Innocence

“Who am I, detective? A principal? An accomplice? An accessory? Or innocent?”What does the detective see before him? Another pampered princess? A sheltered child barely clinging on to the social camouflage of a properly schooled lady upholding family dignity and pride? The performance of a cold-hearted suspect hiding guilt behind bland, vacant eyes and every semblance of co-operation, reason and reasonableness?Stories, myths, gossip, rumor. These phantasms are as powerful as gods, disembodied, insubstantial, immortal armies impossible to fight or capture or elude, their agents as punishing and relentless as the Furies - and sometimes they are made of flesh and blood, taking the form of two NYPD detectives, intruding upon the sanctuary of my domain, this house and the courtyard beyond it, ordered and serene, enclosed by a high walled garden, a garden my mother had once tended as a girl...A long time has passed since heiress Claire Leighton left the cocoon of her idyllic childhood. Yet the tendrils of the past still linger. Old sins, as they say, cast long shadows - and the innocent are as much in danger as the guilty of being ensnared in the tangled web of love, greed, lies, wickedness, and murder.