Blood in the Water(57)

“I don’t think what’s upstairs had to do with drugs,” Eileen said. “I think it had to do with her. I think she gave it to him.”

“Gave it to him,” Stephen said. “And why would she do that?”

“I don’t know,” Eileen said.

Actually, she did know. At least, she had a suspicion. She had been working it out in her head ever since she heard that the other body in the pool house didn’t belong to Martha Heydreich. It was very hard to make it come clear in her head. There were so many turns and wrinkles in it. Still, she had an idea.

“I think,” she said.

Stephen got up from the table. “I think you just don’t get it,” he said. “You can’t tell the police about something like this. You can’t go off and get us into the papers this way. They can throw us out of Waldorf Pines for something like this. Did you know that?”

“They didn’t throw out Arthur Heydreich,” Eileen said.

“They were afraid they’d get sued,” Stephen said. “Innocent until proven guilty and all that kind of thing. But they won’t have any trouble sticking it to us. They’ve been wanting to get us out of here for a year. That Horace Wingard. He’s been ready to give us the shove at the first excuse.”

“Horace Wingard was always very good about Michael,” Eileen said. “He gave him that job. And he kept him on that job, you know, even though Michael—”

“Even though Michael didn’t show up half the time?”

“It was just a phase,” Eileen said. “He was young, that was all. He thought he knew everything. He’d have grown up eventually…”

Her voice had trailed off. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d believed that.

“The trouble with you,” Stephen had said, “is that you just can’t face reality.”

Then he had gotten up from the table and walked away, out the swinging doors to the dining room. Across the foyer. Eileen had heard his feet on the stairs. Everything in this house echoed. There was a television in nearly every room, but she never put them on.

She heard a door open upstairs. That would be the door to Michael’s room. It was a very clean room. She kept it clean. When Michael came home, he threw things on the floor and messed it up.

The footsteps were in the hall again. Then they were on the stairs. Eileen looked down at her hands and waited.

Stephen came back across the dining room and into the kitchen. He had a Bass Weejun shoe box in his right hand. It flopped and shuddered as he moved. Eileen thought that it was going to fall, and then everything would be all over the place, right there in the kitchen.

Stephen put the shoe box down in the middle of the table.

“I’m going to take this out of here,” he said. “I’m going to move this somewhere, and you won’t find it. And if you ever tell the police, or anybody else, that it was in Michael’s room, or that I’ve got it, I’ll say you’re lying. And make no mistake about it, Eileen. They won’t believe you. They’ll believe me.”

Eileen did not see how there was any way to deny this. This is what had always been true.

2

Caroline Stanford-Pyrie was not the kind of person who panicked, ever. If she had been, she would not have landed safely at Waldorf Pines, and she would not have been able to bring Susan Carstairs with her. She had long been of the opinion that any catastrophe could be survived if it was handled properly. The difficulty lay in knowing what “properly” was meant to be. There was also the rule that you had to be most careful when the police were involved. The police were always the enemy.

Of course, at the moment, her problem was not the police, who had no reason to be thinking about her. Her problem was Susan, who was doing her usual fluttery, addled thing when danger approached. It had started with the news, yesterday, that the charred body in the pool house was no longer thought to be Martha Heydreich, and that the charges against Arthur Heydreich for the murder of his wife had been dropped. Then Arthur Heydreich had been released, and Susan had had something like a nervous breakdown.

“You can’t say it doesn’t matter,” Susan had wailed. “How can it not matter? It was different when he was dead and she was dead and everybody knew who did it. They don’t ask questions when they know who did it. But now what, Alison? Now what?”

“Caroline,” Caroline had said automatically.

Susan had blushed.

“I’m not worried about the police asking questions,” Caroline said. “I’m worried about that. I’m worried about you—”

“I won’t do it again,” Susan said. “I’m sorry. I just get upset. I can’t understand how you can blame me for being upset. After everything that’s happened—”