"And I"d be luckier still, dear boy, if you would be so kind as to get us another bottle of vin. And none of that treacly stuff we"ve been making our friend drink. Look." He pointed disdainfully at my gla.s.s. "He won"t even finish it."
Jason popped to his feet, happy to escape.
Toby waited until he left the room and then draped himself over the arm of his chair so he could capture all my attention. "He feels terrible about it, you know." Toby"s eyes for some reason reminded me of moons. Big moons. Sad moons, like I used to see in cartoons. "All he was trying to do was protect his friend, his secret society friend from university days."
It was, I thought, a rather interesting interpretation of what I had just been hearing. I said, "But he wasn"t. He was protecting his friend"s cousin, who had murdered a young girl."
"I don"t think that"s ever been proven."
This information was delivered solemnly to me by an Englishman in France, draped over a chair.
"Think about it, George. You don"t mind if I call you George, do you? We"re not the least bit stuffy here in Monflanquin. I think it"s what attracted me. I digress. Hear me out."
Toby dropped his arms so that they dangled almost to the floor. Interesting combination, this Toby, of a brute and an aesthete.
"He doesn"t know how the girl died. The family, a famous family, a family who bring rewards just by having you in their presence, a family who have always been quite good to him, explain that she left, sallied forth from the garden gate or whatever, traipsed down the lane." He ill.u.s.trated with rolls of his big hands and swirls of his thick fingers. "Is he to argue? Would you? Would anyone?"
"He could have told what he knows."
I said that. George Becket: voice of experience.
Toby stopped his display of theater and looked at me peculiarly.
Did he know? About me?
"He sees her, she leaves, he leaves. Is that enough for him to talk about? With a family so newsworthy as the Gregorys? Do you really think he should have sold his story to the tabloids? Tell them all about randy Ned, doing a little shilly-shally on the side? That would have sunk Ned"s career. Ended his marriage. And for what? It didn"t have anything to do with the murder. No. No! Better to say Heidi Telford was never there. Better to say you were never there. Better even than that, not to be around yourself when questioners come knocking on your door."
"The same message this Mr. O"Donald gave Leanne."
Toby straightened himself out, then kicked his chair around so he could face me without the drape and the dangle. "Well, yes and no. The fact is, Mr. O"Donald liked Jason, and he had a project for which he thought Jason would be just perfect."
"Moving to France?"
"Not quite. As luck would have it, the family had a number of properties across the globe that needed checking on, make sure they were not being ripped off too basely. What the family needed was for someone to go to these properties, look them over, issue a small report that a.s.sured them, yes, this one"s still standing, still functioning, not overrun by monkeys or wild goats or Arab seamen. Do a service and see the world. It was exactly the sort of thing Jason would love to do." Toby wanted me to appreciate Jason"s good fortune.
"And there was probably no hurry to complete the task, I"m guessing."
"No hurry at all. Isn"t that right, dear boy?"
Jason had come back into the room. He was holding a single gla.s.s and an opened bottle of very dark red. He didn"t say anything.
"Is that what you"ve been doing for nine years, Jason?" I asked.
"Why, then he met me," Toby answered, his voice rattling the windows in the old stone building. "Trekking in Nepal. And when he explained about his job, how he simply had to dash about, we decided we should move here. Set down our stakes. Isn"t that what they say in America?"
"Do you think, Jason," I said, trying not to let Toby distract either one of us, "the Gregorys are going to support you forever?"
Jason had put bottle to gla.s.s, but he stopped in mid-pour. Droplets of wine dribbled off the mouth of the bottle and fell onto the marble table. "What"s that supposed to mean?"
"It means that after all this time, the search for the killer is still on. Whatever they may have done to try to hide you, it hasn"t worked, has it?"
Jason"s question lingered. I answered it another way. "I mean, I"m here, aren"t I?"
"And," he said, handing the gla.s.s to his partner and then refilling his own, "I"ve told you I"ve got nothing to tell you."
"I think you"ll have plenty to say if the Gregorys keep trying to make it seem that you"re the one who killed Heidi Telford."
The pouring stopped again. "They"re not going to do that," he said.
"Why not? You"re the perfect guy to take the fall. You don"t know anything about what happened that night other than Ned"s little tryst, so you"ve got nothing to say in your own defense. And where, exactly, have you been all these years? You haven"t been on the run, have you? I mean, suppose you get asked that. Do you have a record of your employment? No? Why do you suppose that is, Jason? Tell me, the money you get, it wouldn"t by any chance get transferred into your account from the Cayman Islands, would it?"
