The President's Daughter (25 page)

As promised, the 1745 Isaac Martin House, not three minutes from the country store, was clearly marked with a sign that hung next to the front door. Two rocking chairs graced the front porch. On one of them, a woman sat taking in the morning, a thick book in her hands and a fat cat on her lap.

“Good morning!” Simon called to her as he got out of his car. “I was looking for Mr. Stinson.”

“You missed him by an hour.” The woman smiled and slid an errant strand of pure white hair back behind her ear. “Are you from the birding magazine?”

“No, actually, I’m a friend of an old friend of his. Are you Mrs. Stinson?”

“Yes.”

“I’m working along with Dr. Philip Norton on a book about former President Hayward. He suggested I look up your husband, since Mr. Stinson was the party chairman when Hayward ran for office both times. We thought maybe your husband might have some remembrances or some little anecdotes to share about the former President.”

“Oh, my, I’m sure he’d like to be included in that.” Mrs. Stinson smiled. “He’s just down to the marsh, straight on through that path. . . .” She pointed across the street. “But for heaven’s sake, go quietly. He’s been watching a pair of yellow-throated warblers build a nest down there for the past week, and there will be hell to pay if they’re scared off.”

“He’ll never hear me coming.” Simon held a finger up to his lips.

“Well, try not to give him a heart attack, either.” The woman grinned.

“I’ll do my best to strike a balance,” Simon told her as he headed off in the direction Mrs. Stinson had indicated.

Simon trod softly on the path that cut through the tall grass, trying to avoid that bull-in-the-china-shop approach that would undoubtedly alienate Stinson before Simon could get within ten feet.

He smelled the marsh before he saw it. The salty scent borne on a spring breeze engulfed him. A mid-westerner, Simon never quite became accustomed to the smell of the coastal wetlands, salt marshes and mud flats, brackish water and animal matter left too long in the sun.

Up ahead, a man stood motionless at the edge of the marsh, field glasses held to his face. Simon tried to make just enough noise to alert the man that someone approached without being loud enough to scare away whatever it was he was looking at through his binoculars.

“Green heron,” the man whispered as Simon drew near. “I think they’re building a nest there in that stand of reeds.”

Simon leaned forward to take a look but saw nothing moving.

The man offered his glasses to Simon, telling him, “Look to the right of that one low branch.”

“I see them.” Simon nodded. He watched for a moment, then handed the field glasses back. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” The man gave Simon the once-over.

“Are you Peter Stinson?” Not certain of proper birding protocol, Simon kept his voice low.

“Yes. You are . . . ?”

“Simon Keller. I’m working on a book about Graham Hayward, and Philip Norton suggested that I—”

“Saw him not too long ago. He mentioned something about a book, but we didn’t get much chance to chat.” Stinson raised the binoculars to his eyes once again and seemed to be distracted by something that stirred in a clump of tall grasses. “What did you want to know?”

“Well, I know that you were the party chairman while Hayward was in office, and since this book is intended to contain a selection of personal recollections about President Hayward, I wanted to see if you had something to contribute.”

“My recollections of Hayward, you say?”

Simon nodded.

“Graham Hayward was a horse’s ass,” Stinson pronounced as he pointed skyward. “Looks like a black-headed gull, right there. I’ll be darned.”

“Ummm . . .” Simon glanced up. To a boy from Iowa, a seagull was a seagull. “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

“He was a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sort of fellow.”

“Everything I’ve read about him leads me to believe that he was a totally honest, moral, upright—”

“Oh, please,” Stinson muttered under his breath. “You ever see a yellow-winged warbler?”

“Ah, no, I haven’t.”

“Look on the low-hanging branch of that dead tree straight ahead.”

“Ah, yes, I see them. . . . Now about President Hayward . . .” Simon held on to the glasses, hoping to prevent Stinson’s attention from wandering again. “Are you implying that he wasn’t as moral as he—”

“Ask Norton. He knew.”

“Knew about what?”

“About Hayward’s girlfriend.”

Simon feigned shock. “Hayward had a girlfriend?” he whispered.

“Yup. Young one. Beautiful girl, but young. Never a word slipped out about that, gotta hand it to Hayward’s people there. Guess you’re not going to slip it into your book, either, not with Norton involved.”

