Till the End of Tom Read online

  I don’t know what I had expected her to say or do. I don’t know how families behave when one of them has been abruptly, cruelly, and murderously taken from them. I hope I never have to know it firsthand. But I would have thought the loss would be taken more seriously.

  Life must go on, but must it go on quite this superficially, catered and politely low-key, as if purely social? Maybe it was a matter of propriety to keep up appearances, maybe women like Ingrid Severin were trained to keep a stiff—if artificially inflated—upper lip no matter the circumstances. I, however, didn’t get it. The woman’s only child would be buried tomorrow. Did she honestly feel in the mood for cucumber sandwiches, geriatric flirting, and social niceties?

  Nobody offered the cakes to me. Perhaps they were saving me from becoming fat, or from Ingrid’s reaction to my accepting one. She seemed numb to human emotions, except on that topic, but on that topic, she had enough emotions to produce a stroke.

  “Now what is wrong with silly me? How are you expected to know if you’re one of the Peppers I know?” She trilled a small, insincere laugh.

  I thought she’d be consumed by grief. That she’d ask questions, demand I find whoever had harmed her beloved son.

  “I never forget a face—or a pair of shoes, for that matter,” she said. “But names . . .” She shook her head. Her dark blond hair—a wig, I had to assume—was cut in a straight bob. “Not that I was ever that good about names, was I, Penelope?” she added, to reassure us, or herself, that nothing was really wrong with her.

  Penelope’s murmur was unintelligible.

  “I think this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you,” I said. “Meeting the both of you,” I added.

  Cornelius looked startled, as if he generally wasn’t included in conversations.

  I didn’t know how to proceed and Penelope wasn’t helping. She’d asked me to come here to get a better sense of Cornelius, and I didn’t know how to do that in this situation. “Tomas’s death must be quite a shock,” I said to the two of them. Connect! I mentally urged them—grab the thought and go with it. You know, the way people with emotional systems do?

  Instead, they regarded me as if from a distance, as if whatever they might have felt was none of my business. Maybe if I mentioned calories she’d respond.

  Penelope finally spoke. “Miss Pepper is the teacher who—”

  “You’re the one?” Cornelius asked in a tone that combined amazement and sympathy. I wondered how bright he was. He seemed surprised by everything.

  “I wanted to convey my sympathy,” I said.

  “How sweet of you,” Ingrid murmured. And without warning or transition, the cordial hostess mask she’d been wearing crumpled, as much as her lack of facial elasticity would allow, into a bereaved old woman’s face. “My son,” she said in a flat voice. She put her cup on the coffee table, but kept her hand on it, as if it steadied her. Then she looked at me. “My son died.”

  I nodded.

  “He was such a pretty baby, such a pretty little boy.”

  “Now, now, L’il Thing,” Cornelius said.

  Penelope looked away from them.

  “Don’t upset yourself,” Cornelius said.

  “My lady friends oohed and aahed, he was that pretty. And at our soirees, his Nanny would bring him in, and sometimes he’d sing in that pretty little-boy voice he had. He looked like a Botticelli angel.” She nodded and her smooth blond bob shimmered with the movement.

  “Always a beautiful boy, wasn’t he, Penelope? A shining jewel—prettier, even. Irresistible, wasn’t he?”

  Penelope wrinkled her forehead. She hadn’t been with the family when Tom Severin was a boy. Ingrid was confused, but Penelope knew her role, and she acknowledged the memory all the same. “A very good boy,” she said. “And irresistible.”

  “He was perfect. I was so proud to be seen with him. And then such a handsome young man and man. But the police came,” she said. “He died. They think . . . do you think what they think?”

  “I wouldn’t have the expertise to say, one way or the other.” Of course it was murder. She knew it; I knew it. A man doesn’t drug himself, then bash himself in the cheek and then fall backward down the stairs. But I saw no reason to burden her with ideas that wouldn’t change her painful reality and that, in truth, I was sure she already understood herself.

