The Seduction of Water (25 page)

I notice Jack standing on the edge of a group, looking at me, and pat the seat next to mine to invite him over.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d make your boyfriend jealous,” he says, sitting down next to me.

“For one thing, I don’t think he’s my boyfriend anymore, and for another, I haven’t seen him around.”

I see Jack struggling with the urge to ask more questions but, to his credit, he changes the subject. “You must be excited about Gordon’s discovery. Another clue to your mother’s life and art.”

I take a sip of champagne and look up at the second-floor window. A few guests are standing on the landing, no doubt admiring the chandelier. “It made me feel like an idiot,” I say. “All these years I’ve been tracing the influence of fairy tales and Irish folk legends on her work and I never thought to look at the church. A Catholic girl from Brooklyn! I’ve never even been to that church, St. Mary Star of the Sea, except for when I was three.”

“Well, you’ll go now. I bet that portrait is there and something about Catalina della Rosa—who knows, maybe they’ve got a piece of her in a box . . . a whattayacallit . . .”

“A reliquary,” I say. “That’s what this whole project of mine is beginning to feel like. A grab bag of relics of my mother. A bag of bones. Do you know, Phoebe Nix warned me not to write something that might show her mother in an unfavorable light? Then, tonight, she accused me of wearing her mother’s dress.” I don’t tell Jack that the dress might actually have belonged to Vera Nix.

“She sounds like a nut job.”

“Exactly. Look at what a lifetime of living in her mother’s shadow has done to her. I don’t want to end up like her.”

“Then maybe you should get away from here. Why don’t we go back to the city, Iris.” I feel Jack’s hand on mine. I know it’s the moment I should turn to him—he’s giving me a chance to repair the rupture between us—but instead I find my eyes glued to the tableau unfolding on the second-floor landing. The knot of guests has dispersed, replaced by a lone figure—a slim woman in a plain, straight dress. It’s hard to tell from here, with the chandelier candlelight between us, but I think it’s Phoebe Nix.

“Damn, Jack, look, I think that’s Phoebe outside Joseph’s door. She’s been pestering him all week to get him to tell her more about her mother when she was up here. I bet she’s going to ask him if he remembers her wearing this dress.”

The door to Joseph’s suite opens, but I can’t see who’s there. The lights must be off in the living area. Phoebe goes into the room for a moment but comes out quickly, closes the door behind her and walks away, toward the elevators. A few minutes later I see another figure coming from the direction of the elevators—not Phoebe, though; a man.

“Isn’t that your friend?” Jack says. At some point Jack’s hand lifted off mine. I didn’t notice until now.

“Yes, that’s Aidan. He’s probably returning a painting to the locked closet.” I notice, though, that Aidan isn’t carrying anything. He pauses outside Joseph’s door and then lets himself in, leaving the door open. Then he disappears into the dark room.

I turn away from the brightly lit window and see that Jack has been watching me all along. “You didn’t answer my question, Iris. About coming back to the city with me.”

Over Jack’s shoulder I see the dark valley and the lights along the river. Little specks of light—like fireflies—spangle the air above the river too and for a moment I think the fireworks display that Harry has planned for tonight has already started, but then I blink and the lights go away. They were only the afterimage of the chandelier candles I’d been staring at. I look back at Jack to give my answer, but before I can a sharp crack rends the still night air.

“It must be the fireworks,” I say, looking back over the valley.

Jack shakes his head. “It came from the hotel.”

I turn so quickly that the chiffon swag on my dress catches on the rough wood of the bench and I hear something tear. A figure on the second-floor landing is walking, no, stumbling, toward the window. For a moment he’s caught in the light of a hundred candles and then the light seems to explode around him. I think it’s the chandelier falling, but it’s the reflection of the chandelier in the window splintering into a million shards as the man on the landing falls through the glass.

I’m standing before I remember getting up and kneeling beside the man who is splayed out on the terrace before I realize I’ve even started moving. Splinters of glass dig into my knees and the palm of my left hand, which I use to steady myself as I use my right hand to gingerly feel for a pulse, but I don’t need the silence of his flesh to tell me that Joseph is dead.

