Chapter 23
After everyone left, Nicola put Tyler down for his nap and wandered through the house.
It was so big the signal from the baby monitor wouldn’t carry from one floor to the other.
She felt feverish. It might have been a slight sunburn, from the hour they’d spent on the beach, or it could be the heat of extreme pressure, a coal in her chest.
The house didn’t have air-conditioning, but even on a muggy day such as this, it didn’t need it.
The windows were open, and a fresh Long Island Sound breeze blew up the cliff from the estuary, circulating through the hallways and rooms. She thought of the lengths to which museums went to make sure galleries were temperature and humidity controlled to within a degree or a bar, but Mathilda’s collection filled the walls, and the trained conservator in Nicola saw no problems at all.
A dumbwaiter ran between the upstairs and downstairs kitchens. Nicola felt its presence as if it were alive and calling to her, reminding her of what Pete had hidden there. She resisted its pull and walked into her favorite room—the library. The walls were papered in a color between rose and brick.
A marble fireplace, laid with logs, dominated one walnut-paneled wall.
Chest-high overflowing bookcases lined two more, and the fourth had French doors.
Hung with thick draperies of expensive fabric, Clarence House’s Tibet pattern—playful striped tigers in shades of cinnabar, sage green, and pale citron—the doors overlooked the boxwood hedge maze; stone garden ornaments, including gigantic spheres from an eighteenth-century Irish castle; and a lawn sloping into various crags and valleys down toward the river.
The effect was both exotic and very New England.
This was how the upper class lived. Nicola had never felt more like a girl from the sketchy side of Groton.
Small paintings by Willard Metcalf, Matilda Browne, Benjamin Morrison, William Merritt Chase, Henry Ward Ranger, and William Chadwick filled the walls above the bookcases; Childe Hassam’s Fifth Avenue in December hung above the mantel.
It depicted New York at twilight under snow.
The avenue was quiet; the day’s traffic had ceased.
The sky seemed heavy yet charged, as if a blizzard had just passed.
The painting’s electric quality came from the American and French flags flying from every building.
The tableau was patriotic, but Nicola felt it warned that joy would be misplaced—World War I had ended, but the world remained uneasy.
The blizzard could circle around, and another war was coming.
The baby monitor crackled. It was Tyler fussing. Nicola left the library and walked up the wide center stairs. She looked into the room where she and Pete had slept. Their son lay peacefully in the white cradle. He was quiet, deep in slumber; he must have been dreaming.
Why had Kate allowed Nicola to stay? Why had she accepted? She knew Pete had been furious by the way Kate had treated him. Perhaps, in a way, she was glad. He had swept her off her feet, but then he’d seemed not to have the foggiest idea of what to do about it. And it had made him angry.
The smart, ambitious woman he’d fallen in love with had slipped under the weight of his dark moods.
She didn’t like who she was becoming—quick to please him just to stop his anger, less likely to listen to herself than to him.
Accepting Kate’s invitation had felt delicious, a reclamation of who she wanted to be, just as her rebellions against her mother had always helped her draw the line between their strong personalities.
Nicola knew Detective Reid thought Pete had killed Beth, and most of the time Nicola fought that theory.
She told herself that if she really believed it, she’d know physically; she’d be constitutionally unable to stay with him.
So why, as her mother had asked, had she moved back home for those days in July?
And why had she decided to stay here at Mathilda’s instead of letting him create another temporary nest for them at a hotel?
The dumbwaiter was still exerting its gravitational force.
She walked to the end of the second-floor hall, entered the small upstairs kitchen.
Unused now, it must have been useful for household staff.
It had a gas stove, old-fashioned icebox, and a cupboard full of Spode china with an inordinate number of eggcups.
Perhaps the Harkness family, and whoever had lived here before them, had enjoyed breakfast in bed.
Three days after Beth’s murder, Nicola had watched Pete enter this room with a canvas bag and a large claw hammer.
When she heard the sound of nails being wrenched from the wall, she stood quietly in the hall, watching him.
The dumbwaiter had been boarded up, and he removed the plywood.
There in the opening was a small rectangular wooden box that could be raised or lowered between kitchens by a rope and pulleys.
When he reached into the canvas bag, her pulse began to race because she knew what was coming out—it was going to be Moonlight, the stolen Morrison cut out of its frame, and it was going to prove to her that Pete had killed Beth.
But it wasn’t the painting. One by one, Pete removed toys from the bag.
They were for a baby boy: a stuffed blue bunny, a blue teddy bear, a striped ball, a turquoise plastic teething ring.
They weren’t Tyler’s. Pete glanced over his shoulder and saw Nicola.
His eyes were blank. He showed no hint of emotion—the chill made Nicola want to cry out.
He stared at her for a full minute. Then he turned back to what he was doing.
She watched him tug on the ropes to lower the box full of what had to have been Matthew’s things, bought perhaps by Beth in anticipation of his birth, into the dark shaft.
When he had begun to nail the boards back over the door, the hammer blows echoing down the hall, she had walked away.
They hadn’t spoken about it then or since.
He had completely replaced the wood covering the dumbwaiter, and she stared at it now.
She could see the nailheads, the steel bright silver, polished by the recent hammer strikes.
They glinted, calling attention to themselves.
Through the baby monitor in her pocket, she heard Tyler waking up.
She turned and walked down the hall to lift her son from the cradle and feed him.