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"That manager of hers would have killed her before much longer."
"Chris Lund?" Caroline was startled. "They seemed to get along so well."
Again Emilio's English tones gave the explanation. "Ondine had a huge life insurance policy, with Lund the benefactor. She was starving herself to death. Lund pretended he was against her dieting, pretended that he was on the brink of force-feeding her, but at the same time he was the one who had told her she needed to lose weight, and that was what she believed. Just before she died, they'd had word of a major contract cancellation, the second this year lost to younger models; they could both see the writing on the wall. He decided to, as they say, cash in his chips."
"But I thought you said that Mother-that…" If Hilda wasn't Mother, what was she?
Lauren answered her protest, in a bitter voice. "Hilda pushed over the shelf unit, but Chris Lund put my daughter there, vulnerable."
Emilio clarified. "We think Lund killed Karen McElroy either because she'd noticed the similarity between Ondine's hands and Lauren's when she did their manicures, or because she'd overheard him and Ondine arguing and was calling the police. We found a blood spatter on one of his shoes that I'm pretty sure will turn out to be Karen's. Ondine either saw him, or found the girl shortly afterward. And as I said earlier, fainted."
Again, Douglas said what was foremost on Caroline's mind. "And you don't think Lund's death was a little… convenient?"
"An accident," Emilio said blandly, although a bit too quickly.
Caroline glanced at King David-at her father!-and saw him studying his hands, those oddly elegant, larger versions of her own, as if reading their history in the skin and bone. Then Lauren reached her right hand over and wrapped her fingers through his, before doing the same with her left hand and Caroline's.
A family, joined together, with one daughter's husband and the father's lover looking on. A family, rising phoenixlike from the ashes.
Yes, thought Caroline. Lund's death was an accident.
Much better that way.
But-"Wait a minute," she objected. Everyone tensed, willing her not to say aloud that it could not have been, but Caroline had something else in mind. "There was a polka-dot bikini in Claudia's hand when we dragged her out of the mud bath. If… Hilda… killed Claudia, where did that come from? And you can't tell me that my mother was wearing that thing." She fixed the agent of law and order with a look of accusation and was astonished to see those finely chiseled features turn a furious shade of red, flushing down to the neck of his expensive wool suit, and beyond (just how far beyond was a speculation that crossed the minds of all four witnesses).
Emilio gave a short bark of uncomfortable laughter and with great dignity told them, "It was mine. I'm afraid that, among Claudia de Vries's other sins and wickednesses, she was also guilty of the most blatant form of what I would have to call, er, sexual harassment."
He looked up at their snorts of laughter, none of them stifled with much success, and protested. "Honestly, she wasn't a very nice woman!"