Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (37 page)

She led me poolside, “I feel the need to be
outside. I hope you don’t mind,” she said, so I followed.

As Bev had said, the pool
was
teeny,
but it was also completely charming. It was a deep green, rather
than blue, and looked to be quite deep. A diving pool, then. Deeper
than allowable for modern day pools, but in the ninteen-fifties —
when it looked as though the house had been built — it wasn’t
unheard of to dig twelve-foot deep swimming pools. The small size,
the color and the proximity of a little palm grove gave the pool
area a grotto-like feeling. It looked like a relaxing spot to sit
and read a book or just contemplate life. Arianna, however, didn’t
look as though she was in a contemplative mood. In fact, in the
unforgiving light of the outside world, she looked drawn and
pale.

There was no small talk today. She cleared
her throat. In her current state, this looked like a calming
effort. Some sort of preparation. I could see that it was costing
her to stay glued. She didn’t waste time on preamble. “Ernest is...
Ernest is dead.”

This floored me. I’d been so convinced of my
theories, the possibility of them being wrong hadn’t actually
occurred to me. It just hadn’t fit. And, yet...

“How do you know?”

“A sheriff called me. Told me. And he
said... he said,” I could see her struggling for composure.
Winning. But it was training that got her there.
Breeding
they would have said in another era. “I have to go there.” Her
voice slipped to a whisper. “Identify him.”

“San Bernardino?” I asked.

She looked at me sharply. “How did you
know?”

I sighed. “Long story. Maybe it’s not for
right now. But it started with the note you showed me.
Arrowheart.”

“Yes, the note. I remembered that as well,”
her sentences were short, choppy. As though saying these things
aloud was causing her great effort. “Yesterday. I got a call. A
man. It was frightening and, when I think about it, he didn’t
really tell me anything, except he gave me an address. I was to be
there at one o’clock yesterday afternoon. At Camp Arrowheart. And
when I heard the name, I made the connection. I knew it had
something to do with Ernest.”

One o’clock, I figured, was probably about
the time I went stumbling off into the land of the lost. Which
meant that, whatever I saw hadn’t been staged for me at all. It was
Arianna that they’d intended to lure there as witness. I had just
once more blithely stumbled in. But wait, I thought: she had said
that Ernie was dead. They’d found the body. So what did that do to
my staged theory?

“So you went there, at one?”

She shook her head. “Well, I
drove
up
there, but then I got frightened. The driveway was in disrepair. So
I knew I’d have to walk in and since I didn’t know what — or who —
was up there, I just got scared. I... I sat in the car for a while,
and then I came home.” Her voice got very quiet and her head
dropped even lower. This was obviously what she’d been thinking
about when I arrived. “What if I
had
gone, Madeline? Maybe
that’s why I was supposed to go? Maybe I was meant to save
him.”

I thought of Ernie as I’d known him:
self-centered, manipulative, egocentric. Maybe he’d changed. Maybe,
to inspire the sadness I could now see in this woman — his
widow
, I corrected myself — I’d misjudged everything very
badly.

“You loved him very much, didn’t you?”

She pulled her head up to meet these words.
Her gaze met mine. And her expression was full, but I couldn’t read
it. “He was my husband.” Was all she said. It took me a while to
realize that this didn’t exactly answer my question.

* * *

I offered to drive Arianna down to San
Bernardino. It had occurred to me that she hadn’t been in Southern
California very long and probably didn’t know many people. Asking
someone you’d met at a society luncheon to accompany you to view
your husband’s last mortal remains just wouldn’t be... done. And
viewing your husband’s body seemed to me to be something you
wouldn’t want to do alone. Plus I found that, despite everything, I
was coming to like Arianna. Her quiet dignity combined with her
forthright manner and a very real intelligence had won me over. And
the P.I.? As icky as it had made me feel, I wasn’t so sure I
wouldn’t have done something similar in Arianna’s place. Anyway, I
wasn’t doing anything and, to be honest, I wanted to see how it all
played out.