  “There’s no sense speculating and upsetting yourself. Think of good memories. Happy times.” Cornelius sounded as if he was quoting a book of phrases for the newly bereaved. He sounded like someone thirty-two years old and happily ignorant of losses as devastating as this one.

  Ingrid Severin ignored him, pulled her hand out from under his. “He was a graceful man, Miss . . . Miss . . .”

  “Pepper,” Penelope reminded her.

  “Yes. I knew some Peppers. Are you . . . ?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Tom was an athlete. Outstanding ballroom dancer. Not the sort to ever, ever trip.”

  Everyone trips. How could even a mother believe that her son was the exception?

  “And he did not take drugs,” she said firmly. “He did not. He said, ‘Mother, taking drugs is . . . taking drugs . . .’ Well, he said something, and it wasn’t good about taking drugs. He wasn’t the one got addicted. He wasn’t the disgrace. He knew—we all knew—drugs . . .” She shook her head again, the gesture substituting for a host of bad things that he’d said about drugs.

  “Time to lie down,” Cornelius crooned. “A little nap so you’ll feel better.”

  I didn’t know what impression Penelope had hoped I’d get of the young man, but I was watching an attentive, ineffectual, and unimaginative person try to ease an old woman’s pain and confusion.

  “She did it!” Ingrid hissed with such venom, it shocked me, as if actual snakes had sprung from her throat.

  “Shhhh,” Cornelius said.

  “Who? Who do you mean?” Penelope looked alarmed, and I wondered who she was afraid her employer would name.

  “She’s the one who took drugs. Her.” She lowered her lids, looked at each of us in turn. “Where is she?”

  “Who is that, Mrs. Severin?” I asked.

  Ingrid blinked, then ignored my question. She looked around the room wildly, craning to peer behind the sofa, as if “she” might be there. “Spite, that’s all the fat pig ever was about. Ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside, I say.”

  “Nobody’s there, Ingrid. You mustn’t get yourself all upset this way.” Penelope sounded worried now.

  “Mrs. Severin must be tired,” I said, but the tired woman glared at me and shouted, “Her!” so emphatically, I thought she meant I had killed her son.

  The skin around Ingrid Severin’s eyes had been tightened and, snipped so often I was surprised she could blink, but she could definitely still cry. Her startled-looking eyes welled. “She’d do it just to spite me—I know.”

  “Who?” Penelope asked yet again, but Cornelius stood up and, gently cradling her stick-figure limbs, lifted sobbing Ingrid Severin into his arms. “Time to rest,” he said in a near-whisper. He walked, easily carrying his light burden, but when he was near Penelope, he spoke in a low, sure voice I could hear.

  “You did this on purpose,” he said. “She’s fragile, and you provoked this. What was the point—” he looked toward me, including me in the circle of guilt, and then he turned to Penelope Koepple again. “What’s wrong with you? Are you trying to murder her, too?” He took his ancient, sobbing fiancée out of the room.

  Penelope turned to me, her mouth ajar. “Did you hear that? What he implied? That gold-digging schemer, that—”

  I didn’t want to hear any of them anymore. When a con artist courting a wealthy old woman is the most considerate and decent-seeming person around, it’s time to leave. I felt contaminated. And the plain truth was, Penelope, whose eyes even now were round with outraged innocence, had “done it.” She’d invited me to come, knowing what I couldn’t have known—that it would t
hrow her employer into the darkness that so often enveloped her.

  Penelope demanded to know what I thought of Cornelius’s “performance.” I did not offer any opinions, but I promised a full report as soon as it was convenient. She threatened to fire Mackenzie and me, and I nodded and hurried out.

  I had another stop to make, but then, I couldn’t wait to be home with my trustworthy, ethical, surely-not-gold-digging Mackenzie. I wanted to be where I was sure the ground I walked on was stable. I wanted a shower, to wash off the residue of so many people hating and distrusting their closest ties.

  I wondered who “she” was, the one who knew about drugs and hated Tomas. Was it Penelope, or the ex-fiancée Georgeanne, or one of the wives, or was it the wife, perhaps of one of Ingrid’s lovers? Or was the whole idea of that person a figment of Ingrid’s confused mind?

