‘I first thought something might be wrong when Kristina was fourteen and a half. And she came to me – no, she didn’t, our governess did, Mrs Pitt came to me and said that Kristina had quit her music and dance lessons. All of them. When I confronted her, Kristina said she’d become bored. It was very strange, you have to understand. She’s been playing the piano since she was five. Now she wants to quit? I didn’t buy it. My husband didn’t buy it. But what could we do? She didn’t tell us anything was wrong. We sent her to our family psychologist, who said she was closed-mouthed. He seemed concerned, and that concerned us. He said her behavior could be a response to something. He asked if anyone had recently died. No, we said. The kids are very happy. There isn’t a problem.
‘Every summer they went to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, to my mother’s house. She adored them both, was ecstatic to have them, but Kristina had always been her undisputed favorite. I was my mother’s only child. I think she felt like she was raising another daughter. The kids loved going there, she loved having them. But when Kristina was fourteen and a half, she quietly told me she’d prefer not to go. It was inexplicable. Not go? But why? Grandma loves you. Oh, I know, she said, and then hesitated and didn’t say any more. I couldn’t get another word out of her on the subject. She went. The following year, she said again that maybe she could do something else this summer. I knew my mother would be devastated not to have her – she’d had Kristina every summer since she was born. When Kristina didn’t offer me any explanation for why she didn’t want to go, I insisted. I said it was ridiculous.’ Katherine paused. ‘So she went.’
Spencer asked, ‘She went, or –’
‘No, they both went. Of course. They both went. I thought nothing more about it, but when they came back, Kristina was more into herself than ever. Even my mother had mentioned Kristina’s moodiness. We talked about it and decided it was just adolescence. You have sisters, detective?’
‘Yes, three of them.’
‘Didn’t they go through adolescent angst?’
Actually, he didn’t remember. They were always the same to him, and he was too young to notice how they acted with other people. When Spencer was young his world had been his family, and his sisters had been his surrogate mothers. When I was born, Kathleen, the oldest child, was twenty, Maureen, the fourth, was fourteen, and Sinéad thirteen. By the time I was old enough to understand anything, they had long grown and flown and married. Kathleen, in fact, had my nephew Harry two years before I, the uncle, was even born. Some uncle I was to Harry. He is now thirty-two and calls me his little Uncle Spencer.
‘I guess so,’ said Spencer. ‘I guess they seemed different during that age.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Katherine exclaimed sharply. ‘I’m sure your mother didn’t think anything of it.’
‘I am sure my mother didn’t,’ said Spencer.
‘I didn’t either. Kristina and Nathan returned from New Hampshire, started school, everything was okay. I kept busy. There are many charity fundraisers to organize before Thanksgiving and Christmas in Greenwich.’
Spencer understood. ‘And then?’
‘Then? Then nothing. Sometime in October of 1988, in my own house, in my own great room, on my new couch, my husband came to me on a Thursday night, after a long business dinner, and said, ‘I have to talk to you. It’s about Kristina.’
‘Absentmindedly, I said, sure, what is it? I was stuffing envelopes or mailers, or whatever. John said people had been saying terrible things about Kristina, so awful that he’d punched his brother Jeff earlier that evening because he was so upset. Jeff apparently passed along some information.
‘Now I looked at him. I put my mailers away, and looked up at John. If he said he hit his brother, it had to be serious. John had never hit anybody in his entire life. Then.
‘John told me vicious rumors have been flying around North Street. People were saying – it was just too horrible – that Kristina was pregnant.
‘I laughed. That was my first reaction. I just laughed. Don’t be ridiculous, I said. You interrupted me to tell me this? Don’t be so ridiculous. She doesn’t even have a boyfriend. And he just stared at me so hard that I got very scared. I shook my head and laughed again. What’s gotten into you, John? I said. Cut it out. What are you talking about? I might have screamed at this point. It can’t be true, you know that.