Arianna was mostly quiet on the drive down
and I let her be. She would, I reasoned, have a lot on her mind. I
knew what I was thinking: how would I be if this was me? I knew she
was calmer than I would have been, but that was just part of who
she was. Calm. Cool. Somewhat distant. And you don’t hook up with a
guy anticipating that – some day — you’ll have to view his mortal
remains. It’s just never a part of any plan.

“After our meeting on Thursday,” she said
after we’d been driving for a while, her voice only slightly
punctuating the soft quiet inside the car. “I... well I had my
doubts about you.”

I risked a quick glance at her profile. She
looked as though she were choosing her words with care.

“I guess I kind of had my doubts about you,
too. Pretty natural, under the circumstances.”

“Yes, but I... I did something about
it.”

I shot her a questioning glance.

“I hired a private detective. To follow
you.”

“You did.” It was a statement. I hoped she
didn’t notice. “Why?”

“I didn’t fully believe what you told me:
that you hadn’t seen Ernie in all that time.”

“And you believe me now?”

She smiled then. It wasn’t a big smile, but
it touched her eyes. “To be honest, Madeline, I’m not completely
sure. Just at some point between then and now it ceased to matter
as much.”

I thought about this for a while. Oddly, and
at some level, it made sense.

“Well, for what it’s worth, Arianna, I
haven’t been in touch with him at all. I’ve had no reason to, for
one thing. We travel in different circles. Also, it ended badly
between us. Very badly.”

“Tell me.”

I thought about it for a minute, but it
didn’t seem appropriate: it would amount to dumping on her
now-apparently-deceased husband. Which seemed
so
not cool. I
told her as much. Fewer words, same sentiment. “I don’t think this
is the time, Arianna. Or the day. Sorry. But, trust me: there were
no lines of communication left open between us. Anyway,” I added. A
new thought. “It was all so very long ago. None of it matters
anymore.” That’s what I said to Arianna. But I was thinking about
Alex Montoya’s words and wondering if what I was saying now was
entirely true. Maybe it all mattered. Very much.

In any case, Arianna let it rest and we
traveled in silence for a while longer.

After a few miles more, I remembered: the
posh accent, the rumpled housedress, the ambling overfed gait. “So
how do you go about finding a private detective anyway? The
recommendation of friends? What?”

Arianna looked vaguely embarrassed at the
question. “No. I... couldn’t think of anyone to ask,” she wrinkled
her nose. “Too sordid. Too much fodder for the rumor mill. I loathe
that sort of thing. I looked in the phone book until I found one I
thought I could trust.”

“What happens then? I really have no idea. A
meeting: money exchanging hands.”

“Well, I don’t know if there’s a usual way.
I never felt the need for one before just a few days ago. But I
hired her on the telephone and paid her the same way; by credit
card.” Funny, I would never have thought that PIs were hired on the
phone and paid that way as well. It made it sound like phone
sex.

“Didn’t you think that was chancy? I mean,
how did you know you could depend on her?”

Arianna shrugged. “It was a chancy idea, I
guess. And it wasn’t like it was a
lot
of money. Just three
hundred dollars for the day.”

Three
hundred? Rand had told me five.
So the extra two-fifty had been practically another whole day for
her. And then Arianna had told me about everything voluntarily. I
seethed for about forty-five seconds, then gave it up. That PI
looked hungry. That is, she looked like she was telling the truth
when she said rich clients didn’t fall into her hands every day.
She could probably use the money. I let it go with a sigh.

“I paid the private investigator with one of
Ernest’s credit cards,” her smile was slightly evil: as evil as I’d
seen it yet anyway. I liked her for it. “I thought it was certainly
an expense
he
should handle, even if he’s not around.
Executive decision.”

“So, what’d you find out?”

“Things that should make me even more
suspicious of you,” she said cautiously.

“Like what?” I was genuinely surprised.

“Well, like you were at the Langton sales
office yesterday, for starters,” Arianna’s tone was even.

I was embarrassed: I’d forgotten this bit.
Or rather, I’d been so focused on Steve, I’d forgotten that he
worked for Langton. “I can imagine how that might have looked. But
it was an... unrelated matter.”

I could feel Arianna looking at me closely
for a minute and then, “She told me you met with someone. He walked
back to your car with you and that you exchanged notes.”

