“You can’t forgive me for marrying Calvin, can you?” Renee said, amused contempt in her voice. “After all this time, you still don’t understand that he was weary of your posturing and your neediness-and your aging body; he turned to me for relief from all those things.”

Geraldine smiled. “I’m the one he calls for when he’s frightened, Renee. Not you nor Kylie nor any of the others. Your staff may think he means you when he cries `Deenie,’ but I was always Deenie to him, from the time we first tried swimming together in the Larchmont pool when we were four.”

“I’m the one who protected his reputation,” Renee snapped, her composure cracking. “I’m the one who saved him from prison, who helped build up the Bayard Foundation and the press. I’m the one who turned him into an international figure, while you sat withering, turning grayer and grayer in that mausoleum, buried alive by your mother.”

“Until Calvin’s reputation became so important to you that you killed three people to protect it,” I put in. “I’m not going to pretend to weep over Olin Taverner, but Marcus Whitby was a fine young journalist, a fine young man, while Benji Sadawi was a helpless bystander. Do you think your granddaughter will ever want to live with you again, now that she knows you killed these people? You sacrificed their lives, you sacrificed her well-being-“

“Catherine knows me. She knows I love her as deeply as I do Calvin,” Renee said.

“So she’ll stay with you because she knows you’ll kill anyone who threatens your idea of her? I don’t think so. I think nature made something finer than you or Calvin in your granddaughter. She’ll recoil from you the way she would from sewage.”

Renee smiled contemptuously. “You have no children, no home life. I doubt very much you are a judge of family relationships.”

I thought of my mother’s fierce love for me, and my father’s more level affection; the price they demanded in return was not adoration, nor achievement, but integrity. I could not lie or cheat to avoid trouble. I didn’t try to tell Renee that.

“The sad thing is that I liked you, Renee. I admired your husband to the point of hero worship, but I genuinely liked you. You have the kind of energy and competence I’ve always admired.”

She flushed and left us to go into the dining room. Catherine sat motionless on the table, like a small furry Buddha, but when Renee took her good arm and tried to move her, she jerked away and lay down next to Benji, kissing him on the lips.

I could hear the sirens from the emergency crew keening their way up the drive. A moment later, the cars poured into the yard, their strobes staining the night sky red.

CHAPTER 55

Shoot-Out at the Eagle River Corral

A cold sun hung well over Elk Horn Lake before I got into a bed. It took hours to sort things out with the local authorities. I didn’t blame themthe carnage in the house was shocking. Nor did I blame them for first wanting to haul me away-a youth lay dead in the dining room, a teenager and an old woman both had gunshot wounds and I was the one with a gun.