Skeleton Key(3)

As soon as she had done it, she knew she had made a mistake. It was what he had wanted her to do. He was coming right up behind her. The BMW was not suited for this kind of road. The ruts were too deep and the weeds were too high. She was jouncing and shaking over the un-paved surface. She had lost all semblance of control over the wheel. She tried to remember what it was she had gone to Waterbury for, but all that came to mind was the Barnes & Noble near the new Brass Mill Center Mall, and she hadn’t even gone inside it. She wasn’t thinking straight. She wasn’t thinking. Everything inside her seemed to have frozen up.

Kayla put her foot on the accelerator to give it one more try, but she was stuck in a rut. Her wheels wouldn’t move. She even thought she heard the sound of a puncture.

Then the vehicle came up behind her, fast, and smashed into her back end. She was thrown forward in a rush. Her seat belt locked into place. Her horn went off, and only seconds later did she realize she was pressing it.

“Now what?” Kayla asked the air—and then she turned around and tried to see who was coming for her, in the dark.





2


Margaret Bell Anson had always believed that life had rules, and one of the most important of those rules had to do with the duty a person owed her friends. Cordelia Day Hannaford had been a good friend of Margaret’s until the day she died. They had gone to boarding school together and come out together in Philadelphia, too, because Margaret had been doing a national season. It wasn’t Cordelia’s fault that she had married That Man and been shut away from everybody in Bryn Mawr for decades. It wasn’t Cordelia’s fault that so many of her children had grown up to be psychopaths, either—although, Margaret admitted to herself, you had to wonder about that one. There were two children in jail, from what Margaret had heard, and another one who was some kind of failed academic. The two in jail had both been part of really enormous scandals. It went around and around, in spite of the fact that Cordelia’s husband had been far better off in the family department than Margaret’s. One of the rules Margaret had been brought up with was the one that said Blood Will Out, and it bothered her no end when something made it seem as if it weren’t true.

At the moment, it was after nine o’clock at night and Margaret wanted to be in bed. What she was doing instead was sitting in her own living room, dressed in a good shirtwaist and a pair of heels, making small talk with Cordelia’s third-oldest daughter. That was the other thing about Cordelia that Margaret had never been able to get used to. She bred like a nineteenth-century matriarch or a welfare queen. She had baby after baby, seven of them in all, so that it wasn’t strange that some of them had turned out badly. Margaret had had exactly one child, Kayla, and she had never wanted to have another. The idea of being weighed down by pregnancy and bloodied by delivery sickened her. She was sure it sickened all decent women everywhere, and that they only put up with it for the survival of the species.

The young woman sitting across from her in the yellow wing chair was perhaps not so young, and she had a bad cough, the kind of thing Margaret herself would have had a doctor look after. The age was questionable. Margaret’s best guess would have been around forty. On the other hand, she was truly one of the most astonishingly beautiful women Margaret had ever seen, with the sort of face that existed nowhere else on earth and worked perfectly. It gave her authority in spite of the fact that she was actually rather short, which Margaret always thought made people look ridiculous. Margaret was five-foot-nine herself. There were people who said that when Kayla finished growing, she would be something over six feet.

Unless, of course, Kayla had already finished growing. Margaret couldn’t remember when that stopped. She couldn’t remember exactly how old Kayla was, either, although she could make a good guess at eighteen or nineteen, because that was when girls came out. This was the year that Kayla was coming out. Margaret didn’t think Bennis Day Hannaford had ever come out, but she might have, in a small way, and Margaret might have missed it. There was something un-debutantelike about Bennis. Margaret couldn’t put her finger on what.

There were little demitasse cups on the coffee table between them, and a silver serving set just for demitasse that Margaret had gotten as a gift for her wedding. All of Margaret’s really good pieces had come to her as wedding gifts or been inherited from her mother. Her husband’s taste had run to the obviously expensive, and—as he had told her, time and time again—he was the one with the money.

Margaret crossed her legs carefully at the knee—when she was growing up, ladies crossed their legs only at the ankles, but now it was considered much more sophisticated to do it this way, even in the Northwest Hills—and folded her hands in her lap.