Page 49 of Book of Night
Posey came into the room to hand her the money, then looked around again. “What’s going on? Because you do not look like you’re napping.”
“No, not napping,” Charlie admitted.
Posey gave a big sigh. “I am going to make some ramen and another pot of coffee. You have ten minutes to finish up whatever you’re doing, and then we’re going to have a conversation.”
As soon as her sister was gone, Charlie went back to the internet. She typed “Edmund Carver” in again. Photographs came up in society blogs, him standing around at parties. None from the last four years, but before that, notices of his attending openings and balls.
She found an article about a French Heritage Society gala that showed a picture of him with a blond woman identified in the caption as Adeline Salt. She wore a white silk shift that looked particularly expensive on her tanned and toned and probably microsculpted body.
In the photo, Vince—Edmund—had an arm thrown over her shoulder and a champagne coupe in his hand. He was in mid-laugh, the light catching him so that his shadow loomed over them both.
Charlie knew the girl. She was the one in the photo in Vince’s wallet. Salt’s daughter, which would make her Edmund’s aunt, even though they appeared to be around the same age.
Adeline. The girl he called out for in his sleep.
Several people had posted in the comment section of the newspaper article.
This is the problem with celebrating the parasitic one percent. It’s okay if he’s a murderer so long as he knows all the right people.
I don’t believe the accusations against Remy and anyone who knows him wouldn’t either. He was always willing to go out of his way for people, from getting soaked helping staff put up a tent after a rainstorm threatened to torpedo a party in the Hamptons, to lying down on the filthy sidewalk to retrieve a stranger’s purse that had fallen through a grate. I will never forget sneaking out of the Central Park Conservatory’s luncheon to walk through the park with him. That’s the Edmund I choose to remember.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but I’m glad he’s dead. I wish he’d died before he could have taken the life of an innocent girl with him. It’s disgusting that anyone would defend him, no less “choose to remember” him as anything but what he was—a sociopath.
Charlie heard her sister put something in the sink and knew she had only a few more moments before she was going to have to talk to Posey. But there was one more thing she wanted to do. She put the name Lionel Salt into Google, something she hadn’t done in years.
There was a profile on his estate in West Springfield, apparently bought for $8.9 million in 2001, along with some links to his name associated with ongoing legal cases. As soon as she saw a photograph of the house, Charlie’s palms started to sweat.
It looked just like the palace she remembered.
14A SWARM OF BLACK FLIES
Posey was slurping up ramen doctored with a ton of chili garlic sauce when Charlie emerged from the bedroom.
Dressed in leggings and an oversized shirt, Posey had pulled her brown hair into a single braid. Normal, except she was also wearing eyeliner, lip gloss, and calf-high zip-up boots. She was planning on going somewhere. Charlie just hoped it wasn’t a lab.
“Okay, so you wanted to talk to me without Vince around,” Charlie said, forcing herself to concentrate on this conversation and not everything she’d learned. “What for?”
Posey poked at her bowl. “You’re not going to tell me why you trashed your bedroom?”
Maybe she should get a tarot reading, like saps everywhere. Maybe she needed to hear someone else say it:He’s no good.“You go ahead with your thing first.”
“Fine. So last night, I was talking to this guy…”
Charlie abruptly wished she’d said a lot less the night before. “You told me you wouldn’t.”
“I stopped arguing with you,” Posey said. “I never actually agreed to do what you said.”
With one stupid phone call, Charlie had almost gotten herself killed. What would happen if Salt somehow heard Posey’s story and linked it to Hermes?
“I was careful,” Posey insisted.
“Take it down. Whatever you put out there—take it down.” Charlie looked around for Posey’s laptop as though she could toss it into Nashawannuck Pond and somehow that would remove what she’d posted from the internet.
“It wasn’t online,” Posey insisted. “It was an encrypted chat that deletes everything after it’s read.”
Charlie sat down at the table. Her head was throbbing. The events of the last twenty-four hours were too much. She wanted to curl up in a dark hole and maybe engage in some screaming therapy.
“Forget about all that for a minute,” Posey said. “Because that’s not the part I want to talk to you about.”
