Not Guilty (42 page)

Lucas indicated a pair of chaises with his walking stick, and Keely walked toward them. Beside the long chairs was a small play area with a construction of large, colorful plastic blocks that instantly attracted the baby. Keely and Lucas sat down and leaned stiffly back against the sloping backs of their chairs. Lucas carefully set his walking stick down against the chair. Dylan tossed his leather jacket and his T-shirt at the foot of Keely’s chaise and walked over to the edge of the pool.

The warm air was damp and heavy, and Keely felt conspicuous in her street clothes. She began to perspire in her cotton sweater and long black pants. She crossed her feet at the ankles, and the toes of her leather boots pointed toward the low, vaulted ceiling. Glancing over at Lucas, who was still wearing his raincoat, she could see no evidence of sweat. He was old, she thought. He was probably always cold.

“This feels good,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

Keely did not reply. She turned her attention to her son as he approached the edge of the pool. His lanky frame was pale and vulnerable in the greenish light from the agitated surface of the water. His shoulders were beginning to broaden and his waist to narrow, but his body was mostly smooth and white, like a child’s except for the purplish scar at his throat.

“Something heartbreaking about a boy at that age,” Lucas observed.
“So vulnerable. Not quite a man, but not a child either.”

“Yes,” said Keely.

Lucas sighed. “I remember when Prentice was Dylan’s age. He was always overweight and awkward. Even as a small child. And then the acne. It was awful. He was so self-conscious. There seemed to be no way to reassure him. His suffering was so intense. And as a parent, of course, you’re helpless. You think to yourself, ‘If there is only some way I can spare him this pain . . .’ ”

Kelly turned and looked at Lucas’s wistful eyes, his sculpted features. “It’s a kind of torture, isn’t it?” she said.

“Oh, most definitely,” Lucas agreed. “And you know, the irony is that to me, he was beautiful . . .”

“I know,” Keely said quietly.

Dylan seemed oblivious to them as he dunked a toe in, then swept it through the water. Then, apparently satisfied, he walked around to the deep end and dove, unhesitatingly, into the water. Keely could see his long, thin frame, a dark knife beneath the surface, and he came up sputtering.

Ordinarily, she would have called out to him, asked him how cold it was in the water. But she felt as if her voice was stuck in her throat.
Dylan did not look back in her direction. He fishtailed back under and began to swim.

“He’s a good swimmer,” Lucas observed.

“Yes,” Keely said shortly.

“Unlike his stepfather,” said Lucas.

Keely felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. She gripped the arms of the lounge chair with splayed fingers.

Lucas sighed. “He wasn’t worthy of you, you know—Mark. He didn’t deserve to be their father. If only you could have accepted things as they were after Mark died—left it alone.”

Despite the warm, humid air in the room, Keely felt a chill. He was going to continue, and she wanted to stop him—and knew she couldn’t.

“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to Dylan. Not in a million years. If you had just trusted me. But you kept pushing . . .” he whispered.

Keely felt paralyzed, as if her arms and legs were glued to the plastic slats of the chaise. “Lucas,” she pleaded. “Please. Let’s just drop it now.”

Lucas chuckled and shook his head. “That’s amusing. Now, you want to drop it. Now, when it’s too late. How much do you already know?” he asked.

“I don’t know anything,” she said desperately.

“Oh, yes, you do,” he said bitterly. “I saw Phil Stratton at your house today. Why do you think I waited, and followed you? He told you, didn’t he? You were hell-bent on finding out. Nothing else would do. Don’t you realize that sometimes it’s better not to know?”

She felt her heart sink, like someone drowning beneath the waves.

T
he old woman in the bathing cap climbed out of the pool, tore off the rubber cap, and ran her fingers through the damp, gray spikes of her hair. She wrapped a towel around her tanned, grizzled body, collected her belongings, and walked out of the pool area, past Lucas and Keely, leaving a trail of small puddles in her wake and giving them a curt nod in passing. Keely had the urge to reach out to her, ask her for help, but she knew how preposterous that request would seem to anyone looking at Keely, the baby, and the white-haired gentleman on the chaise beside her.

“How much do the police know?” Lucas asked smoothly. “What did Phil Stratton tell you?”

Keely shook her head and tried to think carefully before she spoke.
“He . . . said that . . . um . . . it seems like Maureen Chase’s death was not a suicide after all. Somebody killed her . . .”

“And that somebody was?”

“Lucas, I don’t know,” she cried. Then she had an idea. “I assume they thought it might be me. He asked me a lot of questions. As if I was a suspect. That’s why I thought we ought to get away . . .”

Lucas turned and looked at her, but Keely kept her gaze fastened on Dylan, in the pool. “You are such a terrible liar,” he said. “I mean that as a compliment.”

Keely felt her face redden, but she did not look back at him.

