The Forty-Year Grudge

Chapter One

No Thank You

When an invitation to attend a reunion of the Sarah Lawrence chapter of the Sigma Delta Tau sorority arrived in the mail, Aubrey Merritt, the nationally renowned private investigator, ran her eyes over it briefly and dropped it in the wastebasket.

"At least think about it," I urged.

She noticed me standing on the other side of her desk. "For god's sake, Blunt, what are you going on about now?"

"At least think about it," I repeated firmly. "You must have some old friends you'd enjoy seeing." I wasn't sure my boss did have any old friends. I hadn't met any of her friends, heard her talk about friends, or seen any sign of friends in the ten months I'd been working as her assistant. That was a problem, as I saw it. Her solitary life was likely one of the causes of her frequent crotchety moods, and as I reliably received the brunt of those moods, I was eager to find ways to ameliorate them.

She cocked her head at me quizzically. If I hadn't known her better, I would have thought the expression adorably puppylike. But she was never adorable. Her voice dripped with disdain when she said, "Are you seriously suggesting that I spend a weekend socializing with a gaggle of women I haven't seen in more than forty years? Who I didn't like much at the time and barely remember now? Why on earth would I do that? And why are you so eager to push it on me?"

"I'm worried about you," I said staunchly. "You've got circles under your eyes, and you're an absolute bear to be around, even more than usual. Gilby says you're not eating much-"

"Oh, so the two of you have been whispering about me, is that right?"

Gilbert Dixon was her cook, housekeeper, and occasional assistant sleuth. A big, fearsome-looking man with a big, fearsome-looking dog, he was as sweet a person as I'd ever met. We often hunkered together in the kitchen of the elegant Gramercy Park mansion where Merritt lived and we all worked, comparing notes on our employer. Both of us wanted to change her and knew we never could.

"Whispering, no. Talking, yes," I said. "You've spent the last week holed up in this office, getting surlier by the day. Gilby and I agree that you ought to be using this rare lull in our workflow as an opportunity to relax and unwind. Practice self-care. Get out and see people. Go to a play or the Met, take a yoga or Pilates class-anything to get your mind off crime and murder, and all the dark, depressing things you're usually thinking about."

Merritt drew herself up to her full height, and I reflexively drew back a step. She was only a few inches taller than I was, but she always seemed to tower over me.

"I'm surprised to hear you speak that way. You of all people ought to know that what I do isn't work to me. It's my vocation. I do it because I'm good at it and because it brings me a measure of satisfaction to impose a modicum of order on the moral chaos of our world. I don't want, have never wanted, to get my mind off it, as you so prosaically put it. In fact, I consider it a privilege to keep my mind on my work every minute of every day. And I expect the people I employ to do the same." A haughty, piercing look indicated that she meant Gilby and me. But mostly me.

"But, boss, when there's nothing to work on . . ."

"That's likely to change very soon!" she barked.

She was probably right. The Merritt Investigative Agency usually turned away many more potential clients than we had time to help. Our present inactivity was definitely unusual and therefore not particularly troubling. But that hadn't been my point.

"It's your spending so much time alone that Gilby and I are worried about," I said.

"Alone? I'm not alone. I often hear you and Gilby in the kitchen idly gossiping, and of course I have my drawings to keep my mind focused and sharp."

I glanced over at her easel, which stood beside a row of tall windows at the end of her long, book-lined office, a room I secretly loved, filled as it was with plush velvet chairs, her elegant Louis XIV desk, a scattering of Persian rugs, and numerous unusual artifacts, including carved masks and woven textiles from her travels to Africa and Southeast Asia, marble busts of Shakespeare, Freud, and Amelia Earhart, and (my favorite) the possibly four-million-year-old fossil of a primordial fish-a coelacanth-found off the coast of Madagascar and gifted to her by a man who signed himself All my love, Harry.

Scattered around the easel were about a dozen sketches she had ripped from the easel and tossed aside, only to start in on a new, presumably better, one. Her subjects were usually categories of some kind-human hands, for example. Or various species of frog. Or different deciduous trees. Lately her passion had been New York City architecture, and the office floor was littered with charcoal sketches of the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. One famous landmark after another rendered in clean, exact lines and precise detail. Her most recent subject, the New York Public Library, was sitting on her easel at the moment, every column and lintel accurately drawn, with one disturbing exception. Patience and Fortitude, the two magnificent marble lions that guarded the entrance, were completely out of proportion. They dominated the foreground, appearing to leer threateningly at the viewer. The slashing black marks with which she'd depicted them were positively frightening. It seemed the work of a disordered mind.

Your mind is already plenty sharp. It's your heart that needs attention, I might have said to her. But very few relationships can withstand that much honesty, and my relationship with Aubrey Merritt wasn't one of them.

"Observe, Blunt." Directing my attention to the drawing on her easel, she settled into an explanation. "We all think we know what we're looking at, but few people actually do. We see a building; we see four walls and a roof. If the building is famous and we've seen it enough times before, we might even be able to call it by its right name and say with confidence in what city it resides. But have we really noticed exactly what makes it so unique, identifiable? It's all the little details, their arrangements, their proportions, the emphasis the architect gave to one or another of them. A great building like this one has a character. It speaks to us about values, aesthetics, about its place in our lives, and it gives very clear signals about who its creator was."

She smiled slightly, pleased with herself, and I knew from that small, complacent smile that she was about to leap into her favorite subject. I wasn't wrong.

"Murder," she said, "is similar. Boringly similar in broad strokes but completely unique in others. The criminal can't help leaving his signature, however faint, just as an architect does. In the ways he attempts to hide what he's doing he paradoxically puts facets of his character on display. It's my job to discern those aspects of his personality he has unwittingly exposed."

