“You never tell any of your girlfriends about the three of us. I think the last one I met, I was introduced as your niece. And I was fourteen.”
“Yes,” Stewart said. “Well.”
The pause on Caroline’s end of the line was longer this time, and when it was broken it was broken with an explosion of laughter. “Good grief,” she said. “You’re serious. You’re serious this time.”
“Possibly,” Stewart said.
“Well, but, how long have you known her? What’s she like? Is she gorgeous—but she couldn’t be as gorgeous as the girlfriends, could she, because she must be in her fifties. Have you asked her to marry you? Are you going to?”
“I’ve known her for a week,” Stewart said, “and I’m not going to ask her to marry me before I ask her to, ah, yes, that’s none of your business.”
Caroline was giggling helplessly. Stewart could hear her.
“It really isn’t that funny, you know. And I have to somehow explain why I didn’t mention the three of you, never mind your mother.”
“Oh, I’ve got to tell Mum. This is wonderful. And Andrew. He’ll laugh for a week. We’re all grown now, though, so we expect to be invited to the wedding, especially if you’re telling her anyway. And you’d better tell her. If she finds out after you’re married, she’ll have your head, and quite rightly, too.”
“Caroline,” Stewart said.
But it was no use. Caroline couldn’t stop laughing, and Stewart couldn’t stop feeling that he had, in his old age, become a figure of fun to his own children.
2
For Kendra Rhode, the days since the murder of Mark An-derman had been a raging annoyance, of a kind and duration she hadn’t been required to suffer through since she’d been in high school. Today alone, a day on which nothing much was happening, she had had to take two telephone calls from family lawyers, one from the firm in New York, which was furious at her, and one from the firm in Los Angeles, which was ready to chew her head off. The consensus was complete. Nobody understood what she was still doing on Margaret’s Harbor. She had nothing to hold her there, no obligations she was required to meet, and by staying where she was she was putting herself and possibly other members of the family in jeopardy. Kendra had been told all about the police when she was very young, and about “ordinary people,” who were not so much ordinary as full of resentment against people like the Rhodes.
“You must never forget,” one of her aunts had told her, at one of those insufferable family “receptions” her father was always making her mother put on, “no member of the public understands who you are, or what you are, or what you’re going through. They think you have an easy life.”
“Of course we have an easy life,” Kendra’s sister Cordelia had said later, up in her bedroom, where she and Kendra had both gone to hide from the aunts. “What does that woman think? That it isn’t easy not to ever have to worry about paying the bills?”
Kendra had been about nine at the time, and she had found it difficult to know where her sympathies should lie. She hadn’t much liked that aunt—she didn’t like any of her aunts; her aunts were all “horse people,” which Cordelia said meant they looked like their horses, and sounded like them too—but she hadn’t liked Cordelia, either, and still didn’t. If anything, she found her aunts easier to understand. The ordinary members of the public didn’t know what she was going through. They thought she was brainless and spoiled and shallow, and she was really none of those things. She had emotions like anybody else. Some of them ran very deep. Some of them were painful. She had insecurities. Then there was the simple fact of her career, which had not gotten off the ground, and was having a hard time getting, because nobody would take her seriously. When you were born with money, people treated anything you wanted to do as if it were a hobby. You didn’t need the money, so you didn’t need the career. They believed that, and then they laughed at you.
Cordelia was one of the people who had called over the last few days, and she had not been happy.
“I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing,” she’d said, her sharp-edged caw bouncing through the ether like a weapon, “but you’re putting yourself in a position to get arrested, whether you had anything to do with the murder or not. You had something to do with him. You know you did. And a piece of utter brainless crap that episode was. I don’t even want to think about.”
Cordelia was in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford, getting a doctorate in microbiology. It occurred to Kendra that nobody ever failed to take Cordelia’s career seriously. Even their father and the lawyers took it seriously. The people Cordelia worked with sounded like they adored her, on those few occasions when they were required to sound like anything. The occasions were a matter of some animosity between Cordelia and her, because she was always the cause of them.