‘Call her, he told me. Call her down. It was late, but I did call her down. I heard her slowly walking down the stairs, and then she stood in front of us, in her white robe and slippers, looking tired and beautiful. “Krissy, Daddy is driving Mommy crazy,” I said. “Look how late it is and we got you out of bed.” She asked us what was the matter, and I felt better for a minute, until I said, “Daddy’s been hearing things around town, some awful lies, I can’t even believe I’m repeating them to you. Daddy – your father and I – we wanted to know –” I couldn’t continue. I was shaking badly by this point. It was just so absurd. I laughed again, and then John got up off the couch and asked our daughter, “Kristina, they’re saying – someone told me you might be pregnant. Is that true?"’
Katherine bowed her head, as if five years and blindness could not hide the bare humiliation she felt then.
‘And she said yes.
‘I looked at my daughter as I’ve never looked at her before, or since. I looked at her and saw her, saw her good and proper, maybe for the first time in her teenage life, I saw her as she was – gaunt, pale, with circles under her eyes, with tired lips and sunken cheeks, and that loose white robe.
‘Apparently it was the talk of the town. Greenwich is really a provincial town, when you get right down to it. A small-minded town. This was the whisper topic of the cocktail parties and the dinner parties and the indoor tennis games.’
Spencer patted her hand. Katherine did not move it away. Her body was motionless.
‘That child, she was mine. She was mine, do you understand? How did we go from her being mine to being pregnant at fifteen?’
As if that was the worst of it, thought Spencer glumly, and Katherine must have read his mind, because she nodded and said, ‘Yes. Pregnant at fifteen, by him.
‘I had to face her. I can’t forgive myself for what I did then. I came up to her and slapped her hard in the face. She fell to the ground. I was going to hit her again, but my husband held me back. I couldn’t even look at John. And eventually – much too soon – I had to face Nathan. I could barely speak when I faced him.’
She could barely speak now, remembering it.
‘Too awful, Detective O’Malley. Too awful. Nathan looked at me with remorseless eyes, he looked at me as if he just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and I knew then, I knew my husband would kill him if he saw that look in his eyes. He would kill him. And I knew how he felt. I understood. I wanted to kill Nathan too, seeing him stare shamelessly at me.’
Spencer shook his head. He was glad Katherine couldn’t see him.
‘I packed him up, very quickly – two hours maybe? I packed him up and sent him on a bus to New Hampshire to be with my mother while we figured out what to do with Kristina. I was on serious medication by this time. I must have been taking Valium every two hours, I was a zombie, but it was the only way to get through it all. Medically induced lack of feeling. We thought Kristina would have an abortion, but would you believe it, she plainly refused. Refused. And do you know why? Because of the worst five words in the English language a mother can possibly hear. Kristina said, “But Mom, I love him.'”
Spencer sniffed loudly and shook his head. Katherine blindly sought his hand with hers. He gave it to her, and she took it and squeezed it. Tears were in her eyes. ‘"But Mom, I love him,"’ Katherine whispered. ‘Can you imagine anything worse?’
‘No,’ said Spencer frankly.
‘We couldn’t drag her against her will to a clinic. I even told Kristina I’d gladly perform the operation myself. But she didn’t want it. She wanted – can you believe it? – to kee
p the baby.’ Katherine laughed silently. ‘I had been more proud of my daughter than of anything else in my life, she was my crowning achievement, but the Sinclairs have a proud tradition of finishing high school before they become pregnant by their brothers.’
Red Leaves House. Spencer wanted to tell this destroyed woman that her life’s work had not been in vain. That Kristina had tried to do something with her life, tried to ease the pain she had caused. But he couldn’t. Katherine’s daughter was dead, murdered; her husband was dead, and her mother was dead. Only Nathan Sinclair remained.
‘How did Kristina get to marry Howard Kim?’
‘Well, tongues were wagging all over Greenwich. The whole town had become one big wagging dog. Wag, wag, wag. We had to do something. And soon. My soon-to-become ex-friends, they may have known that Kristina was pregnant, but they didn’t know by whom. They guessed it was some high school boy. If they were to guess at the truth –’ She swallowed hard. ‘Have you met Howard Kim? He is a good-looking man.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Spencer. ‘He is.’
