”

For a moment I felt too stunned to talk. I had never heard of such a thing.

“Why did none of this ever come out in the press? Was there a cover-up?”

“No cover-up,” he said. “The official story that my mother perpetuated was that Fiona died from dehydration, following a long illness. My mother and stepfather were horrified and ashamed about what had happened and wanted it all kept hush-hush. The press didn’t bother looking into it—Fiona wasn’t on anyone’s radar, really. And though there was some buzz about Devon’s weight then, there wasn’t any link to Fiona. My sister just wasn’t famous enough.”

“Fascinatingly,” he added, his voice tight with bitterness, “Devon began to recover from her anorexia shortly after Fiona’s death.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “How old was Fiona when she died?”

“Nineteen. My mother was never the same after that.”

It sounded as if Richard Parkin had never been quite the same either. So had he spent the last fourteen years biding his time, waiting for the chance to pay Devon Barr back? It was the English, after all, who had coined the phrase, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

“So what was the real reason you went to Scott’s?” I asked quietly.

“Morbid curiosity,” he said. “As soon as Scott mentioned that he was having Devon up for the weekend, I started angling for an invitation, claiming I might be open to doing a profile of her. Once I’d procured it, my better judgment nearly convinced me to back out, but in the end I couldn’t resist. I’d not laid eyes on Devon since weeks before my sister’s death—she never came to the funeral, never got in touch. Oh, I’ve been forced to look at her bloody face a hundred million times like the rest of us, but our paths never crossed. I wondered what she would be like, wondered if she would even put two and two together when she saw me.”

“Fiona had a different last name than you, of course.”

“Yes, and I was just a reporter when she died—well known in certain circles but hardly in the ones Devon Barr had begun traveling in.”

“Are you sure she didn’t pick up on who you were? I found her crying in the woods Saturday morning, and she told me she was afraid.”

“Absolutely not. She looked right through me the entire weekend, and it was very clear she had no bloody idea.”

“I appreciate you being straight with me,” I said, after taking a few moments to digest what he’d shared.

“Why are you so concerned, anyway? From all I can tell Devon was a vile human being, and her only real contribution to humanity may have been teaching us how to pair the right boots with a bustier.”

We rounded the back corner of the gardens, and the wind tore through the trees. We were headed back to the front of the conservatory, and the street was in view farther up ahead.

“Like I said, I think she was murdered. I’d like to know who did it.”

He snickered and shook his head.

“Oh, someone
forced
her not to eat?” he said. “‘Take a bite of that red velvet cake or you’ll never sit in the front row of a Marc Jacobs show again’?”

Because Richard was a dogged reporter, I was sure he probably had checked out the full police report and knew about the Lasix.

“Not that way, no,” I said. “You may be aware that Devon was taking diuretics. That’s a very bad thing for someone with anorexia to do. I’m wondering if one of the houseguests was slipping them to her—putting them into her water perhaps.”

He snickered again but leveled his gaze at me now.

“My, my,” he said. “Quite an accusation. Any ideas who?” In the glow from the lamppost light I saw him narrow his hooded blue eyes even more, and then widen them in surprise. “I hope you’re not suggesting it was Mr. Parkin . . . in the barn . . . with a diuretic?”

I swallowed, glancing out of the corner of my eye toward the far-off street.

“You tell
me
, Richard,” I said.

He suddenly yanked his hands from his pockets, and I drew my upper body back involuntarily. It took him a second to realize what had happened—that he had startled me—and he chuckled in amusement.

“Trust me, Bailey, I have no intention of offing you in the middle of the Central Park Conservatory. I come from a long line of people who took great care of their gardens.”

He rubbed his ungloved hands briskly back and forth. I couldn’t tell if it was to generate warmth or from pure glee at having made me flinch.

“I’ve told you what you wanted to know,” he added. “And now I’m off to Hanratty’s to warm my bones.”

Hands stuffed back in his coat pockets, he mounted the stairs without looking back at me and turned south on Fifth Avenue. Despite the droll tone he’d just used, I could tell I’d rattled him by having learned about his sister. Was it simply because I’d drudged up painful memories that he ordinarily didn’t share with anyone? Or was it because I was getting closer to the
deeper
truth—that he’d concocted a fitting scheme to kill the person who’d helped ruin his family?

I jogged up the steps and headed down Fifth Avenue myself. I could see Richard up ahead of me, though before long he crossed over from the park side of the street and headed east from there. I stayed on Fifth, retracing the route I’d taken from the subway. Along the way I kept replaying our conversation, hoping my gut would answer a question for me. Richard had clearly hated Devon. But had he hated her enough to kill her?

Closer to the subway, I passed the Christmas tree stands again, and this time I stopped in front of one of them and breathed in the intoxicating scent of spruce and pine. Christmas was just weeks away, and the only present I’d bought so far was a little cap and scarf for my brother Cameron’s new baby. And even worse, I had no plans for the holidays. My brothers would be with their wives. My mother would be in Mexico. Beau would be in the Caribbean and/or out of my life for good. And I’d be all alone in my apartment. What was I supposed to serve myself? A trifle layered with cat food and old newspapers?

And what was I supposed to do about Beau? I wondered, despondently. We were clearly at a stalemate. If I were going to talk to him, I’d have to be the one to make the first move.

Back home, I nuked a package of frozen mac and cheese and jotted down the conversation with Richard in my composition book. It was ironic. Yesterday he hadn’t been on my radar at all as a suspect, but today he was the one person with a firm motive. Tommy or Cap
might
have been angry at Devon; Whitney or Tory
might
have been insanely jealous; Christian—or even Scott—
might
have been panicky over something Devon had stumbled on. But there was no
might
have been with Richard. He held Devon responsible for Fiona’s death.

