Chapter 21
Mathilda had loved follies—little secret places built of stone, set all around her property.
Kate sat in her favorite now, the crenellated tower of a small stone hideaway built in homage to Gillette Castle up the river.
She opened the heavy manila envelope she’d brought to show Lulu and withdrew the small key she’d found in Beth’s desk.
She had tried it everywhere she could think of, but it was such an unusual size it didn’t fit any lock.
Right now, in the tower, she stared at a weathered wooden door.
It was only waist high, and she remembered looking inside as a little girl—Mathilda had kept some garden supplies in there. She tried Beth’s key now but no luck.
When she looked up, she saw Lulu walking across the wide lawn. Kate saw in her the sixteen-year-old girl she used to be, carefree in that white dress, in the way she waved and started to run when she spotted Kate.
“Finally,” Kate said when Lulu had climbed the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” Lulu said, squeezing beside her on the narrow bench, throwing her arms around Kate, kissing her forehead, both cheeks. “There’s no excuse for taking so long.”
“You’re right; there isn’t,” Kate said. “You were in Tokyo?”
“And Beijing, and . . .”
“But you couldn’t make it back for Beth’s funeral?”
“Katy, I hate myself,” Lulu said. “But I literally couldn’t show up. I was so afraid.”
“Of what?”
“You?”
Kate was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“I just couldn’t bear to see you. It’s the most unbearable thing, you losing Beth. I couldn’t face you, Kate. I was too scared . . . of this.”
“But I’ve needed you,” Kate said. She rarely cried except, for some reason, with Lulu. She tried to blink back a million burning tears, but they poured down her face.
“Our girl, our South,” Lulu said.
“Lulu, I saw her. I’m the one who found her,” Kate said. “She was broken, Lu. Her head was cracked. Her neck . . .”
“Oh, Kate,” Lulu said, holding her tighter.
“My little sister,” Kate said. “Her beautiful eyes were so cloudy, staring into nothing. The last thing she saw was someone killing her.”
“This is what I was so scared of,” Lulu whispered, stroking her hair.
“Not being able to face what I know you’ve been through.
Why did you have to find her? Of everyone, why did it have to be you?
I don’t want it in your mind, that sight of her.
I want you to remember her alive and happy, our girl . . .”
“I’m so glad it was me,” Kate said. “It was as if . . . I was taking care of her, for the last time. Being with her. Not turning away. I had to see her, Lulu. It would have been ten times worse if I hadn’t.
She was so alone at the end. And she lay there all that time, by herself in that cold room, and no one knew. I had to be the one to find her.”
“I should have been here,” Lulu said.
Kate pushed herself away to dry her tears. She nodded. “Yeah, you should have. I know what you said, but I still don’t get why you weren’t. Not really.” She waited for Lulu to reply, but Lulu just stared down at her feet, shaking her head.
Kate’s gaze fell upon Lulu’s leg, crisscrossed with thin bloody lines.
“What happened?” Kate asked.
“I had an incident at Little Beach. Barnacles.” Lulu paused. “Have you been through the path lately?”
“No,” Kate said.
“Kids sprayed paint all over the rocks,” Lulu said, the awkward non sequitur hovering between them.
Kate closed her eyes. The last time she’d been there was with Beth. This past June they had walked to Little Beach, along the water’s edge at dusk, looking for moonstones. The pebbles had glistened in the wet sand, opalescent in late-day amber light, lighting their path like tiny fallen moons.
“Are you okay?” Lulu asked, watching Kate, bringing her back to the present.
“I’m kicking Pete and Nicola out today. The locksmith is coming.”
“Can you imagine what Mathilda would say if she knew Pete was here? After what he’s put Beth and Sam through?” Lulu asked.
“She’d be apoplectic. Beth should have made them leave the minute she found out they were here.”
Lulu looked away, seeming to think about it. “Maybe she had other things on her mind.”
Of course Beth had had plenty on her mind, but the way Lulu said it made Kate feel uneasy. “What do you mean?” she asked.
Lulu didn’t reply.
“Well, my theory is it made her feel strong,” Kate said. “Like she had the power. Knowing she could get rid of them at any time.”
“She had a lot going on,” Lulu said.
“Yes, the pregnancy, running the gallery . . .”
“Et cetera,” Lulu said.
Kate gave her a sharp glance. “Et cetera? Is there something you want to tell me?”
