Skeleton Key(122)

“It’s always cold as hell all winter.”

“So you like that?” Henry asked. “Why? Why should we both be miserable for months at a time? Why shouldn’t we go to Florida?”

Martin put the ladder down on the ground, on its side. The leaves were thick around his ankles. Somebody would have to come out here and rake. The raking would take all day, and when it was done it would have to be done again. Then the snow would begin to fall, and somebody would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk. Him. He would have to shovel out the driveway and the walk, unless Henry did it, and Henry couldn’t do it if he was in Florida.

“We’ve never been to Florida,” Martin said finally, as if that ought to answer everything.

Instead, Henry was hopping around from one foot to another, grinning like he’d just finished a bottle of whiskey.

“That’s the point,” he said. “We’ve never been there, and it’s warm, and we can go to Disney World.”

Disney World.

For the first time in his life, Martin Chandling thought he was getting a migraine.





2


By late on the afternoon of Halloween, everybody at the Swamp Tree Country Club knew what had happened with Sally Martindale. Everybody knew what the deal was going to be, too, because members had been eavesdropping outside old Mortimer’s door all afternoon. Mortimer was not being particularly quiet in there—in fact, most of the time he was shouting. It was Ruth Grandmere who was keeping her head and being practical about things. If it hadn’t been for Ruth, Mortimer would probably have had the police come right to the club and cart Sally Martindale off to jail.

“It was gambling,” Marian Ridenour confided to Peter Greer as she pulled out a chair to sit down at his table. “Can you believe that? She was taking all this money and going out to Ledyard to play the slots. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of it.”

“It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Jennifer Crawford said, pulling another chair over to the little table. “It was only about ten thousand, and mostly she wasn’t gambling with it. Apparently, she’s been living out there in that huge house for months without enough money to pay the bills. She’d had her heat shut off last winter.”

“Oh, I’d heard that,” Marian said. “Somebody said—I don’t remember who—that she’d had to apply for heating assistance from the state. And yet Mallory was here, the whole time, trying to be a debutante.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said, “Mallory isn’t going to be a debutante anymore. She’s going to go to nursing school. Which is much more sensible, really, if you think about it. It never does any good to be unrealistic about your circumstances.”

Peter Greer had intended to be alone, but at the moment he found this particular conversation soothing. It was so—Swamp Tree Country Club; so—Litchfield County. It occurred to him that there were dozens of women in this small square part of the state who were perfectly sane, who did not think gossip and status were the bedrocks of life, and some of them were even rich. None of them belonged to the Swamp Tree. And yet this was what he wanted. This was what he had always wanted. He wondered what that said about himself.

“What do you think about it?” Marian asked him. “Are you just shocked beyond words?”

“Not really,” Peter said. “I suppose it was hard to keep up after Frank left.”

“Oh that,” Jennifer said. “Well, of course, nothing on earth could excuse Frank’s behavior. But you have to wonder. You really do. You have to wonder if he had cause.”

“Why?” Peter asked.

“Well, because of this,” Jennifer said. “I mean, she couldn’t have been very stable, could she? And Frank had to live with her. He’d have known something was wrong long before we would. Maybe he saw it happening. This breakdown, or whatever it is she’s having.”

Peter cocked his head. “Her husband left her for another woman and stiffed her on the settlement so that she got practically no cash when she’d been used to living well, and you don’t think that’s enough of a reason for her to have a breakdown?”

“Well,” Marian said, “you’ve got to remember. She used to have a job. She worked for Deloitte. And they fired her.”

“She came up for partnership and didn’t make it,” Peter said. “Most people who come up for partnership don’t make it.”

“Still,” Marian said. “You’ve got to wonder if they saw something, too. Now that we know, you see, it all begins to make sense. The odd things she did. Her peculiar behavior. And her behavior really has been peculiar.”