She peered at me, not unkindly, but with a vexed expression, as if I were a problem she had yet to fully resolve. "Drawing is great practice for the investigative mind, Blunt. If you still seriously believe that you could be a successful investigator yourself someday, you would do well to hone your own observational skills. As we both know, there's room for improvement in that department. I know you have complained in the past about my being too critical of you, so let me add that I am speaking to you now with nothing but a kind desire for your betterment in mind."

I rued the day when I'd confessed that my dream was to eventually open my own investigative agency. Ever since then it had been a bad joke between us that all I wanted to do was steal my boss's trade secrets so I could run off and use what I'd learned from her to foolishly attempt to compete with her. That was not entirely untrue: I did, at one point at least, have that ambition. But my hopes in that regard were fading. Because for all my close observation of the famous detective at work, it was still unclear to me what exactly accounted for her success.

She freely admitted that she relied solely on "observation, logic, and psychology" to solve crimes. Which theoretically meant that any person in possession of eyes, a brain, and a heart ought to be able to do what she did. Yet so far I'd been unable to solve a single mystery either before or at the same time she did, even though I had access to the same information. I did suspect that on a few occasions she'd kept one or two critical details hidden from me on purpose, just to give herself an advantage. But that may have been my own sour grapes. In any case, she seemed to enjoy periodically reminding me that I was a rookie, implying that it would be a very long time, if such a time ever came at all, before I could be trusted to handle even the most basic little spousal-murder-to-collect-life-insurance case on my own.

I accepted the ribbing as the price I had to pay for working with a woman who, after three decades of consistently brilliant work, had assumed near-mythical dimensions in crime-fighting circles. In short, there was no better detective in all the United States to apprentice with. But increasingly it wasn't only personal ambition that kept me in her employ. Over the past year, there had been a fair number of truly magical moments when the two of us had got along famously, bantering like equals, our minds dancing together in true partnership-both of us, if I can be so bold, made a little better, a little smarter, by proximity to the other. At those times, and usually for several days after, I lived in a glow of happy fulfillment that I knew was more precious and affirming than anything I would be likely to experience as a sole practitioner.

Now I considered my options. The conversation about the reunion had not gone well. Yet I was unwilling to give up. Her stated reason for declining an opportunity that most people would find delightful seemed childish to me, nothing more than the thoughtless reflex of a woman who, for whatever reason, had made a needless, unhealthy habit of keeping to herself. (There had to be a reason, didn't there? I often speculated about what it might be.) As I'd already taken some heat for broaching the usually off-limits subject of her personal life, I decided to forge ahead and gain whatever progress might be possible. I pulled the invitation out of the wastebasket and read it out loud.

You are invited! Please join your sisters
at the forty-year reunion of
the Sarah Lawrence chapter of
the Sigma Delta Tau sorority!

Where: The Muddy River Ranch, Pecos, New Mexico

When: Memorial Day weekend

Host: US Army Brigadier General Joan Battersea, ret.

Plus-Ones welcome. RSVP requested.

I placed the invitation flat on her desk, the words facing her, and made my voice very firm. "Absolutely no harm will come to your brilliant career or your charcoal drawings if you happened to spend a relaxing weekend catching up with your sorority sisters. And before you tell me you don't need a vacation, let me just point out that the stone lions at the entrance to the New York Public Library really do not look the way you've drawn them. They are not in proportion. They are horribly distorted. Since you pride yourself on accuracy, your mistake there ought to worry you."

Her eyes flickered to the easel.

Aha! I thought. She's not sure. She needs to check the drawing to see if I'm right.

I pressed my advantage. "With all due respect, boss, you would do well to take a few days off. You owe it to your clients to take care of yourself, if only so you can confidently maintain your own high standards. I may not know everything about the art of investigation, as you frequently point out, but I do know something about mental health." That was a brazen lie.

In the time it had taken me to speak those few sentences, Merritt had recovered her composure. With her usual cool complacency, she replied, "Good gracious, Blunt, just when I thought you were beginning to develop some professional dignity and rectitude, you descend to this insipid pseudo-counseling. As if, at the age of twenty-five-"

"Twenty-six," I muttered. I'd had a birthday last month.

"-you could possibly know what is best for anyone, let alone a person with almost four more decades of life experience than yourself. Let me reiterate, and I shall say it only one more time: I have absolutely no interest in sitting around among a bunch of aging women gabbing on and on about whatever nonsense occupies their minds. Their brilliant children, probably. Or, worse, their brilliant grandchildren."

Merritt herself had a grown son living in Los Angeles. He was her only living relative, as far as I knew. I wished she would talk about him a bit. Or talk to him once in a while.

I ought to have been deterred at this point, but I was not. I glimpsed another approach and decided to go for it. This would be my last attempt. "But wouldn't it be nice . . ." I said in a softer, more measured tone, "no, I mean, wouldn't it be interesting, from a strictly intellectual point of view, to observe how some of your sorority sisters grew and changed over four decades, and to what degree the arc of their adult lives does justice to the young women they once were? There are probably a lot of fascinating psychological insights you could glean from that experience to add to your store of wisdom."

"No, Blunt. It would be neither nice nor interesting. I'm sure it would be very dull. I would lose my mind from boredom. Now stop your shameless brown-nosing before you destroy whatever slim hope I have for your future. Go away. Leave me alone." She fluttered her fingertips in my direction, shooing me off.

I left her office in frustration. Aubrey Merritt was a truly impossible person to try to care about! It really wasn't worth the effort. Besides, she was right in one respect: Her mental health or lack thereof was none of my business. I was just there to do my assigned tasks (Monday through Friday, nine to five) while learning as much about the art and science of private investigation as I possibly could. Because someday I would start my own detective agency. And then we would see just how smart I, too, could be!