at him. She knew it was true, although he looked hale and hearty, reclining in his chair. She suddenly realized that it didn’t matter. He was no match for her wrath. Not in the long run. She took a deep breath, and pointed a shaking finger at him. ‘All right. You listen to me now. You have a secret and it is not safe. It’s all gonna come out. Everything. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I’m like a dog with a bone. Do you understand me, Mr Ridley? I know you did it. I don’t know why, but I know you did. I will find the proof. You pushed my daughter off that boat. And you’re going to pay for it.’
Bud raised his shoulders, as if to ward off her words. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said.
Shelby had to ball up her fists and dig her nails into her palms in order to resist the temptation to strike him. She suddenly realized how she could hurt him more. ‘What do you think Peggy will say? How will your wife like it when she learns what you did? What will Faith think about her father then?’
Bud stared at the photo gallery of Faith, his chin trembling.
‘You’re about to find out,’ Shelby said.
TWENTY-FIVE
Shelby knocked at the front door of the house. She had a key to the front door, but she always knocked. It was one way of saying that she no longer saw this place, in any way, as her home. No one responded to her knock. Shelby frowned. Lately, her mother always had a caretaker during the day while Talia was at work. Maybe she couldn’t hear the knocking from upstairs. Shelby didn’t want to startle whichever caretaker was here. But she did want to establish her right to be in the house. Besides, Shelby thought, she didn’t care about accommodating anybody else’s feelings right now. She removed the key from a zipper compartment in her pocketbook and unlocked the front door.
‘Mother,’ she called out as she walked into the gloomy foyer. She knew her mother would not answer, but she figured that would give the caretaker fair warning that she was in the house.
No one answered. Shelby frowned. Was it possible that they had gone out? She had glanced in on Estelle the last time she was here. Estelle was in no shape to go out.
Shelby hung up her wet jacket and cap on a rack of hooks in the hallway, and glanced into the living room to the right of the foyer. Everything was as it had always been. The aged, fraying furniture, the drapes closed, the coffee table piled high with yellowing newspapers, the smell of mold. Shelby sighed, thinking how she had always hated this house.
Maybe not always, she thought. Maybe not when her father was alive. Her memories of him were like glimpses of a past that did not really belong to her. She had a vague memory of him returning home after school, the smell of his aftershave when he lifted her up in his arms. An image of his smile, which she could not fix in her mind, hovered at the edge of her memory. It would appear to her, from time to time, like a ray of sun through cloud cover, and then vanish again. She did not try to recall him very often. The thought of him, forever missing, was painful. But she could scarcely remember those days. Sometimes, it seemed as if her father had been dead forever.
There was no one in the living room. Shelby walked through to the pea green dining room with its massive mahogany set of table, chairs, and sideboards. It made a strange sort of office for Talia, a woman who was a computer whiz. The dining room table was covered with a humming computer, as well as piles of books, papers, and accordion folders.
Shelby glanced into the kitchen. A woman’s denim handbag with a vinyl strap hung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and there were dirty dishes in the scuffed enamel sink. The caretaker must be here, Shelby thought. Maybe she hadn’t heard Shelby calling out.
Shelby went back through to the staircase and climbed the carpet-covered treads to the top. She walked down the hall to her mother’s room and looked in. The caretaker, a skinny young woman with pale skin and dyed maroon-colored hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, was sitting beside the bed, leafing through a