Savage Grace - Natalie Robins Read Online Free

about putting it out of his mind!
    Of course, his granny was always encouraging him to think it wasn’t his fault. She didn’t believe he could possibly have done such a thing. Because he was such a gentle boy, you know. Her blue-eyed boy.
    Elizabeth Archer Baekeland
    Nini was just devastated. I used to go and see her after Barbara’s death—until she became too difficult. She kept going on about Sylvie, how all this never would have happened if Brooks hadn’t run off with “that bitch, that bitch, that damn bitch.” On and on—about how first “that bitch” took Tony away and then she took Brooks.
    Brooks Baekeland
    After years of resisting, and after wearing out four lawyers, starting with Louis Nizer, Barbara had finally agreed to give me my freedom. When Sylvie and I received the telephone call in the house I had built in Brittany telling us that Barbara was dead, we thought she had committed suicide, for it was November 18, 1972, our thirtieth wedding anniversary. “I give you your freedom and my life”—that would have been typically Barbara.
    Sylvie Baekeland Skira
    When this happened, Brooks’s cousin, Baekeland Roll, and his wife were staying with us. I always took the telephones because Brooks was too grand-ducal to ever answer the telephone, so I answered and it was the police in London who said, “We believe that Mrs. Baekeland has been killed.” I came back to Brooks with this news and we, neither of us, believed it really. Brooks said, “She’s again found a way to get at me.” And then they called again, and it was true. This time they said, “We believe her son is involved.” And I put down the telephone. I was frightened. I was so frightened I remember very well I fell into a sweat—you know, I smelled like a bad animal—it was something so abominable, and I rushed upstairs to the cousins.
    It was a horrible thing for me, but for Brooks…he suffered the way you could not imagine. Brooks went out hollering in the garden. He was desperate. He was horrified that Barbara had died. That the boy had done it was something else.
    We left Brittany and we went together to London. Brooks didn’t have the heart to go and identify her, so it was Baekie Roll who did. Brooks never saw her body, but what his cousin saw was that Barbara had a black eye, and he told Brooks, and I think that hurt Brooks more than anything—that she would have had a black eye on top of everything.
    Brooks Baekeland
    He told me when he returned from the identification that there were a lot of bruises—he had tears in his eyes. He had never liked Barbara but was deeply affected by this visual evidence of brutality.
    Sylvie Baekeland Skira
    We were staying in a hotel that we thought wouldn’t be too conspicuous, because of the press and so on—Blake’s Hotel—but it turned out anyway there were a lot of rock-and-roll stars staying at the same time. And Brooks kept seeing lawyers and police and so on because of the inquest. And afterward, he had her cremated. She had been three weeks in the morgue.
    Meanwhile Brooks had been given everything that was in her apartment by the police. Every piece of her mail he made me read, because he said it would hurt him too much to read it. And then there were the cassettes! Barbara had made a whole series of cassettes of a novel she was writing. The police said they were very damaging documents for the Baekeland family and he should take them. Can you imagine writing about going to bed with your son!
    In Brittany we didn’t have a cassette machine in the house, we had a record player, but we had a cassette machine in the car. Brooks played them in the car. For hours and hours! Yes. Until I broke down in front of him and he got earphones so he could listen to them without me having to listen.
    Gloria Jones
    Jim and I were horrified. It was the worst thing we ever heard. We were in Paris and we went to London and tried to help. I called Scotland Yard and I said, “I think I’d like