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 youaskher?”
“She didn’t tell me everything, Kate.”
“And she didn’t tell meanything.”
“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’sChambered 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.
