Death by Surprise Page 6

I slipped off my coat and she reached out to take it.

  “I thought Dad set up an annuity for you, Mandy. You always said you were going to retire to a cabin out at the lake and spend the mornings fishing and the afternoons rocking on your front porch.”

  “Oh now, Miss K.C.,” she chided, “you know your momma can’t find anybody to take my place. Nobody wants to live in anymore. I’ll take care of her for as long as I can because your poppa did everything for me. He put my Rudolph through school. If it wasn’t for your poppa, Rudolph wouldn’t be a doctor today.”

  Maybe not, but was Amanda supposed to pay for that for the rest of her life? And I wasn’t surprised that Grace couldn’t find anyone to take Amanda’s place. Who wanted to work from dawn to dusk with only Thursday afternoons and Sundays off? The market for exploited servants is slim these days.

  Grace was taking advantage of Amanda. Amanda knew it, too, but she was busy satisfying a debt that didn’t exist. Dad wouldn’t have expected Amanda to work forever just because he helped Rudolph. And, God knew, helping Rudolph was little enough to do for the sturdy little woman who kept our home running for all those years.

  “Miss K.C.!”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t say nothin’ now to your momma. She has problems of her own. I tell you, Miss, she is all upset about something.”

  “That is no reason for you . . .”

  “You hush now.” Amanda looked at me sternly. “You are too young, Miss K.C. You see everything as so simple. Sometimes, it isn’t so simple. Old Amanda knows what she has to do. You don’t need to fret.”

  She looked so much like a little dark cat with fluffed fur that I grinned in spite of my resolve. Amanda was right. I did have a tendency to want to run everything, which isn’t an altogether attractive trait. One I had picked up from Grace, perhaps?

  I leaned down, hugged Amanda again and felt her body relax. “Don’t worry, you old workaholic, I’ll mind my own business.”

  But, as I walked down the central hallway toward the drawing room, I couldn’t help judging the amount of work it took to keep this place going. Amanda used to have two full-time girls to do the cleaning. Did she still? I would check on that. Whatever Mother’s problems, they didn’t include money. She could certainly afford help for Amanda and I intended to make sure Amanda received it.

  The house is a relic, a huge, energy-wasting, magnificent survivor of the time when every oil baron built for posterity. It is, as suits Northern California, a Spanish hacienda with immense cool dark rooms, a fountain in the central hallway and wide stone stairs leading up to the second and third floors. Fourteen bedrooms and a ballroom complete the upper stories.

  The centerpiece of the drawing room is a fireplace with tiles from Taxco and a redwood mantel. Above the mantel hangs a Goya.

  I paused in the wide doorway. Little clusters of my kin dotted the room.

  Kenneth and Megan stood near the fireplace listening courteously to Travis. Travis’s wife, Lorraine, watched, a skeptical expression on her face. Lorraine and Travis were, in my view, an odd combination, Travis exuberant, his face a little flushed now from his cocktail, and Lorraine withdrawn and aloof. She is an oncologist. She wore a grey chiffon dress and she looked impatient and bored.

  Edmond and Sue sat stiffly on a Chippendale sofa, not looking convivial at all.

  Mother was chatting with Priscilla but she saw me in the doorway.

  “K.C., we’ve been waiting,” she said immediately.

  “Sorry. Hello, everyone.”

  “We’ll go in to dinner now,” and Mother nodded to Edmond to walk with her.

  The dining room, with its heavy baroque furniture, depressed me as it always had, but, as usual at Mother’s house, the dinner, thanks to Amanda, was superb.

  The courses came and went, Jason serving from a sideboard and conversation surged up and down the table. It was quite animated for this particular group. It might almost be Christmas with its automatic cheer. The wineglasses sparkled and Jason kept them full. California wines, of course. There are no better in the world, despite what the French might think. It was a gay and voluble group with no outward sign of trouble—except for Edmond’s somber face when the conversation lulled and the haunted look in Kenneth’s eyes and Priscilla’s strained stare.

