“Kate, I am so sorry about Beth,” Nicola said, the first chance she’d had to say it, or even see Kate.
Kate didn’t raise her gaze from Tyler.
“Could I hold him?” Kate asked.
Nicola felt shocked by the request, but her instinct was to reach out, hand her baby to Kate. Pete came over and stood between them, blocking her. But Nicola stepped around him. Dark-red light stippled through the leaves of the copper beech, tiny flames from the sky. Nicola heard Pete swear as she put Tyler into Kate’s arms.
Kate held Tyler awkwardly, a woman unaccustomed to holding an infant. Tyler had been asleep, but he stirred, opened his eyes wide, looking into a stranger’s face. Nicola’s arms tensed, ready to grab him back.
“I wish I could have held my nephew,” Kate murmured.
“I’m so sorry,” Nicola said again. Kate looked up, and for a long moment their eyes met and held. Kate’s were red rimmed, filled with emotion—rage, sorrow? No, it was anguish; Nicola recognized that now. She felt it herself, for Beth. Kate started to hand Tyler back to her, but Pete grabbed him. It startled Tyler, and he began to fuss.
“Let’s go,” Pete said, facing Nicola. “We’ll check into a hotel. Something temporary.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Kate said. She stared at Pete with hatred. And then, as if she wanted to say the one thing that would hurt him most, “Nicola and Tyler can stay here. Not you.”
“They’re my family,” Pete said. “Where they go, I go.”
“Sam’s your family too,” Kate said. “She needs to be at home.”
“I thought she was staying with you,” he said. “I thought you had poisoned her against me.”
“Beth wouldn’t want me to do that. The last thing I want is for Sam to live with you. But you’re her father, and Beth would want you to take care of her. Sam wants that too. It’s already done, Pete. I dropped her off this morning. She’s waiting for you.”
Nicola felt wild inside, hearing this exchange. Thinking about Beth, about Sam, about the mess she had helped create. What had she been thinking, that she and Pete and Tyler could ever have a normal life after this?
“Kate’s right,” Nicola said, forcing her voice to stay calm. “Sam needs her home and her father. But I don’t think Tyler and I should stay here, Kate.”
“Really? Where are you going to go? Nowhere near Sam, that’s for sure,” Kate said.
Nicola panicked. Kate was right; she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t return to live with her mother and face all that criticism of Pete, the constant litany of how her mother believed he had murdered Beth.
“So,” Kate said. “I assume you’ll stay.”
Pete looked at Nicola with that intense expression that scared her. It was pure rage, and it contained a warning.
He wanted her to say she would go with him, let him check her into that hotel, but she stepped back to let him know she would accept Kate’s invitation and stay here.
“Thank you, Kate,” Nicola said, trying not to sound meek. “I would like to stay.”
Kate put the key in her hand. Nicola’s fingers closed around it. Something made her look straight at Pete, and despite the hateful fury in his face, she didn’t look away.
23
After everyone left, Nicola put Tyler down for his nap and wandered through the house. It was so big the signal from the baby monitor wouldn’t carry from one floor to the other. She felt feverish. It might have been a slight sunburn, from the hour they’d spent on the beach, or it could be the heat of extreme pressure, a coal in her chest.
The house didn’t have air-conditioning, but even on a muggy day such as this, it didn’t need it. The windows were open, and a fresh Long Island Sound breeze blew up the cliff from the estuary, circulating through the hallways and rooms. She thought of the lengths to which museums went to make sure galleries were temperature and humidity controlled to within a degree or a bar, but Mathilda’s collection filled the walls, and the trained conservator in Nicola saw no problems at all.
A dumbwaiter ran between the upstairs and downstairs kitchens. Nicola felt its presence as if it were alive and calling to her, reminding her of what Pete had hidden there. She resisted its pull and walked into her favorite room—the library. The walls were papered in a color between rose and brick.
A marble fireplace, laid with logs, dominated one walnut-paneled wall. Chest-high overflowing bookcases lined two more, and the fourth had French doors. Hung with thick draperies of expensive fabric, Clarence House’s Tibet pattern—playful striped tigers in shades of cinnabar, sage green, and pale citron—the doors overlooked the boxwood hedge maze; stone garden ornaments, including gigantic spheres from an eighteenth-century Irish castle; and a lawn sloping into various crags and valleys down toward the river. The effect was both exotic and very New England. This was how the upper class lived. Nicola had never felt more like a girl from the sketchy side of Groton.
Small paintings by Willard Metcalf, Matilda Browne, Benjamin Morrison, William Merritt Chase, Henry Ward Ranger, and William Chadwick filled the walls above the bookcases; Childe Hassam’s Fifth Avenue in December hung above the mantel. It depicted New York at twilight under snow. The avenue was quiet; the day’s traffic had ceased. The sky seemed heavy yet charged, as if a blizzard had just passed. The painting’s electric quality came from the American and French flags flying from every building. The tableau was patriotic, but Nicola felt it warned that joy would be misplaced—World War I had ended, but the world remained uneasy. The blizzard could circle around, and another war was coming.
The baby monitor crackled. It was Tyler fussing. Nicola left the library and walked up the wide center stairs. She looked into the room where she and Pete had slept. Their son lay peacefully in the white cradle. He was quiet, deep in slumber; he must have been dreaming.
Why had Kate allowed Nicola to stay? Why had she accepted? She knew Pete had been furious by the way Kate had treated him. Perhaps, in a way, she was glad. He had swept her off her feet, but then he’d seemed not to have the foggiest idea of what to do about it. And it had made him angry.
The smart, ambitious woman he’d fallen in love with had slipped under the weight of his dark moods. She didn’t like who she was becoming—quick to please him just to stop his anger, less likely to listen to herself than to him. Accepting Kate’s invitation had felt delicious, a reclamation of who she wanted to be, just as her rebellions against her mother had always helped her draw the line between their strong personalities.
Nicola knew Detective Reid thought Pete had killed Beth, and most of the time Nicola fought that theory. She told herself that if she really believed it, she’d know physically; she’d be constitutionally unable to stay with him. So why, as her mother had asked, had she moved back home for those days in July? And why had she decided to stay here at Mathilda’s instead of letting him create another temporary nest for them at a hotel?
The dumbwaiter was still exerting its gravitational force. She walked to the end of the second-floor hall, entered the small upstairs kitchen. Unused now, it must have been useful for household staff. It had a gas stove, old-fashioned icebox, and a cupboard full of Spode china with an inordinate number of eggcups. Perhaps the Harkness family, and whoever had lived here before them, had enjoyed breakfast in bed.