“I heard they were running toxicology tests on the body. I have my sources, you know. I imagine they’ve identified the drug in Maureen’s system,” he said.

“I don’t feel like discussing this,” Keely said. Her cotton sweater felt soggy with sweat. She knew there were beads of perspiration on her forehead.

“Phil Stratton told you it was insulin, didn’t he? Did you guess right away, when he told you?” Lucas asked.

Keely hesitated, then abruptly pushed the heels of her hands down on the arms of the chair and stood up. The leather soles of her boots slid on the wet cement, and she caught herself from falling as she walked over to the edge of the pool. “Dylan,” she called. “That’s enough; let’s go.”

Dylan shook his wet head, and water drops scattered like crystals and fell back into the pool. “Mom, I’m just getting started. It’s warm. You should come in.”

“Dylan,” she cried. But he dove back down beneath the surface. Behind her she could hear Lucas pulling himself up from the chair, coming toward her.

Leaning on his stick, he spoke in a low voice, near her ear. “I thought you wanted to know,” he said bitterly. “You and Maureen. Oh, she wanted to know in the worst way. Your husband’s lover. She had to know what happened to him. After all, she loved him. Well, let’s be honest—it was an obsession. But I have to give her credit. In the end, she figured it out . . .”

Keely turned and stared at him. She couldn’t help herself. “Figured what out?” she breathed.

“That I killed him,” Lucas said.

Keely gasped, startled out of any pretense of ignorance. “No. Lucas. That’s not true . . .” she said.

“I’m afraid it is. Maureen finally realized it was me. She’d seen me driving up your street as she was leaving their little tryst that night. She knew Mark was alive and well when she left him. But of course, she never suspected me. After all, Mark was . . . my son.

“No, she blamed Dylan, as you know. She assumed that he’d left the gate open. She was determined to blame Dylan. To make him pay for his deliberate carelessness, shall we say. But then, young Julian turned up looking for Veronica, which put Veronica in the forefront of her mind. And you brought her that suicide confession from Richard, mentioning a murder from long ago. She began to dig, and she put two and two together.

“It was unfortunate that Julian chose to arrive when he did.
Otherwise . . . Well, I suppose it’s justice in the end. Maureen took me by surprise. She invited me to her house, and then she confronted me, accused me. And I’m afraid that all I could think of at that moment was that I didn’t want Betsy to have to find out. I didn’t go there planning to kill her. Of course not. She ambushed me. She laid out her case and then she handed me my coat and told me to get out. Said she was going to ruin me as revenge for Mark’s death. As if he deserved vengeance. She handed me my coat, and I felt my drug kit in the pocket. And I just . . . I have no excuse, Keely. It was an impulse. Then I had to make it look like suicide.”

Keely saw spots in front of her eyes and started to sway. Lucas braced Keely up as she sagged, then gently steered her back to the lounge chairs. He helped settle her back into her chair like an indulgent father putting a toddler to bed. Then he resumed his seat beside her.

“But why Mark?” she whispered. “You loved Mark.”

“Yes, Mark. Mark, who betrayed me for my trouble. Mark, who killed Veronica. And my unborn grandchild. Who took away the only thing that Prentice had to live for, and then he lied to me for eighteen years. Right to my face.”

“But you don’t know that for sure,” Keely said angrily. “You don’t know it was Veronica. You don’t even know that Veronica is dead. I mean, yes, Richard said they killed someone. But Veronica? That was just some . . . whim that Maureen had. Some hunch. She had no proof. She was going to have the body exhumed. To see if the DNA matched. How could you just jump to such an extraordinary conclusion? How could you assume that Mark had killed Veronica with no proof, no reason?” Keely struggled to comprehend his reasoning. “You’re a rational person, Lucas. Why would you do that?”

Lucas glanced at his watch, as if checking the time. Then he squinted up at the vaulted ceiling of the pool enclosure. “Oh, no, no, Keely. I wasn’t jumping to conclusions. I knew it for a fact. Long before Maureen suspected anything, I knew it for a fact. No. Although I don’t doubt that she would have persisted until she had it all. No, I’ve known about Mark’s crime since last summer. It just took me a little while to exact my revenge.”

“No. That’s impossible. How did you know?” Keely cried.

“You remember when Prentice died . . . the condition of his apartment . . .”

Keely nodded slowly.

“I sorted through that mess. The debris of my son’s shattered life. I was looking for a will. I’d always urged him to make one, but he always ignored me. It was quite a job going through it.”

“I remember,” Keely said.

“On his computer were e-mails, unanswered for years. He never even bothered to look. I went through them, one by one. Checked them all. One of them was from your first husband, Richard. He sent it just before he took his own life. He confessed to everything. The whole story. He wanted Prentice to know what had happened to Veronica. It was on his conscience. At least
he
had a conscience.

“The headaches,” Keely whispered. “They never gave him any peace . . .”

