Fidelity

36

Ted Forrest sat in the kitchen of his house and tried to work out his next moves. The house seemed enormous tonight. Even the kitchen, which had always seemed crowded to him, now seemed cavernous and cold, with its long, empty granite counters with rows of identical cabinets and gleaming stainless-steel sinks and hoods. He sat at the butcher-block table at the end of the room because it was the only thing that seemed built to a human scale.

He felt he had to be where he could hear Caroline if she somehow managed to get out of the cellar, even though he had no definite notion of how she might accomplish that. Maybe she could break a wine bottle and use a razor-sharp shard as a blade to carve away some of the wood of the door and reach through, or use some part of a wine rack to jimmy the lock. The hardware was all heavy polished brass, but he supposed it hadn’t been designed to withstand a serious attack.

He went to Caroline’s desk in the sitting room off the library to look at her appointment book. He was relieved to see that she had written in nothing he would have to cancel. The day’s page was just a list of things she had planned to initiate: making calls and sending notes.

Forrest couldn’t recall a time when the house had seemed so empty. He would look out the front window occasionally, just to be sure none of the gardeners or groundskeepers had missed the word and come to work. But he saw no one. Caroline had made sure the servants wouldn’t be around to hear what she had planned to say.

They were Caroline’s servants, really. She had always been the one who cared about the house in the daily way. She inhabited it and used it as the setting of the social identity she had half-inherited and half-invented for herself. She had chosen the servants for their suitability, then trained and bribed them to exercise her will. Maria was the head housekeeper, Caroline’s principal informant. People would assume she spied on the other servants, but the guests here didn’t know that she also eavesdropped on them, and reported what she heard to Caroline.

It occurred to Forrest that he couldn’t have them around anymore. After whatever happened next, he would have to get rid of them for good. It was possible he would have to commission a remodeling and leave the country while it was going on. That would give him an excuse to let all of them go the same day.

He could plan what he should do in a month, but his next stepthe next thing he needed to accomplish-was still a mystery to him. One possibility was to turn her over to Jerry Hobart and leave immediately. Or-frantic with worry-he could report her disappearance to the local authorities and try to be sure his story conformed to the condition of the body. He could throw her body into the ocean. Bodies were found, but there must be thousands of others that never were. He could even dump her in the mountains and say she fell into the ocean.

But one other idea had occurred to him that had a certain appeal. It was to wait here for Jerry Hobart, get him to kill Caroline, and then kill Jerry Hobart. He had been thinking of Hobart as a way of sparing his nerves and his feelings because if he didn’t have Hobart, he would have to get rid of the body and clean up any sign that it had happened. But if he killed Hobart, then all he would have to do was call 911 on the nearest telephone, and public servants would be dispatched to handle both bodies and clean everything up for him. Doing it that way would clear him of any possible suspicion in Caroline’s death.

Hobart was the perfect sort of person to use. He would be armed. He had a criminal record of some sort. Hobart had told him it was for armed robbery. That was good enough, but Forrest had heard or read somewhere that people who had violent-felony convictions often had records with plenty of other serious matters on them that had not gone to trial, often sexual assaults. That would be ideal.

Ted Forrest could be the husband who came home and found his beloved wife killed by a sexual predator, and who, in turn, killed the intruder. Forrest would be simultaneously an innocent man, a bereaved widower, a hero, and-come to think of it-the beneficiary of a significant insurance policy. He had forgotten about that. It was as old as the marriage, purchased with the thought that there might be children. When Caroline was in her early twenties, the cost of insuring her was almost nothing. He had paid a single premium for a policy for each of them, and over the years he had almost forgotten.

Killing Caroline and then Hobart was such an appealing idea that his mind kept returning to it and refining it. One thing it would accomplish was to free him of the need to pay Hobart for Emily Kramer, or for Caroline. Forrest didn’t think there was much risk of an unfriendly interpretation by the police. Hobart was a career crim inal. Ted Forrest was now over fifty, and he had never done anything to arouse suspicion of any kind. And Caroline would make such a good victim. She had achieved the kind of reputation for goodness that only very rich women with a penchant for highly visible acts of philanthropy could hope for.

