Finding Laura (17 page)

“Anne, I thought you were due at the Moretons’ this morning,” Amelia said as she came into the den.

“They canceled.” Anne shrugged, her face taking on a sulky expression that made her look rather like a thwarted teenager.

“Then why don’t you take advantage of the time to begin going through your clothes? We’ll be into cold weather sooner than you think.”

“Do we
have
to go through this twice a year?” Anne demanded, rolling her eyes. “In the spring we pack away winter clothes, and in the fall we pack away summer things. My closet’s big enough for both, so I don’t see—”

“You don’t have to see, Anne. You only have to accept that things are done a certain way in this house.”

“This house is full of rituals, Laura, most of them Amelia’s,”
Daniel had said. It appeared that this seasonal sorting of clothing was one of those rituals. Laura listened as she sketched quickly, trying to capture Anne’s discontented face before she left the room. As she was obviously about to do.

On her feet now, Anne said, “Things have always been done a
certain way
in this house and this family, and I’m sick and tired of it. It’s stifling! And it’s dangerous, Amelia. You think I don’t know that Peter died because of the
certain way
this family conducts business?”

“Anne.”
Amelia’s voice was icy. “Peter died because he was a married man having a sordid affair. And that affair
had nothing to do with business.” She held her granddaughter’s gaze for a long minute, then went to the chair where she had earlier posed for Laura and sat down. “And now, if you don’t mind …”

Without even glancing toward Laura, a burning flush coloring her high cheekbones, Anne turned and stalked from the room.

Amelia sighed and smiled a bit tiredly at Laura. “I’m sorry you had to see that little scene. I try to make allowances for the child—Josie told you about what happened to her mother?”

Laura nodded. “Yes. A terrible thing.”

“She was already an adult when it happened, but it was still a tremendous shock, of course. I try to remember that. But she’s difficult. Very rebellious, even now—she just turned thirty-one, though she certainly doesn’t act it. And everything is always my fault, without question.”

“She does seem very angry,” Laura ventured, abandoning the hasty sketch of Anne and returning to the one of Amelia she’d been working on earlier.

“She didn’t say anything terrible to you, did she, child?” Amelia was anxious.

“No, nothing like that.”
He had plans
. What had Anne meant? And why was she so convinced that Peter had died because of the way the family conducted business?

“Good, that’s good. She often speaks without thinking, you see. Take that remark about Peter and the family business; she knows very well that Peter was never involved in the family business. But I suppose it’s simply difficult for her to accept that his own immoral behavior got him killed.” Amelia nodded sadly as though to herself. “They were close, you see.”

But she didn’t say “the family business,” Amelia. She said “the way this family conducts business.” And I think that’s a different thing entirely
.

But Laura merely nodded and focused her gaze on the
sketch, unwilling to question Amelia on a point that seemed elusive even to herself. But even as her fingers worked skillfully, her mind was fixed elsewhere. Anne was probably a woman damaged by the tragedy of her father accidentally killing her mother; who wouldn’t be? But though that might well explain her sulky and discontented personality, it didn’t really explain, Laura thought, her pointed remarks about the “certain way” the Kilbourne family conducted business.

The question was, did Anne know something about Peter’s murder, or was she merely speculating? And, either way, how could a seeming crime of passion have anything to do with business?

Laura looked beyond the sketchpad at Amelia, finding the old lady sitting primly as usual, smiling faintly as usual, and couldn’t help wondering if her dismissal of Anne’s remarks had been as offhand as it had seemed. Was Amelia convinced Peter had died by the violent hand of a mistress? Or
was
there something odd in the way family business was conducted, something that might have resulted in his death?

Laura smiled. “Amelia, if you could lift your chin just a fraction—there. That’s perfect.” And she concentrated on
getting
those dark eyes just right.

A
S SEEMED TO
be her habit, Amelia left Laura shortly before twelve in order to “check on” lunch; Laura assumed it was another indication of the precision with which she ran this house, that she wanted to inspect preparations for lunch before the meal was placed before a guest. Then again, it seemed likely that she did the same thing even if a guest was not present, simply because she was a perfectionist.

