The Seduction of Water (26 page)

“Thinking that Mr. Barry was unconscious, Mr. Krupah headed for the door to go for help.” Detective March crossed the room and opened the door to the hallway. I could see the boarded-up window on the landing and a guest walking toward the elevators. “Only Mr. Barry regained consciousness when Joseph was still in the doorway and, thinking to stop the witness to his crime, he took out his gun and fired. Remarkably, the impact of the bullet didn’t knock him down immediately. He was still on his feet, still trying to get away—” Detective March lunged into the hall, with Harry and me following at his heels, startling the Eden sisters who had been ascending the stairs. Detective March bowed to them and went on with his story, on the landing, with the Eden sisters hovering—no doubt eavesdropping—in the hallway. “—but unfortunately, he ran straight for the landing and lost his balance there. That’s when he fell through the window. Aidan Barry gathered up his paintings, went down the back staircase—by that time the commotion on the terrace had brought all the guests and staff out of the kitchen and dining room—and left by the west side of the hotel where he probably had an accomplice waiting for him. We figure they headed to Canada on the back roads. We alerted the Canadian border patrol before morning but unfortunately our friends to the north aren’t always as vigilant as we could hope.”

I pictured Aidan driving north, the sun coming up over the Adirondack Mountains. It reminded me of another sunrise.

“How’d he carry them?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Detective March was already walking away from the window, his performance completed.

“The paintings. There were six of them, including a huge skyscape of dawn that Aidan could barely carry by itself. How did he get all six of those paintings down the stairs by himself?”

“That’s a good question, Ms. Greenfeder. Maybe he had help—it would be worth noting whether any of your staff or management has any sudden influx in wealth over the next year. We’ll keep an eye on that. In the meantime, perhaps we should do another search of the hotel and grounds in case Mr. Barry stashed any of the paintings in the hopes of returning for them. I’m afraid it will cause some disruption to your guests . . .”

“I’m closing the hotel this weekend,” Harry said, “so feel free to look to your heart’s content. In fact, the staff and I will help you.”

“Closing the hotel?” I repeated. It was the first I’d heard of it. I looked down the hall to see if the Eden sisters were still listening in but to my relief they had vanished. I knew they were planning to stay through the fall.

“I’m sorry, Iris, I’d meant to tell you, but Detective March has kept me so busy these last few days. Don’t look so stricken; I don’t mean to close it for good. I’d planned to get an early start on renovations and this unfortunate tragedy has simply accelerated my plans. We had only a handful of bookings for September—no groups, nobody very important—and there’s sure to be a pall over the hotel because of the tragedy. We’ll use the time to refurbish—we’ll strip the woodwork, redo the floors, paint, and tear up all the old drapes and carpets. When we reopen next May you won’t recognize the place. And although I know you won’t believe me now, even this sadness over Joseph will have passed. After all, he wasn’t a young man. Of course I know how distraught you are now. Why don’t you take some time off? Go back to the city. I don’t need you for the renovations—although of course you’ll be kept on salary through the winter . . .”

I know I should appreciate Harry’s generosity, but it’s one of the things that nags at me all the way down the Hudson, the idea of being on the hotel’s payroll while I’m leaving it to be gutted by the renovators. I’m not sure whom I think I’m letting down—Joseph, who’s beyond my help, Aunt Sophie, who’s already gone to Florida to join the Mandelbaums, or the hotel itself. It looked, in my last glimpse of it from the train station, so insubstantial and improbable, a white temple perched on a cliff above the Hudson, that I already feel as if it’s a place I made up and that when I try to find my way back it will have been swallowed up by the forest, folded back into the mountains.

Certainly, when I climb the ramp up into Grand Central and run into the crush of northbound commuters, the stale smell of the city summer rising off them, it’s hard to believe such a place of grace and coolness exists. Crossing the main hall I remember that when my mother embarked on her first journey north she said that the hotel seemed as distant to her as the constellations in the teal-vaulted ceiling. Did she feel, when she came back that last time, as I do now: as if returned from a trip to the moon?

By the time I’ve made it to the taxi queue outside I’m drenched in sweat and gasping in the fetid air. I try to shift the suitcase to my left hand, but my hand’s still bandaged from the glass cuts I got on the terrace kneeling beside Joseph. I can feel too that the bandages on my knees have come loose, and that my jeans are rubbing against the scabs. When I finally sink gratefully into the torn upholstery of an un-air-conditioned cab I can see a moist dark crescent below each knee where the blood has spread. I roll down the window and watch the city passing by. The sepulchral white marble of the main library, the plane trees in Bryant Park, their leaves limp and rusty, the fruit and vegetable stands in Hell’s Kitchen, the Red Branch Pub on Ninth where I stood with Aidan that night we walked back from the station together. When I realize I’m scanning the faces of the pedestrians for him I close the window, despite the heat, lean back in my seat, and concentrate on the meter for the rest of the trip.