Curious about the dynamic between Devon and Fiona, I went online and searched eating disorder partnerships. There were several articles, including a first-person account. When two women took on the challenge of staying superthin together, they empowered each other. It was as if they were part of a special club with a secret code only they communicated in. One woman wrote poignantly about having gone through this horrible dance with a friend. In the end, she had survived but the friend had died.

After I finished eating, I decided to check in on my mother. It had been over a week since I’d spoken to her, and several weeks since we’d discussed her Christmas trip to Mexico. Part of me was hoping that her plans had fallen through and she now felt desperate to roast me a Christmas turkey.

“How’s the weather there?” she asked. “It’s absolutely freezing here.”

“Yeah, pretty cold.”

“Is your apartment warm enough?”

“Yes, yes. Believe it or not, I upgraded a couple of years ago to a heated one.”

“And your job is good? What are you working on?”

“Not too much.” I’d learned years ago that the best time to tell my mother about any dangers related to my work was after everything was over. “The usual celebrity-train-wreck stuff. How about you, Mom? What’s happening on your end?”

“Things are good. I’ve decided to teach a course next term after all. I won’t be able to travel as much, but it will be nice to be back on campus again.”

“Speaking of travel, are you still planning on going to San Miguel?”

I found myself holding my breath before she answered, which seemed so damn pathetic.

“Oh, yes, everything’s lined up. They have a pool, and I don’t have a suit yet, but I suppose I could wear that black one I wore on the Cape this past summer. Was it too dreadful? I kept expecting people to yell ‘Orca!’ every time I emerged from the water.”

“No, you looked quite smashing in it,” I said as jovially as possible, though my heart was sinking. What the hell was I going to do for the holidays?

“I do feel weird being away from you kids this year,” she said. “But you’ll all have fun. And the less Cameron has on his plate right now, the better.”

“Is he just overwhelmed with the baby?” For a brief moment I couldn’t even remember my new nephew’s name.

“Yes. But your sister-in-law seems even
more
so, and he’s got that to contend with, too. She has this perpetual whine going these days. I feel awful complaining, but it’s becoming tiresome.”

“What’s she whining about, anyway?”

“How her life is out of her hands now. She says she has no time to do anything for herself. I do feel a little bit sorry for her. Babies change your life so much. Nothing is ever the same after that. How’s Beau, by the way?”

Yikes, she’d ricocheted from babies to Beau in one second. Was she subconsciously linking the two in her mind? Through no real fault of my mother’s, the conversation was starting to depress the hell out of me. I felt suddenly desperate to end it.

“Oh God, Mom, my dishwasher is making a weird noise,” I blurted out. “Like it’s going to blow up or something. Can I call you back later?”

“Shouldn’t you call the super?”

“Yeah, yeah. I better call him. I’ll try you later—or sometime tomorrow.”

I rested my head in my hands for a few seconds and then stood up and began pacing the living room. A weird feeling had suddenly snuck up on me, and I couldn’t define it. Yes, there was a twinge of guilt over the dishwasher hoax, and the melancholy from knowing I’d be on my own for Christmas, but something about the conversation I’d just had was nudging me slightly, like a breeze you see rustling the leaves of a tree far across the yard but don’t feel yourself.

I knew I had to distract myself, because only then would it come to me. So I trudged to my desk and looked online at the route I needed to take to Pine Grove the next day. After familiarizing myself, I laid out the disguise I planned to wear—baseball cap, an old black ski parka, and hiking boots.

And then I took a deep breath and called Beau. It was torturing me not to talk to him, to not
know
what was going to happen with us. He picked up right away, sounding as if he was on foot someplace on the streets of Manhattan.

“Hi,” I said. “I was hoping we could talk.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” he said. A part of me relaxed a little. I’d been fearful of hearing a comment like “I don’t think we have anything to discuss, Bailey.”

“I can tell you’re out, so probably right now isn’t good. I’m going to Pennsylvania tomorrow—to Devon’s funeral—but I should be back late in the day.”

“Actually,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m not far from you at the moment. Just off Washington Square Park. Want me to come by?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few minutes then.”

I hadn’t glanced in a mirror since my return from seeing Richard, and when I did, I discovered that I looked like hell. I had a wicked case of hat hair from the wool cloche I’d worn, and my makeup had vanished, exposing the dark circles under my eyes. Quickly I brushed my hair back into a ponytail, applied concealer, lipstick, and mascara. The buzzer rang just as I was tugging on a fresh sweater.

When I swung open the door and set eyes on Beau, with those deep brown eyes of his and his hair tucked sexily back behind his ears, the jitteriness I’d felt in anticipation of his arrival ballooned into something bigger: fear about where our discussion would lead. And then came a heart-squeezing sadness over the fact that our relationship might be doomed. Beau shrugged off his coat, letting it drop on a chair; I was surprised to see he was wearing a jacket and tie.

“Do you want a beer?” I asked.

“Yeah, thanks.”

When I returned with two bottles, Beau was sitting on the couch. He cocked his head toward my composition book and a pile of folders on the dining table.

“Have you figured anything out yet?”

“No, not yet. But I’m not giving up.”

“How’s the situation at
Buzz
, by the way? Have they accepted your version of things?”

“Not even close,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to the funeral. I need to figure out who’s tight enough with Devon’s mother to have put her up to this.”

“But the person wouldn’t be stupid enough to tip his hand in front of you.”

I offered a grim smile.

“I’m not going to let anyone know I’m there,” I said. “I’m going to spy, watch everything from a distance.”