PART III

The Selkie’s Daughter

Chapter Twenty-four

A week after Joseph died I took the train back to the city. I was surprised to see that the trees along the Palisades were still green. It felt like years since I had glimpsed the first hints of autumn color in the woods behind the hotel and for a moment I imagined that I had somehow fallen asleep and missed the turning of the year only to awaken in a new spring. If only I could go back to this past spring, I thought, back to the night Aidan showed up on my doorstep, back to the train ride when I promised to help get him the job at the hotel. But there would be no going back. Joseph was dead and Aidan was gone, wanted for his murder.

When we finally got into Joseph’s suite—I was reluctant to leave Joseph on the terrace even though it was clear that nothing could be done for him and it took some time before Harry was able to get up from the ledge where he had been checking the fireworks preparations—it was empty. The Hudson River School paintings were gone, although the lock on the closet showed no signs of forced entry. There were some signs of struggle in the living area: a broken lamp, an overturned chair, one of Joseph’s crutches lying on the floor, a splotch of fresh blood on the carpet near where the crutch lay. Even before the DNA tests confirmed that the blood belonged to Aidan (cross-matched with samples from his prison record), the detective from Kingston had already established a fairly convincing scenario for what had happened in Joseph’s suite.

It was not my evidence alone that placed Aidan in the suite minutes before the gunshot was heard. When questioned, Phoebe admitted—somewhat reluctantly, I noticed—that she had passed him in the hall after she left Joseph’s suite. “He told me that he was making a last check on the paintings as per Harry’s orders.”

Harry denied that he had sent Aidan on any such mission. “In fact, I hadn’t seen the boy all evening and I was annoyed that he wasn’t downstairs supervising such an important event.”

Of course, no one knew exactly what had happened once Aidan entered the suite. I told Detective March twice that it was too dark inside the room to see anything from where I was on the terrace. When he asked the question a third time Jack interrupted and told the detective that he’d been sitting right next to me on the terrace and what I said was true: you could see the hallway on the second-floor landing because it was lit by the chandelier, but the lights must have been off in Joseph’s suite and you couldn’t see into it from where we were seated.

“But at least you were facing the window when the gun was fired?” Detective March asked Jack. “While Ms. Greenfeder was . . .”

“I was looking out over the valley,” I said. “I thought the sound was the beginning of the fireworks display, but then Jack said it came from the hotel . . .”

“Can you tell us if you saw Joseph Krupah leave the room before or after the gun was fired?” Detective March asked Jack.

“I’m not sure, but I think he was in the doorway, or maybe a foot or two into the hall, when I heard the sound. He was limping and I thought,
What’s he doing out without his crutches?
and then when I heard the sound he fell forward, toward the window, and then he fell through it.”

The gun was found two days later, caught in some brush on the ledge below the terrace—as if someone had tried to throw it off the side of the mountain but hadn’t thrown it far enough. It was Harry Kron’s gun—reported to the police as stolen a month earlier—and it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

“Would Mr. Barry have had access to your suite the night your gun was stolen?” Detective March asked Harry when the gun was found. He’d asked Harry and me to meet with him in the Sleepy Hollow Suite, which had been cordoned off as a crime scene since the night of the murder. I hadn’t been in the suite since that night and I’d expected to feel uneasy because of the blood on the carpet or the remains of fingerprinting powder that still lingered on the furniture and woodwork, but what upset me most was sitting in the same seat by the window where I had sat only a week before talking to Joseph, under the specter of the Headless Horseman whose fiery severed head seemed to leer at me from the painted wall. Now Detective March sat in the wing-backed chair where Joseph had sat, Harry sat in the matching chair on the other side of the window, and I was perched on the footstool in between the two.

“I leave it to my manager to decide who has a master key,” Harry said, deferring the question to me.

“He shouldn’t have had one that night,” I said, “because Mr. Kron hadn’t promoted him to special-events coordinator yet . . . he was just working in the garden . . .”

“And you don’t generally give out master keys to the gardening staff?” Detective March asked me with barely disguised disdain. I was convinced he had taken a dislike to me the minute I confessed that I’d looked away from the window at the crucial moment and that aversion was strengthened when I explained that I had knowingly hired an ex-convict to work in the hotel.

