It was a bit of a gamble-I had no idea what Catherine would say if the housekeeper called my bluff-so I only paused briefly before adding, “I’ll be honest with you: Catherine would not tell me what she was doing at Larchmont. But she says that when her grandfather can’t sleep, he goes over there, that he has a key, and she sometimes goes with him-they like the privacy at Larchmont Hall.”
“A key to someone else’s house? I never heard such a ridiculous suggestion.” She sounded fierce, but her eyes were moving uneasily between me and the house.
I pulled out my cell phone. “I agree it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what Catherine told me. Let’s call her to check on that. All I really want to know was if Mr. Bayard did go to Larchmont, if he did see Mr. Whitby. I’m trying to find the person who last saw him alive.”
Ruth looked again from me to the house. Hers wasn’t really an indecisive nature: after a moment’s further hesitation, she ordered me to come with her. I followed her through the side door to an areaway where people left coats and muddy boots. Beyond that, another door opened onto the kitchen, where the two deliverymen were drinking coffee and laughing with someone out of my field of sight. On our right, I could see the food cartons stacked in a pantry.
Ruth whisked me past a back staircase, whose narrow pine steps presaged perilous journeys for anyone carrying laundry or logs or whatever had to be hauled up and down. We passed through a swinging door into the body of the house, where the hall immediately widened. Something dark and highly polished, with thick blue runners down the middle, replaced the pine flooring. Our feet whispered in the blue pile.
Ruth moved so fast that I almost had to trot to keep up with her, so I got only a blurry sense of a dining room with a vast table loaded with silver, followed by a series of doors to smaller rooms, and pale walls hung with art of the kind people like me see only in museums.
When we reached the east end of the hall, Ruth opened the door into a small anteroom and commanded me to remain there. She continued down a right turn in the hall, heading to the front of the house.
The little room was primly furnished, with a couple of hard chairs standing in front of an empty grate. Mullioned windows gave a view of the back of the property. A series of gardens stair-stepped down to a small stream, beyond which lay New Solway’s communal wood. I stared out the window at the bare trees.
A couple of deer stepped out of the woods into the gardens. A Border collie raced out to drive them back into the woods. A man appeared, whistling the collie to his side. The two disappeared toward the outbuildings.
With the live figures gone from the landscape, I turned away, looking for something to read or do as the minutes ticked past. The room held that sense of despair you feel in any waiting area. No one worked or lived here, they only waited for someone to make decisions about them. Like at the doctor.
I abruptly went down the hall in the direction Ruth had taken. This took me to the main entryway, where an ornately carved staircase rose from a marble floor. Life-sized portraits of bygone Bayards were hung on the walls.
I prefered Marcus Whitby’s simple staircase with its poster of Kylie Ballantine’s “Ballet Noir,” but I backed up to get a better look at a stern woman in mauve silk, wondering if she was the Mrs. Edwards Bayard who had gone to the opening of Larchmont Hall in 1903; I could see a resemblance to young Catherine and to Calvin Bayard in the narrow planes of her face. Not the great beauty Geraldine Graham’s mother had been.
I heard Ruth’s voice above me and slid around behind the stairwell where the balustrade formed an alcove. “All you have to tell her is that he was asleep and in bed. But you know if this happens again, I will have to talk to Mrs. Renee about it.”
A second woman mumbled something inaudible. I hurried back down the hall to the anteroom, the thick carpeting muffling my steps. I managed to be standing at the window, gazing outside with supreme indifference, when Ruth reappeared. The mumbler was a woman in her thirties, with a bony, anxious face. Like Ruth, she wore jeans, not a uniform, and had on a heavy gray cardigan over a faded T-shirt.
“This is Theresa Jakes.” Ruth fished my card out of her blazer pocket and did a creditable job in pronouncing my name. “Mr. Bayard has been ill and Theresa is helping Mrs. Bayard nurse him.”
Theresa’s hands were red from much scrubbing. She tucked them nunlike into the sleeves of her cardigan and looked at me nervously.
I repeated my little speech. “Did you take a phone call from Marcus Whitby? Did you try to arrange for Mr. Bayard to see him?”
Theresa shook her head. “I know better than to let journalists come here. It’s Mrs. Bayard’s strictest order. Anyone who wants an interview has to talk to her in town. No one can bother Mr. Bayard here at home.” “Could he have taken the call himself?” I asked.
Theresa looked helplessly at Ruth Lantner. “There is a phone in his room, but we’ve turned off the ringer so it won’t bother him. Unless heI guess I could check it.”
“But he did go out Sunday and Monday night, right?” I said, plowing forward despite my growing uncertainty. “Was it you who brought him home?”
“He wasn’t out,” Theresa said. “He was sleeping, sleeping heavily.” “You were with him all night?” I asked.
“He doesn’t need someone in the room with him,” Theresa said. “He doesn’t have that kind of illness. But if he leaves, an alarm goes off over my bed so that I can make sure he’s all right.”
“And that alarm never sounded?” I persisted, hoping to get some inkling about what she’d done that Ruth was going to report the next time it happened-since whatever it was explained why I’d been admitted to the house. “It’s funny, because young Catherine emphasized that she’d used his key to get into Larchmont Hall.”
Theresa made a little dismayed face at Ruth, who shook her head at the other woman and said, “Catherine wasn’t here Monday night. Mr. Bayard did not leave the house on Monday. Or on Sunday. Whatever scheme you have in mind-“
“If something hadn’t happened here, you wouldn’t have let me into the house at all,” I cut in ruthlessly. “I have the names of everyone who lives here; one of them will talk to me and tell me the truth.”
“The men can tell you nothing that I don’t already know,” Ruth said with finality. “Theresa, you go back upstairs to Mr. Calvin so Tyrone can get on with the vacuuming.”
Theresa put her chapped red hands into her pockets and scuttled down
the hall toward the main staircase. I couldn’t think of any way to press my point. If Ruth had seen Whitby, or any strangers, Sunday night she wasn’t going to tell me. If Calvin Bayard had left the house, despite whatever illness he had, she wasn’t going to tell me that, either.
I might be able to find a way to talk to the men working with the hay, but it wouldn’t happen today under Ruth’s stern eye. Theresa looked as though she’d be more likely to crack, but it would take me some time to find a way to talk to her alone.
I wryly conceded the field to Ruth, shaking her hand, thanking her for her help. I started down the hall toward the front door, but Ruth called to me to follow her back the way we’d come.
I smiled blandly. “My car is right outside the main entrance. It’s ridiculous for me to use the side door.”
Before she could order me out of the front hall, Calvin Bayard suddenly lurched around the edge of the great staircase and headed toward us, calling “Renee! Renee!”
Theresa walked next to him, a chapped hand on his arm. “Renee isn’t here, Mr. Bayard. She’s at work right now.” With her patient, she was a different person: assured, gentle, her anxiety gone.