Jason continued to hold the wine bottle almost but not quite parallel to the floor. He looked stricken.
"So now that everything"s set up, what"s going to prevent them from making you the scapegoat?" I asked. "Leanne? When was the last time you had any contact with her? McFetridge? He"s known the Gregorys since birth. He"s the next thing to family, and you, Jason, who are you to them? A now distant college friend of Ned"s, and at this point n.o.body even cares that he was boning the babysitter a decade ago."
"She cares."
"What?"
"I said, "She cares." Her family cares. Her husband cares."
I was missing something. I struggled to sit up while I replayed that last exchange in my mind. "The au pair? You know her?"
"I know her husband. I went to Eaglebrook with him."
Eaglebrook, a pre-prep school. A boarding school you went to in order to get into a good boarding school. An inst.i.tution for the country"s elite. A place from which someone might grow up to be sensitive about his wife having once had an affair with a married Gregory.
"Who is she?"
Jason glanced at Toby. Words were not spoken, but there was plenty of message in the glance.
I was struggling to unravel that message when Toby"s booming voice brought my thoughts to a halt. "I think, Mr. Becket," he said, "you will concede that you have no jurisdiction in this country."
"Yes, but-"
"And that it is highly unlikely you or anyone else would be able to obtain extradition from this country for Jason, because nothing gives the French more pleasure than to f.u.c.k with the American legal system."
I didn"t need extradition. I needed information. And cooperation. I started to say that and was cut off.
"Those things being true, or at least unrefuted by you, I think you will agree that there is little reason for Jason to continue speaking to you on this subject."
But there was. I was almost there, within an arm"s length of nailing Peter Gregory Martin for the murder of Heidi Telford. I needed only to reach a little bit farther.
But I was not going to get the chance, because Toby the protector was not done protecting.
"Which means, sir," he said, "your time as a guest in our home is at an end."
It is possible my mouth hung open.
"Chambre Quatre is at the top of the stairs. I suggest you find it now or you may discover that your time as a guest in any capacity in our establishment has ended as well."
"Then you-"
"Au revoir, Monsieur Becket."
CAPE COD, September 2008.
ROUTE 6A FROM SANDWICH TO BREWSTER HAS TO BE ONE OF the most beautiful roads in America. It runs along the north side of the peninsula, past cranberry bogs and blueberry patches and small farms, and in early fall the small farms still have honor racks filled with corn and squash and tomatoes. It pa.s.ses antiques shops, country stores, esoteric museums, cemeteries with flat, vertical gravestones that might date back to the 1600s, and tiny town centers with parks and gazebos. And all along the way are large eighteenth-century homes with huge lawns and stone walls and great, leafy trees. Some of those homes have been made into inns and restaurants. Like The Captain Yarnell House.
Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Brewster-each town has a slightly different look, a slightly different personality, far more obvious to the locals than the occasional or first-time visitor. Get to Brewster and the woods grow thicker and the s.p.a.cing between homes and businesses becomes greater. Brewster, being at the end of the road, has a slight air of being pleased with itself simply because it is where not everyone can or will go. Pa.s.s Nickerson State Park, turn north on a small country lane and head toward the bay, where the water can recede a mile or more during low tide and people can go clamming with buckets and rakes or let their vizslas or Labs scamper across the flats in pursuit of seagulls. The Captain Yarnell House is set back behind a sickle-moon driveway filled with pebbles that splatter against the underside of your car if you drive in a little too fast. Which you might do if you"re in a hurry, or nervous, or anxious because you have come a long way to get here and you know you are getting close to your goal.
At 3:00 on a postLabor Day afternoon, I did not need to be in a hurry. Many restaurants on the Cape close for the season in September. The higher-end ones may stay open until November or even December, but you never know. The folks at Captain Yarnell could have packed it in and moved on to Florida or New Hampshire or Vermont, so I was glad to see a pair of vehicles in the parking lot: a small black BMW and a rather beat-up Ford pickup truck. I parked next to them and made my way around the back of the building to the entrance to the kitchen.
It was warm, somewhere between seventy and seventy-five degrees, and the screen door was still in place. By putting my two hands around my eyes I could lean my face against the screen and look inside. Two men were working. A short Latino was in a T-shirt and full ap.r.o.n, peeling vegetables. A tall, dark-skinned man wearing a white double-breasted chef"s jacket was working over a gargantuan stove that must have had twenty burners. He was furiously stirring something in a heavy metal pot, and I thought it best not to disturb him until the fury subsided.