  I made polite conversation with Travis but it was Kenneth who dominated my thoughts. That look in his eyes reminded me of when he and Priscilla came to live with us. Edmond and Travis were already grown, Edmond married and well started on his investment career, Travis was in college. Uncle Bobby and Aunt Margaret were flying home to La Luz from Scottsdale, Ariz., one snowy December. He had been warned not to take off, a huge storm was building in the Sierras. But no one ever told Uncle Bobby what to do. They didn’t find the wreckage until the following April.

  Kenneth and I became allies of a sort against the coldness of my mother and the sense we both carried that life continued under siege. I don’t remember much of Priscilla then. She had fitted into the house, content with a newly decorated room, absorbed in playing with a doll’s house built like a Victorian castle.

  I never had the feeling Priscilla grieved for her parents.

  It was the summer after Kenneth and Priscilla came to live with us that Kenneth and I made detailed and intricate plans to run away. We wanted to follow the harvests all the way to Central America.

  We hadn’t included Priscilla or Sheila, of course. They were just little kids.

  That wasn’t the reason I left out Sheila. I didn’t tell Kenneth. Perhaps, then, I hadn’t even admitted it to myself, but I was running away from Sheila and mother’s absorption in her. I just told Kenneth that Sheila and Prissy were too little to go and Kenneth agreed.

  Prissy wouldn’t have been interested in our scheme. She was never interested in anything outside her own comfort.

  But Sheila was interested. She always in that huge house knew everything. Perhaps that summer day she followed us up the stairs, as we crept so surreptitiously toward the third floor. She could have hidden behind the blue urn on the first-floor landing, skipped on silent feet after us up the second flight and the third. In the dim and shadowy reaches of the ballroom, she must have crouched behind the covered grand piano as we tied the rope, then stayed behind as we started back downstairs.

  There wasn’t any logic, of course, to our plan to scramble three flights down a scratchy hemp rope. The house was locked at night but we could have started our trek soon after breakfast, making a nocturnal escape unnecessary. It would have been hours before we were missed. Who knows if we ever would have climbed down the rope at all? It was the romance of escape that fascinated us, the desire to be free and gone mixed in our minds with visions of desert brigands fleeing castle walls by rope.

  So we left the rope, tied insecurely to a narrow band of metal, and crept down to the second floor; then, tired of stealth, burst out onto the front lawn to climb the huge sycamore that shaded the drive.

  We couldn’t see the window where we had tied the rope. It was on the west side of the house.

  I was midway up the sycamore when I saw Rafael, the yard man, waving his arms and running toward the side of the house. It was such an odd sight, so unexpected, that I hung there openmouthed. Rafael never ran. He always moved slowly. Amanda said he had molasses in his bones.

  Then the high shriek came.

  I knew.

  I clung to the rough bole of the sycamore, pushed my face against the bark until it hurt, and tried not to hear the trailing cry and the heavy thud.

  Kenneth slid down the tree first and began to run.

  I came, too, of course, and hung on the outskirts of the gathering circle and saw my little sister lying among the thick stems of the irises, one leg bent awkwardly beneath her.

  It was the irises, they said later, that saved her life, cushioning her impact. They said it was a miracle, to fall three stories and suffer only a broken leg.

  After the ambulance carrying Sheila and Mother lef
t, Kenneth and I huddled in the shade at the side of the house. It was almost evening when my father came looking for us. We didn’t know then what had happened to Sheila. We didn’t know if she was going to live. That was what we thought, all that long afternoon, that we had killed Sheila. When my father found us, he understood. He consoled us and said she was going to be all right, that she had only a broken leg.

  My mother came upon us then, angry and vengeful.

  “If your sister’s leg doesn’t heal, if she always walks with a limp, well, we will know who is to blame, won’t we, K.C.?”

  I stood there with a stolid look on my face.

  My father interrupted sharply, “Grace, that’s enough. The children are upset as it is. They didn’t intend for anyone to be hurt. And think of this, both K.C. and Kenneth are bigger and heavier than Sheila. If either of them had tried to go down the rope, it would have torn loose much sooner and we might have lost them.”

