Skeleton Key(14)

Sally punched at her keyboard again. Kayla Anson’s fifteen hundred dollars became thirteen hundred dollars. Sally punched at her keyboard again and Kayla’s name disappeared. All Sally had to do now was wait for the morning, when she picked up the club’s weekend cash at the bank. She could take the two hundred dollars off the top right in the car. All anybody would know if they checked was that Kayla Anson had spent two hundred dollars at the club on Friday, October 27, and that the spending had been done on food and liquor. The club was not supposed to serve liquor to minors, but it had been doing it for decades, and it wasn’t going to stop now.

Sally exited the program and put her screen saver up. Then she stood and got her purse from the floor. Kayla Anson wasn’t in the club tonight. Her little BMW was not in the parking lot. As far as Sally knew, Kayla hadn’t been in the club all day. When Sally had first started doing this, she had been much more careful about making sure that the dates of her withdrawals matched the dates on which the account holders were really here. After a few months, it had been impossible to keep that up. It was incredible how fast money went, and how much there was to spend it on. It was incredible how completely broke a person could get and not be dead.

Sally turned off the lights and went back into the hall. Nobody was around. The club manager went home on weekend evenings, in spite of the fact that they were often the busiest nights of the week. The very busiest night of the week was Thursday. That was the night the maids traditionally had off, and nobody wanted to stay home and cook.

Sally went into the main lobby again and then through to the dining room. Mallory was sitting alone at a table near the kitchen door, reading a ragged copy of Field and Stream. At a table in the center of the room, three girls from Mallory’s coming-out class—including one Vanderbilt connection and a girl whose mother was related to Jacqueline Onassis on the Bouvier side—were huddled over gin and tonics, giggling.

If Sally Martindale could have done anything at all right that minute, she would have strangled her daughter and thrown the body in the duck pond beyond the terrace. Maybe the ducks would be able to get through to Mallory where she could not. Maybe the ducks would come up with a reason why Sally should go on living.





6


It was almost 11:30 by the time Peter Greer got home, and he was tense as hell about it until he came through his garage and into the main room of his Adirondack-style house. That was when he heard the giggling coming from his sunroom, where the hot tub was—giggling that meant that Deirdre had waited for him after all, and gotten herself fairly drunk on champagne in the process. That was almost too perfect to believe: a drunk and naked Deirdre, in a good mood. Peter had been jumpy all night. It was impossible not to think of all the things that could go wrong if he didn’t keep an eye on his life every single moment. He had so many balls in the air right now, he wasn’t even juggling anymore. He was just flailing, pinwheeling his arms and living on hope. One of these days it was all going to come crashing down on his head, and then what was he going to do with himself?

He went past the massive stone fireplace with its framed poster on the mantel: the cover of the first Goldenrod catalogue he had ever produced. He dropped his scarf and his down vest on a black leather love seat and kept moving toward the sunroom. Almost everything he owned had appeared in one Goldenrod catalogue or another over the years. When he really liked something, he tried to get a franchise to sell it. Goldenrod was all about his personal taste. No, that wasn’t it. It was all about his personal identity. Either that, or the kind of identity other people thought he had. Everybody was looking for an image these day. Everybody wanted to see themselves living out their lives on a big screen. Peter had no idea what people had done in other eras, when there hadn’t been so much media around, or so many opportunities to appear in public. He had always thought anonymity was a little like death, or maybe something worse. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really make a sound? If a person lives a life that nobody else notices, was he ever really alive? The trick was to call as much attention to yourself as possible. That way you could be sure you wouldn’t just disappear.

Peter ducked his head into the sunroom. Deirdre was lying in the hot water, letting her body float to the surface every once in a while and then forcing it back down. She really was naked. When Kayla came here—and Peter brought her here often; it was the most sensible thing he could do—she always wore a bathing suit.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” Peter said. “I take it there haven’t been any interruptions.”