Stranger on the Shore - lanyon Josh - Страница 25

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“It’s an interesting case. It’s still unsolved. And nobody’s written a book on it yet. It seemed like maybe it was time someone took another look.”

“And you think you can succeed where the police and the FBI failed?” Michaela’s smile was mocking. Tonight she wore a perfectly ordinary full-length black-and-blue beach dress. Of course her beach dress probably cost more than most women’s formal dresses.

“Well, he can hardly do worse,” Marcus muttered, and his sister threw him a surprised look.

Mrs. Truscott appeared and announced dinner was ready. They filed into the dining room leaving Acker Bilk to play “Sentimental Journey” to an empty room.

The food was once again very good. Poached salmon—wild caught not farmed, per Muriel—with cucumber and dill sauce, delicata squash with pomegranates, cauliflower with pine nuts, currants, and fresh Italian parsley—

“Muriel, will you kindly shut up and let us eat,” Michaela intervened.

Muriel turned a ladylike shade of purple and glared at her sister.

“Yes indeed,” Jarrett said, fixing his youngest daughter with a kindling eye. “Do inform us as to what constitutes proper table manners, Mike.”

It was Michaela’s turn to redden.

Ring gave Jarrett a narrow look but said nothing. Marcus continued to drink his dinner. Getting plastered seemed to be his nightly goal. Griff was surprised Chloe didn’t choose to eat out more often.

Had they always been this uncomfortable to be around, or had this dynamic evolved through time and tragedy?

Griff quietly ate his dinner, watched and listened. With the exception of Jarrett, who made regular efforts to draw him into the conversation, the others were happy enough to ignore him. He didn’t think they forgot him though.

At one point Muriel mentioned Chloe being on a date and Griff said without thinking, “Are Chloe and Pierce...?” He didn’t finish it because as the words were leaving his mouth he realized that to even ask the question was a mistake.

An astonished silence followed.

“Chloe and Pierce?” Muriel said as though she thought she hadn’t heard him correctly.

“No,” Jarrett answered quietly. “They’re not.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters, Mr. Hadley?” Muriel asked, and the conversation swirled away again like water parting to make a new course around a boulder.

“No. I was an only child,” Griff said.

“That’s sad. No family at all?”

Michaela said impatiently, “I’m sure Mr. Hadley has all the usual extended family.”

He didn’t. But he wasn’t going to share that with these people. His mother had been estranged from her family—and apparently his father’s family too. Which, given his mother’s temperament, wasn’t that much of a surprise. In fact, as Griff grew older he had begun to wonder if his father had simply taken off, not died at all. He had found no death certificate, no insurance papers, nothing in his mother’s effects.

She wasn’t an easy woman to live with, that was for sure. It was the kind of thing she might have lied about. She had always been very proud.

The Arlingtons kept up their dinner conversation, chatting about a new restaurant that had opened in Oyster Bay, about flower shows, about a planned spring wedding for the daughter of one of their neighbors. Maybe it was for his benefit. Maybe when they didn’t have a distrusted member of the fourth estate at their table they talked about something more meaningful than fashion shows for charity.

They didn’t talk like people who liked each other. Heck, they didn’t talk like people who even knew each other very well. And a lot of that had to be Jarrett. As much as Griff liked the old man, Jarrett was the patriarch. Jarrett was the alpha in this pack, and if dog eat dog was the rule here, well, Jarrett was the guy who made the rules.

It was kind of sad. Not that Griff’s own family life had been The Brady Bunch. But he liked to think that maybe somewhere outside of television there were families, even if the family was just two people, where trust and respect and liking was the rule not the exception.

He had hoped for that with Levi, and for a time it had seemed like maybe that might happen. But in the end, it turned out they didn’t like each other much. Which just went to prove that enjoying the same movies and same books and same music didn’t mean as much as you might expect.

Dessert was a coffee-flavored creme brulee with a crackly brown sugar crust. It was served with some kind of wine called a sauterne. Griff rarely drank wine, but he had never had anything in that house that wasn’t delicious, so he went ahead and gave it a try. The sweet wine with its hint of vanilla and honey turned out to be a good match for the delicate and creamy dessert. Crazy to think these people ate like this all the time. No wonder they were divorced from reality. Had anyone here ever done without a meal?

Ring had probably done without a few meals. Maybe Michaela. She had a perpetually hungry look.

At last dinner was over and the Arlingtons adjourned to the drawing room for more bridge. Even Ring seemed okay with the idea of bridge, so maybe it was a match made in heaven.

Griff stopped Jarrett in the doorway. “Can I speak to you?”

Jarrett raised his brows. “Of course, my boy.”

As they stepped into the hall, Griff said, “I wanted to ask if it would be all right for me to take Gemma’s journal down to the cottage this evening.”

Jarrett looked relieved. What had he expected to hear? “Of course. Of course.”

“Otherwise I don’t think I’ll be able to read the whole thing in the amount of time I have.”

Jarrett repeated, “My boy, it’s a reasonable request. Come with me.”

Griff accompanied him down the long hall to the library. The walls were lined with gold-framed portraits, family portraits going by the physical resemblance of the subjects to each other.

Jarrett pointed at a portrait of a fair young woman in a blue gown and a sixties bouffant. “My late wife. She died when Mike was two. I think we would have been a very different family if Nicole had lived.”

“I’m sorry,” Griff said, having no idea how to respond to that.

“It’s disconcerting to see us through your eyes.” Jarrett smiled faintly. “I hope you’re not a poker player, my boy.”

And now Griff really had no idea what to say. He offered, “More like Crazy Eights,” and Jarrett laughed and patted him on the back.

They walked into the library and Griff was relieved to see the lavender journal still sitting on the long table surrounded by photo albums. He had half expected that it would be gone. But no. There it was. Right where Muriel had left it the day before.

Jarrett picked up the fat volume and handed it to him. His smile seemed twisted.

“I promise to be careful with it.”

“I know you will be.”

Griff’s gaze fell on the birdcage clock. He remembered that he had been dreaming of the automaton bird the night before. The red-and-blue bird seemed to watch him with a beady and skeptical eye. “That’s some clock.”

Jarrett followed his gaze and smiled fondly at the motionless bird. “Ah. Yes it is. That’s a 1920 German clock made by Karl Griesbaum. I remember being fascinated by it when I was a boy. Sadly, Chloe knocked it off the table when she was still learning to walk. Now it only sings at five o’clock. The cocktail hour. I’m not sure if that’s significant or not.”

Griff laughed, put the journal in his pocket, and bade Jarrett good-night.

* * *

Ifeel awful for saying it, but I wish Muriel had not come back.

Griff sat up, punched the stack of pillows into shape against the headboard, and flopped down again, opening Gemma’s journal to his saved place. He had been reading for about three hours and he was now well into 1993, only a couple of weeks from Brian’s kidnapping.

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