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The library was so still the air reverberated, even the whispers of the fireplace seemed to pause. Into this hush dropped a name.
"Ondine."
Caroline must have made some sound, some protest, because Lauren looked up and smiled, tears quivering unshed. King David was holding her hand.
"It's a cycle, isn't it? My baby, too, was put up for adoption. Claudia's sister agreed to take me back, more or less permanently, but she couldn't handle a baby as well. Ondine was removed from me when she was two days old, and I never knew what happened to her. All I knew was that my baby was a girl and that she had a birthmark on her face, although the doctor said it would fade when she grew. On her eighteenth birthday we both registered to have our records released, but even then it took us years to find each other, the records were so confused. She was so beautiful." And then she wept.
The DEA agent cleared his throat, to take the room's attention off the weeping woman. Caroline's eyes, however, remained on the actress. Her sister.
"About three years ago, we became aware of another figure on the scene, directing Claudia and Raoul. A silent partner, with authority but working through a lawyer in Atlanta. Christopher Lund came into it around then, too, a clever young man with a growing appetite for money. There were several questionable deaths co
"So you get the idea. A lot of greedy and hard-to-prove illegalities, most of which were arranged by a known blackmailer. We're talking major income and influence. So when Ondine threatened to interfere with Chris Lund, that threatened the business's smooth ru
"In truth, the deaths co
Douglas tightened the grip on his wife's hand, but Caroline was beyond sorrow. The daughter of a smiling psychopath, she said to herself. That is what I am. Maybe she would feel sorrow later, when the numbness had passed, sorrow and guilt and revulsion against the blood that moved through her veins.
Emilio-hard to think of him as that other name-was going on, but Caroline heard only a part of it. Peddling influence, setting up a distribution network for their cocaine operation, and blackmail, that pool ever widening: business as usual for Claudia, only more so. Then he was saying something about a key.
"-on Ondine's body. Hilda obviously didn't know that Ondine had the thing, or she'd have retrieved it, but the key seems to have passed through several hands before the girl got it. Howard Fondulac's fingerprints were on it, so Ondine may have been given it by him, or maybe she found it when she was trying to get him untangled from the Pilates machine.
"I doubt we'll ever be certain. I do know that Ondine told David she would see him in his cabin tonight. I assume she would have given him the key then, to give to Lauren, whom Ondine did not wish to be seen with too often. Ondine knew that Lauren was looking for the key to a safe and thought this might be it; she had no way of knowing that David had an interest in the contents of that safe as well."
"But did she know?" Caroline interrupted. "Did Ondine know that her mother was…?"
"Lauren told her the first night. They pretended to be strangers whenever there was a chance someone might overhear, but, yes, she knew where she came from."
That was who she'd seen with the model, Caroline realized, on the other side of the moonlit lake. Laughing or sobbing-or, more likely, both. Which also meant that if Lauren Sullivan was Hilda Finch's other, illegitimate daughter, Caroline had spent the first evening here in friendly conversation with her own niece. Those unexpected sparks of sympathy she'd felt for the achingly pretty younger woman were facilitated by blood ties. A spasm of grief took her, and she missed Emilio's next words, until:
"-Finch looks to me a fairly pure example of a sociopathic personality. Without a conscience, her concern for others a learned facade, her only interests self-serving. I haven't had a chance to interview her fully, of course, but I did ask her if she knew she'd killed her granddaughter in Ondine. She did not. There seems to have been a lot that Claudia kept from her silent partner-it was, as I said, more a triumvirate than a partnership. Claudia and Raoul, with the newcomer Hilda Finch anonymous behind the lawyer; all three jostling for power, attempting blackmail to keep the others under control, making temporary alliances against the third, aiming for domination. It is the reason a number of you were brought here, so that Claudia could assemble her victims in a bid for power against the others. Once Hilda Finch revealed herself, warfare was open-with knowledge as the weapon. One of them would feed another information to undermine the third. Hilda, for example, told Raoul about a secret compartment in Mrs. Blessing's cello case; Claudia told Hilda about Raoul's felony record. Raoul may have told Hilda that Claudia had a safe, or Hilda may have figured it out on her own. In either case, Hilda did not know where it was at first, nor did she have the key. In the case of Ondine, it is possible that Claudia herself didn't know the identity of Ondine's mother, since she had not been involved in that adoption procedure. At any rate, Hilda's reaction, when I told her, was chiefly exasperation: She'd been overjoyed to discover that Lauren was hers, not from any maternal urge but because it would be a coup for the spa."
(Vince elbowed his assistant. "I toldja, didn't I? Anyone that didn't care about her own daughter had to be dangerous?" Mike LeMat nodded.)
"Her chief regret for Ondine's death was, I quote, 'Just imagine what I could have done with this place if I'd had both of them.'"
Caroline couldn't even wince. She'd known it was coming, had known since hearing of Hilda's hidden partnership with Claudia that her mother was not just impossible, she was downright evil. Looking back, Hilda must have known that Douglas was being blackmailed, and by what means, yet she had made no move to tell him the truth, to free him from the appalling images in his mind, to free Caroline to be happy in her marriage once again. Caroline studied her hands, feeling every eye in the room on her, the daughter, born to and raised by a creature like that. Only from Douglas did she feel empathy-Douglas and, oddly enough, King David. She straightened her spine and lifted her eyes to meet the tattooed gaze squarely: She did not want this disturbing man's pity.