Bleeding Hearts(88)

It wasn’t first thing in the morning and Alyssa wasn’t sitting up in bed. It was four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the day after her father’s murder. Alyssa was not sure this was a very good time to do what she wanted to do. Caroline was still sitting downstairs in the living room, working. James was out—but out where? And for how long? Then there was Nicholas to consider. Nicholas was at his club for the afternoon, playing backgammon. How long he stayed depended on whether he won or lost.

Alyssa had no idea why she wanted to hide this little excursion from her husband, or why she wanted to hide it from anybody else. She just did. She just wanted to go off and get a little piece of private information for herself, on her own, just this once. She’d tell Nicholas all about it later. She really would. She’d tell James and Caroline too, if she had to. Honestly, it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a right to do what she was going to do. It was just that she wanted to do it on her own and without… fuss.

There was a door on the back staircase that led directly from the apartment Alyssa and Nicholas kept on the top floor to the rest of the house. It was never locked. Alyssa never locked it from her side because she didn’t see any reason to. Caroline and Paul and James didn’t lock it from theirs because they were pretending to be a really close, really involved family unit. At least, that was what Alyssa thought was going on. It was hard to get things straight with people like Caroline and Paul. They talked such fluent recovery that you could never figure out what they were trying to mean, if anything. Alyssa much preferred James. James might pretend to believe in crystals and powders and potions, but he didn’t really believe in them, and if you called him on it, he would say so.

Alyssa let herself into the main house and went down the fourth floor corridor to the main stairs. There were several big bedrooms on this floor, but only one of them—Caroline’s—was occupied. Alyssa looked in there for a moment, but without much interest. The look of Caroline’s bedroom always mirrored the state of her immortal soul. This time it was neat to the point of being antiseptic and as lacking in personality as a room at the Holiday Inn. Obviously, Caroline’s soul was being anal this month. Alyssa checked out the necklaces hanging on the jewelry tree—Caroline’s inner child had a positive passion for jade—and decided she didn’t like any of them. She left the room and went downstairs to the third floor.

The third floor was much more interesting than the fourth floor. Both James and Paul had rooms on it, and there was also a small sitting room James had turned into a kind of museum. This was where he kept the bits and pieces of his trade that had gone out of fashion. This was where he piled up now-useless copper bracelets and discarded pyramids, smooth stones for aid in trance channeling and packets of herbs meant to scent away your psychic pain. Lately, crystals had been finding their way into the collection, first a few, then more and more. Crystals must be about to become passé. What would they be replaced by, Alyssa wondered. Just when you thought the New Age had gotten as silly as it could get—just when you were sure people couldn’t get any stupider than they had already been—people like James came up with something new.

Alyssa gave the museum a quick look-over—nothing new there—and then glanced into James’s room, just to make sure he wasn’t there. Then she went into Paul’s room and sat down on the bed. The room was unnaturally clean today. Paul himself had never kept it this neat. Today it had been put back together again by the pair of policemen who had come to take it apart. They had been trained in dustless surfaces and hospital corners.

“Yes?” Caroline’s voice suddenly shot up the stairs, sharp and angry. “Yes? Is there somebody up there?”

Alyssa got off the bed and went into the hall. “Caroline? It’s just me. I was on my way downstairs to see you.”

“You didn’t sound as if you were on your way downstairs.” Caroline was still on the first floor. Alyssa could tell by the way her voice sounded. It was a relief.

“I stopped in to look at James’s museum,” Alyssa said. “He seems to be on the verge of giving up crystals.”

“You should have called down to me,” Caroline told her sharply. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were a thief at least.”

Any thief with half a brain in his head would come in on the first floor, in the back, where the kitchen was. That was the easy way.

“I’ll be there in a second, Caroline. I just want to use the bathroom.”

“I’m going to go back to work,” Caroline said. “I hate being interrupted.”