“Why would you say that?”

“He’d never let that get out. He’s like the keeper of the flame. Anyway, it’s no secret that Graham’s boy will be running in the next election. No way they’re going to let that cat out of the bag. Why muddy the waters?”

“Then why did you tell me?” Simon passed the binoculars back.

“What’s the difference?” He shrugged “You’re working with Norton, so he must trust you. He won’t let you use it anyway, but you probably already know that.”

“So that’s the only scandal about Hayward, that he had a girlfriend?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Stinson snorted. “Can’t tell you how pissed off I was when I heard about that. All those years of being Mr. Morality, making it hard on the rest of us to live up to his code, and here he was, doing just what everyone else wanted to do and was afraid to for fear he’d find out and give ’em hell.”

Stinson shook his head. “Hayward was a damned hypocrite.”

“How did you learn about her, the girlfriend?”

Stinson watched a flock of birds take flight from the opposite side of the marsh. “From David Park.”

“The vice president.”

“Yes. He was quite excited about the prospect of moving up the . . .” He stopped mid-sentence.

“. . . the ladder?” Simon finished it for him. “Why would Hayward having a girlfriend make Park think he’d be moving up? Infidelity has never been an impeachable offense.”

“Hayward was in no danger of being impeached. But at one time he did make some ridiculous rumblings about not running for a second term.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because for one brief shining moment Hayward thought that he might walk away from it all.”

“From his office.”

“Yeah. Because of the girl.”

“But of course he didn’t do that.”

“Nah. It was a stupid whim on the part of a stupid man. He never would have been permitted to do it.”

“Who talked him out of it?”

“I did. Me and Kendall, actually. But as it turned out, he wouldn’t have gone through with it anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“The girl died.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes. How’s that for a coincidence? Hit-and-run, they said, but who really knows about these things?”

“Did you know, Mr. Stinson?”

“No, no. But I did wonder about it; I sure did. Just seemed awfully convenient, and they never did find the driver of the car. Another bit of convenience, if you ask me. Officially, no one heard or saw a thing, even though this accident happened on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Now, granted, it was the middle of the night, but still, you had to wonder, you know? It just never sat right.” Stinson looked Simon straight in the eye and said, “I’d wanted to strangle Hayward with my bare hands when he started talking about how maybe he wouldn’t run again. All the time and money that went into building his political career. Not to mention the potential fallout in the Congress. But killing the girl? I can’t imagine anyone who would have gone to such lengths. And Hayward ended up staying in office, but between you and me, he never was the same.”

“In what way?”

“He lost his fight. The girl died, and he just sort of dried up. He died within a month of leaving office.”

“Yes, I know.”

Stinson raised the glasses to his eyes and scanned the heavens. “Guess it’s safe to assume that that’s one little anecdote that won’t show up in your book, eh?”

“Stinson admitted that he knew about Blythe, admitted he knew about Hayward thinking about not running for a second term, admitted he was less than pleased with it. But he gave no indication that he knew anything at all about your birth, and I don’t see him as having anything to do with Blythe’s death. He just gave me the feeling that he was as perplexed by that as we are.”

Simon stood in the narrow phone booth, the door closed over to keep out the sheets of rain that blew against the clear walls and streamed down the sides in thin rivers, mentally kicking himself for losing the battery charger for his cell phone in his move to Arlington. At the same time, he wished he could just magically transport himself back to Wild Springs, so that he could see Dina’s face as clearly as he heard her voice. He’d found himself thinking an awful lot about that face today.

“So we can cross him off our list of possible mystery drivers. Besides, he was leading a midnight bird walk through the marshes every other night for the past two weeks and would have been giving his lecture on migrating birds of prey at the time you were jumping over hedges.”

“You’re sure?” Dina felt a tug of a disappointment.

She’d wanted Stinson to be the one to have been behind everything, had been hoping against hope that somehow Stinson would quickly and easily and, without further threat to anyone’s well-being, be revealed as the culprit so that they could be done with the uncertainty. Not a very likely or realistic outcome, she knew, but still, she’d hoped for a bit of a miracle.

