The Profiler's Daughter (Sky Stone Thriller Series) (18 page)

“
Mon sanctuaire
,” Francois said, shutting the door. “You have no idea how draining it is to deal with every Desperate Housewife that waltzes through my door searching for reinvention.” He placed a hand high on his forehead. “And
les femmes d’un certain age
, do not get me started.” He lifted a hot pink accent pillow from a sling-back chair and plopped down. “If one more menopausal beast with a Chanel Reissue 2.55 offers details of her latest hot flash, I may be forced to kill myself.” He gave the pink lampshade a slight adjustment and fluttered his lashes at Sky. “Now, let me look at you.” Francois stared at her so long that Sky wondered what the man could possibly be thinking.

“Your grandmother must be so proud. You have Izzy’s eyes, you know.” He used her grandmother’s nickname. “And you have her lovely, long neck.” Francois placed a ringed hand against his chest and lifted his chin. “The sign of a true aristocrat.”

“I don’t see my grandmother much.”

“Oh?” Francois sipped his tea, but Sky could feel his mind working over this factoid with an interrogator’s intensity. “You have beautiful hands, ma chère,” he said. “Such slender, delicate fingers. I don’t see a wedding ring …”

“No,” Sky said. “Tell me about Nicolette.”

Francois repositioned himself in the chair and crossed his legs. “She was excited during her appointment, talking a mile a minute. What is that word you psychologists use? Manic. Yes, Nicolette was manic. Going on and on about how different her life was going to be when she ‘hooked up’, I believe that was the phrase she used, with some gentleman. He had an unusual name.” Francois scanned the ceiling in an effort at recall. “Viper, that’s it. Mr. Viper. She appeared to be madly in love with him, said he was rich and powerful. And a great lover.” Francois leaned toward Sky with an odd look on his face. “But that girl had not a single piece of jewelry from him. I do believe that’s the true measure of affection, don’t you?”

“Did Nicolette mention Mr. Viper’s first name?”

“No.”

“Did she say where he lived?”

“No.”

“What he did for a living?”

“No.”

“What kind of car he drove?”

“No.”

Francois brightened. “Nicolette did say Mr. Viper was going through a difficult time, that all would be revealed soon. She was apparently sworn to secrecy. I worked on her for over an hour just to get that much out of her.”

Francois stood and walked to a ski-shaped coat rack where a floor-length fur hung. The hairdresser stroked the coat and gave Sky a wistful look. “My dear, seeing you brings back so many memories of your grandmother.” His hand moved up and down the pelts with a sensual intensity. “There was a time when Izzy Winthrop ran this town. Not politically, of course. But the social scene? Izzy must have chaired every important organization in Boston in her day. Charitable or otherwise.” He gave a wistful sigh. “But it was so much more than simple
noblesse oblige
. One is born with
le sens de style
or one is not. It cannot be purchased. Isabel Winthrop’s sense of style, her virtually unlimited funds …” He paused. “Your grandmother and Boston were never a good fit. Her towns were New York, Paris.” He chuckled. “Boston bluebloods are a frightfully frumpy lot. Your grandmother was as a diamond among lumps of coal. When Isabel Winthrop walked into a room other women simply disappeared.” He shrugged. “Such is the synergy of exquisite beauty and fabulous wealth.”

Sky listened to the aging hairdresser’s reminiscences with bemused interest. She knew her grandmother had been a great beauty, she’d seen the pictures, the paintings. But style and power? By the time Sky was old enough to have any sense of either, her grandmother seemed impossibly old, numbingly outdated.

Still, it suggested an idea on how best to manage the problem of what to wear to the rapidly approaching Four Seasons fundraiser. How long had it been since she’d seen Izzy? A year or more. Maybe it was time for Sky to pay her grandmother a visit.

Francois fingered his ruby necklace. “If you want to know the dirt on anyone, just ask an old queen. We know where all the bodies are buried.”

The curious remark caught Sky by surprise. “Do you still see my grandmother, Francois?”

“No.” He looked away. “We had a falling out many years ago.”

Sky waited.

“It was around the time your grandfather died.” Francois’s voice grew tight and his eyes darted around the room.

