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“I don’t think he can tell you anything,” she said as he dialed. “What a client puts in his will is a confidential matter.”
“I’m not going to ask what’s in the will, just whether Cyrus made any changes recently.” He spoke into the phone. “Pierce Reynolds calling for Mr. Joseph Brewster, please.”
The way Pierce’s voice deepened whenever he wanted to impress someone had never failed to amuse Susannah, and even now a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She wondered if Pierce knew what he was doing. Probably not, she decided; the habit could well be so ingrained he was no longer aware of it.
As Pierce asked his question, he began to tap a pencil on his desk blotter at even intervals, and by the time he put the telephone down the steady rhythm had almost driven Susannah mad. She took one look at his glum face and forgot the tapping. “I told you he wouldn’t answer the question.”
“Oh, he answered.” Pierce tossed the pencil aside. “Cyrus hasn’t changed his will in years.”
Susannah sighed. “I guess that’s that.”
“Unless he went to some other attorney, of course.”
“Come on, Pierce—how likely is that? Maybe we should look on the positive side of this whole thing.” Susannah tried to laugh, with little success. “With all those valuable paintings, and the publicity we expected to get, security would have become a massive problem. We’d have been begging for handouts in the street just to pay guards.”
Pierce didn’t hesitate. “We wouldn’t have any trouble fund-raising for security.”
Didn’t the man have any sense of humor? “Okay, so it was a bad joke. But you may as well accept the facts.”
“And if things had gone right we wouldn’t have had to worry about securing this place at all.”
Susannah frowned. “What does that mean?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.” Pierce looked a bit shamefaced. “But—oh, what difference does it make now? I’d hoped that Cyrus would give his house to the museum, too.”
Susannah had never seen Cyrus’s home, but Pierce had told her about the huge old Queen Anne house, featuring all the grandeur of the high Victorian style, furnished with solid old walnut and located on a half-block square lot in one of Chicago’s oldest and finest suburbs.
“And move the present collection there?” She shook her head. “It certainly makes our current troubles with access for the handicapped look like peanuts.”
Pierce dismissed the problem with a wave of the hand. “Cyrus installed an elevator just last year.”
Susannah rolled her eyes. At least, she thought, that harebrained scheme would never come to pass. Surely the board of directors would never have gone along with it...
On second thought, however, she realized that there was method in Pierce’s madness. In fact, the idea made an odd sort of sense. In its downtown location, the Dearborn would always be just one among Chicago’s several prominent art museums. But in the suburbs, it would stand alone, surrounded not by competition but by middle class families with time and money for cultural activities—not only visits but art classes, lectures, tours... Possibilities poured through her mind.
“Well, why not?” Pierce said defensively. “It’s not as if Cyrus had a family to leave it to. Besides, his pictures were the most important thing in his life. Why not leave them in the setting he created for them?”
Reluctantly, she pushed the stream of ideas aside. It was too late for them. And too late, Susannah thought, for sympathy to do Pierce any good, either. She said, finally, “What about the funeral? Shall we go together?”
For a moment, she wasn’t certain whether Pierce hadn’t heard her or if he intended to refuse. Then he gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Oh, why not?” he said. “Doesn’t every fisherman like to get a last glimpse of the one that got away?”
Susannah was on the telephone when Alison tapped gently at her office door and put her head in.
Susannah beckoned her in and said, “Yes, Mrs. Adams, I know exactly how disappointed you are. I’ve found, however-”
Alison sat down on the edge of a chintz-covered chair, looking half afraid that the deep, soft cushions would drag her down like an undertow. Funny, Susannah thought, with half her mind still on Mrs. Adams, how different the partners were. Alison could sit like that, hands folded like a studious schoolgirl, for hours. Kit, if forced to wait, would probably have reorganized the bookshelves. Susannah would have flung herself on the overstuffed plaid couch and at least pretended to take a nap.
Finally she soothed Mrs. Adams into hanging up, and rubbed her ear as she put the telephone down. “Someday,” she said, “I’m going to try to hang up the phone and discover that I can’t because it’s melted into my ear and become part of me.” She looked longingly at the couch, but she knew better than to chance wrinkling her skirt. Linen—even black linen—showed every crease.
Alison smiled in sympathy. “Rita told me she’d put through calls from every single member of the Dearborn’s board of directors today.”
“Oh, she has. I can’t decide whether to thank her for being such an efficient secretary, or yell at her—for exactly the same reason.” Susannah’s voice was dry. “Thank heaven that was the last of them—at least for this round.”
“What’s on their minds? Or did they all know about Cyrus?”
“No. Not by name, at least. But the news seems to have leaked just this morning that all hope of getting the collection has gone up in smoke, and every person who isn’t running for cover is making threats instead.”
Alison’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “What kind of threats?”
“Oh, the usual noises about hiring a new director.” Susannah waved a hand. “I think I got most of the feathers soothed. Eventually they’ll realize it wasn’t Pierce’s fault—and also that they can’t hire anyone else for what they’re paying him—and everybody will be back on good terms. What’s up, Ali?”
“Pierce, actually. Rita sent me up to tell you that he’s waiting downstairs.”