“Before I left town, I stopped back at the country store, which is sort of the newsstand, coffee shop, post office, social center of the town. The man behind the counter was on that walk.”

“Sounds like a neat little town.”

“I think you’d like it. Lots of old houses with lots of old gardens. They even had their own tea-burning incident back in the seventies.” Simon paused, then added, “That would be the seventeen hundred seventies.”

“It might be fun to visit.”

“That trip will have to wait until I get back from Virginia Beach.”

“What’s in Virginia Beach?”

“Conrad Fritz. I’m going to be stopping in to see him first thing in the morning.”

“You’re not coming back up to Betsy’s tonight then?”

“No. I’m going to head on down through Delaware and over the Bay Bridge Tunnel tonight, so that I can catch up with Fritz early.”

“And then what?”

“I guess that’ll depend on what Fritz has to say.”

“Simon, you’re going to be careful, right? You’re not going to . . . well, do or say anything that’s going to cause him to, well, to
do
anything to you, are you?”

“Not if I can help it. The object is to narrow down the list of possible players on the bad guys’ side, not on our side.”

“We being the good guys.”

“Absolutely we are the good guys.”

“Well, you be careful. You know what they say about good guys finishing last.”

“Not this time, sweetheart,” Simon tried to cheer her with his best Bogie. “Not this time . . .”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Polly glanced up as the little bell over the door announced a customer. A small figure in a sunny yellow raincoat stood just inside the shop, shaking water from an umbrella, which was left by the door.

“Hi!” Polly called from the counter where she’d been wiring dried hydrangea to a wreath. “Can I help you with something?”

“Are you Ms. McDermott?” the woman said from the door.

“No, I’m not. Is there something I could help you with?”

“I was looking for Dina McDermott.”

“I’m afraid she isn’t here right now.”

“I was hoping to discuss a garden renovation with her. I’ve heard she’s quite talented.” The potential customer smiled warmly.

“She’s the best.” Polly smiled back.

“So they tell me. My husband and I are looking at an old farm that’s for sale a few miles from here, and I was wondering if the garden was worth restoring or if we should just scrap it and start over.” Another smile. “I thought perhaps we should get an idea of what something like that might cost. The renovations on the house alone are going to be major, so we thought maybe we should look at the whole picture.”

“Get an idea of what the whole project might cost.” Polly nodded. “A smart thing to do.”

“So I was hoping to maybe get together with her as soon as possible. Is she expected soon?”

“I’m not sure.” Polly debated. This was the third inquiry about a potentially promising landscaping job since she’d spoken with Dina two days ago. Whatever was keeping her, Polly thought, it must be really important.

“Look, why not leave your name and phone number, and I’ll make sure she gets the message.”

“That would be fine. The last name is Dillon. Here, I’ll write down the number for you. . . .”

Polly waited until the customer had left the shop before grabbing the phone and dialing Dina’s cell phone but was forced to leave voice mail.

“Hi, Dina, sorry to disturb whatever it is that you’re doing—hope it’s something good, by the way, something involving a gorgeous man and lots of sunshine, but I promised myself I wouldn’t pry. Anyway, I just thought you should know that we’ve had three customers asking about landscaping. One McMansion—a neighbor of the Pattersons whose property you did last fall—and two other potential garden jobs. The one garden is a Mrs. Fields—she and her husband just bought that house with the red siding on the left as you go out of town. And the other is a customer who stopped by to see about getting an estimate for a renovation on an old farm a few miles from here, forgot to ask which one. Anyway, she and her husband are trying to decide whether or not to make an offer on this property and wanted your input on what it would take to bring the grounds back. Their last name is Dillon. I’ll give you the numbers. . . .”

At Wild Springs, the three women had fallen into a guarded routine, the company sometimes more uneasy than at others. Betsy may have been in a wheelchair, but she was anything but sedentary. The hours not spent in the riding barn—where, with the aid of another instructor, Betsy gave lessons three afternoons each week as well as Saturday mornings—there was tennis. Or ambling along the fields and woods around Wild Springs. And for Dina, there was the garden.