Isabel Winthrop – Izzy to her friends – had done her best to instill in Sky her own fanatic certainty regarding the superiority of the Brahmin blood line. Izzy took her self-imposed role as the historic nub of the East Coast establishment to heart, and worked Sky’s nerves every summer with her claim to genetic advantage.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as Sky liked to say (her word for the relatively modest five-bedroom of Monk’s parents in Iowa City), Sky’s paternal grandmother, Mary Margaret O’Hara Stone, born and raised in Meridan, Kansas, tried to inculcate Sky with the relative supremacy of her own ancestors, who came from pioneer stock.

‘That weak-chinned, inbred east coast gene pool? There are consequences when cousins marry, for heaven's sake. Which they did for nearly three hundred years. Maybe even still do.’ Sky’s Kansas grandmother would raise her eyebrows in distaste. “Any recessive traits remaining after fifteen hundred miles in a covered wagon were dispensed with during the homesteading.’ She would fix Sky with a steely look. ‘The best thing your mother ever did was marry your father. Hybrid vigor.”

Sky smiled to think of it, the two women so convinced of their respective genetic advantages.

Sky was familiar with Isabel Winthrop’s cruelty, and her habit of cutting people out of her life who disappointed or angered her. It was clear that Francois had suffered Izzy’s ire. Sky decided to offer the man a confessional leg up.

“My grandmother can be difficult.”

Francois gave a nervous giggle and fiddled with the collar of his shirt. “Isn’t that the truth,
mon petit
? Your grandfather had been so ill.”

Sky remembered the summer her grandfather, Dudley Whipple Winthrop – Whip – took sick. He was a kindly, playful man who wore shabby khakis and delighted in driving an ancient green Cadillac with dented fenders. One day a friend of Sky’s dropped by just as her grandfather was leaving and pointed out, “He looks homeless. Good thing he has money.”

When Whip became bed-ridden the house in Back Bay took on the gloomy quiet of the sick room.

Francois continued. “Izzy was nursing your grandfather herself. That woman was a saint. I would come to the house every Thursday to give her a trim, as I’d done for years. One afternoon I got there a little early. I walked in on your grandmother, in the summer kitchen …” His voice trailed off and he stood with his back to Sky. “Izzy was fixing Whip’s lunch tray,” he paused. “She was spooning something into a bowl of chowder. I watched her from the doorway. She looked up and saw me …” Francois’s voice quivered. “Izzy just smiled and put a finger to her lips, as if to say ‘This is just between us.’” His narrow shoulders slumped. “Your grandfather died a few days later. Izzy changed salons. I never worked on her again.” He pivoted on Gucci loafers and faced Sky. “I know she was doing the right thing, putting poor Whip out of his misery. But why cut me off like that? After all our years together?” Francois edged closer to Sky’s chair and shot furtive glances her way, like a child waiting for absolution.

Sky had a sense of unreality. Did this stranger just suggest that Izzy poisoned her grandfather? Francois appeared oblivious to the implications; the hairdresser’s only concern seemed to be his unfair banishment from Isabel Winthrop’s universe.

Sky considered her options. Interrogate Francois and find out what it was, exactly, that Izzy had put in the chowder? That could be a tricky business, a distraction from Nicolette’s murder. First things first, she thought. Whip would have to wait.

“I’m attending a fund-raiser at the Four Seasons tonight, Francois.” Sky pointed to her hair. “Could you squeeze me in?”

“The Diamond?
Mais oui
! It would be a privilege. Just like old times.” He seemed to forget the subject of Isabel Winthrop and put a saucy hand on his hip. “The Boston Globe will have a society photographer there, without question. Have no fear. Francois will make sure you’re the princess of
that
ball.”

He ran a practiced eye over Sky. “I must have time to do this right. Wash, cut, full foil. Hot stone massage, just to make you feel good. Eyebrow wax, of course. Manicure, pedicure.” He peered at Sky’s face. “Complexion like a Georgia peach, no worries there.”

It seemed a daunting list to Sky. Her self-care regimen during the year on Nantucket involved a quick shower and maybe painting her toes once a month.

But Francois was giddy with anticipation, and made Sky promise to return by four o'clock. “It really would be best if you could bring your evening clothes with you,
ma chère
.”

The oil portrait rattled behind the driver’s seat as Sky drove the Jeep toward Boston. She checked with Kyle on her cell and gave him directions to the salon. “Pick me up, nine sharp.”

“Where the hell are you?” Kyle sounded grumpy. “And what’s that knocking sound?”

“I’m on Beacon Street, headed to Back Bay. That knocking sound is my past, come back to haunt me.”