Susannah stood up, smoothed her skirt, and slipped her black jacket on over her snowy white blouse. “Good. I mean, I’m not looking forward to Cyrus’s funeral, but it’s better than dealing with the phone.” She picked up her wide-brimmed black hat and glanced in the mirror mounted on the back of her office door.
“I know. That’s why Rita asked me to come up and tell you—because she didn’t want to break into your call.” Alison paused in the doorway. “You and Pierce look like a matched set, by the way, except you don’t have a black tie and he wouldn’t look nearly as good as you do in that hat.”
Susannah paused as she adjusted the tilt of her hat. “You’re sure it isn’t just a little over the top? I don’t want to look like a professional mourner. But I did like the old man, and as a mark of respect...”
“Looks great,” Alison said. “If I could wear a hat with that kind of dash, I’d never take it off.”
Susannah smiled in spite of herself. “They really get in the way when it comes to being kissed, you know.”
“Just as I said—I’d never take it off.” Alison grinned and started up the stairs toward the top floor production room.
“If you’d stop being quite so practical, Ali, you’d have lines of men wanting to kiss you.”
Alison didn’t even pause. “Really? Well, since I don’t have time for that sort of nonsense, I’ll definitely have to look for a hat.”
Susannah made a face behind her partner’s back and turned toward the staircase to the main floor.
Pierce was standing in the receptionist’s office, hands clasped behind his back, shifting his weight from toes to heels and back again. He was staring at a framed poster which hung near Rita’s desk, but Susannah doubted he’d even seen it, or heard her come in. She was wrong on both counts.
Pierce stepped back from the poster and said, “I could get you something really nice to hang there.”
“On Tryad’s decorating budget? I doubt it.” She let her gaze run over him. In his dark suit he looked taller, but in fact his eyes were exactly on a level with Susannah’s when, as now, she was wearing heels. His tie wasn’t black, it was charcoal; Alison had been wrong: But she’d been correct about the rest. They couldn’t have patched more perfectly if they’d been dressed by a single designer. Rita, she noticed, looked impressed.
Pierce had left his tiny sports car in front of Tryad’s converted brownstone. He helped Susannah into the passenger seat, and she tried to keep her skirt from sliding impossibly high.
“At least it’s a pretty day,” she said as he got behind the wheel. “I wondered why the services were delayed so long, but it worked out beautifully, didn’t it? After the rain yesterday and the day before—” Why was she babbling? The urge to talk simply to fill the silence was a sensation she’d never felt with Pierce before, and it took Susannah by surprise. Theirs had always been an easy and professional relationship.
“The funeral was put off for the heir’s convenience.”
Susannah frowned. “What heir?”
“Didn’t I tell you what I’ve found out? The will currently in force was made more than ten years ago, and—”
Susannah interrupted with a long, low whistle. “You’ve put the delay to good use, haven’t you?”
Pierce shrugged. “I don’t know what use it is to know that Cyrus left everything he possessed to the son of an old flame.”
“Well, well,” Susannah drawled. “Who’d have thought it of Cyrus?”
“I know,” Pierce said bitterly. “It’s hard to believe that somebody as savvy as Cyrus was didn’t bother to update his will now and then, even if his financial circumstances hadn’t changed. A ten-year-old will is ridiculous... to say nothing of his leaving everything to somebody who wouldn’t even bother to cut his Hawaiian vacation short so the funeral could be held on time.”
“That wasn’t quite what I meant,” Susannah said. “It just occurred to me that perhaps the son of the old flame might be Cyrus’s son, as well.”
Pierce looked startled. “Oh, I don’t think—”
“Even Cyrus was young once. And now that I think about it, there was a certain twinkle in his eyes sometimes.”
Pierce snorted.
There were to be no church services, only a gathering in the cemetery. A surprising number of cars were already parked along the narrow, winding roads which cut the grand old cemetery into segments, and Pierce had to park at a distance. Susannah glanced from the gravel lane to her shoes, and sighed.
But before they’d gone far, the inconvenience of walking across grass and gravel in heels had given way to Susannah’s love of old cemeteries. She’d almost forgotten how much she loved graveyards, full of elaborate monuments and family histories carved in stone in a kind of shorthand only the initiated could read. She’d been good at that, once, deducing from names and dates what had happened to the people who lay below the quiet sod. But she hadn’t gone exploring for years now. Eight years, to be exact....
“But how do you know?”
The question echoed in her head, in an almost-plaintive baritone that she hadn’t heard in the better part of a decade. Funny, she thought, that she could still hear it so clearly...
“How can you tell from a tombstone that life was rough for women?” Marc had asked on a crisp November day, as he stood beside her in an old cemetery in a far north suburb of Chicago. “It’s a man’s tombstone, at that.”
“That’s right,” Susannah had said. “The monument is for the patriarch, but look on the back at the list of names. His three wives didn’t even get a stone to themselves. He married them one at a time, of course, but now they’re all lying here bedside him, together for eternity.”
“But how?” Marc had asked, very practically. “He’s only got two sides.”