“No, but all the maids have master keys . . .”

I saw Detective March write something in his notebook and guessed that it was a note to question all the maids as to whether or not they had given their master keys to anyone that night. I knew that Paloma would probably lie for me and deny giving me her key that night, but I guessed that she would lie badly and that the lie would cost her. I’d seen too many maids called into my father’s office after a guest had reported some valuable item stolen from his or her room. I’d seen them come out, their faces bleached with fear and guilt, even the ones who were exonerated hours later when the watch or billfold showed up in the guest’s own pocket.

“I lost my key that night,” I told the detective, meeting his eyes as he looked up from his notebook, not out of bravery but because it was easier to face his antipathy than the look of disappointment in Harry’s face. “I think I lost it in the library where Gordon del Sarto was giving his lecture that night.”

“I believe Mr. Barry helped set up the slides for that,” Harry said.

“So Mr. Barry might have found the key and let himself into Mr. Kron’s suite . . .”

“But why? I mean, I know how much Aidan wanted to avoid going back to prison. He wrote a beautiful essay about it . . .” The look on Detective March’s face stops me from further praising Aidan’s eloquent rendition of Tam Lin.

“That’s very nice, Ms. Greenfeder. I’m glad to know my tax dollars are going toward teaching prisoners to express themselves. Tell me, do you know why Mr. Barry was in prison?”

“He told me he was in a car with his cousin that turned out to be stolen and to have stolen guns in the trunk. He said he didn’t know about the guns, but he did know his cousin was involved in raising money for the IRA.”

Detective March made a choking sound in the back of his throat, which I supposed was his version of a laugh. “Uh-huh. Did he mention that when the car was pulled over he ran?”

“No, but . . .”

“And that the officer who pursued him was hit by another vehicle and died?”

I shook my head no.

“Sort of impulsive, your friend Aidan Barry. Flighty, you might say.”

I remembered the look in Aidan’s eyes when he asked me if he should leave. The sense I’d had of him poised for flight. Maybe he thought the paintings were his chance for a new life. At least that’s what Detective March thought.

“This is what I figure happened,” he told Harry and me. “Aidan Barry probably didn’t have any definite plans when he stole Mr. Kron’s gun but guys like him like to have a gun in reserve, just in case. When you so conveniently presented him with a key he naturally used it to check out his boss’s room and when he came across the gun he took it for a rainy day—excuse the cliché, Ms. Greenfeder, English never was my best subject, unlike our Mr. Barry. I remember you English teachers hate clichés, but in this case I can’t think of a better way of putting it, can you?”

I shook my head no. Great, I thought, on top of being a poor witness and having an irresponsible hiring policy, I had apparently offended Detective March by being an English teacher. No doubt I was paying for some martinet grammar-queen he’d had in the eighth grade.

“So he waits around to see what’ll turn up at this nice hotel of yours.” Detective March waved his hand toward the view of the rose garden as if to illustrate what a “nice” hotel it really was, only the garden was not looking its best. True to Joseph’s last orders, the limited water supply had been allocated only to the perennials. The annual borders were dying and the grass was beginning to brown. The whole garden seemed to have gone into mourning for the dead gardener.

“You know I probably shouldn’t admit this, being an officer of the law, but I used to sneak in here during the summers and swim at your lake. A lot of the local kids did it. I thought this place looked like Paradise. But I bet it didn’t look as good to Mr. Barry as those paintings did. How much did you say they’re worth, Mr. Kron?”

“Well, of course it always depends on the market. American landscapes have enjoyed a resurgence of interest lately . . .”

“A ballpark figure, Mr. Kron.”

“Several million at least, I’d say four and a half million altogether at auction, but of course, on the black market it’s hard to say.”

“Well, a couple of million anyway. And your Mr. Barry is not unconnected.” When he said
your Mr. Barry
he looked directly at me. “That story about gun smuggling wasn’t a total fabrication—he does have some ties to the IRA, which as you may or may not know has been linked to art theft rings before.”

