I longed for sleep more than I had wanted anything my whole life. I wanted a bath and a bed and oblivion, but instead I had the Eagle River cops and the Vilas County sheriff, as they tried to make sense of the senseless.
When Catherine and I returned to the house with Benji’s body, I laid him on the dining room table, a catafalque of sorts, a laying out in state. Catherine refused to leave him, even though she was shivering so violently that her hand couldn’t stay in place on Benji’s head.
I went to the living room for the blankets we’d wrapped Geraldine in earlier. When I brought them back to the dining room, Catherine had climbed up on the table beside Benji. She was cradling his head in her lap. I swathed her in blankets, but her shivering wouldn’t stop.
I took my cell phone from my bag and looped the mike around my neck. While I tracked down the local emergency services, I folded my arms around Catherine, trying to rub some warmth into her. By the time I was finally connected to the county dispatcher, the worst of her shaking had eased, but the room was filled with the sickly sweet scent of her fear, and her urine.
A shadow in the living room made me let go of her and run to the arched doorway. It was Geraldine, not Renee, drawing on her own formidable will to hobble down the stairs on her wounded foot. She looked from
me to Catherine shivering in her blankets, then limped over and draped her sable coat across the girl’s shoulders. I tucked it around Catherine as best I could. She wouldn’t move or look at me, but stared straight ahead, Benji’s head in her lap.
I’d seen a set of wicker chairs in one corner of the living room. I brought two of them over to the arch connecting living and dining rooms, so we could sit but still keep an eye on Catherine. I pulled over a coffee table for Geraldine to prop her foot on. She’d lost the towels I’d tied around her wound; blood oozed onto the glass tabletop.
“That was a terrible deed, shooting the boy in front of her own granddaughter,” Geraldine said, adding in a conversational tone, “I wasn’t able to kill Renee. What are we going to do with her when she revives?”
“Try to get our story in first,” I said grimly. “The law will be here soon, and she’s going to be spinning her line about Benji as a terrorist kidnapper.” “Was he a terrorist?” Geraldine asked.
“I think he was an orphan boy far from home who got caught in a war he didn’t know was going on. All he wanted to do was make money to help his mother and his sisters.” Tears pricked the back of my lids. I shook them off angrily-I needed my wits, not my emotions, for whatever lay ahead.
Geraldine and I sat silent, both of us exhausted. At one point, she said, “How odd Darraugh and Edwards will find it, to know their mothers have been fighting.”
I grunted, but didn’t move or speak until I heard Renee stirring on the upper landing. I got up, gun out, as she staggered down the front stairs, disheveled but haughty.
She looked past me to Geraldine. “You have a knack for hovering around my family when you are least wanted, Geraldine. You may leave my granddaughter to me now”
I felt my temper rising. “Renee, I don’t know if you’re insane or just giving a good impersonation, but a high-handed act isn’t going to work tonight. Catherine is in shock because she saw you murder Benjamin Sadawi in cold blood. We will not leave you alone with her.”
Renee looked at me loftily. “I thought you and that terrorist had kidnapped her; I shot him in the belief I was protecting her.”
“I should have hit you harder, Renee,” Geraldine said in her flutey
voice. “It brought me such satisfaction, I should have hit you forty years ago. Perhaps I could have beaten some sense into you. I understand what you’re doing; I understand you believe you can persuade a policeman and a judge of what you are saying, because you have the power and position of the Bayard name behind you. You think Victoria is a servant of no account who can be belittled and discounted the way my mother treated detectives forty years ago. But times have changed; detectives are sophisticated nowadays, and Victoria stands high in my son’s and my estimation. Very high. We are prepared to support her version of tonight’s events.”
“You can’t forgive me for marrying Calvin, can you?” Renee said, amused contempt in her voice. “After all this time, you still don’t understand that he was weary of your posturing and your neediness-and your aging body; he turned to me for relief from all those things.”
Geraldine smiled. “I’m the one he calls for when he’s frightened, Renee. Not you nor Kylie nor any of the others. Your staff may think he means you when he cries `Deenie,’ but I was always Deenie to him, from the time we first tried swimming together in the Larchmont pool when we were four.”
“I’m the one who protected his reputation,” Renee snapped, her composure cracking. “I’m the one who saved him from prison, who helped build up the Bayard Foundation and the press. I’m the one who turned him into an international figure, while you sat withering, turning grayer and grayer in that mausoleum, buried alive by your mother.”
“Until Calvin’s reputation became so important to you that you killed three people to protect it,” I put in. “I’m not going to pretend to weep over Olin Taverner, but Marcus Whitby was a fine young journalist, a fine young man, while Benji Sadawi was a helpless bystander. Do you think your granddaughter will ever want to live with you again, now that she knows you killed these people? You sacrificed their lives, you sacrificed her well-being-“
“Catherine knows me. She knows I love her as deeply as I do Calvin,” Renee said.
“So she’ll stay with you because she knows you’ll kill anyone who threatens your idea of her? I don’t think so. I think nature made something finer than you or Calvin in your granddaughter. She’ll recoil from you the way she would from sewage.”
Renee smiled contemptuously. “You have no children, no home life. I doubt very much you are a judge of family relationships.”
I thought of my mother’s fierce love for me, and my father’s more level affection; the price they demanded in return was not adoration, nor achievement, but integrity. I could not lie or cheat to avoid trouble. I didn’t try to tell Renee that.
“The sad thing is that I liked you, Renee. I admired your husband to the point of hero worship, but I genuinely liked you. You have the kind of energy and competence I’ve always admired.”
She flushed and left us to go into the dining room. Catherine sat motionless on the table, like a small furry Buddha, but when Renee took her good arm and tried to move her, she jerked away and lay down next to Benji, kissing him on the lips.
I could hear the sirens from the emergency crew keening their way up the drive. A moment later, the cars poured into the yard, their strobes staining the night sky red.