After I pay the cab, I stand for a minute on the corner, looking across West Street to the river, gathering my strength for the five flights of stairs up to my apartment. Or, I admit, gathering myself to face the emptiness that waits for me in the little tower room I’ve loved so much all these years. I’ve never come home with such a sense of disappointment before. With each flight of stairs I find myself more and more reluctant to face that empty room. I’ve always returned to it as to a cloister, a place of quiet where I could finally turn away from the distractions of the world and write. This was the world I’d made for myself, an empty tower room with a view of the river, a place where what happened to my mother would never happen to me. I’d never have to flee the distractions of husband and child because I’d never have those things. What had Phoebe said?
Haven’t you lived your whole life based on what you thought you knew about your mother’s story? No marriage. No children . . . You’ve avoided everything you thought killed her.

When I open the door, though, I’m greeted by light and air. The suffocating cell I’ve been dreading is instead open to the sky and river. I’m so relieved by how welcoming it looks that it takes me a minute to realize why it’s not so lonely. It’s because I’m not alone. Stretched out below the open windows on my couch, his forearm flung over his eyes to block out the late-afternoon light, is Aidan, fast asleep.

Chapter Twenty-five

I could back out, go downstairs, and call the police. I have plenty of time to think about it, standing there in the doorway, watching Aidan sleep. Long enough for the sun to lower toward the New Jersey skyline across the river. I have plenty of reasons too, which I list to myself as the light on Aidan’s face and arm changes from gold to red. The red calls to mind the blood on the terrace after they moved Joseph’s body and the splotch of blood on the carpet in Joseph’s suite. I notice a bandage on Aidan’s forehead, black sutures creeping under the edges of the white gauze. So this isn’t the first place he came to; he’s had other help. What, then, is he doing here?

That’s what finally makes me decide to close the door and sit down at my desk. If, as Detective March insisted, Aidan is so well connected, he’d have no reason to be here. Although I’m already schooling myself against believing everything he says—remember the DNA tests, I think, remember you saw him go into Joseph’s room—I still want to hear his story.

He sleeps so long, though, that I grow impatient—and hungry. I meant to go to the Korean grocer on the corner once I dropped my bags off, but I’m afraid that if I leave he’ll be gone when I get back. When I check the refrigerator I find eggs and milk with current expiration dates and a box of McCann’s Irish Oatmeal double sealed in plastic bags on the counter. I find this last detail hopelessly endearing—he’s a man on the run, but still he’s careful not to attract bugs. I notice too that the few dishes he’s used have been washed and left to dry on the drying rack, the dishcloth folded neatly on the counter.

It’s the smell of cooking food that finally wakes him. I’m facing the stove, my back to the couch, when I hear him speak.

“I suppose it’s a positive sign you’ve not called the police,” he says, “or is that a last meal you’re cooking me?”

I bring over the plates of eggs and toast and two mugs of tea—strong with milk and sugar the way he takes it. I usually have mine plain, but I remember from Barbara Pym’s novels that sweet tea’s supposed to be the thing for shock and I’m expecting to hear at least a few surprises when Aidan starts talking. At least, I’m hoping that what he says will surprise me. The alternative is that I already know the whole story from Detective March.

He makes room for me on the couch, but I pull my desk chair over instead. He rakes his hair back from his forehead and I can see how far the sutures go back along his scalp.

“Joseph gave you quite a knock,” I say, sipping my tea and pretending when I wince that it’s from the heat of the liquid.

“Is that how the police figure it?” he asks. “That Joseph did this?” He points to his forehead and then shakes his head. “Joseph didn’t hit me.”

“Then who did?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that it was the same person who shot Joseph.”

I take another sip of tea. “I saw you from the terrace,” I tell him. “I saw you go into Joseph’s room and then five minutes later we heard a gunshot and Jack said he saw Joseph run out the door and then fall through the window.”

Aidan nods. I notice he hasn’t touched his food. He’s lost weight in the week since I’ve seen him, and grown pale again. He’s gotten that same hollow look he had when he was in prison. “Jack said,” he repeats. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Jack would have no reason to lie about what he saw. I’d already told him it was over between him and me.” It’s only half a lie. It’s what I’d been about to tell Jack when the gun was fired and it is what I told him the next day.