Minutes pa.s.sed before the Latino noticed me. "Hey!" he said, and his eyes grew wide.
The chef looked over. He did not stop stirring. He returned his eyes to his task. "Help you?" he called out.
"Chris Warburton?"
"That"s me."
"I"m George Becket from the D.A."s office. I need to talk to you."
The job t.i.tle works better some places than others. The smaller man stopped peeling and stood very, very still. Chris Warburton slowed his stirring, peered at his creation, lowered the flame beneath the pot and mumbled something to his a.s.sistant, who used a sidestep to take his boss"s place at the stove without removing his eyes from me. Then Chris came toward me, wiping his palms against each other in quick, noisy slaps.
He was a handsome man with a confident smile. He gave me that smile because he, Chris Warburton, chef of The Captain Yarnell House, had nothing to fear from the district attorney"s office, except perhaps the immigration status of his a.s.sistant.
I moved aside as he opened the screen door and came out of the kitchen. He looked up at the blue sky with its bright gray and white clouds rising from the horizon and said, "Nice day."
From the kitchen came a series of m.u.f.fled noises. The a.s.sistant no doubt scooting off. I wondered if he would try to make it to the pickup truck or just hide in the main part of the restaurant. The cellar or the attic, perhaps. Maybe dash away on foot, head for the marshlands.
"I need to ask you about a job you used to have, Chris."
"Sure." Ask away. Look at my smile. Don"t pay attention to what"s going on behind me.
"With the Gregorys."
"The Gregorys?" Chris Warburton"s smile got even bigger. "I was a kid then."
It was nine years ago. The man was not yet thirty.
"You used to, what, be a gatekeeper for them?"
"Yeah, pretty much. I mean, mostly I sat in a Jeep Wrangler and checked who came in, kept the gate closed to those who weren"t supposed to be there. A lot of tourists would show up, try to peer through the bars." He showed me, holding his hands to the sides of his face, making his job seem both glamorous and boring at the same time. I had the feeling he could do that about anything, tell you how mundane his life was and make you wish you were doing it with him.
"When you were there, were there other people working at the compound? People who weren"t just friends or family?"
"Oh, sure. Lots of "em. Housekeepers, yard guys; they had care-givers for old Mrs. Gregory, the Senator"s mom. And then she died, of course, so they weren"t around after that. It was a group of Irish la-"
"You remember," I said, cutting him off, "an au pair that Ned Gregory and his wife used for their kids?"
The smile stayed. The eyes roamed. I wondered if I had gone too far. Chris may have been a beneficiary of the Gregorys" largesse, but he had gone out and made it on his own. Barbara had told me that. I was counting on that. Chris Warburton, chef, beholden to no one. Except, looking at him, it didn"t seem like such a sure thing anymore. The Gregorys, Barbara said, had sent him to culinary school, got him his first jobs, put him on the path to success. How can you not be beholden to someone like that?
He was stroking his chin, thinking about how he could best answer. Au pairs? he could say. There were so many of them. They would come and go. Ned would give them a poke or two and they"d be on their way.
"This one came from a wealthy family," I said. "Her father owned movie theaters."
I heard an engine starting. It was a rough sound, not the kind a BMW would make.
"Lexi," Chris said, rather more loudly than he needed.
From the other side of the building I could hear pebbles being splattered.
"Lexi what?"
"Lexi Sommers," he almost shouted.
There were very tiny beads of sweat on Chris"s broad forehead. I deliberately turned my own head in the direction of the engine and the flying pebbles.
"I heard she got married."
"That"s right."
"You know what her name is now?"
The pebble sound was over now. The engine sound was fading. Chris moved just enough to intercept my long-distance gaze. "Why, Lexi done something wrong?"
"Just give me her name and tell me where she is," I said softly, "and I"ll be on my way."
Chris heard the change in my voice. But with each pa.s.sing second his task became less difficult. Stall, stall, say nothing.
"You were both about the same age, both working for the family. With them but not part of them. You must have at least gotten to know her, Chris."
"I did."
"So I"m expecting you stayed in touch."
The engine sound had completely disappeared. The fleeing Latino helper could be on 6A now. I looked at my watch. It was just a show. I didn"t even note the time.
And Chris, for his part, simply let the time go by.
"Letters, pictures of the kids. Things like that." I was thinking about what Barbara had done at Jason Stockover"s prep school.