Read Online Moonlight Becomes You by Mary Higgins Clark - Free Book Online Page B

moving it so that it caressed her cheek and chin.
    Lane sighed. She was a lightweight—“a ninny,” his grandmother would have snapped—but she was pretty. He had felt himself most fortunate eighteen years ago, to have convinced an attractive—younger—woman to marry him. Plus, she did care about him, and he knew her frequent, sugary-warm visits to the residents delighted most of them. She might seem cloying at times, but she was nonetheless sincere, and that counted for a lot. A few residents, like Greta Shipley, found her vacuous and irritating, which to Lane only proved Mrs. Shipley’s intelligence, but there was no question that here at Latham Manor, Odile was an asset to him.
    Lane knew what was expected of him. With virtually no show of the resignation he felt, he stood up, put his armsaround his wife and murmured, “What would I do without you?”
    It was a relief when his secretary buzzed him on the intercom. “Miss Holloway is here,” she announced.
    â€œYou’d better go, Odile,” Lane whispered, forestalling her inevitable suggestion that she stay and be part of the meeting.
    For once she didn’t argue but slipped out the unmarked door of his suite that led to the main corridor.

17
    T HE NIGHT BEFORE , BLAMING THE THREE-HOUR NAP SHE had taken earlier, Maggie had been still wide awake at midnight. Giving up on going to sleep anytime soon, she had gone downstairs again and, in the small study, found books, several of them fully illustrated, on the “cottages” of Newport.
    Carrying them up to bed, she had propped pillows behind her back and read for nearly two hours. As a result, when she was admitted to Latham Manor by a uniformed maid who then called Dr. Lane to announce her arrival, she was able to take in her surroundings with some degree of knowledge.
    The mansion had been built by Ernest Latham in 1900, as a deliberate rebuke to what he considered the vulgar ostentation of the Vanderbilt mansion, The Breakers. The layout for the two houses was almost the same, but the Latham house had livable proportions. The entrance hallwas still overwhelmingly large, but was, in fact, only a third of the size of The Breakers’ “Great Hall of Entry.” Satinwood—rather than Caen limestone—covered the walls, and the staircase of richly carved mahogany, carpeted in cardinal red, stood in place of the marble staircase The Breakers boasted.
    The doors on the left were closed, but Maggie knew the dining room would be there.
    To the right, what originally must have been the music room looked most inviting, with comfortable chairs and matching hassocks, all richly upholstered in moss green and floral patterns. The magnificent Louis Quinze mantel was even more breathtaking in reality than it had appeared in the pictures she had seen. The ornately carved space above the fireplace stretched to the ceiling, filled with Grecian figures, tiny angels, and pineapples and grapes, except for the smooth center, where a Rembrandt-school oil painting had been hung.
    It really is beautiful, she thought, mentally comparing it with the unspeakably squalid condition of a nursing home interior she had surreptitiously photographed for Newsmaker magazine.
    She realized suddenly that the maid had spoken to her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I was just trying to take it all in.”
    The maid was an attractive young woman with dark eyes and olive skin. “It is lovely, isn’t it?” she said. “Even working here is a pleasure. I’ll take you to Dr. Lane now.”
    His office was the largest in a suite of offices along the back of the house. A mahogany door separated the area from the rest of the first floor. As Maggie followed the maid down the carpeted corridor, she glanced through an open office door and noticed a familiar face—Janice Norton, the wife of Nuala’s lawyer, sat behind a desk.
    I didn’t know she