“Which is?”
“The Harper family is at the end of its line, overbred and barren. There will be no one after us,” she said.
The wine was an inexpensive domestic burgundy, dry with a faint metallic bite. How much longer until the police finished? I thought I’d heard the rumble of a truck a while ago, the wrecker coming to tow away my car.
“I accepted it as my lot in life to take care of my brother, to ease the family into extinction,” Miss Harper said. “I will miss Gary only because he was my brother. I’m not going to sit here and lie about how wonderful he was.”
She sipped her wine again. “I’m sure I must sound cold to you.”
Cold wasn’t the word for it. “I appreciate your honesty,” I said.
“Gary had imagination and volatile emotions. I have little of either, and were this not the case I couldn’t have managed. Certainly, I wouldn’t have lived here.”
“Living in this house would be isolating.” I supposed this was what Miss Harper meant.
“It isn’t the isolation I mind,” she said.
“What is it you mind, then, Miss Harper?” I queried, reaching for my cigarettes.
“Would you like another glass of wine?” she asked, one side of her face obscured by the shadow of the fire.
“No, thank you.”
“I wish we’d never moved here. Nothing good happens in this house,” she said.
“What will you do, Miss Harper?” The emptiness of her eyes chilled me. “Will you stay here?”
“I have no place else to go, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“I would think selling Cutler Grove wouldn’t be hard,” I answered, my attention wandering back to the portrait over the mantel. The young girl in white smiled eerily in the firelight at secrets she would never tell.
“It is hard to leave your iron lung, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m too old for change,” she explained. “I’m too old to pursue good health and new relationships.
The past breathes for me. It is my life. You are young, Dr. Scarpetta. Someday you will see what it is like to look back. You will find it inescapable. You will find your personal history drawing you back into familiar rooms where, ironically, events occurred that set into motion your eventual estrangement from life. You will find the hard furniture of heartbreak more comfortable and the
people who failed you friendlier with time. You will find yourself running back into the arms of the pain you once ran away from. It is easier. That’s all I can say. It is easier.”
“Do you have any idea who did this to your brother?” I asked her directly, desperate to change the subject.
She said nothing as she stared wide-eyed into the fire.
“What about Beryl?” I persisted.
“I know she was being harassed months before it happened.”
“Months before her death?” I asked.
“Beryl and I were very close.”
“You knew she was being harassed?”
“Yes. The threats she was getting,” she said.
“She told you she was being threatened, Miss Harper?”
“Of course,” she said.
Marino had been through Beryl’s phone bills. He hadn’t found any long-distance calls made to Williamsburg. Nor had he turned up any letters written to her by Miss Harper or her brother.
“Then you maintained close contact with her over the years?” I said.
“Very close contact,” she replied. “At least, as much as that was possible. Because of this book she was writing and the clear violation of her agreement with my brother. Well, it all got very ugly.
Gary was enraged.”
“How did he know what she was doing? Did she tell him what she was writing?”
“Her lawyer did,” she said.
“Sparacino?”
“I don’t know the details of what he told Gary,” she said, her face hard. “But my brother was informed of Beryl’s book. He knew enough to be extremely out of sorts. The lawyer agitated the matter behind the scenes. Going from Beryl to Gary, back and forth, acting as if he were an ally with one or the other, depending on whom he was talking to.”
“Do you know the status of her book now?” I asked carefully. “Does Sparacino have it? Is it in the process of being published?”