  And then I realized I didn’t care.

  I wanted Penelope to fire us. I wanted out.

  But I wished somebody had offered me one of the little glazed cakes first.

  * * *

  Nine

  * * *

  * * *

  THE Koepple bitch got to you, didn’t she?” Georgeanne Errico blew her nose, which was so puffed and rosy she’d probably been sniffling for some time. She sat ramrod straight on her loveseat. A fluff of a dog so small my cat would dwarf him sat at equal attention on her lap. Georgeanne had agreed to talk with me only after I said I was concerned with the legal aspects of Tomas Severin’s death. I was fairly certain she’d interpreted that the way I’d wanted her to—as if I’d meant I was working on the financial aftershocks and her possible inheritance as an almost-wife with an almost prenup. She sniffled and blew her nose as necessary, she dabbed at her eyes, but she never explained her respiratory distress. I wanted to believe that despite their engagement having been so recently and unexpectedly dissolved, this was a display of grief at the loss of a love she’d hoped to recover, not the flu, an allergy to her dog, or despair at having come so close to billions, only to have them disappear forever because of her too-evident greed, if Penelope was right.

  Unless, of course, she’d been so enraged—a woman scorned, a fortune unshared—that she was the hand that propelled Tom Severin down those stairs.

  Her apartment was shabby-chic. Almost everything could have stood reupholstering and slipcovering except that then it would not convey the idea that these were long-standing family possessions, that each piece had a pedigree and distinguished heritage and, therefore, so did she. Even the art—uninspired landscapes darkened with time, and a fly-specked botanical drawing—appeared to be hand-me-downs because who would choose them now? The effect, real or carefully created, was that nothing had needed to be bought, that Georgeanne was the product of old and understated financial comfort.

  Perfect for a man like Tom Severin who, according to Penelope K., liked his wives about Georgeanne’s age and of his own social class.

  Sasha had never stood a chance. She must have been an exotic amusement for him.

  A suitcase, the rolling kind, stood by the door, and next to it, a pet carrier. She saw me notice it. “We were going to Boston for a shoot.”

  I must have looked confused about the “we.” “Pickles and me, we go everywhere together,” she said. “Doesn’t always make little Mister Pickle-wickle happy to travel, but it makes me happy to have him nearby.” Each time she said the tiny creature’s name, or something that rhymed with it, his ears lifted and he cocked his head, which I had to admit, was fairly adorable. He was also much more tolerant of her icky baby-dog talk than I was, and that’s one reason nobody lists me as man’s best friend.

  “I’m a photographer’s assistant,” she said by way of explanation. “Mostly in New York, but this shoot . . . Of course now, now . . .” She shook her head. “I’m too devastated to do anything, to even unpack.”

  I would have found Georgeanne’s plight more touching had she not been the victim of excessive prenup bickering with a man who was still married to someone. And had she not been dumped a week ago. “You saw Penelope, didn’t you?” she asked. “What did the Dragon Woman tell you?” She blew her nose again.

  I smiled and shook my head in a way I hoped expressed regret that professional ethics made me unable to divulge anything. That was a lot to lay on one rueful smile, but I wanted it to do even more—to also suggest that otherwise, we’d be new best girlfriends, swapping the secrets of our hearts. “Only that you were dating Tomas Severin, and that you’d been a childhood friend of Ingrid Severin’s, um, fiancé,” I said.

  “I was Tom’s fiancée, not just a date,” she corrected me. “It hadn’t been announced yet, because of his situation.”

  I liked that. A new one for the SAT’s: a synonym for marriage is—situation.

  “We were engaged. We were going to be married as soon as . . .” She waved off the obvious remainder of the idea. She was a pretty young woman, and not the flashy creature I’d anticipated. I should have known that Tom Severin wouldn’t have had a visible bimbo as a serious consort. He could afford the very best.

  Georgeanne’s polished, aloof posture made her sleek black hair and chiseled features more impressive than they actually were. She was tall and thin and dressed completely in black, either for mourning or simply because that was the uniform of fashion photographers. One thing I could tell was that she was daring, holding a long-haired white dog on her black-swathed lap.

