Kelly had to admit that the polished older lady with the British accent didn’t look like a reporter.
“Okay,” she said, against her better judgment. “I’ll meet you in Starbucks when I’m done here. Right across the street. Say five o’clock?”
She was as good as her word. At five on the dot, Alexia ordered coffees and the two women sat down to talk.
Kelly Dupree was red-haired with pale Irish skin and a smattering of freckles across her nose that made her look younger than her twenty-eight years. She had the overplucked eyebrows of a professional beautician, and she tapped her acrylic nails loudly and nervously on the table as she spoke.
“I’m sorry if I was a little abrupt before. It was awful what happened to Jen. But a lot of the newspapers and TV people treated her death like entertainment. As if it were some sort of sick reality show, you know? It’s made me wary of talking about her.”
“I don’t blame you,” Alexia said. “I used to be a politician—I’m retired now—but I certainly understand how manipulative the media can be.”
“So what is your interest in Jenny? No offense, but I’m having trouble believing you’re a ‘friend of a friend.’ Jen didn’t know too many people like you.”
“I knew her father, many years ago. We lost touch. When I heard about Jennifer’s death and what happened, I felt I owed it to Billy to try and find out the truth. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seemed to me as if the police kind of let things slide.”
Kelly Dupree laughed bitterly. “You’re not wrong. The cops were as bad as the media. Worse in a way. For a few weeks Jen’s murder was a hot story. Then everybody forgot about it and moved on to something new. They had no leads. Their so-called investigation was a joke. As soon as they realized it wasn’t Luca, that was it. They gave up.”
“Luca Minotti? Jenny’s boyfriend?”
“Fiancé. Right. Sweetest guy on earth. Luca wouldn’t step on a spider if he could help it. Lucky for him he was in Italy when she went missing, otherwise the NYPD would have pinned it on him for sure. They wanted it to be Luca so bad. That’s all they asked me about.”
Alexia sipped her Americano. “And what about you. Do you have any theories, any thoughts as to who might have killed her?”
Kelly shook her head. “Not really. Some psycho. I mean she wasn’t robbed. She wasn’t raped. There was no reason for it. It was so senseless.”
“Was Jenny troubled at all before her death?”
“She was cut up about her dad. You knew he was murdered too, right? In London, the year before Jenny.”
“Yes,” Alexia said quietly, banishing an image of Teddy from her mind. “I knew that. Were they close?”
“Oh God, yes. Very. Billy was a little odd, you know, but Jen was his only child. He adored her. She worried about him a lot.”
“About his mental health, you mean?”
Kelly nodded. “Yes, that. And his loneliness. But you know, there were other things. He’d been in jail a long time ago, before Jenny was born. I never quite knew the details, but Jenny seemed convinced he was innocent of whatever it was he got sent down for. It made him paranoid. Right before he died, I remember he called the apartment and told Jenny that the British government was out to get him. That they’d drugged him and put him on a plane or some nonsense. He was really frightened.”
Alexia’s hand tightened on her coffee mug. Poor Billy! He came to me for help and I scared him out of his wits. And then to have nobody believe him, not even his own family. The guilt was like a stone around her neck.
Kelly Dupree went on. “Things were amicable between Jenny’s parents, but her dad never fully got over the divorce. And then there was the business going down the tubes. And his best friend, his business partner, taking off and leaving Billy holding the bag.”
Alexia cast her mind back to Edward Manning’s file on Billy. She dimly remembered something about a business partner—was the name Bates? But she hadn’t realized he and Billy had been close friends.
“Jen used to say it was like her dad was cursed. And we were all like ‘no, no, that’s crazy.’ But it did sort of seem that way, you know?”
Alexia knew.
“The irony was, toward the end Billy became totally obsessed with Jenny’s safety. Like, she was here, worrying about him, and Billy was on the other side of the world, obsessing about something happening to her. We all thought he was crazy, to be perfectly honest with you. But maybe he knew something we didn’t.”
“ ‘We all’?”
“Me. Luca. Jenny’s friends. Her mom.”
“So Jenny’s mother didn’t believe her daughter was in any danger?”
“No. None of us did. Why would she be? We thought Billy was just rambling. Maybe he was. But it does seem kind of odd that Billy gets knifed to death in London and then a year later some psycho does this to Jenny, don’t you think? Like, maybe someone out there really really doesn’t like that family.”
Family.
For some reason, the word struck a chord with Alexia. She and Teddy had been a family once. Back in the mists of time, when Michael and Roxie were children, untouched by tragedy, blissfully unaware of the misery the future held for all of them. It occurred to her that in some ways, her own experiences mirrored Billy’s. The sense of being cursed, of having somehow brought calamity down on themselves and their families. Both she and Billy had lost their marriages, both lost their children. Billy’s business had failed; Alexia’s career had collapsed. When Kelly Dupree spoke about someone holding a grudge against the Hamlin family, Alexia thought, That’s how I feel. As if my family are all puppets, and some sadistic, malevolent puppeteer is up their pulling the strings, picking us off one by one.
Of course, she knew it was nonsense. Teddy had killed Billy. And Teddy knew nothing about Jennifer’s death. So there was no connection. Just like there was no connection between Roxie’s suicide attempt and Michael’s accident, or between Teddy’s imprisonment and her own ruined political career. It’s human nature to try and tie these things together. To find a pattern, to believe there must be a purpose behind the misery. It’s what Summer Meyer had been trying to do with Michael’s accident. And now I’m doing the same, with Jenny Hamlin’s murder. But the truth is there is no reason, no connection, no mysterious person pulling the strings.
It was almost seven by the time Alexia left the Starbucks. Kelly Dupree had given her addresses for Jennifer Hamlin’s fiancé, Luca, and for her mother, Sally, but it was too late to pay either of them a visit tonight. Alexia would eat, sleep, and see what more she could find out in the morning.
Back at her hotel, a town-house boutique in the East Village, Alexia collapsed onto her bed, suddenly exhausted. After the slow pace of life on the Vineyard, just being in New York tired her. The lights, the noise, the relentless energy of the city. I’m too old for this. Maybe Lucy was right. I should have stayed at the Gables and let sleeping dogs lie.
Nothing she’d heard today encouraged her to believe that she was going to succeed where Chief Harry Dublowski and his men had failed. She wasn’t going to find Jennifer Hamlin’s killer. Suddenly the whole enterprise seemed pointless. What the hell am I doing, raking around in another family’s grief? As if I don’t have enough grief of my own.
She checked her messages. Since their bonding session at Michael’s bedside, Summer Meyer had taken to texting Alexia regularly from London, just to check in, or send pictures of a sleeping Michael. But today there was nothing. Summer’s mother, Lucy, had called twice, but left no message. It was odd, Alexia reflected, the degree to which the Meyers had filled the void left by her own crumbling family. Lucy, Arnie, and Summer were all she had now. Alexia thanked God for them.
She considered calling Summer herself, just to make sure everything was okay. But before she could figure out what time it was in England, exhaustion overtook her. The phone slipped from her hand and she sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Sally Hamlin patted down the earth around the newly planted hydrangeas and surveyed her front yard with satisfaction. Spring had fully sprung in Tuckahoe, the quiet Westchester suburb Sally had retired to three years ago, and the scent of summer already hung tantalizingly in the air. Back in Queens, Sally had never had a yard and had always wanted one. Now she derived deep, intense pleasure from her little rectangular patch of grass and flower beds. The simple satisfaction of planting something, tending it, and watching it grow filled her with contentment and peace, and gave a much-needed sense of control and order to her world. After so much loss, so much horror, Sally had learned to take pleasure in the small, predictable joys of life.