And One to Die On(3)
So far, in forty-five minutes, she had managed to pack two silk day dresses, two evening suits, and a dozen pairs of Christian Dior underwear. She was sucking on her Perrier and ice as if it were an opium teat. In a chair in a corner of the room, her latest husband—number six—was sipping a brandy and soda and trying not to laugh.
If this husband had been like the ones that came before him—beachboys all picked up in Malibu, notable only for the size of the bulges in their pants—Hannah would have been ready to brain him, but John Graham was actually a serious person. He was almost as old as Hannah herself, at least sixty, and he was a very successful lawyer. He was not, however, a divorce lawyer. Hannah was not that stupid. John handled contract negotiations and long-term development deals for movie stars who really wanted to direct.
Hannah threw a jade green evening dress into the suit bag and backed up to look it over.
“What I don’t understand about all this,” she said, “is why I’m going out there to attend a one hundredth birthday party for that poisonous old bitch. I mean, why do I want to bother?”
“Personally, I think you want to confront your father. Isn’t that what your therapist said?”
“My therapist is a jerk. I don’t even know my father. He disappeared into the sunset with that bitch when I was three months old.”
“That’s my point.”
“She murdered my mother,” Hannah said. “There isn’t any other way to put it.”
“Sure there is,” John told her. “Especially since she was in Paris or someplace at the exact moment your mother was being killed on the Côte d’Azur. It was your father the police thought killed your mother.”
“It comes to the same thing, John. That bitch drove him to it. He went away with her afterward. He left me to be brought up by dear old Aunt Bessie, the world paradigm for the dysfunctional personality.”
“There’s your father again. That’s it exactly. What you really want to do, whether you realize it or not, is brain your old man. I hope you aren’t taking a gun along on this weekend.”
“I’m thinking of taking cyanide. I also think I’m sick of therapy-speak. You know what all this is going to mean, don’t you? The auction and all the rest of it? It’s all going to come out again. The magazines are going to have a field day. People. Us. Personality. Isn’t that going to be fun?”
“You’re going to find it very good for business,” John said placidly. “People are going to see you as a very romantic figure. It’ll do you nothing but good, Hannah. You just watch.”
The really disgusting thing, Hannah thought, was that John was probably right. The really important people wouldn’t be impressed—they probably wouldn’t even notice—but the second-stringers would be all hot to trot. The agency would be inundated with people looking for anything at all in Beverly Hills for under a million dollars, who really only wanted to see her close up. If this was the kind of thing I wanted to do with my life, Hannah thought, I would have become an actress.
The jade green evening dress was much too much for a weekend on an island off the coast of Maine. Even if they dressed for dinner there, they wouldn’t go in for washed silk and rhinestones. What would they go in for? Hannah put the jade green evening dress back in the closet and took out a plainer one in dark blue. Then she put that one back, too. It made her look like she weighed at least a hundred and five.
“What do you think they have to auction off?” she asked John. “Do you think they have anything of my mother’s?”
“I don’t know. They might.”
“Aunt Bessie always said there wasn’t anything of hers left after it was all over, that everything she had was in their house in France and it was never shipped back here for me to have. Maybe he kept it.”
“Maybe he did.”
“Would you let him, if you were her? Reminders of the murdered wife all around your house?”
“You make a lot of assumptions, Hannah. You assume she’s the dominant partner in the relationship. You assume that if he has your mother’s things, they must be lying around in his house.”
“Her house. It was always her house. She bought it before she ever met him.”
“Her house. Whatever. Maybe he put those things in an attic somewhere, or a basement. Maybe he keeps them locked up in a hope chest in a closet. They don’t have to be where your aunt is tripping over them all the time.”
“Don’t remind me that she’s my aunt, John. It makes me ill.”
“I think you better forget about all this packing and go have something to drink. Just leave it all here for the maid to finish with in the morning, and we can sleep in the guest room.”