David took the baggie.
“How come she never tells me I’m too thin?” Gary said, rolling up his window again.
David watched as the Lexus did a three-point turn to head back toward Evanston, then went into the foyer, got yesterday’s mail out of the creaky metal box, and trudged up the stairs. Apart from the low buzz from the fluorescent light fixture on the landing, the building was as quiet as his own little apartment would be.
But as he put his key in the lock, he was overwhelmed, and not for the first time, by the thought of the world without his sister in it. To him, it was as sad and terrifying a prospect as anything from Dante—but more so, as this one could prove to be all too real.
Chapter 4
Mrs. Van Owen—Kathryn to her close friends, of whom there were almost none—had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. She had hoped that no one else would ever have to be sent.
But her lawyer, Mr. Hudgins, had just informed her that Phillip Palliser was dead. His body had been found floating in the Loire, several miles downstream from a little French town called Cinq Tours.
“And what does the coroner say was the cause of death?” she asked, her eyes already straying to the huge windows that looked out over Lake Michigan from her penthouse apartment. “Drowning?”
“Probably,” Hudgins replied. “But there were considerable abrasions to the body and face. The injuries might have been postmortem, or they might have been caused by … a violent attack first. It’s unclear.”
Another one, Kathryn thought, caught in the spider’s web.
He lowered his gaze to the stack of folders and papers arrayed on her glass-topped coffee table. The afternoon light filled the spacious, expensively appointed room, and after he had waited a suitable amount of time, he said, “So what would you like to do?”
She touched a finger to a stray brunette hair, putting it back in place.
“Do you wish to go forward?” he asked.
Did she? What choice, really, did she have? “Yes.” It was all like moving another chess piece into play. “Of course I do.”
“Then it would be this young man at the Newberry,” Hudgins said, glancing at a paper. “This David Franco?”
“Yes.” She had always cultivated the next candidate before his predecessor had failed.
“And you think he has done a good job on the Dante volume?”
“A very good job.” She had been impressed with his credentials before she had seen him at the library, and she was even more impressed after hearing him speak.
“Then I’ll go ahead and make the arrangements for us to meet with him,” Hudgins said. “How soon would you like to do so?”
“Tomorrow.”
Even Hudgins seemed a bit surprised. “Tomorrow? Well, then, I will leave it to you to assemble the materials you wish to share with him.”
Kathryn nodded, almost imperceptibly, but she knew his eyes were riveted on her. Men’s eyes generally were, and it was something she had grown accustomed to over the years. Hers was a sensual face, with high cheekbones, arched brows, and full lips, unaided by collagen. But it was her eyes—a remarkable blue, tinged with violet—that made the most striking impression. One ardent admirer had even proclaimed her beauty to be “timeless,” and it had been all she could do not to laugh out loud.
“Now, in respect to your late husband’s estate,” he said, shifting gears and moving a separate folder to the top of the pile, “I’ve been in contact with his family.”
Randolph Van Owen had died a month earlier, but when it happened, one of his sisters had been on a world cruise she was loath to interrupt and the other was recovering from a face-lift.
“They have agreed to come to Chicago and hear the reading of the will this Friday.”
“That’s fine. The sooner, the better.”
“But they have asked if the service could be … less private? As one of Chicago’s most recognized families, the Van Owens were hoping for a more public expression of your late husband’s importance to the fabric of the city. In fact, they had suggested—”
“No,” she said. “Randolph would have wanted a very small, private ceremony, and nothing more.”