‘He practices tai chi chuan. He was in good shape, mentally, physically. Also, he took his responsibilities seriously. Which is why my husband trusted him and went to Hong Kong. Howard had wanted to come to America for a long time. Finally he had his chance. So you see?’ she said, trying to smile. ‘Everybody won.’
Spencer didn’t say anything.
‘How is he now?’ she asked.
‘He is very well. Successful.’
‘Good, good,’ she said without emotion. ‘I’m glad for him. Did she die still married to him?’
Spencer shook his head. ‘No,’ he then said quickly, remembering she couldn’t see him. ‘They were divorced in November.’
‘This November? Just past?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did she die?’
‘November twenty-fourth,’ said Spencer, and watched the mother shudder.
‘Two days after her birthday,’ she said, her voice breaking.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she –’ Her voice broke. She whispered, ‘Did she die a good death, detective?’
No, she died a violent death, he wanted to tell her, and she fought for every last breath, for every aching, icy breath, but in the end, her shoulder was too weak and her arm too sore, her ribs couldn’t hold off the pressure, her throat was fragile, full of fragile life, and it gave out in the end, though not without a railing fight.
‘Yes,’ he said aloud, but couldn’t add anything more.
Katherine stared into space. ‘I always thought she would die young,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know why. She lived too much life when she was too young. She didn’t save any for later.’
After a silence, Spencer asked, ‘Did marrying Howard quiet the wags?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Katherine waved dismissively. ‘It really didn’t matter. The following month, the son of one of my friends went into drug rehab, another’s was in the hospital for overdosing, a couple more kids were arrested for drunk driving on the interstate. Life went on. That is – other people’s lives.
‘We just kind of stood still – lost at that moment, suspended in our house, without Kristina, without Nathan, and really without each other. My husband blamed me. I blamed myself. A few months later I overdosed on Valium myself and spent a month in the hospital. I think John was hit harder than I was – if that’s possible. He thought of Nathan as his son, you see.’
When Spencer didn’t say anything, lost in his thoughts, Katherine said, ‘Marrying Howard was the right thing to do. Even if she had had the abortion, detective. Big deal. That’s like killing the devil’s child. There is still the small matter of the devil. And what? Should he have continued living in our house?’
‘Of course not. Of course not.’
‘And if we sent him away, how would we have explained that?’
‘But Mrs Sinclair – you did send him away. How did you explain that?
‘His sister got married, and he wanted to be closer to her. We sent him to boarding school in New York.’
‘Ahh.’
‘It was really the best possible course.’
‘Of course.’
Katherine didn’t speak after that, just sat there and kneaded her old cotton blanket. Spencer finally said, ‘Where is he now? Nathan? What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know. After my mother found out why Nathan was with her –’
‘How did she find out?’ Spencer interrupted.
‘Believe it or not, Nathan told her.’ A little smile crossed Katherine’s lips. ‘He was just dauntless. He told her, she said, because he wanted her to be appalled at the way we had treated Kristina. The gall.’ Katherine snorted, but her unseeing eyes betrayed some other emotion – shame? Guilt?
‘My mother kicked him out of her house, into the middle of winter. He was sixteen, and she took out a gun from her nightstand, my seventy-eight-year-old mother, who had me when she was forty-four, and told him to get out or die. He got out. No one has heard from him since.’
‘Did Kristina hear from him?’
‘No, I don’t think so. He didn’t care about any of us. Besides, my husband forbade her. Nathan’s trust fund had been dismantled, and John had set up a separate one for Kristina to be administered by Howard, a trust fund for her living expenses, college, and whatever else. But John stipulated that if there was one sight of Nathan, Kristina wouldn’t get a penny of that money.’
Spencer said that if Kristina had loved Nathan she would’ve figured out a way to see him.
Katherine scoffed. ‘Love him! She didn’t love him. Sixteen-year-old girls don’t know the first thing about love. Money was too important to her. She wouldn’t have risked it, not even for him.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ he asked.
Katherine was slowing down. Spencer could see she was becoming less interested in answering his questions, and generally less interested in sitting with him altogether.
‘Because …’ She sighed wearily, ruffled her blanket, and went on, ‘John knew some people. He hired a private investigator to find Nathan, but he had disappeared from the face of this earth. No one could find him. We assumed he’d left the country or changed his name. Or both.’