  “If Sheila is crippled . . .” Mother began.

  That was all that mattered to her. Just Sheila. She wouldn’t have cared if it had been Kenneth or me.

  “Sheila is not going to be crippled,” my father said angrily. Then he turned to me and Kenneth. “It’s all right, children. Everything is all right.”

  I remembered that afternoon with crystal clarity, the heavy stillness about the house as we waited and the look of dread and despair in Kenneth’s eyes.

  It was the same look he had tonight as we all sat around the damask-covered table, talking lightly and inconsequentially.

  A desperate haunted look.

  Megan was aware of it. I saw her glance at him several times, quick worried looks.

  After my talk with Priscilla, when I promised to vote as she wished, I had decided that Kenneth had agreed to the meeting to help his sister.

  I couldn’t imagine that Kenneth had ever done anything Francine Boutelle could exploit. Now I wasn’t sure.

  Travis, of course, hadn’t missed any of it, Kenneth’s demeanor, Megan’s worry. He said to me softly, “Hey, what’s eating little Sir Lancelot?”

  I was surprised at my twinge of irritation. But I just shrugged and said, “Who knows?”

  I deliberately turned away from Travis and began to talk to Lorraine.

  Lorraine complained for a while about the smog in LA, the insolence of stewardesses, and the probable contamination of shellfish off San Francisco. Then, I suppose in an attempt at some social grace, she asked, “Are you enjoying your practice?”

  “Yes, I really am. Though, as with most lawyers, it’s either feast or famine, and, right now, I have way too much to do.”

  Lorraine frowned, thinking, I suppose, that if I organized well, anything could be managed.

  “Do you do criminal work?”

  “Some. Not a lot. I take anything that walks through the door,” and smiled.

  Lorraine didn’t smile in return. “I wouldn’t do criminal work if I were a lawyer,” she said sharply.

  “Really. Why not?”

  “The kind of people who commit crimes do not deserve lawyers.”

  God. What a lovely outlook on life and jurisprudence.

  “Well,” I observed quietly, “perhaps it’s a good thing you aren’t a lawyer. Every lawyer has to do some criminal work. The court appoints lawyers to defend indigents who can’t afford counsel.”

  Lorraine stabbed a fork into a piece. “That’s what’s wrong with this country. The government makes everything easy for the shiftless. If people don’t have the money for a lawyer, then I don’t see why the rest of us should pay for it.”

  “Actually, you don’t pay for it,” I explained, “unless your city has a public defender’s office. When a lawyer is appointed by the court, he doesn’t receive any recompense. It’s pro bono work.”

  Lorraine spread butter (fresh butter churned in the kitchen) on hot parker house rolls (baked by Amanda) then paused to sip wine before resuming her diatribe against the shiftless poor getting free legal service.

  “Besides,” she concluded, “The whole system’s wrong.”

  “Really?”

  “Half the time, the guilty are acquitted and, even when they go to jail, it’s only for a little while, then they let them out to prey on society again.”

  I took a drink of my wine. Was there any point in trying to talk to someone like Lorraine? Then I put my glass down and tried.

  “Look, Lorraine, people are acquitted when the prosecution fails to convince a jury the defendant is guilty. Twelve people listened to the evidence and didn’t buy it. As for paroling prisoners, the hope is for rehabilitation. It’s hard enough for a man or woman to come back from prison and keep out of trouble but the longer time they spend in prison, the more brutalized they are and the less likely they are to make it on the street without going back to crime. Society isn’t well served by keeping people jailed for long terms.”

  “If they are convicted a second time,” Lorraine said, her mouth thin, “they should be put away for life.”

  “For life? Even if it’s a kid who’s stolen a car? He should go to the pen for life?”

  “Yes. I have no sympathy with lawbreakers. None.”

  “Apparently not.” I wondered how she felt about patients with a recurrence. But I suppose she saw no correlation between social malignancies and physical ills.

  “In fact,” she said heatedly, “I believe this country could benefit from looking at Saudi Arabia.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Saudi Arabia has very little crime.”

  “Really?” I knew that, of course. I was baiting her but some temptations are hard to resist.

