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“A small glass of white would be lovely.”
What I really crave at the moment is a Diet Coke, something to keep my throat from going bone-dry, but it seems best to follow Caroline’s lead. After tugging the bottle of white from a bucket and expertly uncorking it, she fills two long-stemmed glasses with liquid the color of golden straw and carries them across the room.
Since she didn’t ask to take my coat, I leave it on, but I undo the buttons.
“Cheers,” she says, passing me a glass. “I think you’ll like this.” With her own glass in hand, she lowers herself onto the couch across from me.
“Thank you,” I say. I take a small sip. It’s nice and buttery. “I do like it.”
“Now tell me what I can do for you. I’m more than happy to listen and help if possible. And then we really need to get on with our lives.”
Easy enough for her to say. Someone’s not letting me get on with mine. But right here, right now, I need to focus on the point that’s she’s making: after this, she’s done with me.
“Yes, of course, understood. As I explained the other day, I met your son in Boston. A dozen years ago this past April, to be exact. I’m just wondering if... if you might know why he was there that weekend.”
She takes a generous sip of wine, eying me over the rim of the glass with her deep blue eyes. I hear the muted click of a door closing in another room of the house. A housekeeper moving about, perhaps. Surely Caroline would have one, and it might have been her who organized the wine in the bucket. Or maybe she’s found another partner since her husband died, one not mentioned in her son’s obit.
“Whywas he there?” she asks finally, setting the goblet on the coffee table. She looks perplexed. “When you and I spoke last week in town, you said that Chris had been there on business.”
“That’s what I assumed at the time, but now I’m curious if there might have been another reason.”
She shrugs. “Any answer I give you would be only a wild guess. Visiting friends, perhaps? I imagine he and Jane knew people in that area, though if he were there to see them, Jane would have been with him at the hotel. Which we know she wasn’t.”
I can’t tell if she means it as a dig, but I choose to let it go.
“He did go out to meet with someone that night, but only briefly,” I tell her. “By any chance do you recall him acting differently around that time? Not like himself? Perhaps troubled?”
“Are you wondering if he felt guilty about the fling?”
“Not about that, necessarily. But perhaps unsettled by something else that happened on the trip?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t imagine what you mean. Besides, I doubt I’d have been aware of a mood shift on his part, and it’s so long ago, anyway, that I wouldn’t remember it if I had.”
I sense irritation building in her now. She seems eager to have me gone.
“Right, good point,” I say, realizing I have to pivot. “I know you said you thought he’d left the trust to me because of Jane’s affair, a kind of retribution, but do you think it’s possible he actually felt he owed me something?”
“Owedyou?” She flips her palms up and shifts her gaze frommy eyes to a point just off my face. “My dear, that’s a question you’d have to ask yourself, based on the time you spent with him.”
I’m totally flailing here. “Yes, you’re right. Of course.”
She clasps her hands together, fingers straight, and taps the edge of the steeple against her chin a couple of times. “So will that be it?”
“Um, yes.”I’m leaving with nothing, I think wearily, not even a glimmer that might lead me to the truth. But what did I really expect her to say?Yes, now that you mention it, Chris did seemtroubled after that weekend, like he had blood on his hands.
“Why don’t I see you out then,” Caroline says. “I’ve arranged for my chauffeur to give you a ride to the station.”
“Thank you, but I’m happy to get there on my own.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s the least I can do after you’ve come all this way, and he’s very close by. He lives above the garage.”
She snatches a cell phone from the coffee table and taps out a message. I rise slowly and pretend to take in the room again, glad at least to be saving myself the cost of another Uber.
“What a lovely house to raise a family in,” I say. I don’t really mean it—it’s hard to imagine little boys building Lego sets on the floor of this room or racing around the lawn on tricycles—but I’m stalling, trying to come up with a more productive question than the useless ones I’ve spit out so far.
“No, we raised Chris and his brother in a house two miles from here,” she says, rising now, as well. “It was wonderful, too, in its own special way, but after my husband died, I felt a change would do me good.”
Footsteps sound behind me, and Caroline, arms akimbo, lifts her chin in greeting to the person who’s entered the room from behind me.
