Spencer explained that it was probably a crime of passion, that the girl who the police department thought had killed her went temporarily crazy, that she had been crazy with jealousy for several years. One woman acknowledged that Kristina was a beautiful girl, there was a lot to be jealous over. Spencer half-heartedly agreed. He was being unexpectedly treated to an alive Kristina. It comforted him.
He asked them if they were coming to the funeral tomorrow. Then he asked if they had received news of the money coming to them. The assistant to the proprietor stepped forward and dabbing her eyes said, ‘Yes. She was extraordinary, wasn’t she? Just extraordinary. To have thought of us, to have remembered us. It’s really too much.’
She told Spencer that after the local paper wrote on Sunday that Kristina’s fortune was going to Red Leaves House, they’d had a remarkable response. Today they must have gotten five hundred cards with checks in them. One of the counselors brought over three mail bags to show Spencer. He was impressed. Kristina had left a mark on this earth. Her good had begat good. Actually, it was Albert’s – no, Nathan’s – good that had begat good, but Spencer wasn’t about to give that bastard a gram of recognition for anything.
Spencer sat for a while listening to them, nodding politely. The armchair was comfortable, he was warm, the last of the day’s sunlight was coming in from the side windows and making him sleepy. He actually closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his insides ached for home. Wherever that home was, he knew it wasn’t in Hanover.
After Spencer bid them all good-bye and walked out to his car, it occurred to him that until today he had never drunk tea in his adult life.
Spencer treated himself to an expensive dinner at the Daniel Webster Room. He knew this would be the last night of his life in Hanover.
The consequences of quitting the only job he’d ever loved hadn’t hit him yet. Would the chief give him a reference, or was Spencer planning to be a security guard for the rest of his life?
Will had been a good friend through the years; Spencer was sorry he hadn’t made a better departure. Maybe Will could’ve thrown him a party.
He thought of going back to the headquarters to say a proper good-bye to his old partner and to drop off the last of his police gear, but didn’t want to come close to Conni Tobias sitting in her jail cell.
Spencer didn’t want to face Conni. Too often he would close his eyes and see Kristina, naked, nearly out of time, standing on the bridge while a fully dressed ranting young woman thrust her hands forward.
What kind of denial did Kristina have to live through twelve months continually facing a girl she knew had tried to kill her?
Kristina had lived too close to death for too long, thought Spencer, trying to work up an appetite for the braised duck he had ordered. Mostly he drank. He drank alone at the table, and when his glass was empty he would motion for another. He sat quietly without disturbing a soul and drank to dull the pain, drank to forget. By two in the morning, Spencer had drunk enough whiskey to forget pretty much anything, and mostly he had.
Except he couldn’t forget Katherine Morgan Sinclair.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Once Upon a Time in Greenwich,
Connecticut
The memory of Katherine Sinclair tugged at Spencer’s whiskey-laden heart.
Spencer saw Katherine Sinclair for the first time sitting calmly in her wheelchair near a white-framed window.
She probably had been a beautiful and stylish woman. Now there was only a glimmer of a life long gone, a life once well lived and well loved but now past. Katherine’s hair was untended. He imagined how it had looked when there was color to it and a brush ran through it, and shampoo and conditioner every day; when the hair was set in curlers or left loose, blond and wavy around the shoulders. Katherine Morgan Sinclair. Her name still had glamour. It didn’t matter where Katherine was now, it didn’t matter what she looked like or what she wore, or how she talked. What mattered was that her name still said everything.
I am Katherine Morgan Sinclair, it said. And I once had a life.
It was a miracle he had found her. He had spent two and a half hours on Sunday morning calling every hospital in Connecticut until he found a Katherine Sinclair at Norwalk State Hospital. The director was protective of Katherine and her fragile health and was extremely reluctant to let Spencer in to see her, badge or no badge. Spencer had to threaten Katherine with a subpoena before he was allowed in.
