Scraping the sauce off her fish with a butter knife, Adelaide said, “I couldn’t say, really. I told Carol I wouldn’t be much help to you, as I wasn’t much help to her.”
“You were a tremendous help,” said Carol.
Sir Hugo leaned forward and fixed Adelaide with his signature piercing stare. “But you do remember her.”
Adelaide seemed immune to the piercing, refused to buy into the drama of her role as eyewitness. She made an inscrutable moue with her red lips, said, “Marian Graves was a very tall, very thin, very blond grown-up I was called in to greet more than sixty years ago. I don’t think she was good with children. I don’t think she said much to me. Honestly I’m not positive I actually remember her at all or if I just remember the memory.” She looked at me. “See? Nothing you can use.”
“You never know,” said Carol. “It was you who told me about Caleb Bitterroot.” She turned to Hadley. “There’s very little out there about him, but once I realized he’d been in Marian’s life from beginning to end, I saw the outline of a grand romance. I’m very intuitive that way.”
“What she means is that there’s no proof of any romance at all,” Redwood said, and Carol made a psssh sound and flicked her hand at him.
“Is it different,” Leanne asked Sir Hugo, “playing a real person versus a fictional character?”
He swirled his wine. “A bit. With a real person, you need to be cautious of falling back on an impression. Your task is to make the person, fictional or not, seem real.”
“Same with writing,” said Kyle Day, but no one paid him any attention.
“It’s not like you can really know that much about anyone, anyway,” I said, annoyed that Leanne had clearly intended the acting question only for Hugo. “No one sees most of what we do. No one knows more than a tiny fraction of what we think. And when we die, it all evaporates.”
Adelaide looked at me with a new glint of interest, sharp but unreadable.
“My parents died in a small-plane crash when I was two,” I told her. “I was raised by my uncle.”
“Ah,” she said. “So you understand something about Marian.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell if I do.”
“Mitchell Baxter,” said Travis, and when Adelaide, predictably, looked blank, he added, “He was Hadley’s uncle. He directed Tourniquet.”
“Ah,” said Adelaide.
“He’s dead now, too,” I said.
Carol, trying to get us back on track, said, “I think Jamie Graves and Adelaide’s mother, Sarah, were lovers.”
“Of course Carol has the spicy theory,” said Leanne.
Sir Hugo hoisted his distinguished eyebrows at Adelaide. “Do you think they were? Or do you perhaps know?”
“They were childhood sweethearts,” she said, “but in my admittedly new acquaintance with Carol, I’ve noticed she thinks any two people who have anything to do with each other are probably lovers.”
“I’m a hopeless romantic, what can I say,” Carol said.
“I’m not,” said Leanne, pouring herself more wine.
“Me neither,” said Sir Hugo. “I’m a hopeful hedonist. Redwood? Did you inherit the dreaded romance gene?”
“It’s recessive,” said Carol, “and his father did not have it.”
“I’m open to possibilities,” Redwood said. “I don’t know if that’s romantic or not. Maybe I’m a cautious romantic.”
“When I first met Redwood,” I said, avoiding Leanne’s eye, “he told me his go-to emotion was ambivalence, and ambivalence isn’t romantic.”
“What about you?” Adelaide looked at me glintily again.
“Not a romantic,” I said.
“Come on, don’t say that,” said Travis, who I’d begun to sense was nursing an interest in me. Ordinarily I might have flirted back, but something about his shininess, his zeal repulsed me.
“No?” Adelaide said to me. “What, then? Are you a cynic? A skeptic? A stoic?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I said. “Everything always seems to fall apart around me.”
“You’re a wrecking ball,” said Sir Hugo.
“What about you?” I asked Adelaide.
“I was a romantic for a long time. Disastrously. I believe since then I’ve been what’s known as an opportunist.” Beadily, she looked me over. Her deadly confidence reminded me of a bird of prey, a hawk or a falcon. “A piece of advice for you,” she said. “Knowing what you don’t want is just as useful as knowing what you do. Maybe more.”