Forrest was highly attracted to the notion of having Hobart be the vicious intruder, the violent criminal who had burst in and attacked and killed the virtuous Caroline. It would enshrine her forever in exactly the role she had invented for herself: a secular saint. But could Forrest carry off the deception? Once Hobart had shot Caroline, it wouldn’t much matter how crudely and inefficiently Ted Forrest managed to kill him. In any state-certainly the state of California-if a man came into your house and shot your wife to death, you wouldn’t have a hard time getting the police to declare the shooting selfdefense, no matter what the angles of the bullet holes were. All Ted Forrest would have to remember was to tell the truth about the positions of the three people at the time, and be consistent about the order of events. All he had to do was keep from contradicting what the cops would see.

Forrest got up from the kitchen table, opened the door to the basement stairs, and listened. He thought he should be hearing something-pounding or shouting-but he wasn’t sure whether he did. He descended the stairs cautiously and walked quietly through the tasting room. He put his ear to the wine-cellar door and listened.

“I hear you, Ted,” she called. “I know you think this is funny and you’re really being clever, but you’re not. Eventually you’re going to have to face up to the way you’ve treated that girl. It’s illegal.”

He said nothing.

“I know you’re there.”

“Of course I’m here, Caroline.”

“Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I’m not arguing with you. I know it’s illegal. Well, sit tight.”

“Very funny!” she shouted. “You’re just pissing me off and making it harder on yourself. If you’ll let me out now, I may not show the cops the bruises you put on me last night.”

He made a lot of noise walking up the steps, but stopped near the top, sat on a step and closed the door, and then listened. There were no scraping sounds, and there was no hammering. Maybe she had already given up on getting out by herself. He stood, opened the door, and went up into the hallway by the pantry.

Hobart had said he would be here this evening, so there was plenty of time for preparations. Forrest went about them thoughtfully. Since Hobart had to drive here, he would drive through the open gate, up the driveway, and park on the circle in front of the house. He would come to the front door.

Forrest went to the front door and studied it, and then went to the other door at the rear of the house that opened by the pantry. That door was the one where deliveries were made, the one a stranger would see first. He began to work on the door. He got a large jackknife he had kept in the back of a desk drawer for years, went outside, and worked on the pantry door. He scraped away some paint and then dug more deeply into the woodwork beside the doorknob. He kept at it until he could slide the blade into the wood behind the metal plate and push the latch aside to open the door.

Forrest stepped back. He wasn’t sure whether he had done a good job or a bad one, but it looked the way the latch on the door of Kramer Investigations looked the night he had burned the place, so he was sure it would do. He had no reason to believe that Hobart was a locksmith or a safecracker, so he was confident it would look to the police as though this was the way he had come in. Hobart would never see this door.

Forrest stopped and looked around the kitchen for a moment, and tried to evaluate his plan. Did he really need to do this to Caroline? Yes, he did. She knew about Kylie, and she intended to use the girl to force him into giving her control over his fortune and his freedom. When he had gone into a rage and grabbed her, he’d had no intention of killing her. He had simply been the victim of an immediate need to make her shut up. He had needed to be by himself and think. But having thought, he could not see any way of getting through this with Caroline alive. She really was ready to call the police. Right now she would probably be down there doing things to herself so she would have enough marks on her body to impress the authorities and make him look like an abuser.

He could hear the prosecutor now: “Surely she didn’t make marks like these on herself. So who did?”

Nobody knew Caroline the way he did. They would never imagine that she was so opportunistic and calculating. At worst they would think she was a vengeful wife who was being replaced by a much younger woman. And the law’s crude view of human life demanded that there be a victim and a criminal. Caroline was an expert at roles, and she would be all the victim that the law required. He was sure that if he opened the door right now, he would find her covered with bruises.

That was fine. His breakin story would account gracefully and smoothly for the bruises, too. They would all be fresh enough. He was sure doctors could tell how recent a bruise was, and she had never had any before. Those marks could have been caused only by the intruder. The more ways that Forrest found to think about his situation, the more certain he was that the intruder story was the best way to handle it.

There were several things he would have to prepare before Hobart got here. Forrest needed to put together the money to show Hobart. That would be what Hobart demanded to see first. But Forrest had been assembling and keeping large sums of money in the house for weeks, ever since Philip Kramer had contacted him. He hurried upstairs and opened the safe, got the banded stacks of hundreds, and laid them out on the bed to count them. He put two hundred thousand in a large bag he used to take to the gym. That was the payment for taking care of the Emily Kramer problem. Then he counted out enough stacks of money to make the same payment for Caroline. He could probably fit those into the same bag, but he decided it was better to have two. That way, at some point Hobart’s hands would both be encumbered.

