Dark Rooms (35 page)

I look down at my crossed legs, at my ballet flats, the sole of the left coming off, which I know I'll Super-Glue before buying another pair. I uncross my legs, press both feet to the floor.

“Oh, what the hell, right?” Mrs. Amory says, tapping her cigarette on the side of the ashtray, trying to lighten up. “An ashtray's an ashtray. So, dear, how's your father doing?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“I heard the funniest rumor about him the other day.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“You'll laugh when I tell you.”

“I like laughing,” I say, though I have a feeling I won't be.

“A friend of mine told me that a friend of hers saw him slinging cocktails at the downtown Marriott. Can you imagine? I told my friend that her friend should get her eyes examined.”

Keeping my gaze steady, on hers, I say, “Yeah, she really should. Marriotts and Holiday Inns aren't at all alike.”

A little inhalation of shock. “But I thought he was on sabbatical?”

“He is.”

“But don't the teachers at Chandler usually travel or take graduate school courses during their time away?”

“It's an unpaid sabbatical, so . . .” I trail off.

“Oh, I see,” she says, her voice going small and soft with sympathy. “You know, it's a crime how poorly paid teachers are in this country. James and I were talking about it just the other night. Such an important profession yet so little appreciated. Horrible.”

I can picture her and Mr. Amory, never having had to work a day in their lives, sitting in their dining room, dinner over, sharing a nice bottle of wine, glorying in pity for those less fortunate. I let my eyes drop from hers, but from behind my lashes I'm watching. Resentment blooms as I take in the washed-out, aristocratic features: the long nose, the fragile neck, the skin so white it's nearly blue. “So,” I say, shifting in my chair, “Mr. Amory must really hate to travel at night. I mean, if he'd rather stay in a hotel than just take the train back. The trip's only two hours.”

Mrs. Amory nods unhappily, stubs out her cigarette.

“Does he spend a lot of nights in the city?”

“A few.”

“A few a year? A month? A week?”

She answers in a voice so low I can't quite make it out.

“What was that?” I say, leaning in, cupping my ear.

Slightly louder, “It varies.”

After that she seems to turn inward. The silence between us grows.

“When did you know?” I finally say.

“Know?”

“That Nica was Mr. Amory's daughter.”

She half laughs. “You want a date? Okay. It was the day Jamie brought his new girlfriend home from school to meet his parents. That was the middle of his sophomore year—winter vacation, I think—so almost three years ago.”

“How? What made it so obvious to you? Nica didn't look like Mr. Amory.”

Mrs. Amory drains her coffee mug, then stands. She walks out of the kitchen, weaving a little. When she comes back, it's with a photograph of Mr. Amory. I study it. He looks older than Jamie, naturally, his blond hair shot through with gray, and his body a little thicker. But the features are identical. There's no resemblance to Nica that I can pick up on, though. I shake my head at Mrs. Amory, try to hand her the photo.

“Look,” she says, pushing it back at me.

“I just did.”

“No. Look again. Look carefully.”

I look again and I look carefully. But whatever it is I'm supposed to be seeing, I don't. I'm about to say so when, suddenly, I do. “The tiny gold rectangle,” I say. “He has it in his eye, too. I never noticed before because he wears glasses.”

“Except in pictures. Too vain for that.” She takes the photo from me. “The rectangle is a flaw in the iris. Very rare. So, of course, as soon as I saw it I knew Nica was his. I didn't say anything, though. I was waiting for him to. I suspected he'd had an affair with someone at the school during our engagement. Early on in our marriage, too. Your mother, I assumed, since she was so awfully good-looking.”

“Why didn't you break off the engagement if you thought he was running around?”

She gives me a look, like I've asked a dumb question. Which, I suppose, I have. Because she was in love with him, obviously.

“I wanted him to admit that he'd been unfaithful,” she says. “But he held out. Gritted his teeth and held out for more than two years.”

“He must have been afraid of hurting you.”

“More like afraid of hurting himself. We have a prenuptial agreement. If he gives me cause, he gets nothing in the divorce.”