  “You’ve known Cornelius for some time?” I prompted.

  “We went to the same high school. He was two years ahead of me, but my folks and his knew each other, so he paid a little attention to me. He was on the basketball and tennis teams, big star, way popular. He wouldn’t have noticed me without the family connection. We went out a few times, but there was nothing there, and then we went our separate ways. I never saw him again until after I started dating . . .” She swallowed hard, apparently unable to say the name. A tad histrionic, I thought, given the circumstances. “Tom,” she finally managed. “And because I recognized him and said hello, and we joked about high school, the Dragon decided we were—well, I don’t know what. Intimates, she called us.” Georgeanne looked at me, her mouth pursed in obvious imitation of Penelope Koepple. “How she got to be such a priggish snob, I will never know. She’s the lady’s secretary, not her best friend.”

  “When you knew him in high school, was his name—”

  Georgeanne waved away the rest of my words. “Yes. His name is Cornelius Westerly and always was. For some reason, the Dragon Lady is sure he changed it, and how stupid is that? She should talk to his parents. Their names are Arabella and Constantine. Cornelius’s brother was Montgomery and he has a sister Isolde. You know, when you’re operating on a budget, the one thing you can afford is the most ornate, gold-encrusted name in the universe. The Westerlys were plain people, aside from their names. His dad had a shoe-repair shop.” She shrugged. “Probably still does.”

  I reconsidered her choice of furnishings. If her parents were friends of the cobbler, the furnishings here were probably not family heirlooms. Clever Georgeanne to create the perfect, canny backdrop from scratch, to make Tom Severin feel at home with Cinderella, even if he didn’t quite know why. But how horrible to have an über-catch like Tom the billionaire slip away because of poor negotiating or diplomatic skills. We were silent a moment, and then she appeared to have thought something out.

  “I’m not saying I approve of his . . . romance. And not only because of the age difference. I resent that she’s using him more than he’s using her. She’s always had lovers. Dozens of them and as vague and confused as she gets, that part of her brain still seems to function. Forgets her own son’s identity, but then she’ll talk about her ‘conquests.’ That’s her word, not mine. She sounds like a big-game hunter when she talks about them. How she spotted them, how beautiful each of them was, and she tells you in great detail. Ingrid is a great connoisseur of beauty. Self-appointed. Then she describes how she entrapped them—honestly,
how she used them, God help us, and then, how she dumped them. She brags about it. And worse, she tells you how much each one cost. One cost a boat she bought him, one was dirt cheap, just enough liquor to keep him soused. And so on. That’s how she thinks of people, lovers or no. Commodities. Things to be bought and paid for, used and discarded.

  “Cornelius is one more toy, and she said he might be the most expensive. ‘A few apartment buildings,’ she said, and said it right in front of him, too, and then she laughed. So don’t think of her as the poor old lady being snookered by a . . . a whatever Koepple called him. And don’t think of him as a sleaze. Trust me, he’ll have earned whatever she decides is his ‘cost.’ He can’t be having much fun.”

  I didn’t think “fun” was on Cornelius’s current list of objectives.

  “Not that Mama Ingrid was ever great fun from what I heard,” Georgeanne said. “But now, it’s like her social censor’s turned off and the viper’s out there for all to see. She only stops spewing poison when she sees—saw—that she’s gone too far, that she’d upset Tom. She’d do anything for him.”

  “They were close?”

  “The one problem I had with Tomas was how tight he was with his mother, but I figured I could ride it out. She’s ancient and going, after all.” She dabbed at the sides of her eyes, although I couldn’t see any tears. “Who could have imagined that he’d be the one to go?”

  “Did you think that Cornelius came between her and Tom?”

  She shook her head. The little dog watched her every move, adoringly. “Nothing could have. Of course, she didn’t always listen to Tom’s advice once Cornelius was on the scene, and that made Tom furious even though just maybe Cornelius could have been right about a few things. It wasn’t like Tom was going to be out on the street if she gave Cornelius a building here and there.”