“How enigmatic of you, darling.” Kyle paused. “Why Back Bay?”

Sky steered the Jeep into rush hour traffic. “Because Cinderella needs something to wear to the ball.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sky parked on the corner of Beacon and Charles and lifted the collar of her trench coat against a nasty wind. She dawdled along the bricked sidewalk because she’d forgotten how much she loved this neighborhood – the gas lights and Greek revival row houses, the lion-head doors and secret gardens, the ancient elms.

Soon enough, she stood across the street from her grandmother’s mansion with her back against the wrought iron fence of Boston Common. The first thing she noticed was the odor of sulfur and a gloomy atmospheric. Designed in 1796 by Charles Bulfinch, the Federal style house radiated a vague malevolence. Sky tried to view the arches, the Chinese fretwork balconies, the Corinthian pilasters as a stranger might, because she knew some considered the house a thing of rare beauty. But she found no softness here, no welcoming aura. Even the cupola, where Sky had crouched as a child during games of hide and seek with her grandfather, seemed suspicious to her now.

She climbed past the fluted Greek columns of the portico and paused in front of the powder blue door. A silly song came to her, one her grandfather sang long ago. ‘Blue Sky blue, when I see this door, I think of you.’

It made Sky’s heart hurt to see the door blistered and peeling. A spider web laced though the iron fretwork of the porch railing and she thought about Francois Duquette’s story, the insinuation that Izzy poisoned Whip.

Sky pushed the ringer, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand. Tonight’s charity ball.

A minute later, the door opened and a slight man with an intelligent face and skin the color of caramel blinked at her.

“Mademoiselle?”

Sky introduced herself to Izzy’s butler and stepped into the marble-floored vestibule. She knew he was the butler because Izzy’s butlers always wore the same uniform: white shirt, black pants, black vest. Sky was surprised to see a person of color, however. Izzy was an unreconstructed racist. Her taste in domestics usually ran to Scots or Irish.

The butler led Sky into the formal parlor, unchanged since her childhood. She took in the Louis Quatorze table, the carved and gilt-framed sofa, the Queen Anne chairs, the antique French Aubusson rug, and decided that the only thing missing was the red velvet rope. The place was a virtual museum.

“There’s a spider web on the portico,” Sky told the butler. “Izzy has fired staff for less.”

“Ah. I am afraid you have caught me.” He offered a lopsided grin. “I have been watching that little spider since it crawled out of the egg sac last fall.
Argiope aurantia
. An orb-weaver.” His voice had a lyric quality, as though he were singing the words. “Come June she will have a most beautiful yellow and black striped body.”

The butler bowed slightly from the waist. “Call me Raj.”

He disappeared soundlessly down the carpeted hallway and returned a few moments later. “Your grandmother is in the greenhouse.”

Raj led Sky down the central hall, past oil paintings with massive gilt frames – horses and hounds, landscapes with spectacular cloud formations, the three-masted
Arbella
in full sail, dour ancestral portraits – to the glass-paned greenhouse.

Her grandmother sat in a wicker chair among gigantic potted palms with a Hudson Bay blanket draped over her lap. Small and delicate, like Sky, Isabel Winthrop now seemed shrunken, an effect magnified by the cloud of white hair puffed into a bun on top of her head.

“You’re here.” The once strong voice was feeble with age and sickness. “Come closer.” She clawed at the air with an arthritic hand. “My eyes aren’t what they were.”

Sky stepped forward. The odor of mud and decayed leaves hung in the clammy air.

“You’ve got a new butler,” Sky said.

“I found him at a resort in the Maldives, working security. He’s Nepalese.” Izzy’s lips crumpled into a sneer. “He steals from me. He thinks I don’t know.” She looked at Sky with rheumy eyes. “He’s stealing your inheritance.”

“Good. I’ve no doubt he’s earning it. Grandfather’s trust fund is enough.”

“Stupid child. There’s never enough.” A thin string of drool escaped from the old woman’s mouth. “You won’t be young forever. One day you’ll want my money.”

“I’m going to the Four Seasons tonight. The Diamond Ball. Black tie. I need an invitation.”

“The Diamond?” Izzy seemed to perk up. “I chaired that event for many years. Raised millions. Raj has that invitation somewhere. The bitch sends me one every February.” She pressed a button on the wall monitor next to her chair and croaked the butler’s name into the screen.