When he came to see her, he didn’t know what to expect. ‘I’m much better now,’ Katherine had told him. ‘I could leave anytime, really, but it’s comfortable here, and they take good care of me.’ She had agreed immediately to see Spencer without knowing who he was or what he had come to tell her, and now sat there stoically, regally, her back firmly against the wheelchair. She occasionally turned toward the window, outside which was a park, a meadow, a lake.
Katherine was blind. She sat there quietly, her white cane propped behind her wheelchair. Spencer guessed the white cane was redundant. The nurses probably brought it because she asked for it, but it looked as if Katherine Sinclair never rose from her wheelchair. Her body had the weak look of long atrophy. Her limbs were loose beneath her skin.
Spencer cleared his throat.
‘Don’t bother, Detective O’Malley,’ Katherine said quietly. ‘I know you came to tell me she is dead. Didn’t you?’ she said without inflection.
Spencer nodded, and then, realizing she couldn’t see him, said, ‘Yes.’
They sat. A twitch passed through Katherine. It started in her eyelids and passed all the way down through her mouth and her neck and her arms and legs and ended in her feet. Then Katherine was still.
She stared at the space to the left of Spencer’s head, and he stared at the blanket that lay limp on her lap. He couldn’t bear to look at her.
Finally, Katherine asked Spencer to get her a glass of water.
When she had taken a sip, she whispered, ‘My baby. My baby.’ Spencer reached out to touch her, and she said, ‘No, no, detective. Please. It’ll be harder with your comfort. I’ll be all right. Just give me a minute.’
He gave her two minutes, and then five.
‘Did you know my daughter, Detective O’Malley?’
He nodded. He had to stop doing that. ‘Yes, Mrs Sinclair. I did. Not well, unfortunately.’
‘She was still quite beautiful, was she?’
‘Very beautiful.’
Katherine smiled. ‘Yes. She was really exquisite as a child. It used to break my heart to look at her. I just couldn’t believe she could be so beautiful. Or do you think every parent thinks so about her children?’
Spencer’s own mother thought the world never had more beautiful children than her own. ‘Kristina was objectively lovely,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Yes. You know, I’m happy now I can’t see. I had seen her, and that was enough. Now I won’t have to see her dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears.
Spencer turned away.
‘How did she die, detective? Was she in a car accident? Did she freeze? Was she murdered?’
Spencer wanted to say yes to all three; he was profoundly upset. ‘She froze,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’
‘The snow, she loved the snow,’ Katherine said brokenly. ‘She used to run outside in her pajamas the mornings after it snowed. And fall on her back into the snow. Get up, I used to shout. You’ll freeze to death.’
Spencer shuddered.
It was a miracle Kristina had lived at all, Kristina’s mother told Spencer. Katherine was a diabetic, and Kristina and her twin brother were born eight weeks premature.
The boy didn’t make it; he had been born too weak.
Kristina, meanwhile, spent the first three months of her life fighting for it. Katherine buried her baby son and then day after day trod to the Greenwich Memorial Hospital to sit next to the incubator that warmed her only child. Kristina weighed one and a half pounds when she was born, but she held on for dear life. ‘How sh
e held on, Detective O’Malley,’ said Katherine Sinclair with misted eyes, her fingers furiously tearing at the worn cotton blanket on her lap. ‘Every breath she took, I thought it would be her last. I listened to her and I thought I would go insane hearing her gasp for breath, up, down, short, short, long, too long, another labored breath. But she came through in the end. We took her home on her four-month birthday. She weighed eight pounds then.’ Katherine smiled. ‘She grew up nice and tall, didn’t she?’ She stopped smiling suddenly. She stopped tearing at the blanket and turned in the direction of the window. ‘She grew up so nice. So neat. And she wasn’t a diabetic. She was healthy as anything after her first year. Didn’t ever get chicken pox or any other childhood disease. Rarely caught cold, never had the flu. You’d never know she’d been on the edge of death.’