That realization made Laura eye her sketch uneasily. Would this suit a perfectionist? Probably not. The only
positive note was that Amelia had not asked again to see the sketches, and Laura hoped she wouldn’t. It was going to be unnerving enough having her view the actual painting once she began working on that; these preliminary efforts, though improving, were not meant to be judged by a perfectionist.

Laura closed the sketchpad with a sigh, then looked up as she heard a few unhappy notes from a piano. The music room was just across the hall, she remembered, and she guessed that Kerry was getting in a bit of practice before lunch.

She left her sketchpad on the chair and went out into the hall, thinking only that the music sounded awfully despondent and that no one should be that alone. But she didn’t realize until she was a couple of steps into the music room that it wasn’t Kerry sitting on the padded bench of the baby grand and playing the sad notes.

It was—had to be—Madeline Kilbourne.

The wide, pale blue eyes she turned to Laura were red-rimmed and a bit puffy from crying, and also had that slightly vague look that came from some sedatives. But despite the drugs, she was perfectly dressed in an elegant black suit with pearls, and her attractively graying dark hair was flawless. So was her makeup.

“Oh, excuse me,” Laura murmured, not venturing from her place just inside the doorway and not at all prepared for this meeting. “I expected Kerry.”

“You’re Laura.” Madeline’s long, elegant fingers left the keys and drifted to her lap, and she tilted her head to one side as she considered the stranger. “Amelia wants you here.”

“Yes. I’m very sorry about your son,” Laura said uncomfortably.

Those dazed blue eyes filled with tears, and her voice shook. “He was my baby. Such a beautiful boy, so sweet-tempered,
so full of charm. He was like his father, you know. He was all I had left of John.”

Laura hadn’t meant to speak, but heard herself say, “You still have Daniel.”

Madeline frowned a little and seemed briefly confused. Then she shook her head. “No, he’s not at all like John. And he was never mine, not like Peter was. He never came in and sat on my bed in the evening to tell me about his day. But Peter did. He never told me all his secrets. But Peter did.”

Again, Laura heard herself speaking when she hadn’t intended to. “Did he tell you about the mirror, Mrs. Kilbourne?” Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to address this woman by her first name.

The question seemed to recall Madeline’s attention from some distant point, and she frowned again. “Mirror? That’s why you said he went to see you. Because of some mirror.”

“Yes. A mirror I bought here at the estate sale. He wanted to buy it back. Do you know why?”

“Peter wasn’t interested in mirrors. He wasn’t vain,” Madeline explained anxiously.

The last thing Laura wanted to do was to grill this dazed, grieving woman, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “He said the mirror was a family heirloom, Mrs. Kilbourne. A brass hand mirror. Do you recall it?”

“I don’t know anything about a mirror.” Madeline’s voice was dull now, but as she looked at Laura, her cloudy eyes cleared to become as sharp as a knife’s edge. “Did you kill my son?” she asked in the tone of someone who desperately needs an answer.

“No.” Laura cleared her throat. “No, Mrs. Kilbourne, I swear I didn’t. I had nothing to do with his death.”

Those urgent blue eyes remained fixed on Laura’s face for a moment, then tracked past her suddenly and widened. “Oh,” she said softly.

“Mother, you should be resting.”

Laura didn’t start at the sound of Daniel’s quiet voice, because she had been unconsciously braced for it. She felt him behind her. But she heard her breath catch when he touched her for the first time, one of his powerful hands on her shoulder as he gently guided her to one side a step so that he could pass her there at the doorway.

He didn’t look at Laura as he passed her, but went to his mother and took her arm, urging her to her feet. He didn’t appear to use force, but she rose immediately, looking up at him with a kind of entreaty.

“You should be resting,” he repeated as quietly as before.

“Yes. Yes, of course I should.” She looked at Laura, eyes cloudy again, and said with vague politeness, “You will excuse me?”

Not trusting her voice, Laura nodded.

Daniel led Madeline from the room, his gaze meeting Laura’s only once, fleetingly and unrevealingly.

Alone, Laura stood there for a moment before she realized how tense she was. She lifted her hands and stared at them, unaware until then that her fingers had been curled so tightly that her nails had dug crescent imprints deep into her palms. She rubbed her hands together slowly.