“No, he wasn’t lying,” Aidan says. “I imagine that’s what it looked like from where you two were sitting and I doubt I’ll be able to convince you otherwise. Do you want me to tell you my story, or are you content with the police’s version?”

“I’ll try to keep an open mind,” I say.

Aidan leans forward on the couch and I think for a moment that he’s reaching for my hand, but he’s only reaching for his cup of tea. He folds his hands around the mug, as if to keep his hands warm, or maybe just to keep his hands busy, because he holds the cup while he tells me his story without ever taking a sip from it.

“As soon as I went into the suite, I knew something was wrong. The room was dark and the wall switch didn’t work. I tried a lamp on the coffee table and it didn’t work either.”

“The lights were still out when Harry and I went into the suite, but they were working. We turned them on.”

“I’ve thought about that. Someone could have thrown the circuit breaker for the second floor. Most of the guests were at the party so no one would have noticed. I thought about going for a flashlight, but there was enough light coming through the windows—remember Harry had put in all those floodlights in the garden—to check the paintings.”

“They were all there?”

“I think so. I was counting them—just to make sure—when someone hit me from behind and I fell down onto the floor.”

“So how do you know it wasn’t Joseph who hit you if you didn’t see who it was?”

“Because the minute I hit the carpet I saw the door to the bedroom open and Joseph came in—no mistaking him with that limp. He saw me on the carpet, but instead of coming toward me he headed for the door. It scared me because I figured whatever—or whoever—he saw behind me had scared him. I tried to turn over to get a look behind me, but someone stepped on the back of my head. Hard. Right where I’d been hit already. I think I started blacking out. I remember, though, a block of light and someone standing in it—bloody thought I was heading down the tunnel of light toward my final reward—but then something exploded and the figure in the light looked like he was flying toward the window. I think I did black out for a minute then, because when I came to the pressure on my head was gone and I was alone in the room. Alone in a room where a couple of million dollars’ worth of paintings had just been stolen and a gun had gone off—I could smell it. It didn’t take too much imagination to see the picture that was taking shape. I ran. Took off down the back staircase and went through the servants’ wing—out the side and down through the woods. I got down to the Agway at the foot of the mountain and called some friends in the city to come pick me up—by morning the story was out and I knew Joseph was dead. I was sorry, Iris, I couldn’t be with you. I know how he loved you.”

He comes to a stop—winded from just the memory of all that running. I feel breathless too. All the light has seeped out of the sky outside and I can smell the river—a dank, low-tide smell. The uneaten eggs on both our plates have grown cold. I get up and take the plates to the sink.

“I don’t blame you for not believing me,” he says. “I didn’t really expect you to, but I wanted to tell you. I had to tell you.”

I turn around, lifting my hands, palms up, like some statue of impartial justice. “Why would someone else shoot Joseph? If you didn’t kill him, who did?”

“Whoever hit me over the head and took the paintings. When I fell the sound woke Joseph and he came running in.”

It’s a plausible theory, and I would like more than anything to take it at face value, but I can’t. “But why were you there in the first place? Harry said he didn’t ask you to check on the paintings . . .”

“Well, no, he didn’t ask me directly, that harebrained niece of his did.”

“Phoebe?”

“Yes. I met her in the hall on my way down to the party. Did she fail to mention that to the police?”

“No, she said she saw you, and that you told her Harry had asked you to check on the paintings.”

Aidan stares into his cup as if trying to read the tea leaves through the cold, murky liquid and then he shakes his head.

“You know, I had a feeling she was lying. Something about the way she insisted I turn right around and go back to the suite. When I was unlocking the door I noticed she was still standing in the hall as if checking to make sure I was following her orders.”

I sit down on the couch beside Aidan and, closing my eyes, picture the second-floor hallway. It was one of my favorite places to play as a child because the landing there was wider and the chandelier was so beautiful to look at . . . and something else . . . because if I waited long enough I might see my mother there.

“Where was she standing?” I ask Aidan.

“What? I told you, in the hall . . .”

“
Where
in the hall. Down by the elevators?”

“No, closer. At the next door, I think.”

“The door to the suite’s bedroom?” I ask.

Aidan looks up from his tea. “You’re thinking Phoebe let herself into the bedroom side of the suite, waited for me to open the closet door, and hit me over the head? But why?”

“Because she wanted something out of the locked closet. Remember when she came into the suite and was surprised that there was a closet on that side of the suite?”