“But ultimately he was willing to, right? Hurt himself?”

She snorts. “That's how he tried to pass it off. Came to me after he walked in on your sister and Jamie, told me he”—changing her tone, making it masculine and blowhardy—“
had to say something
. Acted like he was being honorable and self-sacrificing when, in reality, he was just being prissy. Incest was fine with him as long as he didn't have to see it.”

I think how alike she and Mom sound on this subject. I can't imagine, though, that she'll appreciate the comparison, so instead of making it, I say, “I know he only told Nica the truth at the time. Did he tell Jamie later?”

“Please. He didn't have the guts for that. Said he was afraid of Jamie thinking less of him. Didn't care what I thought, I guess.” Her voice, which has been hard until now, cracks. “I don't know,” she says. “I just don't know.” She takes a deep breath as her eyes start to fill.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm . . . yes. I will be.” Mrs. Amory feeds herself a cigarette, picks up the pack of matches. She tries to tear one off the cardboard strip but her fingers are trembling too badly.

I take the matches from her. By the time I strike one, though, she's already dropped her head in her arms. “Do you want me to pour you another cup of coffee?” I ask.

She rounds her back. Sobs rack her body.

“Forget the coffee,” I say, standing. “What you need is a drink. Do you have anything? Whiskey?”

She lifts her blotchy face to me, lips parted like she's baffled, like the existence of whiskey and its possible presence in her house is a
fact she can't quite wrap her head around. “I . . . I'm not positive but I think we might. Check the cabinet above the stove. I think I remember James putting a bottle there a while ago. I think.”

I open the cabinet. Sure enough, there's a half full bottle of Redbreast sitting there. It's wet on the outside where she must have run it under the tap earlier. A sticky ring has formed underneath it. There are no clean glasses, so I take her coffee mug, pour a healthy slug into it, then carry it back to her.

She sips it, squeezing her eyes shut, forgetting to shudder from the burn as it goes down her throat. Smiling weakly at me, she says, “Why don't you have one, too? My husband and I always let Jamie have a glass of wine at dinner.”

“Oh, Mrs. Amory, I can't.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why can't you?”

“It would make my mom too happy. She thinks I'm a Goody Two-shoes, no fun at all. Would love it if I were wilder. Basically would love it if I were more like her. No way am I giving her the satisfaction.”

Mrs. Amory giggles. A naughty little girl. She likes me better now, I can tell, because of the whiskey and the disloyalty to my mother. She raises her mug. “To your health, Grace.”

I raise an imaginary mug back. “And to yours.”

For a while we're quiet. She smokes, mutters to herself occasionally. I gaze out the window, watch the last of the color bleed from the day, turn over what I've just heard in my mind. So, Mr. Amory would rather admit to Mrs. Amory that he'd not only cheated on her but fathered a child with another woman, risk her leaving and taking her money with her, than admit to his son personal frailty. As motives for murder go, it's not half bad. Technically Mrs. Amory is still under suspicion, too, but only technically. Nothing she's said so far tells me she's definitively not involved. I just don't believe she is. She's too unguarded, too openly bitter, too fixated on smaller offenses, to be bearing that compromised a conscience.

I decide my next move should be to start hammering away at Mr. Amory's alibi, see if it cracks. But before I can open my mouth, Mrs. Amory speaks, addressing the mug in her hand rather than me. “Who told you about your sister?”

“My mom.”

“When she did, were you”—pausing, looking up—“were you glad?”

“Yeah, I was,” I say truthfully. “I mean, I was sad, too. For my dad, mostly. And for Nica. And, of course, I was angry—still am angry—with my mom. But I appreciated her finally being honest with me. It's my family, so I deserve to know.”

“That why I wanted to tell Jamie. I felt he deserved to know. That's even the word I used when I was talking to James about it.”

Trying to hide my excitement, “Did Mr. Amory agree?”

