I didn’t think Geraldine had forgotten anything: the name of the charity, why her mother had objected so strongly or even how Calvin Bayard came to support Llewellyn. But for whatever reason, Geraldine thought the person she’d been in those days was dead. Her mother had triumphed-her mother’s portrait hung over her head day after day to remind her.

How had she spent her days back then, while Mrs. Drummond ran Larchmont? Maybe she’d thrown herself into motherhood and amateur dramatics, or county politics. Marriage had been supposed to settle both her and MacKenzie Graham. I remembered again the articles describing her return from Europe in the early thirties, looking “interestingly thin.” She’d slept around, gotten pregnant, gone to Switzerland for an abortion? And MacKenzie? What form had his New York City peccadilloes taken?

Even with thirteen bedrooms to wander through, how had Geraldine endured all those years with her mother and a husband with whom she had nothing in common? What had she been mourning, when she said she mourned MacKenzie’s death?

CHAPTER 42

Silence Is-?

Lotty couldn’t give me as much comfort as I wanted. Over a bowl of lentil soup, I recounted the details of my last several days, trying to puzzle out the complicated relations of New Solway.

When I finished, she asked, “Where does that Egyptian boy fit in?” “He doesn’t. Except I think he could tell me how Whitby got into the pond.” I described the layout of the Larchmont attic to her and my imagined picture of Benjamin Sadawi standing on a chair, watching for Catherine.

Lotty pushed her reading glasses up into her hair. “So you do know where he is, Victoria.”

I flushed, but nodded.

“And is that why you’re concealing his whereabouts? Because you want to get information out of him? If he’s a terrorist, you should turn him over to the authorities.”

“If I knew he was a terrorist, I’d turn him over in a heartbeat.” “And you’re the best judge of whether he is?”

I got up from the couch and walked over to the window, where I could see the lake glistening when car lights hit it. “It’s the trouble with these times, Lotty. We don’t know who to trust. But an attorney general who

thinks that calico cats are a sign of the devil doesn’t inspire me with greater confidence than I have in my own judgment.”

“Your judgment on this isn’t backed up by any experience or expertise. You’ve never worked with Arab militants, so you don’t know how or what to look for to say whether he is one or not. You certainly don’t speak Arabic, so you can’t even talk to him.”

I turned to look at her. “Lotty, do you think every Arab in this country should be interned?”

“Of course not. You know I loathe stereotyping of any kind. But this morning’s paper ran a story about the mosque this youth attends. The antiJewish rhetoric there runs high.” She sighed and looked down at her hands. “It seems to run high these days in London and Paris as well. Nothing has changed since my childhood. All over Europe and the Middle East, instead of blaming terrorists for our current woes, people are blaming the Jews. Even some poet in New Jersey is chanting that tired old litany. So I’d like to make sure this particular Arab boy doesn’t want to see me dead before I applaud you for hiding him.”