She felt ashamed of herself for having questioned Madeline, especially since the answers were useless to her. And she was afraid she had earned yet another black mark in Daniel’s book because of it.

Before she could do more than consider that unhappily, Laura was distracted when a gleam of sunlight found its way through the narrow opening of the draperies and reflected brightly off a wall mirror above a side table. The light was brief as the sun ducked back behind the gray clouds that had been present all day, but Laura hardly noticed that. She had only looked into this room before
and hadn’t seen the mirror; now, as always, she was drawn to it.

She wasn’t even aware of moving until she stood before the mirror. It was a big mirror, two feet by three feet, in a gilded frame, all details Laura noted only in passing. As always, she ignored her own reflection to study the room behind her, past her right shoulder. And as always, what she saw left her with a gnawing sense of disappointment, because whatever it was she looked for was not there.

“Damn,” she whispered.

M
ADELINE WAS NOT
present at lunch.
Neither was Daniel.

T
his is getting really interesting,” Dena said on Tuesday evening when she stopped by Laura’s apartment with her second progress report. “Not to say tragic.”

Laura couldn’t help wincing. “Don’t tell me. The mirror’s cursed?”

Dena sat down on Laura’s couch and made a slight gesture. “I wouldn’t go that far. Yet.” She opened her notebook. “Okay. As I told you before, in 1858, the mirror was purchased from the son of the silversmith who made it by a Faith Broderick, who later married the silversmith’s son. Ready for their story?”

Laura sat down in her chair. “Go ahead.”

“Bight. Stuart Kenley, the silversmith’s son, was born in 1833; Faith Broderick was born in 1836. They both lived in Philadelphia, but apparently had no contact with each other until she walked into his father’s shop after spotting the mirror in the window.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Yeah. Faith left a journal. It’s in some archives in
Philly, but a helpful librarian copied a few relevant pages and faxed them to me. According to Faith, it was love at first sight for both her and Stuart. She waxed fairly poetic about it, talking about twists of fate—that kind of stuff. I copied the pages for you, so you can read them yourself later.”

Laura nodded without comment.

“So we have a young couple in love,” Dena went on. “The kicker is, she’s already engaged, and in those days, engagements aren’t so easily broken. She doesn’t waste any time, however, in breaking it off. Not much comment in the journal about what must have been a terrible scandal—beyond Faith’s unhappiness at hurting a good man. Anyway, she and Stuart plan to marry just a few weeks after they meet. The day before the wedding, Faith receives a note from her former fiancé asking her to come to his home. Still feeling guilty about having dumped him, she does. And finds his body. He’s hanged himself, leaving another note placing the blame squarely on Faith’s shoulders.”

“What a prince,” Laura said.

“Yeah, I thought the same thing. He couldn’t have her, but he made damned sure she’d never forget him.” Dena shrugged. “On the other hand, maybe he was truly heartbroken and just wanted her to know. Anyway, all Faith says about it in her journal is that she’s sorry he could find nothing else to live for.”

“She married Stuart?”

“Very quietly the next day, though their church wedding was canceled. They left Philly almost immediately for Washington, D.C., where they were living when the Civil War began. Stuart joined the Union army and was killed in battle, at the age of thirty, in 1863. Five months later, in 1864, Faith died in childbirth at the age of twenty-eight. The child died with her.”

After a moment, Laura said, “I’d call that tragic. I mean, the whole thing.”

Dena nodded. “No kidding. The only positive thing in the whole story was the love Faith felt for Stuart—and he, apparently, felt for her. She said—well, you’ll read it for yourself. It’s really sweet.” She turned a page in her notebook, and added, “Okay, after Faith died, the mirror went to a sister, who apparently kept it until her own death more than thirty years later. The sister’s estate ended up being sold at auction, in New York City, around 1897 or 1898. I’m working now on running down the records of the auction.”

Laura accepted the folder Dena held out to her, but didn’t open it and read this part of the report for herself. Instead she said, “I’ll say it again—I’m impressed. No kidding, Dena, you’re doing great.”