Susannah had found the comment hysterically funny, and she’d finally wobbled over to a low flat stone nearby and sat down to recover from her fit of laughter..But in fact she’d never managed to get her breath back, for Marc had joined her there, and kissed her...
And she hadn’t walked in a cemetery since.
“What a nuisance this is,” Pierce said. “Trust Cyrus to make things inconvenient.”
“Shush.” They were getting close to the small tent where the crowd had gathered. A soft breeze tugged at Susannah’s hat and ruffled the corners of the American flag covering the casket.
She hadn’t known that Cyrus had been in the armed services. But then, Susannah thought, there seemed to be lots of things that they hadn’t known about Cyrus.
They were almost the last to arrive, and only a few moments later a man in flowing robes began the service. Susannah tipped her head a little, allowing the wide brim of her hat to shield her eyes as she glanced around the crowd.
She saw a few vaguely familiar faces, but no one she knew well. And try as she might, she couldn’t locate any likely candidate to be—what was it Pierce had called him? The son of the old flame, that was it. No one stood out from the crowd. There was no row of chairs, no one obviously fighting strong emotion...
Perhaps, she thought, Pierce was wrong and the heir hadn’t showed up after all?
The service was brief. From a distant hillside, a rifle salute cracked the air, taps sounded, and an honor guard briskly and efficiently folded the flag which had covered Cyrus’s mahogany casket.
Susannah watched with interest as they presented it to a man standing nearby. But all she could see was the back of a well-groomed head and a brilliant white shirt collar showing between sleek black hair and a gray pin-striped suit. Not black, she thought, with interest.
“That must be the old flame’s son,” Pierce muttered into her ear. “Wish I could get a better look.”
The pastor said a final prayer, then looked out over the crowd, drawing them all together with his gaze, and said, “It was Cyrus’s request that everyone who attended this service be invited back to his home immediately afterward, for a party.”
Susannah smothered a gasp. “That’s macabre!” she whispered.
“What it is,” Pierce muttered, “is a waste of money the museum could have put to far better use. A party! What nonsense.”
But instead of turning back toward the city, Pierce followed the trail of cars toward the western suburb where Cyrus had lived.
“Wait a minute,” Susannah said. “Surely you don’t intend to go to the party, Pierce. Both of us think it’s bad taste—”
“That’s beside the point,” Pierce said grimly. “Odds are the old flame’s son has equally bad taste, or he wouldn’t have gone along with the idea.”
Susannah thought about that sleek dark head, and frowned. “I don’t quite see—”
“He probably doesn’t have a clue about what to do with Cyrus’s old pictures. Maybe he doesn’t even realize that they’re important. So maybe I can introduce myself and make another stab at the collection.”
“Pierce, isn’t it time to give up?”
“What kind of PR person are you, anyway? We can’t lose by just asking. You’d feel like an idiot if he gave it to somebody else—or threw it away—because we didn’t tell him we’re interested.”
He was right. In any case, she was going to end up at the party, since throwing herself out of a moving car didn’t strike Susannah as much of an option. So she might as well give the idea a stab.
Cyrus Albrecht’s house wasn’t just a Queen Anne, she realized as Pierce pushed open the wrought-iron gate to the front walk. It was the most elaborate Queen Anne she’d ever seen. Towers and porches and balconies sprouted from everywhere she looked. The details of gingerbread and moldings and finials had been picked out in a palette of soft greens and browns, with an occasional startling touch of red.
“It would make a great haunted house,” she said. “All it needs is a full moon and a few spider webs. But I don’t see it as a full-fledged art museum—there can’t be enough big walls.”
Pierce shrugged. “We could have built a new wing. But that’s out of the question now. This house is worth a fortune, the heir wouldn’t even consider donating it.”
Susannah paused. “The paintings are worth a fortune, too.”
“But everybody has an idea what a house like this will sell for. On the other hand, to an inexperienced eye, the paintings might not look like much at all.”
“Pierce, you can’t misrepresent—”
They reached the front door, standing open to the summer breeze, and the murmur of the crowd reached out to them. Susannah knew her protest would carry back inside, so she bit her tongue and resolved to have it out with Pierce later.
They stepped across the threshold into the enormous dark-paneled front hall. Despite Susannah’s hat, the change from sunlight to dimness blinded her for an instant. Before she saw the heir, who stood with his back almost squarely to the door, Pierce had already moved toward him, pulling her along. His right hand went out, demanding the heir’s attention, and in the deepest voice she’d ever heard Pierce use, he said, “I’m sorry we meet on such a sad day. I was a friend of your.... I mean, of Cyrus’s. I have a bit of an interest in art, too, you see.”
Susannah stared up at him in shock. A bit of an interest?
“Indeed,” the heir said, and his voice echoed through Susannah’s brain like the boom of a cannon.
Like a wooden marionette who could move only one joint at a time, she turned away from Pierce toward the heir. Under the wide brim of her hat, she spotted the monogram on his shirt cuff as he reached out to shake Pierce’s hand. MDH, it said, in delicate embroidery.
MDH... Marcus David Herrington.
Marc, who had been the single biggest mistake Susannah Miller had ever made. Marc, who had prompted the most disastrous idea of a long and varied series.
Marc...
