Fall from Grace by Richard North Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

favor. She spared me the surprise when I followed Ben on one of his nightly jaunts, and saw him standing with a woman on the promontory.”
    “A woman, or Carla Pacelli?”
    “It was too dark to see. But I’m sure it was her—they appeared to be having the kind of intense conversation that men and women only have when they’re involved. And she’d taken the guesthouse at the Dane place, as Teddy told you. So it would have been an easy walk for her.”
    Adam recalled one of the minor mysteries of his mother’s past—her aborted friendship with Whitney Dane. Among the affluent WASPs who summered on the Vineyard, the Barkleys and the Danes were unique among their class for living in Chilmark, which came to feature a significant Jewish population, rather than Edgartown, the traditional redoubt of their class. Through college, Adam knew, Whitney and Clarice had been intimate friends; as an adult, Whitney had become an eminent novelist, and would have been a natural peer for Ben save that Clarice, for reasons unclear to Adam, assiduously avoided her. That Carla Pacelli had landed in her estranged friend’s guesthouse could only have deepened his mother’s wounds. But of more immediate interest was the location of the guesthouse—from several directions, anyone could approach the promontory and not be observed. He was framing another question when, without warning, Clarice bent over, hands covering her face, shoulders trembling with soundless sobs. In that painful moment, Adam felt the pride, shame, and repression that had come to define her life. Helpless, he put his arm around her, and then his mother broke down entirely, cries of anguish issuing from deep inside her.
    “Talk to me, Mom. Please.”
    At length, she sat up, her voice tremulous. “It’s everything. Any day now, I’ll wake up and she’ll own our family’s home, and the guesthouse where Teddy lives and paints. Neither of us will have anything.” She paused, her throat working. “But it’s so much more than that. Where do I put my memories of Ben when he turned them all to ashes? What can I say my life meant? What can I believe I accomplished, with one son estranged, the other struggling? Nothing. By the end, all I hoped for was to live my life with some semblance of dignity. And now my husband of forty years has taken that from me as well, in the cruelest and most public way.”
    With your collaboration, Adam thought. For a long minute, he gave her the gift of silence. Then, gently, he said, “When you signed that postnup, he must have promised something in return.”
    Mute, Clarice shook her head.
    “Why, then?”
    “As I said, I thought I was going to inherit all I needed from my father. Another rude surprise.”
    Adam searched his inventory of family lore. “I thought Grandfather went bankrupt before I was born.”
    “No,” she said tersely. “After.”
    Perhaps, Adam thought, she had been too insulated by her family’s cosseted life to believe that it would ever vanish. “And you knew nothing about this new will?”
    Clarice sat straighter, retrieving a semblance of her usual composure. “No. Once Father lost everything, I thought Ben would do the decent thing. As to affairs, he’d had them before.”
    “You didn’t think this woman was different.”
    “No.” Clarice exhaled. “It was your father who was different.”
    Adam watched her face in profile. It had been some time, he realized, since she had looked him in the face. “Did Dad ever threaten to leave you?”
    She gave a vehement shake of her head. “Never. Nor could I leave him. Not just for my own security, but Teddy’s. Once he got sick, he depended on us, both for a place to recover and for money to get back on his feet.” Her voice became parched. “As for me, I had the consolation of being Mrs. Benjamin Blaine. The one he always stayed with.”
    And now, Adam thought, she faced the reckoning that she had never allowed herself to imagine. “I’m back,” he told