Dina had spent several hours during the first two days at Wild Springs inspecting the beds, absently pulling a weed here or there, mentally dividing this clump of overgrown daylilies or that clump of iris— acts that were, for Dina, as natural as breathing. Dina had told Betsy that dividing overgrown perennials was something akin to using the Heimlich maneuver on a choking man in a restaurant. And to Dina, it wasn’t work. It was therapy of the purest kind. If nothing else, it was familiar and soothing, so necessary in this time of turmoil, when her life had been turned inside out. It offered her time to be alone, to reflect on all that had happened and all she had learned. It was the one constant in her life, and she welcomed every chance she could get to dig her hands into the dirt.

“Your Siberian iris should be divided,” she’d announced at breakfast on the morning that Simon had left to visit Stinson.

“I’ll put it on the list for the gardener. I’m not sure when he’ll be able to get to that. He’s had some problems with his hip, you know. Arthritis,” Betsy had told her as she spooned scrambled eggs onto her plate.

“Have you thought of possibly hiring someone else to come in?” Dina offered.

“Shhhhh,” Betsy shushed her. “It’s Mrs. Brady’s husband, and he’s been working here for years. I’d hate to have him think that the minute he can’t work like he used to he will be replaced. Not good for his morale. He worked with my dad and my granddad. I simply couldn’t just replace him.”

“Would you mind if I just tidied things up a bit, then?” Dina asked.

“Now, I don’t want you to feel obligated, Dina.”

“Actually, I’d feel better if I was doing something. I’m not used to sitting around. I hate the feeling that I’m hiding out and wasting time that could be spent doing something useful. I’m getting a bit stir-crazy.”

“I understand completely, my dear. After breakfast, I’ll show you where the garden shed is and where the tools are kept. Feel free to do as much or as little as you like.”

“Maybe it will make me feel less guilty about the time I’m spending away from my business. We’re just gearing up for our busy season, and I know I need to be there.”

“You did say you had reliable help, though—”

“The best. But still . . .”

“Well, you have been on the phone with Polly about twenty times since yesterday, Dina,” Jude reminded her. “And wasn’t that Mrs. Fisher you were speaking with this morning? It’s not as if you’ve been neglecting things altogether.”

“I know, but it’s not the same.”

“Of course it isn’t the same, but it’s going to have to do until Simon comes back with a suspect.”

“Having a suspect won’t mean a thing without a game plan,” Betsy noted. “Unless, of course, someone confesses to having killed Blythe. I for one am not holding out any hopes for that happening.”

“Well, obviously, but we can’t formulate a game plan without knowing who—”

Dina shook her head and walked outside, leaving the two women to bicker to their hearts’ content.

She’d only thought to separate a few choice plants that were overgrown, but before the morning had ended she’d weeded out three beds and made room for the new plants she’d divided from the old. Besides keeping her physically busy and giving her a respite from focusing on something other than all the changes in her life, she found in the gardens at Wild Springs an unexpected connection to the grandfather and great-grandfather she had never known.

And in the afternoon, after she’d cleaned up from the garden and Betsy had cleaned up from the barn, the three women gathered in the sitting room for tea as they had every afternoon since Jude and Dina had arrived and went through the photo albums that lined the bookshelves. It was during those times that Dina got her first glimpse of what it meant to be a Pierce and just how much underlying hostility had yet to be resolved between Jude and Betsy.

“Now, these pictures were all taken when my father was Ambassador to Belgium. Lovely photos of Mother there, this was right before she took ill. . . .” Betsy’s face grew wistful. “We lived in Brussels for a time. It was lovely. Blythe and I attended a tiny school for the children of diplomats where only French was spoken. I had to learn the language very quickly. Blythe already had taken French, of course, at school here, but I couldn’t speak a word. We only stayed there for a year. After Mother became ill, we came home. Father, of course, stayed on. . . .”

“And then she went to the Shipley School?” Dina held up her right hand, where Blythe’s school ring sat on the middle finger.

