Keepsake (11 page)

He paused again, gazing at her with sympathy etched on his aristocratic features. “If it’s not too late, I want to offer you
now some of what you were deprived of as a child. I say this with complete sincerity. I know that the past cannot be erased,
but I would like to try to make amends in whatever way I can. And I know that this is what Sabrina would have wanted me to
do.”

He reached across the table and took one of her cold hands gently into his. “Come and work for us, April. Please. Life is
offering you an exciting new adventure. And I am asking for a chance to make up for some of my past follies before I, too,
slip into the silence of the grave.”

April felt herself wavering. He sounded very much in earnest in his regrets about the past. His eyes looked directly into
hers, and she began to have a sense of what must have so attracted her mother.

“I’ll need more time to think about it. Until yesterday such a possibility had never occurred to me. I have a business back
in Boston. What would happen to that?”

“And you have a partner, no? Surely he could run the
bookstore for a few months while you see how you like working with us.”

“It does seem unfair to Isobelle. If she expected—”

“Isobelle had always expected far too much.”

April had nothing to say to that. The family dynamics were not yet clear to her.

“Take a few days, by all means,” he said. “You have many unanswered questions, I’m sure, both about Power Perspectives and
about your mother. You didn’t know your mother well, did you?” he added in a neutral tone.

“Obviously not.”

“She was a complex woman. I loved her dearly, make no mistake about that. But she could be—” he paused as if seeking the right
word “—difficult.”

April waited. She hoped he would elaborate as he eventually had about his children, but instead of continuing, he gave another
shrug. “Perhaps the best way for you to get to know her is to have a look at the place where she lived. I will give you the
key to Sabrina’s apartment. It was her private sanctuary, and has been left entirely as it was when she was using it.”

April raised her eyebrows. “I thought—you mean she didn’t live with you?”

Armand smiled and shook his head. “No, I see I have not made myself clear. Sabrina lived with me, of course, but she also
maintained a place of her own. A small apartment on the Upper West Side. It was initially the headquarters of Power Perspectives,
until the Foundation grew so large that she had to acquire professional office space. Sabrina kept the apartment to use as
her office space, where she could be alone to think, to plan, to meditate.” He opened his hands. “She used to describe it
as a room of her own.”

“Important to every woman,” April said with a smile.

“Yes, so every woman tells me. I could show you
around, but perhaps a better idea might be simply to give you the key. You see, it was her private place. It is alien to me,
in a way. I’ve been over there of course to go through her papers and sort out her affairs, but otherwise I’ve left everything
the way she kept it.”

She presumed he was referring to the co-op apartment that the attorney had mentioned—the one which was actually owned by Power
Perspectives and part of Rina’s legacy to her. Had it been ethical of Armand to go through the papers and other personal items
contained in the apartment? she wondered. As her husband, he may have felt that he had the right to do so. Given what had
happened, the police had probably been through the place, too.

“I’d very much like to see it,” she said.

“Would you like to go now? Tonight? Do you think it might help you make up your mind about Power Perspectives?”

She told him yes. Anything that would give her more insight into her mother would help her make up her mind.

“I’ll have my driver drop you off there as soon as we finish our coffee.” Armand reached into his pocket and removed a set
of keys. “This, I believe, will open both the inside and the outside doors. There is a doorman. I’ll phone over to him so
he will be expecting you.”

“Thanks,” she said as he put the brass keys into her hand.

“Please spend as long a time there as you desire. After all, technically, the apartment is yours now. And remember, if you
come to work for us, you’ll need a place to live.”

How odd, thought April. It was as if she were taking over her mother’s life—first her job and now her apartment.

Just as long as you don’t die the way she did.

“I hate my father,” Kate de Sevigny muttered to herself as she rode up in the elevator of the apartment building where Gran
used to live. She’d been repeating the words like a litany ever since fleeing her own home where she lived with her father
and catching a cab. The driver had looked at her funny until she’d pulled a fistful of cash out of the pocket of her jeans,
then he’d hopped to it fast enough.

“He’s such a fuck-up,” she added as she got off the elevator on the tenth floor and hurried down the corridor to Gran’s door.
Well. What used to be Gran’s door.

I miss you, Gran! she thought.

It was almost 10:00 at night, and Dad would take a hissy when he got home and found her gone. Good. She hoped he got really
worried. She hoped he called all the hospitals and funeral homes. She hoped every cop in the city started looking for a skinny
seventh-grader with yucky brown hair who hated her dad.

’Cause they weren’t gonna find her.

Once inside the apartment, Kate headed for the spare room that Gran had always let her use when she visited. She dumped her
backpack there, then went next door to Gran’s room to see what they’d done to it.

They’d been through it—that was much evident as soon as she looked around. Gran had been very particular about where she kept
her things. Looked like they had all been moved.

What losers, she thought. Couldn’t they just leave her stuff alone?

During the last couple of years since Gran had been spending so much time in New York, this place had been Kate’s refuge.
She’d even skip school sometimes to come and visit Gran. And the best part of it was that nobody knew. Dad didn’t like Gran
much. He always said nasty things about her behind her back. She suspected that Gran wasn’t too wild about Dad, either, although
she was careful not to say so. But she listened sympathetically whenever Kate poured out her misery and unhappiness.

Gran had been such a good listener.

It wasn’t fair that she was dead!

Not that things were ever fair. She’d learned that two years ago when Mom had been killed in that car wreck. Before that she’d
never even known that people you knew and loved could die. And now it was pretty clear when you looked around at all the lousy
things that happened in the world that fairness had not been too high on God’s great list of benefits to humankind. Assuming
there was a God, which Kate wasn’t so sure about.