“Hardly. He thought telling Nica was enough, that she'd ended things with Jamie, crisis over. But, no, crisis not over. Afterward Jamie was so down in the dumps. His grades were suffering, his squash was suffering. He drove home from school every weekend, wouldn't come out of his room. Didn't eat, didn't sleep. Do you know how painful it was for me to watch him pining away for a girl it was impossible for him to be with? All I could think was that if he understood who she really was to him, he'd snap out of it.”

Stay calm,
I tell myself.
Don't react. Whatever she says, it's nothing you haven't heard before
.

“And I wasn't only worried that if this went on much longer he'd destroy his chances to get into Princeton. I was also worried that if this went on much longer he'd start using again. Recovering heroin addicts are three times more likely to relapse if they're exposed to a high-stress situation, you know.”

It takes every bit of self-control I possess not to show the shock I'm feeling. Recovering
heroin
addicts? Wow. Mom was right. Jamie's problem was major. Heroin isn't some creampuff drug. It's a serious
business one. The kind of drug under whose influence you might do all sorts of things. Out-of-character things. Violent things. “Has he gotten treatment?” I ask.

“We sent him to rehab twice. First to an expensive place in Utah, then to an even more expensive place in California.” She hesitates. “The last time he went, though, was over three years ago. And he never injected the heroin, just snorted it. And as far as I can tell, apart from marijuana, he's been clean since, so maybe I worked myself up over nothing. But, then again . . .” Her voice fades as she continues the argument, one she's clearly had with herself a million times already, in her head.

After a bit she shuts her eyes. Then she picks up the mug, messily gulps down the rest of the shot, wiping the excess on the back of her hand. I consider offering her another but that would imply she's capable of drinking more than one. I force myself to sit still, stay quiet.

“Anyway,” she says, with a sigh, “I told him.”

“When?”

“The night Nica died.”

As casually as I'm able, “After he came back from the tournament in Westerly, right?”

Her face darkens with annoyance. “He got creamed by some little Chinese kid who shouldn't have been able to hold his racket bag. Do you know what that kind of early exit does to your ranking?” She shakes her head at the memory like she's trying to shake it off. Then she says, “James had already gone to bed. We'd had words because, well, because he'd been traveling to New York quite a lot, staying over. He said he was working on a deal with a couple of venture capitalists who specialized in something or other—information technology, I think it was. I don't know. Maybe that's what he was doing. But I felt he'd been away from home too much. And I asked—demanded, really—that he not go in that weekend. I wanted him to spend it with me. He got mad. Took one of my Ambien. Went upstairs.”

So Mr. Amory's alibi holds up. Could be Jamie's does too. Could be Jamie just has a different one than I thought—at home in Avon instead of in a hotel in Westerly. “You didn't go upstairs with Mr. Amory?”

“No, I stayed in the kitchen, drinking coffee until Jamie walked through the door, which I wasn't expecting him to do. I supposed he'd be in Westerly until Sunday's final. But there he was. He sat down in the seat you're sitting in now, as glum as glum could be. And that's when I told him. No leading up to it, no preparing him. I just—wham—let him have it.”

I can imagine the scene: Mrs. Amory half in the bag after a couple mugs of her eighty-proof coffee, furious with her husband for wanting to escape her, furious with herself for loving him too much to allow him to. Enter Jamie, equally depressed and heartbroken, hangdog, as well, from a humiliating loss. The sight must have enraged her, reminded her of her own situation, her own weaknesses, and she just blew her top completely. “How did he take it?” I ask.

Her laugh is bleak. “Not well, surprise, surprise.”

“How not well?”

“He threw that hutch over there.”

I turn to where she's pointing. “It doesn't look damaged.”

“I was able to get it repaired. Not the wineglasses inside, though.”

“What happened to them?”

“Smashed, every single one. Little shards of glass went flying and embedded themselves in my leg. I was scared of the questions they might ask at the hospital so I tweezed them out myself. Didn't do a very good job of it, I'm afraid.” She twitches back the skirt of her robe and holds up her leg. I can see small shiny-looking pink puckers, very faint, in the skin of her calf and ankle.

“What did Jamie do next?”

“He stormed out of the room. A minute later, he stormed out of the house.”

There's opportunity, I think. “He didn't say anything?”