“No. I’m just upset. Who’s going to run the gallery now?” Lulu asked.
“Maybe I’ll have to.”
“What about your job? Uh, you’re a pilot.”
“I know. Maybe I can do both.”
Lulu gave her a skeptical look. “They’re both kind of full time, aren’t they?”
“I’m not ready to think about this,” Kate said.
“You can hire someone to run the gallery. As long as you don’t sell it. You have to keep it in the family. I still think of it as Mathilda’s.”
It touched Kate how loyal Lulu was to Mathilda.
Mathilda had influenced both of them to become pilots.
Lulu had gone up with Kate and Mathilda many times.
But Lulu was right: the gallery had always been and would always be Mathilda’s.
It bore the stamp of her style and personality, a home for the art of the Black Hall Colony.
“Beth was planning an exhibit around Hassam’s World War I flag paintings. It would have been an homage to Mathilda. She really loved that series.”
“Well, she was a veteran, a patriot.”
“She always told us that Hassam had wanted to volunteer to go to Europe and record the war. I think she wished a Black Hall artist had done that for her war.”
Her war. World War II, when she’d learned to fly.
As Kate and Lulu headed across the lawn to meet the locksmith, Kate thought of the Harkness-Woodward women, how they had been shaped by their grandmother’s bravery.
She’d withstood bullets and bombs and being demeaned by men in power.
There must have been times when she had been so afraid, but she’d never talked about it to Kate.
Maybe she had to Ruth. Kate thought about how even the strongest women could feel fear.
The idea of Beth’s last hour filled her mind.
“She must have been terrified,” Kate said.
“Mathilda?”
Kate shook her head. “Beth. At the end, when he was strangling her, knowing that she was going to die. That she’d lose the baby. And whatever led up to that moment when . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “Do you think about it?”
“Of course,” Lulu said, staring into space. “All the time.” Her mouth and jaw were tense, set, as if holding back words.
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“Look, there’s the locksmith,” Lulu said.
Their feet crunched over white gravel and crushed clamshells as they approached the maroon van.
It was painted with a gold lock and key.
The locksmith was young and lanky, with a long dark ponytail covered by a red bandana.
Kate showed him the doors with locks she wanted changed.
Seven altogether, all around the first floor of the big house.
When he was done, he wanted payment in cash.
Kate had gone to the ATM and was prepared.
She and Lulu went into the kitchen and grabbed big black plastic garbage bags. Going through the bedrooms, they filled them with Pete’s and Nicola’s things. Kate stared at Tyler’s toys and clothes and couldn’t bring herself to touch them.
They piled the trash bags next to the driveway.
Kate made Earl Grey tea, and out of a sense of reclaiming Mathilda’s house, served it in Limoges cups she had loved as a child—the translucent white porcelain delicately painted with butterflies, tiny roses, forget-me-nots, and ladybugs.
She tucked the large manila envelope under her arm and carried the tray out the side door.
They sat on the side porch, the ceiling painted the palest shade of sky blue.
The Compass Rose had had many tea parties in this exact spot.
Mathilda had taught them to brew loose Darjeeling the way she had learned in England, when she had been stationed north of London during the war.
Once the leaves had steeped enough, Kate poured the tea, and Lulu added extra sugar to hers.
“I want to show you something,” Kate said after they’d finished the first cup.
Lulu watched her reach into the envelope and pause. Kate felt torn—Lulu was her best friend and had loved Beth as much as anyone. But revealing her sister’s secret felt like a betrayal.
“What is it?” Lulu asked.
“I found these hidden in Beth’s desk,” Kate said. “She obviously didn’t intend for anyone to see them. I wouldn’t show them to anyone, even you, but I need help, to figure out what they mean.”
She handed Lulu the key, laid the drawing on the white wicker table. Kate stared at the signature, JH. The nude figure study was beautiful, showed Beth’s soft curves, her wavy hair falling loosely over her shoulders, the gentle heaviness of her breasts and slightly rounded belly.
“She’s pregnant here,” Lulu said, leaning closer. “But not very far along.”
“I thought that too,” Kate said, noticing that Lulu didn’t express surprise.
It wasn’t the fact Beth had posed without clothes—when they were young, living in an art town, they’d all picked up a hundred dollars per session as models for the Black Hall Art Academy’s figure-drawing classes.
