In-Laws and Outlaws (12 page)

Oscar took a swallow of his drink before he answered. “He's going through a bad patch right now. Keeps to himself a lot. Sits in that house or takes long walks alone. Ellie's been trying to bring him out of himself a little, but I tell her it's something he's got to work through alone.”

“Connie says he and Annette decided on a divorce the same weekend Raymond died.”

He frowned. “I don't think so. Seems to me they'd already made up their minds before that.”

“Before you all came to the Vineyard for that big family conference? When Raymond died?”

The only light on the deck came from inside the house, but I could make out Oscar looking at me quizzically. “You know about that conference?”

“Only that there was one. Raymond got here first and all the rest of you followed him. You even left work unfinished in Washington to come.”

“Connie told you all that?”

I nodded. “What was the conference about, Oscar?”

He swallowed the rest of his drink. “Some unsettled family business.”

“Such as who had been killing the kids in the family?”

I could feel his shock there in the semi-darkness. “Where did you get an idea like that?” he finally said.

“Raymond found out something, didn't he?” I persisted. “He thought he knew who the killer was. That's why he called the conference. And that's why
he
was killed, because he knew.”

Oscar let out a low moan. “Gillian, Gillian—I'm afraid you've been jumping to conclusions. In the first place, Raymond didn't call that conference. I did.”

“
You
did?”

“I did.” He paused, getting his thoughts in order. “Look, I don't want you to repeat any of this until I say so. Will you give me your word?”

“Of course.”

“I'm getting ready to run for the Senate.” He waited while I caught my breath—
Senator
Ferguson! I wasn't really surprised, though; it was a logical progression. I offered my congratulations.

Oscar accepted them as his due and went on, “Obviously I need a larger voting base than just my Congressional district, so for the past few years we've all been working toward lining up additional support. I called the conference because that week I'd just won the endorsement of a labor bloc that could put me over the top. It seemed like the right time to declare my candidacy—that's what the conference was about.”

I could understand why the Deckers wanted a Senator in the family; they'd probably started planning for this eighteen or twenty years ago, when Elinor and Oscar were first married. “What did you decide?”

“We didn't. Raymond was killed before we could reach a decision, and everything else had to take a back seat to that. Then I had to return to Washington immediately, to finish up some business before Congress adjourned.”

“I don't mean to be nosy, Oscar, but since you were going to adjourn so soon—why not just wait until then to call a family conference? Why
that
weekend?”

“Ah, that was the whole point. I wanted to be able to go back and announce my candidacy privately to certain key people in Washington while we were all still there together. It wasn't essential to do it that way, but it would have made a good dramatic move. Alas, it was not to be.”

I got up from where I was sitting and moved over to lean against the deck railing. It was beginning to get chilly; I wished I'd brought a sweater. “Okay, I was wrong about the family conference. But I could be right about why Raymond was killed, couldn't I? Connie said he'd been nervous and jumpy right before he died. That sounds to me as if he'd come across something incriminating and then was killed for it. Surely you must have wondered about that?”

Oscar joined me at the railing. “We considered it, but no one could really believe it. If Raymond had found out something, he would have told us. Immediately. Why would he keep a thing like that to himself?”

I could think of one reason, but it sickened me so much I couldn't bring myself to say it. Instead, I told him I'd read the private investigators' reports Rob Kurland had shown me and asked if they'd come up with anything about Raymond's death since then.

The answer was no. “They're floundering, just like the rest of us. Nobody saw anything or heard anything. We're a little off the beaten path out here, you know. The only people the detectives could question are members of the family—we have no other near neighbors here.”

“So it's a washout.”

“Looks like it.”

We were both silent for a moment or two, and then I mentioned the photograph of the four youngsters Connie had given me. “Lynn was a lovely young girl, Oscar. What a terrible waste.”

“Waste isn't the word for it. There
isn't
a word for it.” His face was in shadow, but I could imagine his expression. “Did you know she campaigned for me the last time I was up for re-election? She was only sixteen then, but that slip of a girl would stand up and face those huge audiences—and they weren't always friendly ones, let me tell you—but face them she did. And most of the time made them listen to her. She had a lot of courage, my daughter did.”

I wished I could have seen that—coltish young Lynn facing down a crowd of skeptical voters. “Did she like campaigning?”

“She loved it, Gillian—absolutely loved it. I've never seen anyone take to politics as quickly as Lynn did. She was a natural.”

I interpreted that to mean Lynn was being groomed to take her father's place as the family's link with Washington. But now that plan was scotched, just like the plan to make Bobby Kurland a venture capitalist and Ike Henry a research scientist.

“Ellie was over forty when Lynn was born,” Oscar murmured, more to himself than to me. “No more children, for any of us. It's all for Joel now.” He looked at me sadly. “It's too bad you and Stuart didn't have kids.”

“That's what I told her once,” Elinor said from the sliding doors that led to the deck. “Remember that, Gillian? You got a little annoyed with me, as I recall.”

“Did I? I don't remember.” She came over and joined us at the railing. “Where's Connie?”

“Connie's in one of the bedrooms having a good cry. I just told her we'd hired private investigators to look into the deaths in the family.”

At last! “And it upset her.”

“Well, it's a relief too, you know. It means the family agrees with her and that something's being done. At the same time it's stirred up a lot of anxieties that I think were better left alone.”

“That sounds as if you didn't want her to know about the detectives.”

Elinor sighed. “No, she has a right to know. And when the girls asked me to tell her, I couldn't very well refuse.” The “girls”—forty-five-year-old Annette and Michelle. “She'll be down in a few minutes. She just needs a little time to compose herself.”

“Er, do I know about the detectives?” I asked.