“Ah yes,” Harry interrupted, “I believe there’s a theory that the Isabella Stewart Gardner robbery was engineered by the IRA . . .”

“So when he sees all these expensive paintings,” Detective March went on, ignoring Harry, “—and we know from a Mr. Ramsey of the Cornell Gallery that Aidan Barry discussed with him the monetary value of one of the paintings—he decides that maybe hotel work’s not quite the line for him after all. Maybe retiring to the Cayman Islands is more up his alley. I think about it myself some days, especially when another winter’s bearing down—it gets awfully cold up here, as I’m sure you remember from your childhood, Ms. Greenfeder.”

The detective paused so I could nod and when he still didn’t say anything I wondered if I was supposed to reminisce with him about record-setting snows and blizzards of our youth. Or maybe I was supposed to break down and confess that the thought of spending another winter up here at this lonely hotel drove me to engineer an art heist with Aidan and I was only waiting to make my getaway to the Caribbean. I didn’t say anything and, finally, Detective March continued with his imagined scenario.

“And look how easy it is.” Now he gestured in the direction of the closet, which had been closed and locked. “A couple of million dollars’ worth of art in a closet, guarded by an old crippled gardener. Let’s give Mr. Barry some credit. He probably didn’t figure that the old gardener would give him any trouble. He probably figured he’d be asleep. All he’d have to do is let himself into the suite—” Detective March got up and went to the front door of the suite, miming Aidan coming into the room. “—which he’d been doing all week, open the closet—” The detective took a key out of his pocket and opened the closet door, which swung into the wing of Harry’s chair. “—which he also had a key for, and pack up the paintings and slip out of town. Probably had a friend with a car waiting down the road a bit. Unfortunately, Mr. Krupah wasn’t asleep. Your niece told us that, Mr. Kron. She’d visited Mr. Krupah to ask him a question a few minutes before she passed Aidan Barry in the hall. I didn’t quite get what the question was about. Something to do with a stolen dress?”

I sighed and prepared myself to explain the dress incident to Detective Marsh, but he held up a hand to stop me. “No matter. Miss Nix bent my ear about that dress for half an hour yesterday. I believe she would like me to shelve this murder investigation to find out who stole her mother’s dress fifty years ago. All I care about is that five minutes before Aidan Barry let himself into this suite, Joseph Krupah was in the living room talking to Miss Nix about her mother’s dress. Miss Nix said that he told her he was going to bed, but it would have taken him a few minutes to get down the hall between the living room and his bedroom, so when Mr. Barry let himself in Mr. Krupah was still in the hallway. Ms. Greenfeder, you be Mr. Krupah.”

Detective March signaled for me to follow him across the living room and into the hallway that led to the suite’s bedroom. He partially closed the door and left me there. I heard him ask Harry to “be Mr. Barry.” I heard a door close and then Detective March whispering something to Harry that I couldn’t catch. Then I heard a click and something creaked.

“Did you hear the door open, Ms. Greenfeder?” I told him I had. “Now come in.”

I entered the living area and saw Harry standing at the closet door, his back to me. For a moment I didn’t see the detective, but then I saw him standing between the closet door and the wing-backed chair, craning his head around to see the scene he’d set up. “As you can see, the minute Mr. Krupah entered the living room he’d see what Mr. Barry was up to. He knew that the paintings were locked in for the night, that Mr. Barry had no business coming back for them. I bet he always had his suspicions about Mr. Barry and it rubbed him the wrong way to see this punk stealing the paintings. I guess he was a pretty loyal employee, this Joseph.” Detective March paused for Harry and me to concur. Harry, his back still turned to me, murmured something, but I couldn’t open my mouth.
Loyal employee.
Is that how I’d sum up what Joseph had meant to the hotel and my family for the last fifty years?

“I think Joseph Krupah tried to avert the robbery. Not a very smart thing to do, but you’ve got to admire the old guy. He hits Mr. Barry over the head with his crutch—” Detective March came out from behind the door and raised his arm over Harry’s unsuspecting head, bringing it down within an inch of his bald crown. “He must have given him a pretty good crack given the amount of blood on the carpet.” We all looked down—Harry turning from the open closet—to look at the dark spot on the carpet.