Forrest found a bag of Caroline’s in the closet. It was a piece of luggage-an overnight bag, really-but it was about the right size, and seemed to him to be a nice touch. If it got bloody or something, he could even leave the money in it and place it with the bodies, as though Hobart had forced her to open the safe before he killed her. If Forrest’s fingerprints were on it, that didn’t matter. After all, the money was his.

Everything fit together perfectly. It left nothing dangerous, nothing ugly, nothing messy or inconvenient. Thinking about his plan gave Ted Forrest a sample of the happiness that he was going to feel.

He needed a gun, of course. There were two in the house. One he retrieved from his nightstand, an M9 9mm Beretta. There was also another gun somewhere in the master suite. He had bought it for Caroline years ago, when things were still cordial between them. It might fit the story he was concocting if that turned up somewhere, too, but he didn’t like the unnecessary complexity. He tested the story. Caroline hears noises downstairs, gets up to investigate, and brings her gun with her. She gets ambushed from behind, or shot-no, ambushed and beaten if there really are bruises on her-by the intruder. She’s killed. Ted hears the shots or something, goes downstairs and shoots the killer. No, too many guns. He decided to forget hers.

He looked around to be sure there was nothing out of place. The bed had not been slept in last night. It was still made, the covers tight and the decorative pillows arranged at the head of the duvet as the chambermaid had left them. He moved the pillows to the couch where Caroline usually put them, and then pulled back the covers and punched the goosedown pillows to indent them as though someone had slept here. He turned off the light and hurried downstairs. This had taken too long. He should have been where he could watch the front of the house and listen for sounds from the wine cellar.

He stood with his ear to the door of the basement, heard nothing, and then opened the door. He went down the stairs into the tasting room, but still didn’t hear her. He put his ear to the door of the wine cellar.

It occurred to him that he might have forgotten another problem. There was no real ventilation down here. The wine cellar wasn’t a place where anyone had ever spent much time before. The new cooling unit worked by pumping water through a closed system, not blowing air. She could be suffocating. He reached for the door, then stopped. What if she were suffocating? His story would accommodate that comfortably. But if he opened the door, air would rush in again and revive her. She would be active and difficult.

He turned and walked toward the steps, and climbed. As he reached the third step from the top, his cell phone rang. It startled him because he had forgotten he had it, and then realized he had been below ground. It might have been ringing for a minute or more. He answered it quickly. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

He heard simultaneously Kylie’s voice and a muffled shout from behind the door.

Kylie said, “Hi, baby,” as Caroline shouted, “Let me out, you bastard!”

He stepped into the hallway and shut the door as he said, “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

“What’s up over there?”

“Nothing. I got back really late last night and I’ve been asleep.”

“I heard somebody.”

“It’s just one of the maids yelling out the back door at the gardeners. This place can be really nuts sometimes. It’s a big place, and there are always people running machines or yelling. Sometimes I wonder.”

“Poor thing,” she said. “So when are you going to pick me up so I can make you feel better?”

“Oh, how I would love to go get you right now. But I just can’t. Caroline is home today and, well, you know.”

“I know. Maybe when I’m older, things will be better.”

“I promise. Now, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I can. I love you.

“I love you,” she said. “‘Bye.”

Forrest cut the connection, and then looked at his watch. He had been surprised to hear Kylie’s voice, but it was three forty already. She was already out of school. He tried to calculate. He had called Hobart at around four A.M. Hobart had said he was nearly done with Emily Kramer. He would have needed to get rid of her body and probably take care of a few incidentals. Give him two hours for that. Then he would have to spend an hour showering and packing and checking out of wherever he had been staying. That would make it seven A.M. If Hobart drove up here it would take him at least six hours, and with stops, much longer. Make it four in the afternoon at the earliest. If Hobart arrived at four or five, he would want to check into a hotel, change his clothes, probably rent a different car, have dinner somewhere. He would not arrive here at the house until early evening, just as he had said on the phone.

And Forrest was all ready for him.

Forrest walked through the house examining doors and windows, then revisited the pantry door where the police would decide Hobart had broken in. He placed the two bags of money in two downstairs closets. That way he could produce the one for the already-completed job on Emily Kramer when Hobart arrived, and save the other to induce him to kill Caroline. The sight of so much money would blind Hobart to any little signs that something was out of place.

Forrest spent an hour rehearsing in front of the full-length mirror in the downstairs cloakroom off the foyer. He spoke to an imaginary Hobart, searching his own face for a furtive expression, listening to his voice for a false tone. Finally he devised and memorized a sentence he could say at the very moment when he was pulling out his gun: “I don’t know how to thank you for taking care of this for me.”