Free To the Manor Dead by Sebastian Stuart Page B

hard for them.”
    “Did you at least write up a report?”
    “I did.”
    “Can I see it?”
    “Course. It’ll be typed up in a few days. Now is there anything else I can help you with, because I’ve got to go deal with those ferrets.”
    “No, I guess not.” I looked down at the counter for a moment, drummed my fingers. “Listen, I couldn’t help overhearing. Sounds like you’re going on a fishing trip.”
    “Sounds like you’re on one right now.”
    “Touché.”
    He leaned back on his heels and stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Matter of fact, I am. Florida Keys. Might do a little condo shopping while I’m down there. Pretty word, isn’t it: condo. Short for condo-minium. Good thing they don’t call them miniums, nowhere near as pretty.”
    “So you’re close to retiring?”
    He smirked. “Might be. I’m definitely retiring this little discussion. I got a job to do.”
    “Go easy on the ferrets,” I said.

Franny Van Kirk’s estate was just a few miles south of Westward Farm. There was a caretaker’s cottage at the entrance and then the drive wound past a pond, some barns, an orchard—everything was neat, but not manicured. I came to the small stone chapel. There were about a half dozen cars in front—most of them Camrys and Volvos. I parked and got out.
    The desultory clutch of mourners mingling on the chapel’s front steps were mostly women, mostly ancient, wearing rubber-soled shoes and sans-a-belt slacks—this money was so old it didn’t give a shit. Dazed and moving slowly, most of them looked like they were suffering from some combination of early-stage dementia and late-stage alcoholism.
    A woman standing on the front steps stuck out her hand as I approached. “Welcome, I’m Franny Van Kirk.” She gave me a big smile with a manic edge that screamed I Love My Paxil . She had to be in her eighties, with beautifully mottled and deeply lined skin, green eyes, wispy gray hair.
    “Hi, I’m Janet Petrocelli.”
    “A friend of Daphne’s?”
    I nodded.
    “Wait a minute, are you the one who discovered Daphne’s body?”
    “Yes.”
    She clutched my hands in hers. “We have to talk. I’m serving tea down in the house after the service. Can you come?”
    I nodded.
    “Good. Now I better get in.”
    At the back of the chapel there were two large easels holding boards with photographs and mementos of Daphne’s life pinned on them. They told a fascinating story. There she was on the lawns of Westward Farm, a beautiful child living in a lost world. The pictures followed her at birthday parties, on boats, in hotel ballrooms—in all of them she was luminous, enormous eyes, radiant smile. Then she was a teenager and something changed in her face, a tightness around her mouth, a wariness in her eyes—and now she was walking a desegregation picket line, in an avant-garde play, sulking at a family dinner; a yellowed newspaper article announced her arrest for chaining herself to the gates of a nuclear power plant.
    Then there was another incarnation—a picture book on the table, Swinging London , opened to a picture of Daphne partying with Mick Jagger and Mary Quant. Beside that was a small book of poems, Movements in the Now and Then by Daphne Livingston, and a catalogue for a show of her watercolors held in Aix-en-Provence. The other easel held a pulpy movie poster, in Spanish— Viaje Aspero , Rough Journey—showing Daphne sitting on an enormous suitcase beside an empty road, looking glamorous, longing, lost. And then the pictures stopped. There was no record of the last twenty-five years of her life, when, according to Abba, she had descended into the netherworld.
    I’d had clients like that, people who were fighting hard to tame their demons and stay in the game, but were always being pulled downward by voices buried deep in their psyches—seductive voices urging them to give up, give in, cross over. What made them sympathetic to me was that they did fight, just as Daphne so clearly