  “Why, yes. They don’t fool around over there. If a man is a thief, they chop off one of his hands. If he steals again, they chop off the other.”

  “Pretty effective,” I murmured.

  “Oh, it is, it is. They have almost no thievery over there.”

  Yes, Saudi Arabia is tough on lawbreakers. Adultery rates a whacked-off head. That’s pretty final. Saudi justice probably discourages a lot of adultery and encourages extreme care on the part of both thieves and amorous dalliers.

  Lorraine continued to extol enthusiastically the virtues of Saudi culture.

  I pictured her in one of those head-to-toe burkas. It might muffle her mouth so I decided Saudi Arabia couldn’t be all bad.

  I also decided that I would find someone besides Lorraine to talk to after dinner.

  Dessert was freestone peaches Mandy had frozen last summer. Defrosted and topped with ice cream and a raspberry sauce, it was a delicious Peach Melba. Conversation was beginning to be desultory.

  Mother caught everyone’s attention.

  “Let’s go to the library for coffee.” Her chin lifted. “We will decide what to do about that dreadful Boutelle woman.”

  As chairs scraped and were replaced and everyone began to move toward the doorway, I saw Megan tug at Kenneth’s sleeve. He bent his head to listen, then shrugged, his hands turning palm upward.

  I thought I could read that little scenario and it made me sad. Megan was asking who the Boutelle woman was and Kenneth was saying he didn’t know. I wondered what Kenneth was going to tell Megan if everyone admitted to seeing Francine except him? How long would it take Megan to put it all together? Not long. Megan was smart. She was like so many of her kind, bright, well educated, devoted to good works, and, in a quiet and tolerant way, totally convinced of her own superiority. She never thought about it. It was a given. The Megan Carlisles of this world live in a rarefied atmosphere, luxurious homes, servants, attentive children, civic involvement. All Megan lacked to complete the picture were children, handsome, gifted, and, of course, innately superior.

  It suggested to me that Kenneth had been playing around. That surprised me. A lot. Not that I thought Kenneth too moral for extracurricular sex. I thought him too devoted. In his cold fish life, it always seemed to me that he had shown a surprising passion for Megan. I remembered the Christmas that they met. It wa
s a debutante ball and a typical one. The girls, all in white, which always amused me, danced the first dance with their fathers. I was there, unwillingly, because mother was chairman of the ball committee. My own coming-out had been several years earlier. I was terribly bored that evening and had danced with dozens of eligible young men, none of whom interested me. Perhaps because they were so eligible. In any event, Kenneth and I ended up in a corner, trying, not too hard, to talk to each other. He was in his second year at law school and insufferably superior to a mere college senior. Then, abruptly, he caught my arm.

  “That girl, the one over there by the fern. Who is she?”

  I craned my neck. I happened to know because she was the younger sister of a girl my age. “That’s Megan Phillips.”

  “I want to meet her,” and he had my arm and was steering me across the room.

  I introduced them and Kenneth danced away with her. I don’t think she ever had a chance to know another man. I never saw such a determined courtship. They were married when Kenneth finished law school and I thought that surely theirs would be for ever after. To all appearances, it was. And Megan campaigned hard for Kenneth, even though fish fries and county fairs are not exactly her style.

  Greg despised Megan. It was funny I should think of that, but I knew it was so. She represented everything he most detested: privilege, inherited wealth, and station.

  Actually, Megan was quite likable. She had a gentle dry sense of humor quite at odds with her severe appearance. She was kindly even though it was often a noblesse-oblige response. She was crazy about Kenneth. You couldn’t miss that. It was in the way she looked up when he came in a room, the way she smiled when she caught his eye, the way she would reach out and lightly touch his arm.

  So the whole thing was damn depressing. I felt tired suddenly. Tired of all the Carlisles and their problems. I had never cared for Kenneth and now it looked like he was cheating on the woman who truly loved him—and whom I thought he adored.

  It reminded me that you can never be sure of anything— or anyone.

  I would have bet a lot on Kenneth and Megan’s marriage.