sure it was Mrs. Kilpatrick—was glaring at her. She felt her mother tugging at her arm, and realized that the service was over.
The pallbearers were carrying the casket down another flight of steps, and as Beth, walking beside her mother, followed Tracy and Phillip Sturgess—at old Abigail’s side now—she saw that there was a tiny cemetery in the forest behind the mausoleum. An open grave awaited, and Conrad Sturgess’s coffin was slowly lowered into it. Abigail Sturgess stepped forward, reached stiffly down to pick up a clod of sodden earth, and dropped it into the grave. Then she turned away, and began making her way back through the mausoleum, and down the path that led to the house.
Beth noticed that Abigail Sturgess, once she had turned away from her husband’s grave, never looked back. It was very much like Mrs. Kilpatrick this morning. Beth wasn’t sure why, but for some reason it bothered her.
Carolyn Sturgess stood uncomfortably in the walnut-paneled library doing her best to chat with Elaine Kilpatrick. She was finding it difficult. It wasn’t anything that Elaine said, really; the woman was perfectly polite. It was just that there seemed to be a chasm between them, and Carolyn had no idea of how to bridge that chasm. It wasn’t that she had no interest in the things Elaine talked about; indeed, one of the things that had attracted her to Phillip Sturgess when she’d first met him a year before had been his own interest in all the things Elaine Kilpatrick seemed to know everything about.
And that, of course, was the trouble. Elaine seemed to know everything about everything, and Carolyn was feeling, once again, like an uneducated, provincial fool.
Carolyn Rogers Sturgess was no fool. She’d graduated from Boston University with a degree in art, and even though it wasn’t Smith, and the degree wasn’t cum laude, Carolyn was proud of it.
And she and Alan had done their share of traveling, too. Of course it hadn’t been Paris and London, nor had she seen the museums in Florence, but she had certainly done her share of galleries in New York.
“But of course we don’t really appreciate art in this country, do we?” she heard Elaine asking earnestly, and silently chided herself for wondering if she detected a note of condescension in the other woman’s tone. Certainly if it was there, it wasn’t reflected in Elaine’s luminous brown eyes, which seemed to concentrate on her with undivided attention.
And yet, as she nearly always did when she was with Phillip’s friends, she had a feeling she was being talked down to.
“No,” she said lamely, “I don’t suppose we do.” Then she offered Elaine what she hoped was a radiant smile. “Do excuse me, won’t you?” she asked. “I see Francis Babcock over there, and there’s something I have to talk to her about.”
“Of course,” Elaine said smoothly, immediately turning to Chip Bailey and plunging into another conversation.
As Carolyn started toward Frances Babcock, whom she secretly loathed, she wondered how Elaine did it. And worse, she wondered if she would ever learn the trick of it, or whether these women had simply been born with all the social graces bred into them over the generations. But whatever it was they had, she knew she lacked it. She lacked it, and her daughter lacked it.
She realized then that she hadn’t seen Beth for more than an hour, not since the receiving line had broken up and the family had come into the library to join their guests. Beth, in fact, had not come into the library at all. Veering away from Frances Babcock, Carolyn slipped out of the library, and glanced down the broad corridor that ran through this wing of the house. It was empty.
But coming out of the living room, she saw her stepdaughter.
“Tracy?”
The girl, her blond hair twisted up in a French knot that Carolyn thought was too old for her, paused at the bottom of the broad staircase that swept from the entry hall up to the second floor. She glanced around furtively, then glared at Carolyn when she saw that they were alone. “What do you want?”
Carolyn felt a twinge of anger. If Phillip had been there, Tracy’s reply would have been guardedly polite. But when they were alone, no matter what Tracy said to her, it always contained a note of challenge, as if she were daring Carolyn to try to exercise any form of control over her.
“I was looking for Beth,” Carolyn replied evenly, refusing