‘Or died,’ said Spencer wishfully.
‘Died.’ She sniffed. ‘We wouldn’t be so lucky, detective. Besides, the evil he brought lives on eternally. Nothing would’ve changed. My husband was consumed by what had happened. You know, he would regularly disappear for weeks at a time, coming back thinner and sicker than ever. John said he was out looking for him. I think that when my husband didn’t kill Nathan right then and there, he just couldn’t live with himself anymore.’
Spencer understood that.
‘I’ve been in and out of hospitals ever since Kristina left us. I haven’t been well, you know. My diabetes – it’s wrecked my eyes, my arms, look –’ Katherine showed Spencer her right forearm, black-and-blue, swollen and peppered with needle punctures. ‘Does it look as bad as it feels? They give me morphine to deal with the pain. I don’t think I’m leaving this place. Why? What for? Even without my mother’s money, I can still afford to stay here.’
‘Your mother’s money?’
‘Yes, my mother’s. She was so furious with us for Kristina, she cut us out of her will. I must say I was shocked. My mother had sisters, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews. And me. No one got a penny. We were all upset, I tell you.’
‘Do you know who got her money?’
‘Of course I know who got her money, detective,’ Katherine said. ‘I did not just fall off the turnip truck. What I want to know is, who gets the money now? Do I get some of that money?’
Spencer shook his head. ‘Kristina made a will before she died. She didn’t speak of you.’ Spencer peered into the blind woman’s face. ‘Mrs Sinclair, you and your husband … you disowned Kristina, didn’t yo
u?’
‘We were angry!’ Katherine shouted. ‘We were furious. Do you have any idea how betrayed we felt?’
Spencer said quietly, ‘It works both ways, you know. If you disown her, you can’t get any of her money, either.’
Katherine breathed out and then shrugged with a humph. ‘Who’d have thought she’d have any money?’ She sat quietly and then said, ‘She was killed, wasn’t she, detective?’
Spencer didn’t have the heart to tell her.
Patting the blanket on her lap, he said, ‘Mrs Sinclair, don’t blame yourself. Please. You did the best you could. Don’t blame yourself. Don’t sit here feeling guilty. How could you know about Nathan?’
‘I could have known. Should have. Why, everyone knows that orphaned children are emotionally screwed up. I read up on it. The attachments they form are few and shallow, the affection they feel is fleeting, their gratitude nil. Their moral code is missing and their social restraint is torn to pieces. That was Nathan, but we thought miraculously he was different. But he wasn’t different. He was the stereotype.’
‘But Mrs Sinclair, not all orphaned children grow up to be morally and socially deviant.’
‘It’s the norm, detective. No, not all. But they are the exceptions. We didn’t get the exception. We got the normal kid. The kid we’re all scared of having. It’s the monkey. The monkey with a bottle but without the wire mommy. You know. Harlow’s famous experiment with monkeys with and without surrogate moms. Nathan had the bottle, but didn’t even get a wire mommy to cling to.’
Spencer patted the cotton blanket again, at a loss as to what to say or do. ‘That’s no excuse. You didn’t know you were going to be this unlucky.’
Katherine’s mouth stretched into a grimace. ‘Actually, Detective O’Malley, I’ll tell you something. When Nathan was first found, he had with him a small cat, which he was allowed to keep. He had that cat for two years. The cat slept with Nathan and ate from his hand, and followed him around the orphanage. They seemed very attached to each other. When Nathan was six, the silly animal was run over by a truck or a bus, or a small industrial vehicle. When Nathan was told of the cat’s death, he immediately threw out all the cat-related paraphernalia, the cat bowl, the litter box, the toys, the catnip, asked for his sheets to be changed, and never spoke of the cat again.’ Katherine stifled a sob. ‘When I heard that story, my heart just filled with love and pity for poor Nathan. Now, there’s a boy who needs to be loved, I thought. But in the end, the joke was on me, wasn’t it? I was the only one who cared about the stupid cat. No one else did. Certainly not Nathan. He never got attached to anything in his life.’