Woman in Black (7 page)

As she stepped into the elevator, she said a silent little prayer of thanks that it was unoccupied. Her luck held out, and it didn't stop at any of the other floors on its way up to the penthouse. Lately she lived in dread of running into other people in the elevator. They either felt obliged to murmur some polite pleasantry or they simply stared silently into space, pretending not to recognize her. It would have been almost a relief if for once someone had voiced what they were surely thinking:
He got what he deserved. And so did you
. It wasn't just that she and Gordon had been found guilty in the court of public opinion; they made people like them nervous. They were a constant reminder of how swiftly one's fortunes could turn. Weren't they all just one catastrophe away from the brink?

Getting out at the penthouse level, she paused at her door before inserting her key into the lock. Did it look as though she'd been crying? It wouldn't do for these last precious hours with her husband to be spoiled by her weepy mood. She straightened her shoulders and took a deep, steadying breath before she unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Their building, at Park Avenue and East 72nd, was one of the Upper East Side's more venerable prewars and the penthouse its crown jewel. With views stretching on either side all the way to the East and Hudson Rivers, spacious rooms with twelve-foot ceilings, and a wraparound terrace, it had been the ideal stage for the numerous parties she and Gordon had thrown, most in an effort to further Gordon's career. Only now, stripped of its decor, with what was left of its furnishings—the more valuable pieces having been sold—swaddled in quilted packing blankets and bubble wrap, the memory of those festive occasions, the front room alive with conversation and laughter, music and the clink of glasses, waiters gliding about with trays of artfully displayed canapés, was a distant one. She felt as if she were walking into a tomb.

“Gordon?” she called.

There was no answer. That was odd. Where could he have gotten to? And where was Neal? He'd said he was on his way up, and that had to have been at least fifteen minutes ago.

She felt a strange sense of foreboding. The parquet floor, with its rugs rolled up, echoed with her footsteps as she made her way through the vestibule and down the hall into the living room. There was something very wrong here. She could feel it in her bones.

She found Neal huddled on the floor by the sofa, his knees tucked against his chest. He was staring blankly ahead, shivering uncontrollably, his face drained of all color.

Lila gasped and sank into a crouch before him. That was when she noticed the smudges of blood on his sneakers and the faint but discernible trail of bloody footprints on the floor leading up to him. A wave of panic crested inside her. “Honey, what happened? Are you hurt?” She felt woozy at the thought, her heart banging lopsidedly in her chest, like a piece of machinery missing a cog.

Neal wore a strange, unfocused look, the muscles in his face slack and his eyes staring sightlessly ahead. He appeared almost drugged. His lips were moving, but only a strangled croak emerged. At last he managed to unlatch his arms from around his knees and lift a trembling finger toward the arched entrance leading to the hallway beyond.

Lila's panic instantly congealed into a heavy, sinking dread. She could feel a pulse thumping in the pit of her stomach, and the world went a little gray as she rose shakily from her crouched position, already half knowing what she was going to find at the other end of the hallway.

“Gordon?” she called softly as she made her way down the hall.

No answer.

The door to Gordon's study was cracked open. As she approached it, time seemed to slow to a standstill. She could see dust motes swirling lazily in the band of sunlight that angled across the polished floor where the Bokhara runner had been rolled up, and she became aware of violin music playing softly inside the study. Beethoven … or was it Brahms? Her husband's love of classical music was a source of both wonderment and amusement to him. “Amazing, isn't it? I grew up listening to Merle Haggard saw on the fiddle. I wouldn't have known a violin sonata from a cat with its tail caught in a door,” he would often remark with a bemused chuckle.

Now, as Lila entered the study, the sweet sounds rose to a crescendo, then hung, suspended, on a single, achingly pure note. For the rest of her days she would be unable to listen to that particular piece of music without feeling a cold trickle down her spine. Or without picturing the blood. Her husband's blood. Pooled on the floor where he lay dead, his stiff fingers clasped loosely about the .38 revolver with which he'd shot himself in the head.

