“So . . . you . . . you and Ethan went over to the Smiths’ house together? To ask for the necklace back?” But this version of events didn’t make sense either. A knot of dread was hardening between my shoulder blades.
“I drove over myself. To make her give it back and to tell her never to show her face again, not anywhere within a hundred feet of my family. She told me to go to hell. She taunted me, said my husband had never loved me and the necklace was hers to keep.”
From deep within me, something caught. A sapphire. A sparkle of blue. I could see it. I remembered. Deep blue against a white throat, a cloud of black hair, warm arms holding me close. Female voices raised in fury.
“I didn’t go over there to kill her. I’m not a monster. I only wanted to scare her. I had Ethan’s gun—the one he kept in his nightstand—and I took it out, to show her I meant it, to make her listen. And then your daddy walked in! In the middle of the afternoon! I forgot he worked those crazy pilot hours. Boone started carrying on and shouting at me to keep quiet and I told him his wife was filth and he came at me and he was going to grab the gun and I just—I just—”
“You shot him?”
“It happened so fast. So fast. He fell over and I was going to help him but your mama flew at me. She hit me, she said I would go to jail forever, that my babies would be orphans. That she would make sure of it. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t let her do that.”
I closed my eyes. Saw the gleam of blue again. There had been noises. Great, cracking explosions of sound and then a pinch in my neck and my mother, sinking soft against me onto a red, tiled floor. Did I in fact remember this? Was I inventing the memory now? Did it matter?
“I didn’t know you were hurt. I wasn’t thinking about you at all. I was in shock and I called Ethan. He was there in minutes. He dug the bullet out of the door, but he couldn’t find the other one. And it was only then that we . . . that we . . .” Betsy drew a great, shuddering breath. “We thought you were dead, too. You weren’t breathing, or it didn’t look like you were. I wouldn’t have left you. I wouldn’t have left a child.”
“Why did he help you?” I whispered. “You had just killed the woman he loved.”
“One of many women he thought he loved over the years,” she said bitterly. “I was his wife. The mother of his children. He wasn’t going to let me go to prison, was he?”
My tongue lay thick and heavy in my mouth. I had to concentrate to lift it, to force it to form words. “So he didn’t do it. Ethan didn’t shoot my parents. You did. He was protecting you, all these years.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Sadie Rawson’s necklace. The sapphire. You took it?”
“It won’t ever be found, if that’s what you’re asking.”
My mind flashed through the events of recent weeks, struggling to recalibrate. “What about—who broke into my house in Georgetown the other night, then? Who took the files from my surgeon’s office?”
“I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. But one can imagine that a professional might find ways to accomplish all sorts of things for the right price.”
A strange, almost comfortable silence settled between us. Two women who had done their worst to each other, sitting alone in our darkened bedrooms, thousands of miles apart.
At last sweet Betsy Sinclare cleared her throat. “I’m going to say good-bye now, Caroline. But let me leave you with this thought: You shot an innocent man and you’re going to get away with it. Don’t be stupid. Keep your mouth shut. Walk away.”
Fifty-eight
* * *
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2013
There is a café on the rue de Grenelle where you can sit and order a café crème and watch the patrons come and go. It’s a humble establishment, not one of the famous Paris cafés. Sartre never held court here. Neither did Hemingway, nor Picasso. They preferred les Deux -Magots, a few blocks farther east.
I’ve always favored the rue de Grenelle café for precisely this reason. It caters to the neighborhood, not to celebrities or tourists. Old men greet each other. A woman tears pieces of her morning croissant and feeds them to her dog. An elegant couple in their twenties, still dressed in shimmering evening clothes from the night before, sit smoking at a table on the sidewalk. He kisses her and she lifts her face to him and you see that she is tired yet achingly beautiful.
I sip my coffee and watch them. I despise coffee, never touch the stuff. A surprise to find myself craving it this morning. A surprise to find it tastes delicious, rich and nutty. You think you know yourself. You think you know whether you care for coffee, whether you care for cigarettes, whether you like to swear, whether you could kill a man. You think you know what you are capable of. Then one day you discover that, quite literally, you are not the person you thought you were.