‘No, you certainly wouldn’t,’ agreed Spencer. ‘She looked a little like you,’ he added, trying in vain to make the woman feel better.
After some time Katherine continued, ‘For the first seven years of her life she grew up as our only child, spoiled like you can’t imagine.’
‘I can imagine, Mrs Sinclair,’ said Spencer.
‘She had two governesses. At four she began piano lessons on her own Steinway grand piano, at five ballet and gymnastics, at seven she wanted to play violin, so my husband and I bought her the best instrument available. She learned to ride horses, had her own horse in a stable we built in the back of our property. My husband ran a very successful business, and I came from money. My mother was very well off.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Spencer.
‘Everyone doted on Kristina. I hovered in the background constantly, wanting her, needing her, loving her. She would brush off my kisses as she concentrated on Mozart. I didn’t mind. She was my only child – can you imagine how I loved her?’
Spencer could only imagine – not the wealth; the mothering. Ah, shit, he said to himself, shaking his head.
‘When Kristina was seven, my husband and I realized we were ruining her. Completely. Our attention was harming her. She became self-involved, independent. She needed a brother or sister. But having children of our own was no longer possible, not if I wanted to live to raise them, and I did, you see.’
‘Yes, Mrs Sinclair, I see.’
‘We adopted a child from an orphanage in Texas. We went all the way to Fort Worth to find just the right boy.’
Spencer could only nod.
‘He was a perfect little boy, dark, thin, well-behaved; he even looked a little like our Krissy. He was desperately in need of a home, and that suited us just fine, because we desperately needed to give him one. The sisters at the orphanage said he had been found three years earlier on the shoulder of a local highway in the middle of the night. At the orphanage at first he didn’t speak. For the first year, not a word. Then two years before we adopted him, he started to speak. He didn’t have a name, he didn’t know his parents, he didn’t know his date of birth. The sisters called him Billy. We renamed him Nathan. After our dead boy. We made his birthday a day before Kristina’s, just like her older twin, who was born at ten minutes to midnight.’
Katherine must have sensed Spencer’s reaction, because she said, ‘Yes, I know. That old superstition. You shouldn’t name a living child after a dead one, my friends told me. Well, why not, I said. Jews do. So I did. We were God-fearing people, not superstitious. We went to church every Sunday, and we said grace at our dinner table. We didn’t believe in old wives’ tales.’
‘I don’t either,’ Spencer agreed.
‘Ah, but we should have,’ said Katherine. ‘We adopted him, we gave him our name, we gave him everything we gave Kristina. Actually, we gave him more. He was a needy little boy.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Spencer.
‘Kristina wasn’t needy at all – as I said, she was too independent. She really thought her daddy and I cramped her style, hovering over her constantly as we did. But Nathan was another matter. He lapped up our love and got very attached to us. He didn’t like to go anywhere without us, or be in the house at night without us. He was an affectionate boy. A beautiful boy.
‘The children took to each other instantly. Kristina was the aggressor, and I always had to intervene on Nathan’s behalf. Kristina, don’t tease your brother, Kristina, don’t make fun, Kristina, leave him alone, Kristina, act your age. Kristina, Kristina, Kristina …’ Katherine caressed her daughter’s name as she spoke.
‘But secretly I was glad. They played, they fought, they watched TV, they played in the yard. Kristina taught Nathan how to swim. He didn’t know how. He taught her how not to be afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Of anything. If there was one quality that described him, it was dauntlessness. Nathan wasn’t afraid of anything. Unlike Kristina, who had a number of childhood fears, of the dark, particularly. Nathan taught her to hold her breath underwater, long past the time the lifeguards would come. Nathan was the boy who climbed a tree and jumped from one tree to another, he was the one who broke his leg hopping the fence and didn’t tell anybody for three days, he was the one who got straight As on everything without ever looking inside a textbook. He was our shining star. We couldn’t believe God would bless us with such a boy.’
All Spencer could think of was that Nathan hadn’t taught Kristina that well, because she had continued to be afraid of the dark.