2

“Ink,” Abigail barked over the phone to her secretary. She frowned. “No, not as in incorporated. Ink, as in what you write with. I'm going to need stamp pads, half a dozen, six each of red and black, for my
A.M. America
segment.” During which she'd be demonstrating a clever way to design wrapping paper using cookie cutters. “No, not today—it's next week. But see that the stylist gets on it right away.” She hung up, expelling a deeply aggravated breath. “Honestly, am I expected to do everything myself?”

The Bluetooth headset more or less permanently affixed to Abigail's right ear emitted a pulsing light as she paced back and forth, her high heels tapping out a frenetic rhythm on the tile floor of her kitchen, where at the moment her husband and daughter were having breakfast and their live-in housekeeper, Veronique, was preparing an omelet at the restaurant-grade Garland range.

Abigail wondered if it was too soon to fire someone she'd only just hired. Well, technically,
she
hadn't done the hiring. She'd long since ceded that job to her executive director, Ellen Tsao. Didn't Abigail have enough to oversee as it was, with her catering business, books, and media appearances? And now the line of bed and bath linens soon to be launched in twelve hundred Tag superstores nationwide—the next step in a well-orchestrated campaign that would make Abigail Armstrong a household name. A light chill, part anxiety and part delicious expectation, rippled through her at the thought.

“I was going to ask if you wanted my omelet, but I can see you'd rather sink your teeth into something more substantial,” observed Kent. She turned to find her husband regarding her with a wryly arched brow over the top of his newspaper. “How about another cup of coffee instead?” He put down the newspaper and got up to fetch the pot.

“Just what I need.” She was already so wired, she could have run a marathon. “Sorry if I'm a little on edge,” she apologized as he filled her mug. Kent shrugged, as if to say,
What else is new?
“I have a meeting with the Tag executives later today. They want to talk about a marketing campaign, and I don't even have a final ship date yet.”

There had been one problem after another at the factory in Mexico, and now they were seriously behind schedule. Her fault—she'd insisted on maintaining full control and ensuring top revenue by taking on the manufacturing herself. She should have anticipated the difficulties in dealing with a Third World country. Now, as a result of the delays, she'd had to ask her foreman, Señor Perez, to step up production, even if it meant hiring extra people and having everyone work double shifts. Even then, if they were able to get the first shipment out on time, it would be by the skin of their teeth.

“Relax; it'll be fine,” Kent assured her.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I know you. You always deliver. Either that, or you'll die trying,” he said with a smile. Something in his tone made her wonder if he'd meant it as a compliment.

“I'd rather not put it to the test. I'm already half dead as it is.” It wasn't just a figure of speech: She hadn't slept more than a few hours last night, and for the past four days she'd been subsisting on diet sodas and protein bars. She noticed that Kent was dressed in his civvies: faded jeans and his favorite Irish fisherman's sweater. “You taking the day off?” she asked.

Kent thought nothing of canceling his appointments for the day if there was a school event of Phoebe's to attend or if one of his pet charities required his presence. It was the reason he'd chosen to join a medical practice here in Stone Harbor rather than remain on staff at Columbia-Presbyterian. While Abigail thrived on pressure, Kent found it soul-destroying.

He nodded, helping himself to a banana from the fruit bowl. “There's some stuff I need to do around here.” She sensed that he wasn't being entirely forthcoming, but she didn't press him.

She was distracted by the sight of her seventeen-year-old daughter hunched over the kitchen table—an old workbench out of a turn-of-the-century woolen mill, which Abigail had lovingly refurbished with her own hands—pushing bits of scrambled eggs around her plate with her fork in an attempt to disguise the fact that she wasn't eating.

“Something wrong with your food?” Abigail asked pointedly.

“No.” Phoebe kept her gaze lowered.

“Then why aren't you eating?”

“I'm not hungry.”

“That's because you don't eat. Look at you, you're wasting away.”

“I eat,” Phoebe protested weakly.

“Good. Then you won't have a problem finishing what's on your plate.”

Phoebe shot her a resentful look and went from rearranging her eggs to tearing up bits of toast and feeding them to their English sheepdog, Brewster, parked in his usual station underneath her chair. Was it a coincidence that while Phoebe wasted away, their dog seemed to grow fatter?

