“She sneaked into his room. She lied to me when I asked her what she was doing.”
“Maybe that was the simplest way of telling you to mind your own business.”
“She hid the copy of the will under her sweater.”
“She probably didn’t have any pockets.”
“She lied to me, James. I’m telling you, she’s up to something.”
“What could she possibly be up to?”
Caroline walked away and went to look out the window herself. Then she walked away from the window and began to look through her bag. It was her big bag, James suddenly realized, the one she used to carry all that equipment in when she went on trips. She was always complaining about how she hated to lug it around.
Caroline came up with a box of cough drops and dropped one in her mouth.
“Of course, what I really want to do is smoke,” she said. “All my addictions are reaching out to me. It’s inevitable in times of stress.”
James had quit smoking five years earlier. He had never once wanted a cigarette since.
“Why don’t you get to the point?” he asked her.
“I am getting to the point,” Caroline said irritably. “Now that Daddy’s dead, we three come in for a whole lot of Jacqueline’s money, isn’t that true?”
“We come into Jacqueline’s money, that’s true. I don’t know how much of it there is.”
Caroline dismissed this. “Jacqueline was rich. There’s tons and tons of the stuff. I think maybe Alyssa needs it for something.”
“Needs it for what? She’s married to a very successful attorney.”
“Successful attorneys aren’t always rich,” Caroline said. “Some of them spend too much. Some of them get into trouble.”
“Nick Roderick isn’t in any trouble. You’ve got no reason to say he is.”
“Maybe it’s Alyssa who’s in trouble, then. Maybe she wants enough for Nick to retire and go away someplace. Maybe she wants to get away from Philadelphia and everybody who knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Knows,” Caroline said.
Then she sat down on the couch and faced him, her knees together, her ankles together, a little smile on her face. She was making James feel very queasy. He didn’t like her attitude at all.
“I think we ought to look into this,” she said, “before one or the other of us winds up dead. We haven’t any one of us made a will, you know. If something happened to any of us, our money would go to our next of kin. Wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” James said. “It would.”
“There, then.”
Caroline popped another cough drop in her mouth.
Yes, James thought, Caroline definitely made him queasy, but it wasn’t because she’d convinced him that Alyssa was up to something.
It was Caroline he thought was up to something.
3
Halfway across town, in the apartment on top of the Hazzard house, Alyssa Hazzard Roderick was putting the final touches on her elaborate Sunday-go-to-the-funeral-home makeup and talking to her husband, Nick. She had a big red heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates at her elbow, open, so that she could pick at it between taking swipes at her lips with her lipstick brush.
“… so Caroline got all upset,” she was saying, “but it didn’t really bother me, because that’s just like Caroline and I think it was important for me to know. I think it’s important for all of us to know. Don’t you, Nick?”
“I already knew,” Nick said. “You could have asked me.
“You were out. I don’t see what all this fuss is about, Nick, really. I just wanted to find out what I wanted to know and not have to explain myself to Caroline. God only knows, nobody in his right mind would want to have to explain anything to Caroline.”
“Gotcha,” Nick said. “I’m not arguing about that. I’m just saying it would have made more sense to ask me.”
“So when you came home, I did ask you. How much did you say it was again?”
“About fifteen million dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“There’s also this house. James isn’t going to be a problem about the house, but if we want to stay here, we’re probably going to have to buy Caroline out. Will you mind doing that?”
“I don’t know that I want to stay here,” Alyssa said. “Do you think Caroline will really want to move?”
“Once she has money? Sure. She doesn’t like any of the rest of us very much.”
“I suppose she doesn’t. I suppose I always thought she had money. With that television show of hers and everything.”