“I noticed that you were wearing that.” Betsy smiled. She hadn’t wanted to comment on the ring, thinking that if Dina wanted to ask, she would. “Yes, we both enrolled at Shipley when we returned home. It’s a bit of a drive—it’s in Bryn Mawr, some miles from here, you see—and it could be most unpleasant traveling in the winter. The school is still there, still thriving, though I understand it’s co-ed now. Unimaginable back in my day, though I suppose it represents progress of a sort. . . .” Betsy sipped at her tea, which Mrs. Brady had served from the silver tea service. “Over the years, I sometimes wondered what you thought, when you looked at that ring. Assuming, that is, that you kept it.”

“I never knew who ‘
BDP
’ was, but for a long time something told me not to show the ring to you.” Dina glanced up at Jude. “When I finally got up the nerve to ask about it, you said it belonged to a cousin of yours.”

“Is that what you told her, Jude?” A frown creased Betsy’s forehead.

“Well, you could have told me that you’d given it to her; it caught me completely off guard when she came downstairs one night with that ring on her hand and asked me who it had belonged to.” Jude’s voice rose in remembered anger. “It was the first thing that came out of my mouth. What did you expect me to say?”

“You could have tried the truth.”

“It didn’t seem like the appropriate time.”

“It obviously never was the appropriate time,” Betsy grumbled.

“I didn’t care for the fact that you went behind my back.”

“Well, I didn’t see where you were doing anything to keep her mother’s memory alive.”

“
I
was her mother,” Jude said emphatically. “I still am.”

“Mom, Betsy, please. Could we please not do this?” Dina pleaded, the color draining from her face.

“Dina’s right. Now’s not the time for us to be arguing,” Betsy said.

“You started this years ago when you insisted on slipping Dina little things that had belonged to Blythe and not telling me you were doing it,” Jude snapped.

“I wanted her to know where she came from. I suspected—rightly so—that you would do whatever you could to keep her from us.”

“I did what I felt was best for Dina. . . .”

“Which obviously wasn’t or we wouldn’t all be here now, would we?”

“Let me know when you’ve finished beating each other up.” Dina rose. “I’m not going to sit and listen to this again. You have issues to resolve, resolve them. You’re adults. Please start acting like it. I’ll be outside. . . .”

For the second time that day, Dina retreated back outside, leaving the two women to air their grievances— sometimes loudly, as their voices drifted through an open window.

Jude, mild-mannered, soft-spoken Jude, could really rip
when she wanted to,
Dina thought as she pruned a shrub.
And maybe it’s good for her, maybe it’s good for both
of them, to finally get out so many years of words unspoken. It must have been so hard for Mom, harder still in
some ways for Betsy, this silence between them all this time.
Maybe it’s time for them to deal with each other, once and
for all and however loudly they choose; then maybe they
can move on.

Maybe they could even be friends. . . .

And maybe,
Dina thought wryly,
the deaf would hear
and the blind would see. . . .

This was all wrong. All wrong.

Where was Jude McDermott? Where was the girl?

Too clever to return to Henderson in the van, the driver had borrowed wheels that were newer—and, most important, unrecognizable, should Jude arrive home and notice a strange car in the parking lot. Though that might be difficult, parked as it was, for the second night in a row, behind a veil of shrubs. The car was too low to the ground to give a clear overview of the surroundings, that sense of omnipresence one got from driving a vehicle that sat so high up over the road, but at the same time it was low enough to conceal behind foliage, and there was something to be said for that. And after all, tonight was merely surveillance of sorts. The next move could not be plotted without knowing where the quarry was.

Church bells from a tower somewhere close to town rang ten times, their solid clanging punctuating the quiet night like exclamation points.

The driver sighed. Where was this woman?

Perhaps she’d been scared away.

If that was the case, where might she go?

Impatient fingers tapped a nervous tune on the steering wheel. Where might a woman like Jude McDermott go to hide if she thought there was danger?

And surely she must know that there is; she has to know that the near miss was no accident. . . .

Ten-twenty P.M., but still no sign of life.

Perhaps she was with the girl. Jude had been intended to be the original target—after all,
she
was the one with the information—but the girl had given an opportunity not to be missed.

The point was to eliminate anyone who knew.

Simon Keller knew, but perhaps he could still be of some limited use.

Jude definitely knew. The tape had revealed this, along with Jude’s name.

Perhaps through targeting the daughter the mother would be made careless.