A sliver of worry worked its way in. Did her daughter have an eating disorder? Or was it just the anxiety surrounding college applications? Phoebe had applied for early admission to Princeton, her father's alma mater—a long shot despite the fact that her grades were good, with the competition being so much tougher than in Kent's day—and she'd been on edge, waiting to hear back. Which gave way to another discomforting thought: Phoebe would be leaving home in less than a year. Hard to imagine, looking at her now. In her baggy sweatshirt and cargo pants that sagged down around her slender hips, her black curls cropped in a pixie cut that accentuated her cheekbones and enormous brown eyes, she looked more like a poster girl for Save the Children than someone college-bound.

Abigail was opening her mouth to suggest they make a date to go clothes shopping in the city later this week, maybe get an early dinner afterward—she'd rearrange her schedule if need be—when another call came in, this one from Rebecca Bonsignore, the producer for her
A.M. America
segment. By the time Abigail got off the phone, any thought of spending a leisurely afternoon with her daughter had vanished along with the coffee she was draining from her mug.

She sat down at the table. Kent had left the front section of the
Times
neatly folded at her place, knowing she seldom had time to do more than scan the headlines. “Nothing for me,” she said to the housekeeper in response to the inquiring look Veronique gave her as she delivered Kent's omelet to the table. Abigail was too wound up to eat.

Veronique frowned disapprovingly. She had old-fashioned ideas about what constituted a nutritious breakfast, and she was certain that one consisting solely of caffeine didn't qualify. A trim, fine-featured Haitian woman with skin the color of the third cup of coffee into which Abigail was now pouring a generous dollop of milk, Veronique had old-fashioned ideas about a lot of things, such as proper work attire. Today she was as stylishly dressed, in a wraparound print dress and low-heeled pumps, as if headed for a job in an office. Abigail wished all her employees took as much pride in their appearance.

A front-page headline caught her eye. “I see they buried the son of a bitch,” she remarked.

Her husband looked up from the English muffin he was buttering. “Who?”

“Gordon DeVries.”

Kent shook his head. “Sad business, that.”

“You should save your sympathy for the Vertex shareholders,” she replied irritably. “I'm sure plenty of those folks thought he got off easy, taking his own life.”

Kent cast a sharp glance at her. “I was thinking of his family. I saw his wife on the news the other day. She looked as shell-shocked as if she'd just come out of a battle zone.”

“Widow,” Abigail corrected. She felt a moment's knee-jerk sympathy for the former Lila Meriwhether, whom she hadn't seen or spoken to in twenty-five years. But it was quickly consumed by the bitterness that had been smoldering inside her like banked coals for as many years.

“You ought to drop her a line,” he said. “Didn't you two used to be friendly?”

“A million years ago. She probably wouldn't even remember me.”

Abigail had been vague with Kent about that whole period in her life. All he knew was that she'd grown up on the Meriwhether estate, where her mother had been employed as a housekeeper. She'd told him little about Vaughn and Lila, leaving the impression that they'd moved in a separate sphere from hers. As for the reason her mother had been let go, she'd chalked it up to the fact that Rosalie had been ill, though in truth she hadn't been diagnosed with cancer until months later. Abigail had told no one, not even Kent, that it was because her mother had been sleeping with Mr. Meriwhether. It would have reflected badly on Rosalie. Who would believe that she'd been motivated not by lust but by the self-sacrificing, if extremely misguided, desire to hold the family together by preventing Mr. Meriwhether from straying outside the home?

When her mother had died a year later, officially of natural causes, Abigail had known that she'd really died of a broken heart.

The Meriwhethers, whom Rosalie had considered her true family, had cut her off without so much as a phone call. The only one who had cared enough to reach out to them was Vaughn. Eight weeks after arriving in Pine Bluff, Abigail received a letter from him in which he wrote to say how shocked and saddened he was by her and her mother's abrupt departure. He would have gotten in touch sooner, he said, but it had taken him a while to track down her address. He hoped she was well and that they would see each other again one day. Sadly, that day had never come, though they'd kept up a correspondence over the next few years. They wrote about mundane stuff mostly, never any reference to what had happened that night out at the quarry, but those letters had been her lifeline, the only thing that had kept her from utter despair during that bleak period of her life.