Cheating at Solitaire(57)

“Caroline,” Stewart said. “It’s your father.”

“I know it’s my father.” Caroline sounded relieved. “I’d recognize your voice anywhere. Anybody would recognize your voice anywhere. How are you? I was thinking about calling last week, when the news hit the papers here, but Colin said he’d called, and you sounded busy. Are you all right? Are they going to arrest you for murder?”

“No, they are not going to arrest me for murder,” Stewart said. “And I’m fine. There’s a friend of mine they’re bringing in up here to help with the investigation. It’s not about that, though. That really doesn’t matter. It’s, ah. Well. Do you hear from Andrew?”

“He’s in the Amazon basin,” Caroline said. “He’ll check in in a day or two and we’ll tell him all about it, but he probably hasn’t heard any news for a week. They’re doing—I don’t know what they’re doing. Some kind of lemur, I think. Is that what you called about? You wanted to find out about Andrew?”

“No,” Stewart said. He was finding it unbelievably hard to say what he wanted to say. He never found anything hard to say. He was proud of his children, though. Caroline was not only a psychologist but married with a child on the way. Colin was a barrister in a first-rate firm in London. Andrew was a zoologist who studied—well, Stewart wasn’t sure what he studied. Nobody was ever sure with Andrew, but Cambridge had taken him on, and some American foundation kept giving him lots of money to mount expeditions to the Amazon, so Stewart assumed that Andrew was well respected in his field. He found it interesting that none of his children had been interested in being an actor.

Caroline was getting concerned. “Dad? Are you all right?

Colin said when he called your house, a woman answered. Is it something about that? I talked to Mum about it. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” Stewart said. “No, I don’t mind. And it’s, well, yes, it is in a way about her, but not exactly. I mean, not directly.”

“So is she somebody important? Is she somebody we should know about? It’s been a while since you’ve hung around with one of those six-foot Amazons with the hot and cold running neuroses.”

“She’s not six feet tall,” Stewart said. “And she’s not neurotic that I know of. Her name is Annabeth Falmer. Dr. An-nabeth Falmer. She—”

“The historian,” Caroline said. “Really? This is serious. She’s got to be almost as old as you are.”

“Caroline,” Stewart said. It wasn’t true that all his girlfriends since his marriage had been six feet tall. It was true that they had all been neurotic. He tried again. “I called because I wanted to know if you resented it. The name. If you wish your mother and I hadn’t changed your name to keep you away from my publicity.”

There was a short silence on the line. “What an odd thing to say,” Caroline said finally. “Especially after all these years. And no, if you want to know, I didn’t resent it, and I don’t think Colin and Andrew did either. Especially not after you became Commander Rees, and it was all over everywhere. You were. I mean by then we were, what, in our teens? We weren’t stupid. We could read the tabloids. I don’t think any of us was interested in having that kind of publicity in our lives.”

“Some people like it,” Stewart said. “In Los Angeles, there are some people, girls especially, who, ah—”

“Who become celebrities by proxy?” Caroline said. “Do you really think I’d want to do that? Or that Colin would? Or Andrew? God, can’t you just imagine Andrew in a tabloid, siccing a python on the photographers?”

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Well. You were always very sensible children.”

“We’re not children anymore, Dad. Colin is forty-five.”

“I know that.” He looked at the pictures on the bed again. Then he gathered them up and put them back in the drawer. Maybe the time had come to keep them out and around and not care if people saw them. There was no chance anymore that any of the three of them would be plagued by schoolyard bullies because he had his picture all over American television.

He had one of those rare but desperate moments when he wished he still smoked cigarettes. It passed. “I did something stupid,” he said. “Not deliberately, you understand, but it was stupid. And now I’m not entirely sure what to do to make it right.”

“whatever did you do?”

“It’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t tell Annabeth about the three of you.”