I brought the dogs with me. After I’d seen Catherine into the Bayard mansion, where Ruth Lantner refused to say a word to me, I drove over to Larchmont and let the dogs out. I took Mitch and Peppy with me through the woods, retracing the route that Catherine followed as she slipped home after bringing Benji supplies. The dogs loved it: they found deer and chased them through the woods.
I wasn’t really thinking about Catherine and Benji as I walked back to Larchmont, but about Calvin Bayard and all the nights he walked this path to lie with Geraldine. To lie with Geraldine, to lie to her.
The Boy Wonder, had he been a golden calf, an idol too false for worship? Or just a flawed human being? Calvin shone, that was his problem. When I heard him speak all those years ago, he seemed literally to shine like gold itself. I was dazzled to the point of enchantment. If you had that gift, the gift of enchanting those around you, what would ever make you want to temper it?
The dogs caught up with me as I passed the Larchmont outbuildings. Mitch dove into the pool and pulled out one of the rotting carp. He rolled in it before I could grab him. I got Peppy into the car before she could join him, then went back to leash him up. “One thing’s certain in this life, my friend,” I told him. “You need a whole lot more dazzle than you’ve got to make me overlook that stench.”
When I’d shoved him into the back of the Mustang, I drove the short distance around Coverdale Lane to Anodyne Park. Geraldine Graham was home, the guard at the gate told me; I could go right up.
Geraldine answered the door herself, as she had when I first came to visit her. Her left foot was still in a cast, she was using a walker, but she was managing on her own. She did ask me to get down her Coalport mugs for tea, but she handled the boiling water and the tea bags without my assistance.
I carried the cups to her alcove, burning my fingers on the thin china as I had on my first visit. The space looked bigger and lighter. At first I couldn’t figure out what was different, and put it down to the greater light in the room from the coming of spring. When Geraldine clumped in behind me on her walker and sat, though, I realized she had taken down her mother’s portrait. The small mountainscape hung there instead.
She saw me looking at the wall and smiled in satisfaction. “When I hit Renee with Kylie’s mask, it brought me a sense of pleasure I don’t believe I ever experienced before, not even in Calvin’s arms. Certainly not in Armand’s, or any of the others.”
She paused, then added, “I loved Calvin, you know. I knew his weaknesses, but I loved him nonetheless. I didn’t think I could forgive Renee, for sweeping in and taking him over, for queening it over me or for setting him up on a pedestal and indulging his weaknesses. But when I brought that mask down on her head-I felt an extraordinary lightness. I am ninety-one now; I have not now the strength to move heaven and earth, but I am grateful for a freer spirit for whatever remains in life to me. I decided you were right: I didn’t need Mother up there reminding me of past humiliations.”
I stayed with Geraldine for an hour, rehashing the case, her life, Darraugh’s life. She had finally told him this week that Calvin was (probably) his father. That explained why Darraugh had invited Catherine to live with him, I supposed-the startling realization that she was his niece. How did it feel to know Edwards Bayard was his brother, I wondered.
“It upset Darraugh, of course,” Geraldine was saying in her high, tremulous voice. “He loved MacKenzie. I told Darraugh it didn’t matter, that he did right to love MacKenzie as a father: MacKenzie was the man who stood beside Darraugh’s nursery bed when he had chicken pox. MacKenzie, not the nurse, certainly not 1, bathed his face to keep him from scratching the pustules. MacKenzie read Darraugh nursery rhymes and put him up on his first pony. MacKenzie did all those things a father does. And some that a mother who wasn’t fleeing the torments of her home might have done.”
“Darraugh should tell his son, his own MacKenzie,” I said. “You guys live such an incestuous life out here-it would never do for young MacKenzie to fall in love with Catherine Bayard”
She looked at me with a momentary return of hauteur, then relaxed and said she would suggest it to him. “What is happening with Renee? They have not yet arrested her.”
I grimaced. “I don’t know if they ever will. The evidence is there, but
it’s all circumstantial, in a way. So what that her prints are on Theresa Jakes’s phenobarb bottle-why shouldn’t Renee have picked it up, wondering what medication her husband’s nurse was taking? And the rest of it-the cab she took from the corner near Marcus Whitby’s house, the valet at the golf club who saw her climb into a golf cart and ride off, she’s taking a firm hand with that and claiming they must be mistaken. The police tread warily when it comes to arresting people from places like New Solway.”