When I finally came to at three that afternoon, she was still sleeping, her narrow face gray and puffy. I stumbled to my feet and into my well-worn clothes, wishing the woman officer had brought something clean in my size last night.
I roused Catherine to tell her I was leaving to find food, but would be back within an hour. She blinked at me dopily and went back to sleep. When I returned with a bag of groceries and a hot pizza, I was stunned to find Darraugh Graham waiting for me. He had hired a small plane to
collect his mother, he said, and he planned to fly Catherine and me down to Chicago with him. I explained that I already had two cars at the cottage, but he told me he’d send up a team later in the week to drive them back.
“Mother told me what you did the last twenty-four hours. For her, for the boy, for Catherine. It’s enough for one week. I’m going to collect Mother at the hospital now; I’ll swing back for you and Catherine. My pilot is instrument rated, but it’s a small plane, it’s better to fly while we still have light.”
I said I needed to check with the local lawyer to make sure everything was settled with the local police, but Darraugh had taken care of that, too. I think I was twelve the last time anyone took care of things for me. I thanked him shakily and went down the hall to rouse Catherine.
On the flight south, we sat in a stupor for most of the journey. At the little airport on the lakefront where we landed, Darraugh had a car waiting. He sent his driver out to New Solway with his mother and escorted Catherine and me into the city in a cab. When he directed the cab to the Banks Street apartment, Catherine started sobbing again: she couldn’t see her grandmother, she wouldn’t see her father, not now, not after seeing Benji die and listening to everyone call him a terrorist. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I said she could come home with me.
CHAPTER 56
At my apartment, Darraugh paid off the taxi and walked us to the door, saying he wanted to talk to me.
“That’s good, because I want to talk to you, too,” I said. “I have to explain to my neighbor what I’ve been doing and get Catherine settled in. Do you want to meet tomorrow?”
“Tonight. I need to go to Washington tomorrow. I’ll use your phone while you do what you have to do.”
Mr. Contreras and the dogs boiled out of his apartment just then. Darraugh withstood the onslaught remarkably well. He and Mr. Contreras had met once or twice, but they had about as much in common as a fish and a giraffe-they were both animals, but that was as far as it went. Catherine, on the other hand, took to Mr. Contreras at once. Peppy helped, but Mr. Contreras’s direct, unpretentious personality reassured her as little else had these last few days.
My neighbor came upstairs with me to help set up a portable bed in my dining room for Catherine-and to hear the blow-by-blow details of our adventure. I had called him from Eagle River, but he wanted to know everything, from the moment Geraldine and I left Chicago, until we got on the plane to return this afternoon.
Darraugh sat in my living room with the phone while I showed
Catherine how to work the locks and where things like toilets and tea were. I wondered how long she’d be comfortable staying in four rooms, with no housekeeper to get the dust out of the corners or make sure she had the Bulgarian yogurt and particular tofu she required.
While I showed her around, Mr. Contreras had been poking in my refrigerator and cupboards. “You don’t have no food in here, doll. You been living on the fly, like I keep telling you is bad for your health. You going out with Mr. Graham? I’ll make spaghetti for this young lady.”
“No meatballs; she’s a vegetarian,” I said.
“Tomato sauce. I make my own tomato sauce and your own ma couldn’t do a better job, that’s a fact,” Mr. Contreras assured Catherine.
She smiled shyly, apparently not bothered by the reference to the mother who’d died when she was one. The old man took Catherine and the dogs downstairs. I changed out of my rank clothes and washed, putting on wool crepe trousers and a rose silk shirt. Whatever Darraugh had to say to me, I wanted to feel alert and attractive.
When I joined Darraugh in the living room, he wrapped up a complicated conversation with Caroline, his personal assistant. I offered him a drink, but he wanted to go out; he didn’t want Mr. Contreras or Catherine coming in on us midconversation.
We picked up a cab on Belmont and rode down to the Trefoil Hotel on the Gold Coast. Darraugh got us one of the little tables in the corner that overlooks Lake Michigan, ordered a dry martini for himself, Black Label for me, sent the waiter about his business.
He made a job out of his lemon peel, rubbing it around the rim of his glass, twisting it until it broke apart. I wasn’t about to try to help him. “Larchmont is a terrible house-sucks the life out of everyone who comes near it,” he said, tearing the peel into smaller pieces. “I should have known when Mother told me she was seeing lights-should have known disaster would follow. You did well. Under the circumstances, very well. No one else could have been as effective with my mother.”
“She’s a remarkable woman. It’s a pity she let your grandmother dominate her life.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Laura Taverner Drummond was a
dreadful person. She did terrible damage to everyone around her. When my father died-she made my life hell. I didn’t talk to her for ten years, until I married and my wife insisted we make some kind of effort at reconciliation. And then my grandmother tried to belittle Elise in the eyes of everyone out in that wasps’ nest of a village. Elise was the gentlest person who ever lived, and Laura-but that’s neither here nor there.”
He swallowed half the martini, then spoke rapidly, not looking at me. “I found my father’s body. I know Mother told you that. She doesn’t know I found his suicide note.”
I put my glass down so fast that whisky slopped over the rim.
“It was meant for her, for Mother. If he’d known I was going to find his body, he would never have killed himself as he did, or where he did. Exeter sent us home in a hurry because three of the boys came down with polio. I didn’t bother to telegraph them. I was used to coming home alone and I knew Mother was in Washington. With Calvin.
“There’s a study on the first floor, where my father would read, watch television. I went to look for him when I arrived, hoping he was in. And found him hanging over the desk. It was-” He covered his face with his hands. The image was vivid in his head even fortyfive years later.
“I cut him down, I tried to give him artificial respiration-they taught us that at summer camp or someplace. All I could think was that Grandmother must not know. She hated my father using the study: it was a man’s room, she said, built by her husband for doing man’s work, so she would never enter it, once my father took it over. I covered his face with my coat. And then I saw the note.” He took his wallet from his breast pocket and removed a much-creased sheet of paper. A schoolboy’s round hand covered the page.
Did you begrudge me a little love, Geraldine? I never held your loves against you, but you’ve used mine to help your own lover. I know Olin and Calvin have always been at odds. I know Olin believes things that no right-minded person can support, but love’s a malady without a cure, and I loved Olin. Now that you’ve seen us together, and told Calvin, Olin plans to tell the world that I tried to seduce him, that I shocked him with my homosexual declarations.
The truth is-no one knows the truth. Olin and I recognized each other the first time we met. We fell in love. We snatched odd meetings in New York or Washington. And now he plans to betray me to the world to save his own skin-no, not even that, to gain advantage over Calvin.