It had been no big deal—a prestigious college, their family’s art lineage, their grandmother’s blessing.
But Beth’s pregnancy meant she had posed for this within the last year, and that’s what Kate found surprising.
“It’s formal but also romantic,” Lulu said. “It doesn’t feel impersonal.”
“Who is JH?” Kate asked. “I can’t think of anyone with those initials.”
Lulu didn’t reply. She lowered her gaze from the drawing to the squat, almost square key. She lifted it up, bounced it in her hand as if judging its weight.
“Heavy little thing,” she said.
“Too small for a door, too wide for a safe-deposit box.”
“American doors, maybe. But it reminds me of a Paris door key,” Lulu said. “They’re shaped just like this. Don’t you remember?”
It was true, and Kate did remember. For her high school graduation, Mathilda had taken her, Beth, Lulu, and Scotty to Paris.
They’d flown Air France from JFK at night, and while Mathilda and Ruth had sat in first class, the Compass Rose had occupied the first four seats in coach.
Kate had loved the feeling of lift, the surge of big engines, the knowledge they were flying over the Atlantic, into the sunrise.
In Paris, they stayed in a large apartment in a Belle époque mansion in the seventh arrondissement, on rue de Varenne.
The house was owned by Hubert and Karine Millet, friends of Mathilda and Ruth.
The Millets had gone to Greece for the summer.
Hidden from the street by high stone walls, it had an interior courtyard with a stone fountain and was filled with Renoir paintings and gilded Louis Quinze chairs that Mathilda warned them were antique and priceless and not to be sat upon.
The graduation trip was a whirlwind of museums—the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Cluny, Musée Jacquemart-André, and Kate’s favorite, the exquisitely intimate Marmottan.
Mathilda rented a car, and they drove out of town to visit Claude Monet’s home and gardens at Giverny and the port town of Honfleur, the site of so many Impressionist paintings. The vacation was centered on art.
They visited the Normandy landing beaches and stood on the cliff looking across the English Channel, imagining the boatloads of Allied forces ready to storm the beaches.
Ruth took Mathilda’s hand. Instead of facing out to sea, they looked up at the sky where the Eighth Air Force bomb groups and fighters had provided tactical air support on D-Day.
Mostly they stayed in Paris. The Musée Rodin was a few doors down from their house.
They had wandered for hours among its marble sculptures, orderly rose gardens, and reflecting pool, greeting the ghost of one of Mathilda’s most revered artists, Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin’s model and thrown-away lover.
Lulu was absolutely right—the key to the Millets’ tall front door had been exactly like the one Kate had found in Beth’s drawer.
“Maybe Beth saved it,” Lulu said, fingers closing around the key. “From our trip. Maybe Mathilda gave it to her.”
“But Mathilda would have left it with the concierge—she wouldn’t have taken it home with her.”
“Then where’s it from?” Lulu asked.
“I have no idea,” Kate said, but a dream formed in her mind—one in which Beth could have been happy and still alive. A hideaway, someplace she went with the artist who did the drawing. Somewhere she could have escaped Pete and everything he had put her through.
Kate took the key from Lulu. The metal was warm from Lulu’s hand. Beth had held the key too. She had treasured it enough to hide it in the small box along with the drawing someone had done of her. The two objects radiated love. Through them Kate felt her sister’s passion.
“Who can this be?” she asked again, pointing at the signature on the drawing. “JH?”
Once again, Lulu didn’t reply. In the distance, they heard a car shifting gears as it climbed the hill, tires rumbling over gravel. Through a row of cypress trees, Kate spotted Pete’s big Mercedes sedan entering the turnaround.
“Here we go,” Lulu said. “In honor of Mathilda, bombs away.” Had she invoked Mathilda’s name as a way of distracting Kate from the fact that she didn’t want to answer her question about JH?
Kate put the key and drawing back into the envelope and headed toward the front of the house.
“Goddamn it!” Pete bellowed as he raced around tearing open the trash bags.
Pete’s reaction should have gratified Kate, but she was still mesmerized by the unfamiliar sense of desire—not truly hers but borrowed from her sister.
The abstraction of passion filled her mind.
Then it ran across her skin, a river of it.
It made her shiver, and she wanted the feeling to last, to be hers, no one else’s.
Maybe the key wasn’t to a house where Beth had already been but to one she had planned to go. A place where she could have been in love.
But with whom?