But Gran’s death hadn’t been some awful random accident. She’d been murdered. Shot, just like on TV. Dad had said that a professional
hit man had shot her, probably somebody who’d been paid to do it, although nobody
knew by whom or why and so far the cops hadn’t done much to solve it. They probably never would. Someone had killed Gran,
and it looked like they were going to get away with it.

Well, not if I have anything to do with it, Kate thought.

Kate returned to the guest room and curled up on the bed. She pulled the familiar comforter around her. From her backpack
she pulled out the laptop computer that had belonged to Gran and switched it on. Maybe if she wrote for a while, she’d be
able to see things more clearly.

“The Mystery of the Murdered Grandmother,” she typed at the top of a brand-new file. She looked at it then shook her head.
Made you think of an old white-haired lady clubbed by a teenage gang while she was doing her knitting. Gran was a grandmother,
but she hadn’t looked like one.

She deleted the line. “Murder at the Podium,” she typed instead. Now that sounded much better. Kate had learned the details
of the shooting by questioning Delores, Gran’s secretary, who had tearfully spit them out after much prodding. While they
had seemed to disgust Delores, Kate had been insistent about knowing such things as the kind of gun that had been used (Delores
had had no idea) and the appearance of the wound in Gran’s head (Delores had scolded Kate for asking—apparently twelve-year-old
girls weren’t supposed to want information about such things).

Kate wanted information about everything. She wanted the entire world to be open to her. Most of what she wanted to learn
was the good stuff, like all the wonderful art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and all the great literature in the New York
City Public Library—both of which she haunted on a regular basis. But she also wanted to know that bad stuff as well. She
wanted to understand
human nature. You couldn’t be a great writer if you didn’t know what would make your characters tick.

And more than anything, Kate wanted to be a writer. She didn’t know if she could be a great one, but she certainly intended
to try.

All writers should keep a journal, Gran had said. A few days later she had solemnly presented Kate with a leather-bound book
inscribed on the front with her full name— Katerine Marie-Claudine de Sevigny. The book was beautiful, but she hated the name
almost as much as she hated the father who had stuck her with it. The other kids made fun of her. “You gotta be some kinda
weirdo or lesbo with a name like that,” Barney Chassen had taunted her last year.

Kate had attacked Barney Chassen and made him pay for this insult with her fists. Last year she could have beaten up most
of the boys in the sixth grade. Only a couple of them had been as tall as she was and none was as scrappy. This year, though,
well, secondary school was more dignified. You didn’t go around beating up boys the way you had in grammar school, no matter
how much you wanted to. You had to try to be a little more mature.

She hated being mature, though. She’d started getting her period six months ago and it was awful. All that blood and you never
knew when it would hit. It was disgusting, really. God must have made a big mistake when he’d invented women’s reproductive
systems.

Which proved God—if he existed—was a male. If She were a female, She’d have come up with a system that didn’t require one
week per month of those disgusting sanitary pads.

Yawning hugely, Kate focused once again on the small screen of the laptop. She’d been trying to keep a journal, but she’d
been writing it here instead of in the book Gran
had given her. It was so much faster to write on a computer, and she’d always thought the laptop was a pretty neat one. She
didn’t think Gran would mind that she wasn’t using the official journal, but had instead appropriated her computer.

Kate was going to be a writer when she grew up, but in order to be one she’d better get cracking. No one ever got to be a
writer by staring at a blank page and daydreaming about other things.

She was going to write a novel about what had happened to Gran. Of course she’d change the names and everything. But the big
difference would be that in her novel, the crime would get solved. She’d make the police smarter and more dedicated than they
were in real life. The chief investigator on the case would be a woman, of course. She’d have the usual trouble getting respect
from the male chauvinists she worked with, but eventually her brains and her courage and her determination would impress them
and they’d give her their respect and affection. Together she and her men would examine all the clues and unmask the killer.
Justice would prevail.

“Murder at the Podium.” Good title. She set aside the laptop and curled up on the bed to think about what would happen in
the first chapter. It would be similar to what had happened in real life.

As she drifted into sleep, Kate thought of how she was going to solve the murder and capture the killer, all by herself.

Daddy would be proud of her then.

Having seen the de Sevigny residence on Park Avenue, April was somewhat surprised when Armand’s driver dropped her off at
the high-rise on West Sixty-Second Street opposite Lincoln Center shortly before eleven o’clock. Several yuppie residents
who appeared to be her
own age and younger were congregated in the downstairs lobby, suggesting not Old World wealth and manners, but the high energy
of a fast-paced contemporary lifestyle.

She identified herself to the doorman and was waved unceremoniously towards the elevators. “Tenth floor,” he told her, and
she noticed as she entered the elevator that there were twenty-eight floors. Rina’s apartment was clearly not the penthouse.

She found the right door at the end of a hallway and used the key Armand had given her to unlock it. She entered a modern
apartment, spacious and airy. To the left was a large L-shaped living room, furnished with two modern, low-slung but cozy-looking
sofas covered in soft green. The oriental rug was ivory with vines and tendrils that were subtly picked up in the wall paper.
There were several large plants that gave the room a refined jungle atmosphere.

Through a large picture window in the living room, April could see the lights of the Metropolitan Opera House and, in the
distance beyond them, the shore of New Jersey across the black waters of the Hudson River.

April glanced at the curtains, wondering how often Rina changed them. She remembered the various tiny “housekeeping cottages”
and one-room apartments where they’d lived together, the dancing new curtains revealing each change in Rina’s love life. Had
she stopped taking new lovers when she’d married Armand? He was a charming, dynamic man. Thirty years ago he must have been
an extremely handsome and sexy man as well. Had he been enough for her or had she never abandoned her freewheeling ways?

If she had been unfaithful, could this have been a motive for her murder? She’d taken her own separate apartment, a room of
her own. Did that suggest that she’d needed a place to meet a lover?