Thomas Fitzgerald, Topher Calhoun, etc. (fitzproctor) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2013-09-25 16:03:00 |
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Current mood: | confused |
Confronting the Wrong One
The pavilion was crowded at lunchtime, but Catherine still had no problem spotting her target, calmly sorting through some papers and not seeming at all interested in the other patrons. This was, Catherine knew, very unlikely; Dinah Rutledge had become one of the more successful gossip columnists in the area because she never missed a single thing. Did she know Catherine was here? She was standing a good way from her, but who knew.
Certainly not Catherine. In the past few weeks, she had become convinced that she knew absolutely nothing.
For a while, she had accepted Daddy’s suggestion, the idea that Theo had spent her money on additional property as some kind of investment, a future home maybe, for Ella and her husband, and that he had just forgotten to tell Catherine about it, or else that it had been a surprise he was saving up. There were, though, too many things that didn’t add up – times he was supposed to have been at the office and not been, articles and affiliates which had simply not appeared even though he had gone on long trips to research them. Receipts in his briefcase, which she had broken into with pathetic ease. Finally, she had gone to see the place herself, and though she had broken into that without too much trouble, either, and gotten confirmation, she had really known from the moment she saw it that it wasn’t the kind of place you bought for your daughter. It was the kind of place you bought to share with your mistress, the one thing she had asked Theo not to have. She didn’t care if he slept around, Merlin knew she didn’t, if he was sleeping around that meant he wasn’t sleeping with her, but she hadn’t wanted him to have a permanent girl. To have what her mother had had with Nick – to be publicly humiliated the way her father had been, for her children to be humiliated nearly as badly as she had. And evidently, that had been too much to ask for.
It had to be Dinah, she thought. He had dated Dinah in school, worked with her now, and it was no secret that she had always wanted him back. It had to be her. Catherine just had to talk to her. Imply she’d have her killed if she didn’t comply. She could end this before it hurt her babies.
Dinah raised an eyebrow when Catherine sat down across from her without asking permission, just wanting it over with. “Catherine Gardiner. What an unexpected surprise. I don’t suppose you could give me any details about your cousin’s marriage plans, could you?”
Catherine opened her mouth to speak, then had to wet her lips and start over. “It’s my marriage that’s the problem here,” she said. “I know about you and my husband, Miss Rutledge, and I want you to end it.”
“It?”
“Whatever there is between you two,” she said. “Please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Dinah studied her for a long moment, and – this was the strangest thing – Catherine thought she looked almost sympathetic, an expression she had never expected to see on Dinah Rutledge’s face, much less when it was directed at her. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Cath, but I think you and I both had our intelligence insulted by Theo a long time ago,” she said. “Whatever Theo and I had, he ended almost twenty years ago. He left me for….” Dinah laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. They’re awfully discreet, you know.”
Catherine blinked. She had expected denials, or else smugness. Not this. Pinning it on someone else. “What?”
“I only saw it…about the time you had your last baby, actually,” Dinah said, and Catherine had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from saying something completely irrelevant to the point. She did not like this woman mentioning her babies, but Dinah did not represent an actual threat to Edmund or any of the others. “When he bought that house…Oh, you know about that?” She looked momentarily amused. “I should apologize for assuming you’re stupider than you are, too, I suppose. Well, I followed him, and suddenly, a lot of things began to make sense. Things I hadn’t thought about since I was fifteen, actually. But if you want to know, follow him yourself.” She put her papers back in her bag and stood up. “I’m not your problem,” she finished. “And if you’re smart, you won’t try to find out who is,” she said. “I wanted to kill them both when I put it together, and I didn’t even have a bunch of kids with the son of a bitch.”
With that, she walked away, cool as ever, leaving Catherine even more confused, if a little less angry just from that, than she had been before.