Trust Me (20 page)

“It must be post-traumatic stress disorder,” Carly said. “You shouldn’t make her relive that night; it’s cruel. I’m sure that
she feels responsible, somehow. It’s her curse: She finds a way to feel responsible for everything. Pauline, let’s go over
there and sit down. Can I get you something? Is there something I can do to help you feel better?”

“Close the door,” Pauline sobbed out, as Carly helped her toward the couch. “You’re letting the bugs in.”

An hour later, Carly was in the solarium, attending to a stubborn fur mat on one of the cats, when Max came into the room.
She was surprised to see that he hadn’t already left. He looked impatient, and she realized that he had been waiting for her
to finish with the animals. She felt a flicker of anticipation, but then sensed from his expression that he was not about
to suggest a last-minute dinner date.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, releasing the cat.

“I want to talk to you,” he said, beckoning. Puzzled, she followed him into the library. He cast a suspicious look around
the room, as if checking to make sure that Pauline was not lurking in one of the corners, then closed the double doors.

“Sit down.” He motioned to the couch.

Carly sat, but Max remained standing, his arms folded against his chest. Something in his face seemed strange.

“Max,” she said, “are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Aren’t you going to sit? Come here. Relax.” She patted the seat next to her on the couch and smiled at him. “If this is what
a normal workday does to you, you should probably take more vacation time.”

He took a seat in the armchair opposite her. “Carly,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me that you were here with my grandfather
just before the accident?”

She blinked at him. “Was I?”

“Pauline told me that he was expecting you at five-thirty that day.”

“Yes, I know. I do house calls on Wednesdays, and since Henry always needs me for something, I make a regular stop here each
week. It’s my last visit of the day, so I usually arrive between five and five-thirty.”

“So it’s true. You were here.”

She found his tone disturbing. “I just said that.”

“But you sounded surprised when I asked you about it.”

“Well… the question was kind of out of the blue, Max. But it wasn’t the part about being here that surprised me, it was what
you said about my being here just before the accident. Do you mean that he fell right after I left?”

“Yes. Pauline found him at seven-fifteen.”

“Oh,” Carly said sadly. “I didn’t know that.” The revelation upset her for some reason, as if temporal proximity to the accident
somehow made her responsible for it.

“When did you think it happened?”

“I don’t know. Later, I guess. I never really thought about it.” In her mind’s eye, she could see Henry in his armchair in
the sunroom, the tiny kitten in his lap.

“What time did you leave?”

“About six. No, it was a little after, because the news had started.”

“Do you usually leave at six when you visit him?”

“No, usually we have tea after I check the animals, but he seemed tired that day, sort of distracted, so I thought that he
probably wanted to relax and watch TV. He’s so polite that he would invite me to stay even if he didn’t really want me to,
so I try to be sensitive to his moods. Max, why are you asking me all these questions?”

“I’m trying to get a better idea of what happened. So you’re sure that you left at… what, six-fifteen?”

His explanation didn’t satisfy her. “Pretty sure,” she said. “I didn’t want to keep him from his show. I guess that by the
time I was in my car and driving away, it was probably as late as six-fifteen.”

“Was anyone else here? Either while you were in the house, or when you were leaving?”

“You mean, like one of the teenagers?”

“Anyone.”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “The kids come right after school, so they’re all gone by five, at the latest.
And Pauline was at the grocery store. She goes to the grocery store every Wednesday afternoon, because that’s when they do
double coupons.”

“There was no one working in the yard? No gardeners, no repairmen, no one like that?”

“Usually those guys are done by that time of day. I didn’t see anyone. I thought it was just Henry and me. Why? Did you learn
something about the accident?” A shocking thought occurred to her. “Max,” she said in a hushed voice, “you don’t think that
someone else was involved with the accident, do you? You don’t think that someone pushed Henry down the stairs?” She couldn’t
imagine where he had gotten such an idea. “Who would do a thing like that?”

“No, I don’t think that anyone pushed Henry down the stairs,” Max said, but to Carly’s great frustration, he didn’t explain.

“But you wouldn’t be interrogating me without a good reason,” she persisted. “What is it? What happened today?”

“I’m not interrogating you. I’m just asking a few questions.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m curious about that evening.”

“Why now? What changed? What do you know that I don’t?”

“Nothing.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that you’re suddenly asking me these questions for nothing! Is this what was happening with
Pauline when I walked in earlier? You made her cry. That wasn’t very nice.”

“I don’t remember ever promising to be nice,” Max said. He reached up to rub his forehead as if his skull itself ached.

Carly scowled at him. It wasn’t fair, she thought. He wasn’t the only tired one. She worked as hard as he did, and she was
worried about Henry, too. This could have been a chance for them to take care of each other, but clearly, it wasn’t going
to be that way. She suddenly felt very tired of reaching out to him and meeting only resistance. If Max didn’t want to talk
to her, and wasn’t even willing to sit near her, it seemed clear that there was nothing left for her to do but leave.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “Do you have any more questions for me, or am I free to go?”

His eyebrows lifted at her shrewish tone, and Carly immediately felt foolish. “No more questions,” he said.

“Good.” She stood up, avoiding his gaze, and turned toward the door. He said nothing as she walked away, but as her fingers
touched the knob, she heard him rise from his chair.

“Wait,” he said.

She turned back, quickly, hopefully. “What?”

“You need to check on Lola.”

“
What?
”

“She has a sore ear.”

