There were tears on Loretta's immaculately painted face; in her trembling hands a sodden handkerchief. This was not the calculating woman who'd presided over the family table at the mansion a few evenings before. Her sadness was too unflattering to be faked: her eyes puffy, her nose running. Rachel put her hand over Loretta's hand, and gripped it. Loretta sniffed.
"I wondered if you'd come," she said quietly.
"I'm not going anywhere," Rachel said.
"I wouldn't blame you if you did," Loretta said. "This is all such a mess." She kept staring at the casket. "At least she's out of it. It's just us now." There was a long silence. Then Loretta murmured: "She hated me."
Rachel was about to mouth some platitude; then thought better of it. Instead she said: "I know."
"Do you know why?"
"No."
"Because of Galilee."
It was the last name Rachel had expected to hear in these circumstances. Galilee belonged in another world; a warm, enchanted world where the air smelled of the sea. She closed her eyes for a moment and brought that place into her mind's eye. The deck of The Samarkand at evening: the sleepy ocean rolling against the hull, the creaking ropes calling out the stars, and Galilee encircling her. She longed to be there as she'd longed for nothing in her life. Longed to hear his promises, even knowing he'd break them.
Her thoughts were interrupted by murmurings from the pews behind her. She opened her eyes, in time to follow Loretta's gaze toward the back of the church. There was a small group of dark-suited mourners there. The first one she recognized was Cecil; then the tallest of them turned to look toward the altar, and she heard Loretta murmur oh Lord, that's all we need and realized she was looking at Garrison. He'd changed since Rachel had seen him last: his hair was short, his face pinched and pale. He looked almost frail.
The murmurs quickly subsided, and eyes were averted, but a subtle change had passed through the assembly. The man responsible for the death of the woman they'd come to mourn was here, walking down the aisle to pay his respects before her casket. Mitchell accompanied him, his arm lightly holding Garrison's elbow, as if to guide him.
"When did he get out?" Rachel whispered to Loretta.
"This morning," she replied. "I told Cecil to keep him away." She shook her head. "It's grotesque."
Garrison was standing in front of Margie's casket now. He leaned over to his brother, and whispered something. Mitchell stepped back. Then Garrison reached over and put both his hands on the casket. There was nothing theatrical about the gesture; indeed he seemed oblivious to the presence of those around him. He simply stood there with his head bowed, as if attempting to commune with the body. Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Everyone-even those members of the congregation who'd earlier averted their eyes-was now watching the mourning man. How many of them, she wondered, believed his version of events? Probably most. Lord knows it was hard enough for her to believe that Garrison was capable of mourning at the casket of a woman he'd murdered.
As she turned back she found Mitchell staring at her. He looked exhausted. For the first time in the years she'd known him she saw the resemblance to Garrison: in the fierceness of his stare and the weary shape of his shoulders. In other circumstances she might have said a couple of weeks in the Caribbean would have cured his ills, but she knew better: he was sliding away from himself-or at least from the polished illusion of himself he'd presented to the world; away into the sad, shadowy place where Garrison had skulked all these years.
What had Loretta called them? The idiot and the nec-rophile? A little excessive perhaps, but it probably wasn't so very far from the truth. They certainly belonged together, the tainted fruit of a tainted tree.
Mitchell had taken his gaze off her by now, and was gently tugging on his brother's arm. Garrison looked back at him. Rachel saw Mitchell say come along, and lamblike Garrison went with him. They sat together at the far end of the same row as Rachel and Loretta. Again, Mitchell glanced Rachel's way. This time she too averted her gaze.
The service was conducted with considerable decorum by a very elderly preacher who during his eulogy told the gathering that he'd baptized Margie in this very church, forty-eight years before. He had followed the life of "this remarkable woman," as he called her, with the same mixture of astonishment and sadness he was certain they all felt. She had been troubled, he said, and had perhaps not always made the best of choices in her life's journey, but now she stood on the Golden Floor, where the vicissitudes of her life were lifted from her, and she could go lightly on her way. Rachel had never heard anybody refer to heaven as the Golden Floor before. She liked the phrase immensely, though she suspected that if Margie had been one of the mourners rather than the mourned she would have slipped away at the first mention of paradise, and gone to sit among the gravestones and smoke a cigarette.
With the service over, the casket was carried out to the graveside. This was the part Rachel had been dreading; but by the time the moment of descent came, and she was standing there in the drizzle watching the casket go from view, she'd been anticipating the horror of it for so long the actuality was something of an anticlimax. There were more prayers; flowers thrown down into the grave; then it was over.
The rain came on heavily as she drove back to the city. A few miles short of the bridge she was overtaken by a white Mercedes being driven at suicidal speed, which was pursued through the deluge by two police cars. Another two miles and she saw red lights flashing through the downpour, and flames burning on the highway. The pursued car had plowed into the back of a large truck; and two other vehicles had then struck it, spinning across the slick asphalt. One was burning, its lucky occupants standing in the rain watching the conflagration. The other had turned over and sat in the rain like a tortured tortoise, while the officers attempted to free the family inside. As for whoever had been driving the Mercedes, he or she had presumably been given up for dead, along with any passengers: it had concertinaed against the rear of the truck and was virtually unrecognizable. Needless to say, the entire highway was blocked. She waited for half an hour before the flow was reestablished, during which time she saw a whole melancholy scenario played out before her like a piece of rain-sodden theater. The arrival of firetrucks and ambulances; the freeing of the family (one of whom, a child, was delivered from the wreckage dead); grief and accusations; and finally the prying apart of the truck and the Mercedes, the contents of which were thankfully concealed from her view. It was only when she was off on her way again that she turned her thoughts to the business of the following day: the search for Danny's letters. If she was lucky Garrison would go to Mass in the morning, as he sometimes did. He had his liberty to give thanks for. And while he was being a good Catholic boy she'd go up to the apartment in the Trump Tower and start her search. If she failed to find anything in the first attempt, she'd either have to wait for the following Sunday, when she could guarantee his absence, or else somehow monitor his whereabouts during the week. It would be hard to spy on the Tower without being noticed. There'd be journalists cruising around for a little while yet; and there had of course been some staff in residence, though she'd heard from somebody that two of them had left after Margie's murder and the third had been telling all kinds of tales to the gutter-press, so she'd presumably been fired.
In the end she'd just have to trust to luck, and have a good, solid excuse for her presence in the apartment if she was discovered. The fact was she felt perversely exhilarated at the thought of going into the Tower. For too long she'd been a passive object; part of the grand Geary scheme. Even her trip to Kaua'i had been initiated by somebody within the family. By helping Danny-or attempting to do so-she was defying her allotted role; and her only regret was that she'd taken so long to do it. Such were the seductions of luxury.