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Bleeding Hearts(9)



“Call her anything you want, Nicholas, the fact is that she’s got to be pushing fifty. And no matter how shrewd she’s been with money—and my guess is that she’s been very shrewd—well, she can’t be what we’d really call rich, can she?”

“She might not be what you call rich,” Nick said, “but she’s rich enough for me. Kindly remember that I checked her out for the family back when she first took up with Paul. She owns that house she lives in out in Bryn Mawr. It’s got to be worth a million five.”

“That’s very nice, Nicholas, but a really big book would make her more than that. Just think of the advances they pay some of these people nowadays. Ten million five sometimes. I’ve heard of it.”

“I just want you to take off your rose-colored glasses,” Nick said. “You’re always looking for the good side to everybody. So Candida DeWitt is going to write her memoirs. So you make excuses for her.”

“She doesn’t need an excuse to write her memoirs, Nick. People do it every day.”

“I know they do it every day.” Nick sighed. “That’s not the point. The point is that the selling angle for these memoirs is the death of your stepmother—”

“Oh, I know.”

“—and the fact that Candida and Paul were screwing like rabbits the whole last two years of your stepmother’s life—”

“I don’t think Jacqueline was capable of screwing like a pickle-jar top. She was a poisonous woman.”

“I don’t care if she was Mrs. Attila the Hun. The point, Alyssa, is that it is extremely unlikely that Candida is going to write these memoirs simply to make a little money. If she needed a little money, we could give it to her. Did you get the impression, when you talked to her, that she would be willing to accept a settlement?”

The chocolate-chip cookie was lying, half eaten, in Alyssa’s lap. She had tucked her feet up under her and was now sitting more or less in the lotus position on the edge of the couch. Nick was so intelligent about these things; he really was. He was so good at starting at the beginning and thinking things through to the end. Maybe that was what he got from being a lawyer.

Alyssa picked up the cookie and took yet another bite of it.

“Candida,” she said slowly, “didn’t really seem to be after much of anything. At least, not much of anything from me. She just—announced it all. Like a town crier giving the news.”

“But it was her idea for the two of you to meet?”

“Oh, yes,” Alyssa said.

“Why you? Why not Caroline, or James? Why not Paul?”

“I don’t think Candida and Paul are speaking, exactly,” Alyssa said. “That’s because of all that stuff with the police when Jacqueline died, which Candida has a perfect right to be upset about, because Paul behaved like an ass. I don’t know if she’s ever met James. And as for Caroline—”

Alyssa and Nick shot each other very, very meaningful looks. They both knew Caroline better than they wanted to.

Nick said, “Even assuming it makes sense that of all the people in the family, she’d call you, isn’t it a little odd that she’d call anybody at all? Why didn’t she just sell her book—is the book sold?”

“What? Oh, yes. I mean, it’s not written yet, you know, but I think there’s an agreement already signed for the book when it’s finished. From Bantam, I think she said.”

“There, then. She’s sold the book. Why didn’t she just go ahead and write it? Why warn the family of a thing of this kind?”

“Maybe she was just being straightforward and above-board.”

Nick sighed. “This is Candida DeWitt we’re talking about. She didn’t play field hockey at Westover. She managed to get an amicable palimony settlement out of a Greek shipping tycoon. Don’t talk crazy.”

“Maybe it was a compulsion with her, then. Maybe she’s one of those people who just can’t keep their mouths shut.”

“If she were one of those, she’d be dead by now,” Nick said. “I’m sorry, Alyssa. I probably like all this as little as Caroline does. It doesn’t feel right to me. Did Caroline have anything useful to say when you talked to her?”

To Alyssa’s mind, Caroline never had anything useful to say. To be incoherent and hysterical was the essence of being Caroline. She got up and brushed the crumbs of the now-demolished cookie off her skirt. The maid would vacuum in the morning the way she vacuumed every morning.

“Caroline”—Alyssa made her way to the drinks cart to pour herself a glass of wine—“was being positively apocalyptic, complete with pop-psych jargon, of course. God, I’m sick of pop-psych jargon. It’s been a bore ever since Daddy took up with it.”