‘Kristina wasn’t jealous?’
‘Are you kidding? She must’ve been pretty lonely her first seven years. We were jealous of them. They were inseparable. They seemed to have a bond that we couldn’t even understand, much less penetrate.
‘They excelled in school. They were impeccably mannered, even Nathan, who learned well despite coming from nothing, from a garbage can somewhere on the plains of Texas. Three years passed, then five, then seven. I got back into my charity work, my husband worked hard on his imported textile business, we went out, we threw dinner parties, at which Kristina played the piano and Nathan sang. He had a beautiful voice.
‘Even now, after everything, I look back on those years and think we had a perfect life. We had a life most people only dream of. Most of our friends were many times divorced, many times remarried, with children, stepchildren, half siblings coming together or coming apart, doing drugs at thirteen, rehab at fifteen, getting caught for stealing, stealing from their parents, rude, spoiled, indulged children, unhappy mothers, drifting, restless fathers. We knew women who were having affairs with nearly everyone who came to their front door, and their men worked all day and looked the other way at night. Except one man who shot and killed his wife.’
Spencer raised his eyebrows.
‘John and I thought we had shielded our children from all that. We thought we’d given them a good life.’
‘You had.’
‘Well, we thought so then,’ said Katherine. ‘Even now, I don’t know where we went wrong. Should I have paid more attention to them? Less? Given Kristina more attention? Given Nathan less? Adopted another child? What?’
Spencer didn’t know what to say. Still, something was called for, so he reached over and patted Katherine’s hand. She didn’t move.
‘It sounds like it was a good life, Mrs Sinclair,’ he said, and in response she made a rasping sound, a strangled cry.
‘Sure does, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘We loved that boy as our own. Do you understand?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said.
‘My husband was priming Nathan to take over our family business when he was older. And in our will, we divided our assets equally between the kids. They both had trust funds that would become available to them when they turned twenty-one.’
Spencer nodded, once again belatedly realizing she couldn’t see him.
‘Nathan and Kristina –’ Katherine swallowed hard, as if it physically hurt her to say the two names together. ‘Little by little they started drifting away from us. Nathan stopped wanting to spend time with us. Kristina never did want to. Oh, well, we said
. Just normal growing up – what do they want with old fogies like us, anyway? By the time they were fourteen, they were more withdrawn from us than ever. We attributed it to their being teenagers. Sometimes teenagers are just like that. Their schoolwork hadn’t suffered, they still got along, they had dinner with us. But something was different. I don’t know. Maybe it was my little girl. I thought I knew her. She was always such an out-spoken, forward child, but lately – then, back then,’ she corrected herself quickly, ‘she was getting inside herself and not coming out much. You know? I still heard Nathan’s voice in the house, but Krissy stopped talking back. It used to make me smile to hear them argue, but now they were silent upstairs, silent in the family room, and pretty silent at the dinner table, too. Very polite, both of them. Too polite.
‘Was this teenage rebellion? My husband and I wondered. If it was, it wasn’t too bad, we decided. Many parents we knew had it much worse. You grow up indulged, the excesses just have to show themselves on teenagers. They show themselves in adults surely enough.’
‘What excesses?’ said Spencer, almost not wanting to know.
‘That’s right. I didn’t see anything wrong either. Now, with perfect twenty-twenty vision – isn’t that ironic?’ Katherine smiled in his direction. She must have been so beautiful once, thought Spencer. ‘I say these things to you, but then I went along blithely, I did my charity work, I threw my small and large dinner parties twice a week, we went to New York for charity events, social functions, plays, parties.’
She was intent on telling him more and more about her past life. Spencer already had a good idea of what kind of life they had led in their estate mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. But she wasn’t through. She needed to talk about it. She went on at some length about Kristina’s piano and violin lessons, about her ballet dancing, about the money she spent on ballet shoes and tutus, about Nathan’s making the varsity basketball team.