“Phone numbers,” I said remembering. “He’s
someone I met at a Langton function I attended the day before you
and I met for coffee. I can see how it must look to you.”

“Well, the private investigator took
pictures of the two of you,” she had? How creepy was that? “And
yesterday afternoon she told me who he was: a minor sales employee,
no obvious links to Ernie or you, so... it seems possible you’re
telling the truth.”

She said this so smugly, I bridled. “Oh, it
seems possible, does it?”

She shot me a glance. “It does. I don’t know
why you’re sounding so offended, Madeline. I did what I felt I had
to do under the circumstances. What I do or think shouldn’t make
any difference to you in the long term. It won’t affect anything. I
did it for me.”

I still didn’t like it, but I tried to put
myself in her shoes — and since that actually involved imagining
myself married to Ernie, it was hard — and figured that, had it
been me, I would possibly have done the same thing. Scratch that:
the way things were going, it was more likely I would have done the
following myself.

“And the private investigator said she lost
you on the freeway near Redlands. But it seemed to me from her
description of where she lost track of you, that you were very
possibly headed to the same place I was supposed to go yesterday.
That camp.”

“The camp you went to, but didn’t get out of
your car?”

She nodded.

“Which,” I added, “put us on the road at
about the same time yesterday.”

She sensed where I was going and rushed in
ahead of me. “Yes, but I didn’t know any of that — any of the
things about where you’d been — until yesterday evening. And
then... then the sheriff called me this morning and told me about
Ernie.”

“But then, with all of that evidence, why on
Earth did you let me drive you down here with you? With the stuff
you’ve told me — about what I was doing, where I was going — I
think I would have at least partly thought I did it.” I stopped to
consider this jumble of words, then kept going: I could see she
knew what I meant. “Weren’t you at least a bit afraid of me? I
would have been.”

“Madeline, if it were just facts, I guess I
would have been. But I know you didn’t kill Ernie,” she spread her
hand in front of her face, “I know it like I have five fingers, and
I’ve never thought about explaining that, either.” Then she really
surprised me, “No, Madeline: you and I are going to San Bernardino
together to make sure the son of a bitch is dead. And he’s not, is
he? You don’t think so any more than I do. But we’ll play this
out.”

She sat back in the deep leather seat, as
though this last admission had exhausted her. For a while, I
thought about things to ask her: questions and theories and
beliefs, but I left it alone and retreated into my own thoughts and
interpretations about what she’d said. We traveled the rest of the
way to San Bernardino in companionable silence. What she’d said had
proven once and for all that, regardless of our differences, we
were sisters under the skin.

Chapter Twenty-Two

It’s possible there’s a reason that morgues
must always be located in the nether regions of the buildings that
house them. If so, I don’t know what it is. We followed a sheriff
into the bowels of the San Bernardino Hospital, beginning our
downward journey in an elevator that smelled of sterilized clean
masking the odors of illness and despair, then trekking down mostly
empty corridors where the sounds of our shoes seemed impossibly
loud in the stillness. Every step we took seemed to carry us
further from life and sunlight and air. The deeper into the Earth
we penetrated, the more I could feel it closing in above me. After
a while, I had to remind myself to breathe.

Arianna had been given directions to the
hospital and, when we got there, I offered to wait in the car, but
she asked me to come in with her. Actually, she insisted. “We’re
going to see this thing through, Madeline. You and I. Someone is
dead in there, and I have a terrible feeling it’s not Ernie,” which
was a cryptic enough statement that I chewed on it for a few
seconds before I followed her out of the car.

The sheriff, a nice 50-something man with a
quiet and serious demeanor, was waiting for us. I hadn’t seen him
before, so, thankfully, he took no notice of me. Since Arianna and
I are similar in build and coloring anyway, he probably assumed I
was her sister or some other relative.

“I have to warn you,” he said when we’d
completed our underworld journey and stood outside the morgue’s
viewing area, “this might be upsetting for you. The body is in...
imperfect condition. I wouldn’t put you through this if it weren’t
absolutely necessary but, as it is, Mr. Billings is not
recognizable to the casual eye.”