Lucas was unmoved by this information. The expression in his eyes was remote, glacial. “Well, he tried to get it off his chest before he died, but Prentice never even opened the mail. He was too far gone. He was already too far gone. But I read that e-mail when I found it—nearly twenty years too late. I read it until I knew it by heart. It seems that Mark and Richard picked Veronica up in Richard’s car one long-ago summer evening, offered her a ride. She went with them because she knew Mark. Of course she did. He was a member of the family.

“They asked her to buy them beer because she was of legal age. Kind of ironic when you think about it. Anyway, after a few drinks, they tried to . . . convince her to have sex, and Veronica resisted. There was a struggle, and apparently, she hit her head. Her death was an accident, but Mark panicked. He didn’t want me to know. After all, I was his . . . meal ticket. So, they got rid of the body—took it out in a boat and weighed it down. Then, they paid some British girl Mark knew from the International Academy to call Betsy and me and say that she’d run away to Las Vegas. The accent fooled us both. We hardly knew Veronica. Their scheme worked. We believed it. Prentice believed it. It was the beginning of the end for him.”

“Oh, Lucas,” Keely breathed. She knew that she was looking at a killer, that he had admitted to murder, but she could not, in that instant, hate him. His story felt like a crushing weight on her chest. “Oh, Lucas, how awful . . .”

“I never really knew Richard. He’s just a name with no face. But Mark—now that’s a different story. When I look back on it now,” he went on in a low, steady, bitter voice, “I realize it was typical of Mark.”

Abby, tired of the plastic blocks, toddled over to the chaises and stood, swaying slightly, between them, resting one small, sticky hand on Lucas’s knee. He looked down at her with a weary, indulgent smile. Abby smiled back widely, showing her few teeth.

“She resembles him a little bit,” Lucas mused, looking at Abby.

“A little bit,” Keely admitted, drawing Abby to her protectively.

“Around the eyes.”

“All those years,” Lucas said. “Nearly twenty years, he lied to me. He looked me in the eye, day after day, knowing what he had done to me. Knowing how he had destroyed my son’s life. He took every advantage I offered him and more.” Lucas sat up and shook his head, like a man trying to awaken himself from a nightmare. “I’m glad he’s dead,” he said. “My sole consolation is the memory of the look on his face when he realized that he was going to die. The pleading, sputtering yelps—”

“Stop it,” she cried.

Lucas stared at her in surprise. “Surely you don’t still care for him, knowing what you know . . .”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she protested furiously. “He was Abby’s father.”

Abby, startled by their harsh tones and the sound of her own name, let out a wail of protest and wrested her little arm from her mother’s loose grasp. She scuttled speedily out from between the chairs, making a beeline toward the edge of the pool.

“Abby,” Keely cried.

Keely scrambled up from her seat and started to bolt toward the baby. In her haste to reach Abby, she slipped in a puddle, coming down hard on her knee. She heard a crack and felt a jagged, searing pain in
her twisted leg. Lucas had jumped up also. In a swift motion, he lunged forward and waylaid Abby, scooping her up in his arms. Abby squealed in protest, and the young couple at the other end of the pool looked up frowning and then exchanged an exasperated glance.

With dramatic sighs and shaking heads, they gathered up their belongings and left the pool area through the rear door. Keely glanced anxiously at the pool. Dylan was standing neck deep in the water, looking at them quizzically. Meanwhile, Lucas bounced Abby gently in his arms, and her fidgeting seemed to ease as her cries diminished. He waved at Dylan, who waved back and dove down beneath the surface again.

“Are you all right, Keely?” Lucas asked.

Keely tried to stand, but her knee would not hold the weight. With difficulty, she managed to hoist herself up on her trembling forearms and pull herself back to the end of the lounge chair. Her knee was throbbing, but as she moved her leg, the pain coursed through her.
“Something’s broken or sprained,” she gasped. She looked up at him.
“Thank you, Lucas,” Keely said. “For . . . stopping Abby.” She managed to get herself seated on the chair and held out her arms for the baby, but he turned away, still holding her.

“Lucas,” she said sharply. “Please give me my baby.”

“I would have made a good grandfather,” said Lucas, looking tenderly at Abby in his arms.

Keely felt frustrated, yoked to the chair and unable to get up—unable to reach her child. “I’m sure you would have,” she said carefully.

“It’s probably only fair to tell you,” he said, “that one thing you believed about your husband was true. He did have a genuine attachment to this baby.” Abby had slipped a thumb into her mouth and was resting against the front of Lucas’s raincoat, her large, long-lashed eyes staring vacantly ahead.

Lucas smiled down at her and smoothed the hair on her head. “The way he would talk about her—I thought perhaps he did. Even after I knew the worst, what a monster he was . . . Still, there was something in his voice and his demeanor that convinced me that he loved her. Truly loved her. Maybe the only thing in his life he ever really did love.”