Krause had the copy of Lansing’s landscape design on her desk. “The question is, did he submit it after Susan’s body was buried on the site. If so, he signed his own death warrant.”

She looked at her watch. “You’d better be on your way. Lansing’s funeral is at eleven o’clock. Keep your eyes open to see who’s there.”

41

I arranged to have my father’s funeral Mass in the church nearest to MaryRest Cemetery where my mother is buried. It’s in Mahwah, a town about twenty minutes northwest of Englewood. I had hoped to keep the time and place of the Mass and funeral private, but when we arrived at the church, the photographers were there in force.

Maggie and I had been picked up by the driver from the funeral home. On the way down the aisle, I saw familiar faces: Vincent Slater, Elaine, Richard Walker, the Barrs. I knew they were planning to be there, but I didn’t want to arrive in a group with them. I was not part of their world when my father died. For these last hours I wanted to separate myself from them. I wanted to keep my father to myself.

In my grief I even felt isolated from Maggie. I knew she had loved my father, and had been very happy when he and my mother were married. I believe that after my mother’s death, Maggie had encouraged Daddy to date other women, but knowing her, I am sure she was secretly pleased that he could not or would not do it.

On the other hand, Maggie had always bad-mouthed Daddy to me about his drinking, although I think she exaggerated those stories to help make sense of his disappearance.

The church was sparsely filled, mostly with Maggie’s friends, so I knew she hadn’t been able to keep her promise not to tell where the funeral would be held. But then I saw the tears in her eyes and my heart ached for her. She had told me once that she never attended a funeral without reliving the grief of my mother’s death.

I sat in the front pew of the church, inches from the coffin, my fingers touching the pendant that until now had been on Daddy’s body all these years. I kept thinking over and over again, I should have known he couldn’t have killed himself. He never would have forsaken me.

Maggie began to cry when the soloist sang, “Ave Maria,” just as it had been sung at my mother’s Mass.

“Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria.” How many times over the years had I heard that song? I wondered. I heard that song before. As the last beautiful notes faded into silence, for some reason, I began to think about that episode years ago in the chapel at the mansion. Could the scene between the man and woman possibly have had more significance than I had realized?

The thought passed through my mind, then was gone. The Mass ended. I followed Daddy’s coffin down the aisle.

Once outside the church, the media closed around me. One of the reporters asked, “Mrs. Carrington, does it bother you that your husband can’t be with you on this difficult day in your life?”

I looked straight into the camera. I knew Peter would have the television on just in case the media did cover the funeral. “My husband, as you must be aware, is not permitted to leave our property. He is innocent of the death of Susan Althorp, innocent of the death of his first wife, innocent of the death of my father. I challenge Barbara Krause, the Prosecutor of Bergen County, to remember the legal and moral principle that in this country, a person is still presumed innocent until found guilty. Ms. Krause, presume my husband is innocent of any crime, then take a fresh look at the facts of these three deaths. I assure you, I intend to do just that myself.”

That night, when we went to bed, Peter wept as I held him in my arms. “I don’t deserve you, Kay,” he whispered. “I don’t deserve you.”

Three hours later, I woke up. Peter was no longer in bed. With a terrible sense of foreboding, I ran through the parlor into the other bedroom. He wasn’t there, either. Then from the driveway I heard the sound of screeching tires. I rushed to the window in time to see Peter’s Ferrari racing toward the gate.

Fifteen minutes later, squad cars, alerted by the Global Monitor System that tracked his electronic bracelet, converged on him as he knelt on the frozen lawn of the Althorp residence. When a cop tried to arrest him, Peter jumped up and punched him in the face.

“He was sleepwalking,” I told Conner Banks later that morning at Peter’s arraignment. “He never would have left the grounds otherwise.”

Once more Peter was brought into court wearing an orange prison suit. This time, in addition to the handcuffs, there were shackles on his ankles. I listened numbly as the new charges were read: Bail jumping…assault on an officer…proven risk of flight.”

The judge did not take long in coming to a decision. The twenty-million-dollar bail was forfeited. Peter would remain in custody.

“He’s a sleepwalker,” I insisted to Banks and Markinson. “He’s a sleepwalker.”

“Keep your voice down, Kay,” Banks urged. “Sleepwalking in this country is no defense. As a matter of fact, there are two guys in this country who are currently serving life sentences because they killed someone while they were sleepwalking.”

42

The shocking tape the police had made of Peter Carrington kneeling on the lawn of the Althorp home, and then attacking the police officer who reached him first, made Nicholas Greco wonder if there was any point in keeping his appointment with Nancy and Jeffrey Hammond, the couple who had been guests at dinner the night Grace Carrington drowned.

Explaining that they had been away, visiting relatives in California, Nancy Hammond called when she heard Greco’s message on the answering machine and invited him to stop in.

The couple lived on a pleasant street in Englewood, where most of the houses were older and had wide porches and shutters, the kind of houses that had been built in the late nineteenth century. Greco climbed the five steps from the sidewalk and rang the doorbell.

Nancy Hammond answered the door, introduced herself, and invited him in. She was a small woman who appeared to be in her early forties, with silver hair that becomingly framed and softened her sharp-featured face.

“Jeff just got home a minute ago,” she said. “He’ll be right down. Oh, here he is,” she added.

Jeffrey Hammond was on his way down from the second floor. “That’s the way my wife introduces me?” he said with raised eyebrows. “ ‘Here he is’?”

Greco’s immediate impression was of a tallish man in his late forties who reminded him of the astronaut John Glenn. Like Glenn, he had smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was balding, and made no attempt to disguise the fact. A particular peeve of Greco’s was to see men not coming to grips with the inevitability of their DNA structure. He could spot a hairpiece a mile away, and even worse in his eyes was to see a man with a comb-over, long strands of hair combed over a shiny pate.

Greco had done a thorough profile on the couple ahead of time, and found the background to be about what he would expect of friends of Grace Carrington. Good solid family on either side: Her father had been a state senator; his great-grandfather, a presidential cabinet member. Both were well educated, and they had a sixteen-year-old son who was presently in boarding school. Jeffrey Hammond was employed as a fund-raiser for a foundation. Nancy Hammond worked part-time at the local congressman’s office in some kind of administrative capacity.

He had explained in both the message he left and in his telephone conversation why he wanted to talk to them. As he followed them into the living room, he absorbed the details of their surroundings. One of them was obviously a musician. A grand piano with books of sheet music dominated the room. Family pictures covered the surface of the piano. The coffee table had copies of magazines, neatly stacked: National Geographic, Time, Newsweek. Greco could see that the magazines looked as though they’d been read. The couch and chairs were of good quality, but in need of reupholstering.