“Sure. Every day.”
“Well, then? She’s doing okay?”
“She says she is.” Peter drew a couple of troubled breaths. “But it’s e-mail. Not like actually—you know, hearin’ her voice. People are all the time sayin’ what they can’t put into words, you just have to have an ear for it.”
“So—maybe there’s things she wants you to know, but can’t talk about?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never been apart more than a couple days since we met. Maybe Echo’s found out—it wasn’t such a great bargain after all.” He had a tight grip on his mother’s hand.
“Easy now. If you trust Echo, then you’ll hold on. Any man can do that, Petey, for the woman he loves.”
“I’ll always love her,” Peter said, his voice tight. He looked into Kate’s eyes, a fine simmer of emotion in his own eyes. “But I don’t trust a man nobody knows much about. He’s got walls around him you wouldn’t believe.”
“A man who values his privacy. That kind of money, it’s not surprising.” Kate hesitated. “You been digging for something? Unofficially, I mean.”
‘Yeah.”
“No beefs?”
“No beefs. The man’s practically invisible where public records are concerned.”
“Then let it alone.”
“If I could see Echo, just for a little while. I’m half nuts all the time.”
“God love you, Peter. Long as you have Sunday off, why don’t the two of us go to visit Rosemay, take her for an outing? Been a while since I last saw her.”
“I don’t think I can, Ma. I, uh—need to go up to Westchester, talk to somebody.”
“Police business, is it?”
Peter shook his head.
“Her name’s Van Lier. She posed for John Ransome once.”
SEVEN
The Van Lier residence was a copy—an exact copy, according to a Web site devoted to descriptions of Westchester County’s most spectacular homes—of a sixteenth-century English manor house. All Peter saw of the inside was a glimpse of slate floor and dark wainscotting through a partly opened front door.
He said to the houseman who had answered his ring, “I’d like to see Mrs. Van Lier.”
The houseman was an elderly Negro with age spots on his caramel-colored face like the spots on a leopard.
“There’s no Mrs. Van Lier at this residence.”
Peter handed him his card.
“Anne Van Lier. I’m with the New York police department.”
The houseman looked him over patiently, perhaps hoping if his appraisal took long enough Peter would simply vanish from their doorstep and he could go back to his nap.
“What is your business about, Detective? Miss Anne don’t hardly care to see nobody.”
“I’d like to ask her a few questions.”
They played the waiting game until the houseman reluctantly took a Motorola Talk-about from a pocket of the apron he wore over his Sunday suit and tried to raise her on a couple of different channels. He frowned.
“Reckon she’s laid hers down and forgot about it,” he said. “Well, likely you’ll find Miss Anne in the greenhouse this time of the day. But I don’t expect she’ll talk to you, police or no police.”
“Where’s the greenhouse?”
“Go ’round the back and walk toward the pond, you can’t hardly miss it. When you see her, tell Miss Anne I did my best to raise her first, so she don’t throw a fit my way.”
Peter approached the greenhouse through a squall of copper beech leaves on a windy afternoon. The slant roofs of the long greenhouse reflected scudding clouds. Inside a woman he assumed was Anne Van Lier was visible through a mist from some overhead pipes. She wore gloves that covered half of her forearms and a gardening hat with a floppy brim that, along with the mist floating above troughs of exotic plants, obscured most of her face. She was working at a potting bench in the diffused glimmer of sunlight.
“Miss Van Lier?”
She stiffened at the sound of an unfamiliar voice but didn’t look around. She was slight-boned in dowdy tan coveralls.
‘Yes? Who is it?” Her tone said that she didn’t care to know. ‘You’re trespassing.”
“My name is Peter O’Neill. New York City police department.”
Peter walked a few steps down a gravel path toward her. With a quick motion of her head she took him in and said, “Stay where you are. Police?”
“I’d like to show you some identification.”
“What is this about?”
He held up his shield. “John Leland Ransome.”
She dropped a three-pronged tool from her right hand onto the bench and leaned against it as if suddenly at a loss for breath. Her back was to Peter. A dry scuttle of leaves on the overhead glass cast a kaleidoscope of shadow in the greenhouse. He wiped mist from his forehead and continued toward her.
‘You posed for Ransome.”
“What of it? Who told you that?”
“He did.”
She’d been rigidly still; now Anne Van Lier seemed pleasurably agitated.
‘You know John? You’ve seen him?”
‘Yes.”
“When?”
“A couple of months ago.” Peter had closed the distance between them. Anne darted another look his way, a gloved hand covering her profile as if she were a bashful child; but she no longer appeared to be concerned about him.
“How is John?” Her voice was suddenly rich with emotion. “Did he—mention me?”
“That he did,” Peter said reassuringly, and dared to ask, “Are you still in love with Ransome?”
She shuddered, protecting herself with the glove as if he’d thrown a stone, seeming to cower.
“What did John say about me? Please.”
Knowing he’d touched a nerve, Peter said soothingly, “Told me the year he spent with you was one of the happiest of his life.”
Still it bothered him when, after a few moments, she began softly to weep. He moved closer to Anne, put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Just go.”
“How long since you seen him last, Anne?”
“Eighteen years,” she said despondently.
“He also said—it was his understanding that you were very happy.”
Anne Van Lier gasped. Then she began shaking with laughter, as if at the cruelest joke she’d ever heard.
She turned suddenly to Peter, knocking his hand away from her, snatching off her gardening hat as she stared up at him.
The shock she gave him was like the electric jolt from a hard jab to the solar plexus. Because her once-lovely face was a horror.
She had been brutally, deeply slashed. Attempts had been made to correct the damage, but plastic surgeons could do only so much. Repairing damage to severed nerves was beyond any surgeon’s skill. Her mouth drooped on one side. She had lost the sight of her left eye, filled now with a bloom of suffering.
“Who did this to you? Was it Ransome?”
Jarred by the blurted question, she backed away from Peter.
“What? John? How dare you think that!”
Gloved fingers prowled the deep disfiguring lines on her face.
“I never saw my attacker. It happened on a street in the East Village. He could have been a mugger. I didn’t resist him, so why, why?”
“The police—”
“Never found him.” She stared at Peter, and through him, at the past. “Or is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
“No. I don’t know anything about the case. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Well.” Her fate was dead weight on her mind. “So many years ago.”
She put her gardening hat back on, adjusted the brim, gave Peter a vague look. She was in the past again.
‘You can tell John—I won’t always look like this. Just one more operation, they promised. I’ve had ten so far. Then I’ll—finally be ready for John.” She anticipated the question Peter wasn’t about to ask. “To pose again!” A vaguely flirtatious smile came and went. “Otherwise I’ve kept myself up, you know. I do my exercises. Tell John—I bless him for his patience, but it won’t be much longer.”
In spite of the humidity and the drifting spray in the greenhouse Peter’s throat was dry. His own attempt at a smile felt like hardening plaster on his face. He knew he had only glimpsed the depths of her psychosis. The decent thing to do now was to leave her with some assurance that her fantasy would be fulfilled.
“I’ll tell him, Miss Van Lier. That’s the news he’s been waiting for.”
The following Saturday night Peter was playing pool with his old man at the Knights of Columbus, and letting Corin win. The way he used to let him win at Horse when Corin was still spry enough for some basketball: Just a little off my game tonight, Pete would always say, pretending annoyance. Corin bought the beers afterward and they relaxed in a booth at their favorite sports bar.
“Heard you was into the cold case files in the Ninth,” Corin said, wiping some foam off his mustache.
He looked at one of the big screens around the room. The Knicks were at the Heat, and tonight they couldn’t throw one in the ocean.