you. Catering to you. Flattering you. Showering you with gifts. Softening you up. Getting you ready for him. He couldn’t wait to seduce you, Viv. We knew that. Luce and I. He did it as soon as he dared. As soon as it was safe. When you were finally twenty-one. The night of your twenty-first birthday party. Jesus, he couldn’t even wait until the next day. The big seduction scene had to be that night.”
“Jack, listen to me, it wasn’t like that, honestly it wasn’t. Sebastian did not seduce me.”
Jack threw back his head and guffawed. “Trust you to always defend him. No matter what.”
“But it’s the truth,” I protested.
Shaking inside, filled with a fulminating rage, I vacated the kitchen. I left Jack sitting at the table drinking his third cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. Seemingly he had started that bad habit again.
I went into the library and, seating myself at the desk, I began to read my piece for the London Sunday Times Magazine section, trying to calm myself as I did.
And then automatically I picked up a pencil and began to edit, doing the kind of fine tuning that was important to me in my work as a journalist. I was so furious with Jack my adrenaline was pumping overtime. But my anger gave me the extra steam I needed, enabled me to push my sadness to one side, at least for the time being. Within two hours I had finished the editing job. I sat back relieved, not to mention pleased with myself.
When Belinda pushed open the door a few minutes later I was taken by surprise. She was not due for another hour and I gave her a puzzled look as I greeted her.
“I’m early because I thought you might need me for something,” she explained, walking over to my desk, sitting down in the chair next to it. “I brought all the newspapers, but I guess you’ve seen them already.”
I nodded. “Jack arrived with them three hours ago. By the way, is he still occupying my kitchen?”
“No, he’s set up camp in my office, where he’s talking on the phone, making the arrangements for the funeral and the memorial service.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I had the dreadful feeling he was going to start acting like the flake he can be at times. That he’d goof off, leave everything to me.”
“He’s speaking with the pastor of the church in Cornwall right now,” Belinda explained. “Talking about Friday for the funeral.”
“We agreed on that last night. And he wants to have the memorial next week. On Wednesday, to be exact.”
Belinda looked at me askance. “I wonder if that gives us enough time? I mean, to inform everybody.”
“Honestly, Belinda!” I shook my head, smiling faintly. “The days of the carrier pigeon and the tribal drum are long gone. They’re extinct. All we have to do is give the announcement to the television networks and newspapers. Or rather, have the Locke Foundation do it, and the whole world will know within twenty minutes, I can guarantee it.”
She had the good grace to laugh. “You’re right. I sound like an imbecile, don’t I?”
Paying no attention to this remark, I went on quickly, “There is one thing you can do for me, Belinda, and that’s field any calls from newspapers for me today. I really don’t feel like speaking to the press. I need a little quiet time by myself.” I glanced at my watch. “Lila’s supposed to come to clean today, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. But not until one. She had a dental appointment at eleven. She called me yesterday to say she might be a bit later than usual.”
“No problem.”
“About the press, Vivienne, don’t worry, I’ll deal with them. If they insist on talking to you though, at some point, shall I have them call back tomorrow?”
“Yes. No, wait a minute, I have a much better idea! If Jack’s still here, pass the press over to him. And if he’s gone back to Laurel Creek Farm, give them the phone number there. He’s as capable of dealing with them as I am.”
With these words I escaped.
Upstairs in my bedroom it was calm, tranquil, with sunlight filtering in through the many windows.
Opening the French doors I went outside onto the wide balcony, marveling at the mildness of the morning, wondering if this extraordinary Indian summer was nature’s gift to us before we were beset by the violent winter weather typical of these parts. The Litchfield hills can be harsh, storm-swept and snow-laden from December through the spring; in fact there was frequently snow on the ground as late as April.
But I would not be here in winter. I would be in France at my property in Provence. For a long time now I have lived in an old mill that Sebastian and I remodeled some years before, and it is there that I write my books, mostly biographies and other works of nonfiction.
Sebastian and I found the property the first year we were married, and because I fell madly in love with it he bought it for me as a wedding present.
The day we stumbled on it there was a piece of jagged wood nailed to the dilapidated old gate on which someone had scrawled, in black paint, Vieux Moulin—old mill—and we kept that name. A second primitive wooden board announced that the land and the mill were for sale, and it was those neglected acres of land that eventually became my beautiful gardens.
We enjoyed working on the mill together, Sebastian and I, and much of its restoration and renovation was inspired by his ideas as well as mine. Vieux Moulin and Ridgehill were my two real homes, one because it had been in my family for hundreds of years, the other because it was truly of my own creation. It didn’t take much prompting for me to become quite lyrical about them both, since they were truly special to me. I divided my time between these two old houses; the one-room studio in New York was just a pied-à-terre, a convenient place to hang my hat and my typewriter whenever I needed to be in the city for work.
When I had arrived in Connecticut in August, on my annual visit, I had intended to return to Provence at the end of October. I still planned to do so. However, there was the matter of the autopsy report; I felt I couldn’t leave without knowing the facts. On the other hand, the police would be dealing with Jack and Luciana, Sebastian’s next of kin, and not with me. There was no real reason for me to hang around, other than my own anxiousness, my desire to know the truth about his death.
I wondered what the autopsy would turn up, what the Chief Medical Examiner’s verdict would be. An involuntary shiver ran through me despite the warmth of the day, and determinedly I tried to cling to the belief that Sebastian had died of natural causes.
Pushing my troubling thoughts aside, I went and leaned against the wooden railings and glanced around. The trees in the gardens below, and sweeping down the hillsides to the waters of Lake Waramaug, seemed more brilliant than ever, fiery-bright plumage silhouetted against a clear cerulean sky. Some leaves had already started to fall earlier than usual, I noticed, and I knew that by the fifteenth of the month the branches would begin to look bare and bereft.
Bereft. That was exactly how I felt.
I wondered dismally if I were the only person mourning Sebastian. Certainly his children weren’t grieving, and who could really know what an old man like Cyrus felt. He was, after all, ninety years old and in his dotage, with one foot in the grave himself. He had survived three of his progeny; now the last one was dead. How terrible it must be to outlive your own children, to have to bury them.
For a long time Sebastian had been the only remaining offspring of Cyrus Locke. As far as we knew, he was the only one living. There was a sister who had disappeared years ago, and what had happened to her was a genuine mystery, baffling to us all. She might be dead or alive.
Sebastian was the eldest child of Cyrus by his first wife, who had not survived the