Chapter Twenty
TED WATCHES HIS wife with concern.
Jill isn’t handling things as well as he’d expected. She’s upset – she’s letting that manipulative bastard Ramirez get under her skin. Ted thought she was tougher than this.
‘We have nothing to worry about,’ he says now. ‘Just try to calm down.’
She shoots him an angry look. ‘Don’t tell me to calm down.’
She’s upset because their cleaning lady, Nadya, had stayed a little late today specifically to tell her when she arrived home that Special Agent Ramirez had dropped in and asked her some very pointed questions.
‘How dare he come in here and talk to our cleaner!’ Jill fumes.
Too restless to sit, she’s been pacing back and forth in front of the windows in the front room.
Now she turns to face him. ‘Telling her that we’ve been having financial problems!
How would he know that? And why would he do that, unless he suspects us? ’
Ted thinks Ramirez probably has ways to find out about their financial situation.
He’s not going to tell her what Ramirez said to him under his breath from the deck of the boat, after he told him there were no cameras.
I bet that’s a relief. He knows Ramirez suspects them, but it doesn’t matter, as long as they hold their nerve.
He approaches her and gently grips her arms above the elbows, to steady her.
He fixes his eyes on hers. ‘You know that there’s no evidence.
We’re home free. He can’t do anything to us.
You know how it works – innocent until proven guilty.
They have to be able to prove it was murder, beyond a reasonable doubt, and they can’t, because there will always be the possibility that it was an accident.
’ He kisses her on the forehead. ‘He’ll give up eventually.
He suspects us because of the money. He knows I inherit.
But it doesn’t matter. He can’t touch us. ’
She takes a deep breath and nods. ‘I know. It’s just … it’s unsettling, that’s all. He upset Nadya. And embarrassed me in front of her.’
Ted steps back, releasing her, and says, ‘Did you see his suit? And the way he was looking around when he was here? He’s probably doing this because we’re rich and he wants to stick it to us.’
‘That’s what worries me,’ Jill says.
He studies her for a moment and asks, ‘Is there something else bothering you?’
She pauses before she answers. Then she says, ‘I had lunch with Lara today.’
‘And?’
‘And … nothing. She was being a bit nosy, wanted to know about the money.’
‘That’s just human nature,’ Ted says. ‘Of course she wants to know about the money. Did you tell her?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did she take it?’
‘Oh, you know, she was thrilled for us.’ And they both smile.
Lara watches through the glass of the front door as Agent Ramirez gets into his car on the street and then turns and fixes her eyes on her husband. ‘What the fuck was that?’
They return to the front room, and she sits on the edge of the sofa and addresses her husband, feeling a little strange. ‘Did he actually say that? That he thinks it might have been murder?’
‘It’s outrageous,’ Ben says, looking genuinely outraged.
That’s Ben, though, she thinks. He doesn’t think badly of anyone.
But Lara actually finds herself considering it.
Could it have been murder? It had never crossed her mind.
She just thought that Ted and Jill had been incredibly lucky.
They sit in silence for a moment, as if neither one of them wants to say it first. Finally, Lara says, ‘Why would he think that? There must be some reason they think it might not have been an accident.’
‘It’s the money, of course,’ Ben says slowly.
‘Ted will inherit a lot of money. He was there when Greg went over the side, and he and Jill survived.’ He looks back at her, troubled.
‘I mean, you can see why they’d look into it.
’ He sighs heavily, his face wrinkling in concern.
‘How awful for them, especially after what they’ve been through.
The very idea. People don’t just murder people. Life is not a book.’
Lara studies her husband, reflecting on how different they are.
She has always felt that truth is much stranger than fiction, that real life often seems far more unbelievable than a novel.
Especially these days. ‘Jill didn’t seem too concerned about it when I saw her today,’ Lara tells him, remembering their lunch earlier.
‘But she told me it was an accident investigation.’
‘No reason she should be concerned. They didn’t do anything wrong,’ Ben says with conviction.
Lara wonders. It’s true Jill hadn’t seemed particularly worried earlier that day. She’d seemed quietly pleased under all that faux regret. Should Lara tell her that the special agent spoke to them, and what he said?
Nadya lies awake, listening for her son, Peter, to come home.
It’s late, and she knows she will probably fall asleep from sheer exhaustion before she hears him come stumbling in, after a few too many beers with his Russian friends.
But tonight, despite being weary from her job, her mind is active.
She keeps thinking about the man who came to the Westcotts’ earlier today and asked her those strange questions.
He had implied that her employers had done something wrong on that boat.
She’d struggled with whether to tell her employers or not.
She didn’t want to have that conversation.
But she feared keeping it a secret from them even more.
What if they found out? She would be dismissed without a reference, and she feared that most of all.
If she were dismissed her other wealthy clients might hear of it and let her go too.
She can’t afford to lose her reputation.
She needs her clients. In the end, she’d decided to stay a bit later and wait for one of them to get home.
She did not feel comfortable having this conversation on the telephone.
It was Mrs Westcott who’d arrived home first. She was clearly startled to see Nadya waiting for her in the front hall. ‘You’re still here?’ she asked.
Nadya could detect the mild annoyance in her voice, despite the bright smile. Nadya was annoyed too. She had stayed late to do what she thought was right. But she was just the hired help to them, nothing more.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Westcott,’ she said, ‘but there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Come into the kitchen, then,’ Mrs Westcott said, and started walking down the hall.
Nadya followed, noting that she was not invited to sit in the front room, like other people.
They sat at the kitchen table instead. ‘What is it?’ her employer asked.
‘A man came here today,’ Nadya said. She pulled his card out of her pocket and showed it. ‘Special Agent Ramirez of the US Coast Guard.’
Her employer was suddenly more alert. ‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted to ask me some questions.’
‘I hope you sent him away,’ she said sharply.
Nadya froze. She hadn’t really thought that was an option. ‘No.’
‘Why the hell not?’
Nadya was angry then, although she was careful not to show it. ‘You never told me that someone might come and ask questions and not to let them in. I didn’t know I had a choice.’ She added, ‘In Russia, when they come and ask questions, you answer.’
‘Go on then, what did he say?’
She continued nervously. ‘He asked if I had ever overheard you and Mr Westcott talking about your financial situation.’ Her employer’s eyes seemed to grow larger. ‘But I told him you are never home when I am here.’
‘Did he say anything else?’ Mrs Westcott asked tightly.
Nadya looked down at the table, embarrassed. ‘He asked if I knew that you and Mr Westcott are having financial problems.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ her employer said crisply. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said I knew nothing about anything.’ Uncomfortable, she added, ‘I just thought you would want to know.’
‘What else did he say?’
Nadya shook her head. ‘That’s all. He was here for a very short time.’
‘Thank you, Nadya. You can go.’ As Nadya rose to leave, Mrs Westcott had added, ‘Don’t speak about this to anyone.’
And she’d come home, an hour later than usual, looked around at her shabby rental – a small run-down house in the south part of Sunnyside, Queens, a long shlep by subway from Brooklyn Heights – and wondered what the hell she was doing with her life.
Now she lies awake, staring into the dark, listening for her no-good son, and thinking there’s got to be more to life than this.