Living in Connecticut, temptation was close for him—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos were not far from Black Hall. But instead of just being away from dinner till dawn, he had started not coming home for days at a time. One day he came home just before she left for school. He hugged her, and she smelled perfume. She was only fifteen at the time, but she knew right then that he was having an affair.
She wanted to tell Beth, but Kate took her position as older sister seriously and had to protect her. She watched her mother, to see how she reacted. For the longest time, her mother seemed fine. But once in a while, her father would talk on the phone in a low voice, then leave the house. Kate would see her mother hitting redial after her father left.
Kate figured her mother must have smelled the perfume too.
Walking down Pequot Avenue, Kate had intended to keep going to the lighthouse. But when she stopped to sit on the wall outside Monte Cristo Cottage, she realized this was where she had wanted to come all along. She needed to visit this house, to feel Eugene O’Neill’s spirit and bring back a moment in her life when she had sat with Beth and Mathilda in the theater, when a certain truth about her father had clicked in her mind.
Her phone rang again. This time she answered without even looking at the screen.
“You didn’t even text me back. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell me,” Kate said.
“You have no idea how much I wanted to,” Lulu said.
“But Beth made you promise not to?”
“No, she never said that. I can’t even figure it out, why I didn’t. At first I thought that, yes—that if she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”
“Am I that terrible?” she asked. “That judgmental?”
Lulu studiously avoided answering the question. “Kate, I want to see you. We need to talk in person.”
Kate’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak.
“Where is Jed Hilliard now?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess.”
“Kate, we weren’t friends. I only met him once—accidentally.”
“Where?”
“On the Block Island Ferry. It was late last winter; the boat was practically empty. I had a few days off and was heading out to clear my head. I spotted Beth standing on deck—I was in the cabin; it was so cold. I remember there was ice on the lines, and it was starting to snow. I was so surprised to see her there at all—I started to go outside, when a guy walked up to her, handed her a cup of something hot—coffee, I guess. I tried to hang back, but she saw me, so I couldn’t avoid going over to talk. She introduced him as an artist friend, said they were going to go to Mohegan Bluffs to take photos of the cliffs in the snow so they could paint the scene later.”
“Maybe they were just friends.”
“I saw him kiss her when he handed her the cup,” Lulu said. “It was a real kiss.”
Kate stared out at the water, picturing her sister on the ferry, kissing a stranger. So Scotty had been wrong—they were more than just friends. And the baby? Could he have been Jed’s? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how Beth must have felt. It must have been exciting. She must have been happy. Kate kept the small fat key in her pocket, and her hand closed around it now.
“Whose baby was it?” Kate asked.
“Where are you?” Lulu asked.
“New London.”
“At home?”
“On Pequot.”
“Stay there,” Lulu said. “I’m coming to get you.”
30
Kate had already decided what to do next. When Lulu picked her up, Kate asked her to drive her home. She needed to be behind the wheel of her own car, regain a feeling of power and control. “I need to get my car,” she said.
“To go where?” Lulu asked.
“Ainsworth.”
“Holy shit.”
“You can come if you want.”
So Lulu parked her Range Rover in Kate’s spot behind the loft building, and they took off in Kate’s Porsche. Kate had sworn she would never see her father again, but he was going to explain this to her—how he’d introduced Beth to a fellow inmate. Kate drove north on Route 9, following directions to the Ainsworth Correctional Institute.
“Why are we doing this?” Lulu asked. “I should be buying you martinis at the Ocean House and begging you to forgive me and understand why I didn’t tell you.”
“Yes, you should. But I want to find Jed.”
“Tell the detective. He’ll find him.”
“I plan to,” Kate said. “But this part’s on me. I want to know if my father introduced Beth to her killer. Do you think Jed did it, not Pete?”
“Well, he wasn’t happy with her.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lulu exhaled hard. “She was married. He wanted her not to be. They fought about it.”
“Was he the father?” Kate asked.
“I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.”
“Did you ask her?”
“She didn’t tell me everything, Kate.”
“And she didn’t tell me anything.”
“What the hell are we doing?” Lulu said. “Get the detective on this so you don’t have to see your father for the first time since . . .”
“He paid to have us tied up in the cellar,” Kate said, finishing the sentence.
Lulu had a point. Kate was so good at blocking out feelings she’d made herself dead from the brain down. This was tricky. Her father, her dad. She had loved him like crazy when she was little. They used to go on expeditions in the backyard, with him carrying her on his shoulders. They’d see their shadow cast by the house lights.
“A two-headed giant,” he’d say.
“Don’t scare me,” she’d say.
“Never,” he’d say. “What are we?”
“Sweethearts and partners,” she’d reply.
“That’s right,” he’d say, bouncing her up and down, tossing her up to the stars and catching her as she fell.
She sped along, the Connecticut River on their right, through Hartford. She and her father used to go to the Wadsworth Atheneum, and she felt her old daughterly love flooding back. She had been close to her father. Whenever they had stopped at the Atheneum, they had visited Andrew Wyeth’s Chambered Nautilus, a painting of a young girl in her gauze-canopied bed, looking out the window with unbridled longing, a luminous seashell on the hope chest at the foot of the bed.
“Why do you think it’s a hope chest?” her father had asked one time.
Kate stared, reddening as if he had caught her having a fantasy. “Because the girl wants to get married,” she said quietly.
“That’s her greatest wish?” he asked.
Kate stared at the painting, haunting in shades of white, wheat, and gray. The girl in the bed reminded her of herself: thin with long brown hair, filled with constant yearning. She could never have expressed that to her father or anyone. No one thought of her as a girl in bed; she was an athlete, always on a tennis court, a sailboat, or skis. She laughed; she didn’t moon. At least those were the things she showed the world.