“I'm supposed to be telling you now,” Elinor said with a smile in her voice. “I'm sorry you've been forced to dissemble like this, Gillian, but there's no longer any need for pretense. And you seem to have gotten stuck with babysitting Connie—we do apologize for that.”

“Oh, I don't mind. Connie just needs a semi-outsider to talk to once in a while.”

There was a pause, and then Oscar asked, “Are you? Still a semi-outsider? Or are you back for good?”

I was startled; the idea had never occurred to me. As gently as I could, I told them I was staying only until Connie was back on her feet, and then I'd be returning to Chicago.

Connie was in a state of exhilaration by the time we got home. “They believe me, Gillian! For once they all believe me!” Her eyes were glistening and she moved in quick, nervous gestures.

I didn't like it; she was starting to behave the same way as when I first arrived. “Don't count on too much. They haven't turned up anything, you know.”

I might as well not have spoken. “They never listen to me … but this time, this time I'm right! They think Raymond was murdered! I knew it! I knew it!”

“Connie, settle down—there's something I want to ask you about.” With an effort she calmed herself. “You told me Raymond came down here that weekend because he was edgy and keyed up and just wanted to get away from the city for a while.”

“That's right. What about it?”

“That wasn't the reason, Connie. He came down for a family conference. Oscar called it. That's why they were all down here so early in the year.”

She stared at me blankly. “It couldn't be. No one told me there was a conference.”

Oh Connie, Connie! “Probably because it was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” I said in a lame attempt at being tactful. “Do you remember what Raymond told you? His exact words?”

She frowned, prettily. “He said he was going to come down with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies if he didn't get out of Boston for a few days. I remember that. He didn't say a word about any family conference.”

“You're sure?”

“Positive.”

“Well, maybe Oscar decided to call the conference after Raymond was already here,” I said. “That would account for it.” We were in my bedroom and I was tired; it had been a long day. The bed looked inviting, but Connie wasn't ready to go yet.

“It still doesn't explain why I wasn't informed,” she pouted. “They don't ask my opinion at these meetings, but they never shut me out. All they had to do was pick up a phone.”

“You were going down the next day anyway, weren't you? Didn't you tell me you had some errands to run in Boston?”

“Actually, they were Aunt Elinor's errands. She asked me to pick up a couple of proposals from groups that were petitioning the foundation for grants of one sort or another. Aunt Elinor said she wanted to look them over during the weekend. What was the conference about, do you know?”

“Oscar thinks it's time to declare his candidacy for the Senate.”

Her face lit up in pure pleasure. “Oh, I'm so glad! It's time, is it? Good, good. I always felt so bad about that other time.”

“What other time?”

She threw me a quizzical look. “That's right—you wouldn't know about that. Oscar was all set to go once before, but then … well, that's when Theo was killed. Raymond told me later that the family decided not to go ahead.”

Later
. When she was out of the hospital. “Did he tell you why?”

“He said because there were sure to be people who'd accuse Oscar of capitalizing on a family tragedy. To get the sympathy vote.” Then something happened to her face; she looked as if she were in pain.

“What is it? Connie?”

She swallowed and said, “I just remembered something else he said. Raymond said he thought the rest of the family was naive to assume there'd
be
a sympathy vote to quarrel over. He said the more common reaction would be one of, oh, some German word—he meant people would get pleasure out of our misfortune.”

“Schadenfreude?
”

“Sounds like it. Isn't that terrible? Just because we're Deckers?”

“Yes, that is terrible.”

“He must have been wrong. People aren't that mean-spirited, are they?”

“No, of course not.” I thought Raymond was probably right, but there was no need to say so; Connie'd just start getting agitated again. At the same time I was a bit amused with myself, with how easily I'd fallen into the usual family pattern of
soothing Connie
. She'd been cast—or had cast herself—in the role of the perennial child that must always be protected.

Eventually she went to her own room and I was able to get to bed. But as so often happens when you're dead tired, your mind just won't shut up and let your body get the sleep it needs. I was still learning things about “my” family, such as Theo's untimely and grisly death thwarting Oscar's first attempt at running for the Senate. But what was nagging at me the most was Connie's being shut out of the family conference.

I'd been to several of those conferences back when Stuart was still alive, and Connie had never been excluded from them; the family was just too courteous for that. She never contributed anything, but she was always
there
. But it certainly did look as if they hadn't wanted her on the Vineyard for that last conference. So had Oscar lied to me about calling the conference himself, ostensibly to determine the next step in his political career? Raymond had lied about why he was going, and Elinor had invented an excuse to keep Connie in Boston one more day. They didn't want her there.

Raymond had figured out who was doing the killing and—if Oscar was telling the truth about that—had kept the knowledge to himself. But if Raymond had found out who was behind it, why hadn't he said so? The only answer could be that he'd been protecting someone, trying to work out a solution that would put an end to the killings without exposing the killer. He wouldn't do that for a business rival. As much as it sickened me to think it, that meant the killer had to be a member of the family.

Only one member of the family had been deliberately excluded from that last conference. Perhaps Raymond had asked Elinor to find something that would keep Connie in Boston while the rest of them were meeting on Martha's Vineyard. Why? The answer seemed obvious. Because Connie was the one he was protecting.

Connie?

The idea was so stupid I laughed out loud. Connie Poor-Little-Me Decker, actually undertaking something as complex and daring as a series of murders! One thing I do know something about is acting, and I knew Connie was not
acting
the role of a passive, do-less woman. She could no more undertake the committing of murder than she could swim from Boston to Miami. She wouldn't kill, not because of her moral standards (which I presumed were as high as anybody else's), but simply because she'd never be able to handle the detail work. All those things to think of, and plan out ahead of time, and keep straight once they were planned, and then actually
do
? Not our Connie; not in a million years.