Aidan nods and I notice that a little color has come back into his pale skin. “She spent the rest of that week dogging my steps,” he says. “I thought she was just being a noodge—” I smile at the Yiddish expression—one I’m sure Aidan picked up from my aunt. “—but maybe she was waiting for a chance to get into that closet. Do you think it was the paintings she was after?”

“No, I think it was my mother’s third book. I think she looked for it the first time she stayed in the suite—that’s why those drawers were broken and the floorboards in the hall closet were loosened.”

“But what would give her the idea that it was in the suite in the first place?”

“Her parents stayed in the suite right below it—Sunnyside.” I close my eyes again to picture the landing outside the Sleepy Hollow Suite and I see the image from my dream: a door vibrating to the sound of typing. That’s why I liked to play in that hallway—my mother must have used that suite to type and I got used to hanging outside for a glimpse of her. “Maybe Vera Nix heard my mother typing in there and mentioned it in her journals and it gave Phoebe the idea that the last manuscript was hidden there . . .” I stop midsentence and groan.

“What is it?”

“The first line of the selkie story
—in a land between the sun and the moon—
the Sleepy Hollow Suite is above Sunnyside and one floor below Half Moon. It’s between the sun and the moon. I can’t believe Phoebe figured that out and I didn’t.”

“But why would Phoebe want
your
mother’s book so much?”

“Well, if Vera Nix was afraid there was something in the book that she didn’t want known, Phoebe might also want to protect her mother’s secret. After all, Phoebe’s based her whole career on presenting her mother in a certain light.”

“But what could Vera Nix have done that was that bad?”

I notice that Aidan and I have switched roles—that he’s become the interrogator and I’ve become the apologist—trying to make a case for his own innocence. And if I can’t? In the silence that follows I imagine Aidan making his next plan. Where will he go from here? I already know I don’t have the heart to turn him in, but I also know that I can’t help him. I hope for his sake that Detective March was right and that he is well connected. I don’t think I could bear the thought of him being back in prison—or worse. I remember Elspeth McCrory’s lurid headline that I’d read in the
Poughkeepsie Journal
: “Woman Visiting Inmate at Prison Killed in Train Accident.” I think I have an idea now of how Rose McGlynn must have felt.

“What did you say?”

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. “I’m sorry, I was just remembering this horrible story about a woman who killed herself after visiting her brother in prison.”

“Thanks for that cheerful thought. I don’t expect you to kill yourself, Iris, but it’d be nice if you baked a cake once in a while. Maybe I could take your class again . . .”

“Aidan, wait a minute. There is something that her mother might have done that would be pretty bad. Phoebe mentioned it herself—only to deny it. She said that when John McGlynn—that’s the fellow whose sister killed herself—was on trial he claimed that Vera Nix paid him to steal her own jewelry so they could split the money from selling it. No one believed him, but what if it was true?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time some rich person paid for her valuables to be stolen so she could collect on the insurance and split the profits with the thief. If this Vera Nix was hard up for cash . . .”

“Phoebe said the press made up stories about her using drugs, but Harry said she did have a drug problem. If the stories weren’t made up . . .”

“She might have been supporting a habit. She might have owed money to people who didn’t take kindly to having their loans reneged on. But if no one believed that John McGlynn fellow at his trial why would Phoebe worry about it coming out now?”

“My mother worked at the Crown Hotel where the jewelry was stolen from. She knew Rose and John McGlynn. She was traveling with Rose the day she threw herself under that train.”

Aidan sits up a little straighter and leans toward me, so close I can see the dark smudges under his eyes and feel his breath on my face. “So if your mother knew that Vera Nix set up John McGlynn she might have written about it in her last book.”

“Still, it’s only a fantasy book. There is this whole story about a piece of jewelry being stolen, and I suppose it could have been based on the Crown jewel robbery—and there is this woman in a green dress like the dress I wore that Phoebe claimed belonged to her mother. Maybe the woman in the story is Vera Nix and we find out in Book Three—
The Selkie’s Daughter
—that she was behind the robbery, but still it’s a fantasy novel. Who is going to put all that together now?”

“But that summer Phoebe’s mother came to stay at the hotel. What if your mother confronted Vera Nix with what she knew then?”

“It still would have been my mother’s word against hers.”

“Maybe your mother had some way of proving that Vera Nix was involved in the robbery. Who knows—she was a maid at that hotel—maybe she found a letter Vera Nix wrote. Think, Iris, what happened to your mother after that summer?”

“You know what happened, Aidan. She died in a hotel fire with another man.”

“You told me they didn’t find the remains of the man in the room where she died. What if she wasn’t meeting a man? What if she was meeting Vera Nix to hand over whatever proof she had?”