Caress Part Two (Arcadia) Read Online Free Page B

one thing I’d learned already, it was that
I needed to keep a clear head where the delectable Miss Whittaker was
concerned.
    Or at least try to.
    For the next hour or so, I did exactly that.
    We talked—at first about the apartment and what Emma was
discovering as she went through the contents. She told me about the books she’d
found with Margo Stark’s own annotations, and what she’d gleaned from them
about the woman herself.
    Her perceptiveness didn’t surprise me; I already know how
intelligent she was. But I was startled when she revealed the direction of her
thoughts.
    “Do you think,” she began a little tentatively, “that there
could have been something wrong here?”
    “What do you mean?”
    Shadows moved behind her eyes. “I’m not sure exactly. It’s
just little things that don’t add up. The way the master bedroom is decorated,
for instance. There’s no sense of Margo herself apart from the dressing room
that’s filled with her clothes. Presumably, Prentice was sharing it with her
but then why isn’t it more like a room for a couple rather than just for a
man?”
    I had no answer for that although now that I thought about
it, the room’s décor was surprising. I’d never shared a place with a woman but
if I did, I assumed that it would reflect both our presences.
    “What else have you noticed?” I asked.
    “Margo supposedly walked out of here in December of 1957
with only the clothes on her back and never returned. She sealed up the
apartment, leaving it as a monument to her love for Prentice, and went into
seclusion for the rest of her very long life. Right?”
    I shrugged. “That’s the story but I’m getting the sense that
you don’t think it’s true.”
    “I have doubts,” Emma admitted. “Mostly it’s a matter of
what isn’t here. Margo read a lot, which means that she cared about the written
word. But I haven’t come across anything that she wrote other than the
annotations in her books. Not a single letter, a diary, nothing remotely
personal. The closest I’ve come are letters exchanged with her agent and
they’re strictly business.”
    “Lots of people don’t keep diaries,” I pointed out.
    “How about a social calendar?” she countered. “What did
Margo do day-to-day when she was in New York? Where did she go? Who did she see
besides Prentice? There’s nothing here to tell us any of that.”
    “So you’re saying that she did take some things with her
after all?”
    Emma shook her head. “A photographer snapped a picture of
Margo the night she left the apartment for the last time. I checked it out on-line
yesterday. It’s true, she wasn’t carrying a thing, not even a purse. Of course,
she could have arranged to have some things packed up and sent on to her.”
    “I don’t think so. The lawyer who’s handling the estate is a
friend of mine. From what he told me, Margo really did cut herself off from her
previous life when she went into seclusion. There wasn’t a trace of it left. She
must have destroyed anything personal during her final weeks in the apartment.”
    “Perhaps,” Emma allowed. “But why? If Prentice meant so much
to her that his death derailed the entire rest of her life, how could she part
with anything to do with him? If she couldn’t bear to have it in her
possession, she would just have left it here.”
    “People in the throes of grief can do strange things,” I pointed
out.
     “That’s certainly true but there are numerous photographs
on the wall upstairs of Margo and Prentice together. If she was going to
destroy anything, wouldn’t it have been those vivid reminders of what she had
lost?”
    The fact that the photos hadn’t been touched was curious but
I didn’t say so. I was becoming concerned that Emma was getting as caught up in
the mystery of dead senator as my sister was.
    On top of that, I couldn’t help wondering if her own past
didn’t predispose her to believe that a darker reality had to lurk beneath