I stayed with Geraldine for an hour, rehashing the case, her life, Darraugh’s life. She had finally told him this week that Calvin was (probably) his father. That explained why Darraugh had invited Catherine to live with him, I supposed-the startling realization that she was his niece. How did it feel to know Edwards Bayard was his brother, I wondered.

“It upset Darraugh, of course,” Geraldine was saying in her high, tremulous voice. “He loved MacKenzie. I told Darraugh it didn’t matter, that he did right to love MacKenzie as a father: MacKenzie was the man who stood beside Darraugh’s nursery bed when he had chicken pox. MacKenzie, not the nurse, certainly not 1, bathed his face to keep him from scratching the pustules. MacKenzie read Darraugh nursery rhymes and put him up on his first pony. MacKenzie did all those things a father does. And some that a mother who wasn’t fleeing the torments of her home might have done.”

“Darraugh should tell his son, his own MacKenzie,” I said. “You guys live such an incestuous life out here-it would never do for young MacKenzie to fall in love with Catherine Bayard”

She looked at me with a momentary return of hauteur, then relaxed and said she would suggest it to him. “What is happening with Renee? They have not yet arrested her.”

I grimaced. “I don’t know if they ever will. The evidence is there, but

it’s all circumstantial, in a way. So what that her prints are on Theresa Jakes’s phenobarb bottle-why shouldn’t Renee have picked it up, wondering what medication her husband’s nurse was taking? And the rest of it-the cab she took from the corner near Marcus Whitby’s house, the valet at the golf club who saw her climb into a golf cart and ride off, she’s taking a firm hand with that and claiming they must be mistaken. The police tread warily when it comes to arresting people from places like New Solway.”

She caught the bitterness in my tone. “Don’t make that the only way you think of us, Victoria. We do some good as well. Without us, there wouldn’t be money for symphonies and theaters, after all.”

I rubbed my fingers wearily through my hair. “I don’t think there’s a ledger of good and evil, this much good offsets that much evil. It’s just; oh, you know, there was that popular book a few years back, when bad things happen to good people, or whatever it was? That’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, to keep all us working stiffs from rising up in fury at the inequities in the world. No one ever writes about all the good things that happen to bad people, how the rich and powerful walk away from the messes they make, and people like me, like my neighbor, like my parents, pay for the clean up.

“I get tired of it. I’ve been pampering a confused rich girl all week. I like Catherine, but she put Benji at risk when she ran off with him. She can take time off from school to focus her life, while Benji’s mother and sisters can’t even come to America to mourn at his grave, and who knows what they’ll live on.”