Just showed how little I really knew the woman at all.
My bewilderment must have shown, because Nina set down her fork and sighed.
“Matthew, if you’re determined to hear my entire life story, I’ll tell it to you. But it’s not very interesting. I truly have nothing to hide.”
I took a big bite of asparagus, then a long drink of wine. “All right,” I said once I finally composed myself. “I’m ready to listen.”
Chapter Nine
Some of the story I already knew from our first meeting. Some I’d pieced together this week after discovering her real name.
She was christened Nina Evelyn Astor, the only daughter of two distinguished New York families. Her father, yes, was a distant relation of the Astors the ones for whom half of New York was named. Apparently I wasn’t wrong in thinking the name was lifted from the street signs. As she told me the night we met, he had left her mother when she was a child and gone to live in London. Her parents never divorced, but Nina had only a passing relationship with her dad.
Her mother, of course, was Violet de Vries, New York socialite and only surviving child of the late Jonathan de Vries (gone before Nina was even born) and Celeste de Vries, one of the last great dames the city’s wealthy were still mourning since her death last fall. Violet was a lush—my word, not hers, but given the number of times Nina referenced white wine while describing her mother, I pieced it together. It was her grandmother, Celeste, who had raised Nina, along with a bevy of nannies.
Like me, she had been abandoned by the people who were supposed to love her. Like me, she had lost the ones who had. Only her loss was much more recent.
“Celeste, I’ve heard about from Eric. Well, him and the papers. Her funeral in November was massive.” I put a scoop of agnolotti on my plate, then served some to Nina. “No, you don’t get to wimp out on the pasta, sweetheart. It’s house made, and the sauce is a double brodo—this reduced stock that’s to fuckin’ die for.”
“I forgot how much you like food.”
Nina watched as I took a bite of pasta, looking, if I wasn’t mistaken, pretty damn jealous.
“Food is a universal pleasure,” I replied. “We only have five senses. Seems like a waste of this short life to deny one of them.” I looked pointedly at her plate. “Go on, then.”
Nina obediently put one of the lamb-filled pockets in her mouth and immediately closed her eyes in pleasure. “Oh my,” she breathed. “That is excellent. My compliments to your friend.”
I smiled with satisfaction. I sort of wanted to order another plate just to watch her make that face for the next hour.
“Celeste willed the company to Eric, right?” I asked as we continued to eat.
Nina nodded. “Yes. He was always the favorite.”
“Despite being the black sheep?”
She nodded again with more than a tinge of resentment. “Yes.”
I’d heard the basics of Eric’s re-entry into his family multiple times at this point. Crazy, rich-people drama, the kind you’d expect to see on one of Nonna’s daytime soaps. Rich matriarch gets a bee in her bonnet about the family legacy. Promises the whole kit and kaboodle to the prodigal heir, but only if he gets married.
She didn’t, apparently, anticipate Eric and Jane being targeted by a homicidal maniac as a result.
“And your mother? She wasn’t available to take things over instead? I mean, why Eric?”
Nina shook her head. “Mother has never been the most…reliable person. I would be shocked to learn if she had ever been under consideration. Her skills now generally revolve around Sancerre consumption and auction attendance. Uncle Jacob—that’s Eric’s father—was the one who was supposed to take things over, but of course he passed when we were children…” She shook her head. “I honestly don’t think the family ever recovered from that, you know?”
I frowned. I had heard that story too. The fact that Eric was the only son of the only son, and that his father had died in a tragic sailing “accident” when Eric was just a kid.
“So Eric loses his dad, the family never recovers, and he takes off as soon as he can only to be rewarded for it ten years later. Have I got that right?”
Nina gave a curt nod.
“But you were the one that stayed around?”
“For the most part. I was actually at Wellesley for school and spent part of that time abroad before I got married. But I was still home quite a bit.”
“And you already had a kid, an heir to the family. Plus, you changed your legal name to de Vries after your dad left.” I tapped my fork on my plate, thinking. “I guess I still don’t understand why Celeste didn’t leave everything to you. Why drag Eric back into the family kicking and screaming when she had another grandchild ready and willing? Didn’t she care at all about loyalty?”
“I thought she did.”
I paused mid-bite of pasta. Like any good prosecutor, I knew when to press a witness, and when to wait for them to speak on their own. Nina was staring at her plate, but the wheels in her head were turning so hard, they were practically shaking the room.
“I asked her once,” she said quietly. “Before she died. I didn’t want to. After all, it was her fortune. She didn’t technically owe me any of it, and the terms of her will didn’t exactly leave me destitute. But Calvin—my-my husband, I mean—he pointed out that I deserved an explanation. After everything I had given her, all the time I had spent with her. He said it should have been me. And I thought perhaps he was right.”
Calvin, huh? Well, that cast a different light on things. Derek was still working on his report on Nina’s husband, but I already knew from my own poking around that the guy was relatively clean. Calvin Gardner’s origins were still a mystery to me, but he had existed on the periphery of New York high society for years. First as a student at NYU’s business school, then later as an investment banker, hopping from firm to firm, fund to fund, until he made his fortune during the late nineties dot-com boom. After he married into the de Vries family, it seemed he checked out of the finance world for good. To do what, I still wasn’t sure.
Now I was starting to wonder…
“So,” Nina continued, “after Eric came back, I asked her why.”
“And?” I couldn’t help it. She was talking so quietly, I was afraid the story would get buried in the din of the restaurant.
“According to Grandmother, I wasn’t a de Vries anymore,” she said. “Not once I became a Gardner.”
“She didn’t like Calvin?”
Nina’s gaze sharpened. “What?”
I shrugged. “I was just asking. This seems like a punishment.”
“She thought…she thought Calvin was perfectly acceptable, under the circumstances.”
“And what circumstances were those?”
Her gray eyes flashed like a blade. “Matthew, I know you’d like me to say that my husband is a terrible person, but he’s not. The circumstances were that he asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I was young, but it was a good match. And frankly, it still is.”
Is that why you ended up in bed with me? I wanted to snarl. I couldn’t fuckin’ help it. Every instinct I had was telling me that Calvin Gardner was a piece of shit, and I didn’t even know the guy. Something was very wrong about him ending up with Nina, but I couldn’t see what it was.