Carly shook her head slowly. It was not quite what she had hoped to hear, and judging from Max’s edgy stance and slight frown,
it was also not quite what he had intended to say. He seemed, she thought, almost as unsettled as she was.

“Were you petting Lola?” she asked.

“How else would I know about her ear? You think she wrote me a note?”

“I thought that you didn’t like dogs.”

“I don’t,” Max said darkly.

The conversation had taken on a surreal feeling to Carly. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll check on her before I leave. Good night.”
She opened the door.

“Wait,” Max said again.

Carly sighed. “You know,” she said to the empty doorway in front of her, “I honestly don’t have the stamina for this right
now.” She turned to look at Max. His shoulders slumped, and his skin had the ashy tone of exhaustion. “You look terrible,”
she said instinctively, concern softening her tone. “What on earth happened to you today? Can’t you tell me? Maybe I can help.”

He looked at her with dull eyes. “I’m fine,” he said.

Carly knew that it would be useless to argue that point. “Of course you are,” she said wearily. “You’re always fine. Okay,
Max. Suit yourself. I’ll see you later.”

M
ax had not expected another Sunday dinner invitation from Carly’s family, and he hadn’t gotten one, exactly. But on Saturday
afternoon, he realized that Carly simply assumed that he would be accompanying her. It was strange to think that the Martins
were expecting him, as if he really had been summarily adopted into their clan. But believing that would be deluding himself.
The Martins were nice people, and charitable with their friendship. Thirty years ago, he had needed a family like theirs.
But now? No. He was an adult, not a stray kid, and it was just… too late. The first visit had left him feeling raw all week,
and he saw no reason to put himself through that again. He had pretended not to see the disappointment on Carly’s face when
he told her that he had too much work to do.

“They aren’t normal,” he said to Henry’s still form on Monday morning at the hospital. “I don’t know what they were thinking,
expecting me to show up for another one of those… things. They aren’t my family. They don’t even know me.”

His visits to his grandfather had turned into semiconfessional monologues. Max would sit by the old man’s bed and talk about
everything from what he’d had for breakfast to his current venture-capital investments. That kind of rambling didn’t come
naturally to him, but neither did sitting quietly in the solemn and sterile atmosphere of the hospital room. Henry seemed
awake enough to require something from him as a visitor, and Max entertained the hope that if he just blathered on and on,
eventually the old man might turn to him and tell him to shut up.

So far, he had kept the conversation—if you could call it that—to neutral subjects, avoiding all of the things that weighed
on his mind but didn’t lend themselves to discussion.

On Friday morning, Max had phoned the District Attorney’s Office to check the credentials of the doctor whom Joanna Melhorn
had recommended. Confirmation had been immediate. Jerry Suzuki regularly worked with both the San Francisco police and the
DA’s Office, and he was considered the top forensics expert in the area. Suzuki had reviewed Henry’s case over the weekend,
and he agreed that Henry had not fallen down the stairs.

With typical professional reserve, Suzuki had been unwilling to speculate on what
had
happened, pointing out that while an attack certainly could have caused such an injury, so could an accidental fall in which
the head contacted a hard, blunt, fist-sized object located close to the ground. The doctor suggested that Max check the area
where his grandfather had been found for such an object.

But Max had already checked, and there was nothing even remotely hard, blunt and fist-sized on the floor anywhere near where
Henry had been lying. Even the carved staircase banisters, entwined with wooden leaves and vines, were delicately shaped,
with no protrusions that could have caused such an injury. Two round end tables sat by the bottom of the stairs, displaying
a motley group of innocuous objects: books, decorative figurines, vases of dried flowers.

A single hard blow to the back of the head.

If there had been an attempted robbery of the mansion, and if someone had surprised Henry and hit him from behind, then why
wasn’t anything missing? It was impossible for Max to believe that Pauline’s hawk eyes would not have noticed a burglary.
The stress and confusion of finding Henry, and the arrival of the paramedics certainly would have distracted her, but she
had been back in the house for days, and if anything had been moved or stolen, she would have said something right away.

Unless she had been involved. What did he really know about Pauline, after all? She had been with Henry for almost twenty
years, which would seem to eliminate her from suspicion, but who was he to say that their relationship was as straightforward
as it appeared to be? Max had already seen that she had a controlling, possessive side, and that she considered Henry and
his house to be her personal property. It didn’t take a detective to come up with a handful of reasons why she might want
to hurt or even kill Henry Tremayne. Perhaps she needed money, and— knowing that she would benefit from his will—she had gotten
tired of waiting for him to die. Or perhaps she had learned that he intended to leave the house to Carly and had gone into
a jealous rage. Hell, maybe Henry had pissed her off by tracking mud into the kitchen.

And even if Pauline was not the type to bash someone in the head, it didn’t necessarily mean that she was innocent. She could
be protecting someone—a brother or a nephew who had come to rob the house at a time when she had assured him that Henry would
be in his chair in the solarium, watching television. Perhaps Henry had heard a suspicious noise and gone to investigate.
That would explain why he was in the front hallway and why nothing had been reported missing. With Henry comatose and Pauline
involved with the plot, there was nobody left to report a burglary—with the exception of the pets, and they weren’t talking.

And yet Pauline had been the first to mention something strange about the accident. If she was hiding her own involvement,
then logically, she would never have called Max’s attention to Henry’s fall. She would be better served by not talking about
it, by behaving more like the only other person known to have been at the mansion that evening. Carly.