The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [83]
“Nice of you to invite me to the reunion, ladies.” He touched Dina’s arm and said out of the corner of his mouth, “How did this come about?”
“It’s a long story,” she whispered.
“I’ll bet it is—”
“Let’s go out to the patio,” Betsy suggested, moving toward the door. “It’s really quite a lovely morning.”
“Did you have a nice drive?” Dina asked Simon as they followed Betsy to the back of the house and to the double doors, where she stopped.
“Things pretty glum?” Simon asked softly, so that only Dina could hear.
“I’m trying to shake it; I really am.” Dina looked up into his eyes, and Simon saw the vestiges of what must have been a sleepless night. “I’m trying my best to act normally, but it hasn’t been easy, these past few days.”
Dina’s hands were shaking, and Simon took them in his own.
“It’s all a little overwhelming, you see,” she added before Simon could say a word.
“Are you two coming out?” Jude called from the patio.
“We’re right here,” Dina said as she stepped through the doors, a smile pinned to her face.
Betsy gestured to comfortable-looking chairs that surrounded a glass-topped table with a vast umbrella overhead. The patio overlooked a garden and pool area with the tennis courts beyond. Simon took a seat and waited expectantly for someone to begin.
“Tell him what happened two nights ago, Dina,” Betsy instructed.
Dina did.
“My God, why didn’t you call me?” Simon turned to her, his eyes dark with panic. “Are you all right?”
“Only frightened.” She smiled weakly. “And I did call you. You weren’t home.”
“I was in Rhode Island interviewing Graham Junior. If you’d told me this on my answering machine, I’d have been here last night. Did you call the police?”
“Yes, of course. Of course, at the time I spoke with them, I had no idea there was a reason why the near miss could have been something other than an accident.”
“After that, I knew I had to tell Dina everything,” Jude said. “She can’t very well protect herself if she doesn’t know there’s a danger.”
“That must have been very hard for you.”
Jude nodded curtly.
“So what are you going to do now?” Simon asked.
The three women glanced at one another.
“Actually, we don’t have a plan. This isn’t something one deals with every day, you know.” Dina cleared her throat. “We don’t know where to start or who to talk to. How do you even start to explain something like this to a stranger?”
“And after all, you already know the whole story. We thought the fewer who knew—about Blythe, about Dina—the better,” Jude added. “And since you were already looking into the affair—”
“This isn’t about the affair anymore,” Simon said pointedly. “It’s about the fact that someone has gotten away with murder for nearly thirty years.”
“But how can you separate the affair from the murder?” Dina asked. “Does anyone really think that Blythe would have been killed if she hadn’t been having an affair with Hayward?”
“I’ve thought about that every day since the day my sister died.” Betsy leaned forward.
“And I’ve tried not to think about it,” Jude admitted, a catch in her voice. “I always believed that as long as no one knew about Blythe and Graham—about Dina—there was nothing that could be done about Blythe’s death without putting Dina in danger. Now I see how shortsighted that was.”
“Is there any reason to think that someone other than the person who killed Blythe is the same person, or perhaps working for or with the same person, who was driving the van that tried to run me over?” Dina asked.
“I don’t think there’s any question that there’s a connection,” Simon told her.
“We need to find out who that person is before someone else gets hurt,” Jude offered, though everyone knew that what Jude really meant was before Dina gets killed.
“Simon, we thought that perhaps in researching your book you might have learned something that could help us to figure out who might have known about Dina’s birth. Who might have a motive for wanting Dina . . . out of the picture. And