59

I despised Elaine for her trickery, but in an odd way, it was also a relief that I was not in possession of the infamous shirt. Even though she was blackmailing us, she also was postponing a moral dilemma for me. As Peter’s wife, by law, I did not have to testify against him. To actively withhold or destroy evidence was, however, something else again. But now, I told myself, I was not withholding evidence because I did not possess it.

The media had a field day after the bail hearing. The cover of one of the tabloids had a picture of Peter standing before the judge, his back to the camera. The judge was looking down. The headline was, ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. IS THE JUDGE ASLEEP, TOO? A cartoon in another newspaper depicted Peter with electrodes hanging from his forehead, a breathing tube over his shoulder, and a hatchet in his hand that he was aiming at a door.

I didn’t know what access Peter had to the newspapers and didn’t ask him. On my next visit, I did question him about the dream he had at the sleep center, when he tried to open the door because he wanted to go to the Althorp home again. “Do you think there was a possibility that you actually saw Gary hanging around Susan’s house the night she disappeared?” I asked him.

“Absolutely not, Kay! If I had, I wouldn’t have let him come within a mile of you!”

Of course he wouldn’t. He was convinced it was just a confusing twist to his dream-but I was not.

Our visits were so painful: We looked at each other through a Plexiglas panel and spoke by telephone. He could sit down with his lawyers at a conference table but was not allowed to touch me. I longed to put my arms around him, to feel the strength of his arms around me. It wasn’t going to happen.

Conner Banks’s suggestion that Peter married me because of what I had heard in the chapel was always in the back of my mind. Then, when I saw the way Peter looked at me, the way his face lit up at his first glimpse of me, I was again certain that he loved me and had loved me from the beginning.

But a few hours later, when I was by myself at home, it did not seem impossible that he and Susan might have been quarreling about money in the chapel that afternoon. Peter was in college at that time. What kind of allowance did he get from a father who was a notorious skinflint? If Susan had something on him, was he driven to desperation-perhaps by fear of his father-to keep her quiet?

These questions haunted me, but when visiting day finally came around again, I felt wretched for ever doubting him.

A dozen times during the weeks after the hearing, I took Nicholas Greco’s card from my desk and considered calling him. I had this crazy feeling that somehow he could help Peter. But each time I would remind myself that Peter might not have been indicted had Greco not tracked down Maria Valdez, and I always put the card back in the drawer, and slammed the drawer shut.

We were enjoying a mild February, and I started jogging again, running every morning around the estate. I often stopped at the place where they had found my father’s remains. This grave seemed more real to me than the one he now shares with my mother in MaryRest Cemetery. The police had dug at least ten feet in every direction around the spot where the dogs had started their frantic barking. That area had been filled in now, but it still stood out from the dormant grass around it, and I knew the dirt would start to sink when the spring thaw began.

I decided I wanted to plant rosebushes here, but then I realized I was too new in my position as Mrs. Peter Carrington to know who attended to the landscaping.

Sometimes I would stand at the fence and look out at the area where Susan’s body had been found. I would try to imagine the twenty-year-old Peter thinking that it was safe to put her body there, because the cadaver dogs had already been through the estate. I even called Public Service Electric & Gas Company. One of their employees told me that there was a gas line near the curb of our property beyond the fence, and that PSE &G had a perpetual easement to service or replace the line. He told me that normally they would never have any need to disturb the ground nearly fifty feet from the curb.

“When there’s a suspected leak, we move right in without notification,” he said. “The day the Althorp girl’s body was found, an odor of gas had been reported, and our people went right over. Our detectors bored test holes much closer to your fence than they might ever do again, he told me.

Which might answer why, even if he were guilty, Peter had not looked particularly upset when he saw the emergency crew digging near the curb.

I thought back to what I knew about that night. Elaine claimed she had seen Peter come in at two A.M. There is no question that he drove Susan home at midnight. Would she have had the nerve to sneak out immediately, or would she wait twenty minutes or half an hour to be sure one of her parents didn’t look in on her? I asked myself. And where between twelve thirty and two o’clock in the morning-whether in a sleepwalking state or not-would Peter have managed to hide Susan’s body?

And if he did do that, then someone had to have been helping him. My suspicion that Gary Barr was involved in all this was becoming stronger and stronger. It would explain why lately Gary had been acting so nervous, and had been trying to eavesdrop. He must be terribly worried that if, out of loyalty, he tried to help Peter, he might still be charged with being an accessory to murder.

Conner Banks gave me a copy of a tape from The Learning Channel showing reenactments of crimes committed in the United States by two men who were sleepwalking at the time. Both are serving life sentences. The same tape shows reenactments of a homicide and an aggravated assault committed by two men in Canada under the same circumstances. They were both acquitted. Watching the tape, I was heartsick. Two of the men had been bewildered when they were woken by the police, and had no memory of what had happened. The other awoke in his car, and drove to the police station himself because he was covered with blood.

One way that I occupied myself-and it was something that I did enjoy-was to make some changes around the mansion. From what Peter had told me, Grace hadn’t done anything much to the mansion, but had completely redecorated the Fifth Avenue apartment. I’d only been at the apartment a few times during those weeks between the literacy reception and our wedding. Now, I had no desire to go there without Peter. It’s silly, but I would have felt like an intruder. If Peter was sent to prison, I knew that a major decision would have to be made about all the property.

In the meantime, however, I began to make some small changes in this home-my home, I reminded myself. I had Gary bring down the crate of Limoges china that I had told Peter about. Jane washed and I dried the plates and cups and saucers and all the wonderful extra dishes that were used at lavish dinner parties in the late nineteenth century. “You don’t see anything like this anymore, Mrs. Carrington,” Jane marveled.

There was a magnificent eighteenth-century breakfront in the formal dining room. We displayed the Limoges there, and packed away the china that Elaine had chosen. Good riddance, I thought.

In one room on the third floor, I found a heavy chest filled with blackened antique table silver. When Jane and Gary had polished it, we found that all the pieces were monogrammed. “Whose initials are ASC?” I asked Peter during one of my visits.

“ASC? That’s probably my great-great-, whatever she is, grandmother. Her name was Adelaide Stuart when she married my great-great-, whatever, grandfather in 1820. I remember my mother telling me that Adelaide claimed some remote relationship to King Charles, and never let my paternal ancestor forget that she was a cut above him socially. She was the one behind moving the mansion from Wales.”