27 Blood in the Water (31 page)

Back in the master bedroom, Fanny threw one of the bags on the floor and kept the other. She went into the closet and opened the bag as widely as she could. She knelt down and started stuffing clothes into the bag, one handful of them after the other.

When the bag was full there were still clothes on the floor, and there were the shoes. She had forgotten about the shoes. She was out of breath, and no matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking. People did things like this all the time. They did them in real life and they did them in movies. How did they get through it without dying?

She got the other bag and started throwing shoes into it, one pair after the other. They fell into the back and hit the floor beneath it with a
thud.
Fanny wished she could just breathe, just a little. She wished she had the courage to start a fire. She could throw a match on all this and then get the children and get out.

She tried to visualize the world made perfect, the world with all her problems erased. She saw only the memory of a bumper sticker:
FORGET WORLD PEACE, VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL.

The bag was full and the clothes were almost all gone. The clothes that were left on the floor were not important enough to pick up.

She had no idea what to do next, or why she would want to do anything.

There was a noise in the room and she looked up to see Mindy standing in the doorway.

Mindy was wearing Strawberry Shortcake pajamas. She should have been carrying a Teddy bear, but she wasn’t. Mindy didn’t go in for teddy bears. She only wore Strawberry Shortcake because she liked the color.

Mindy looked down at the two enormous black trash bags full of clothes and said, “Everybody at school says Daddy is dead.”

2

Eileen Platte had been in the hospital most of the day, and most of the day she had been in this room, which was very carefully designed to have nothing in it that she could use to try to kill herself again. She had tried to tell the psychiatrist they had sent in to see her that she hadn’t really been intending to kill herself, no matter what it looked like. Yes, she had stood on the chair. And yes, she had made a noose from a rope she had found in the garage, a rope Stephen and Michael had both used at one time or the other, to lash things to the roof rack of the bigger car. Of course, they weren’t cars anymore. That wasn’t what you called them. They were SUVs, or trucks, or “recreational vehicles.” Eileen couldn’t keep track of it all anymore. It made her tired.

For a while this afternoon, she had been able to hear Stephen, his harsh, booming voice traveling down the hall, saying things that should have embarrassed her.

“Always been a little off her nut,” was one of the things he said, and “telling the police crazy stories that are likely to get me arrested.”

It was obvious, though, that he hadn’t been arrested. She didn’t see why he ought to be. If they were going to arrest somebody, they should arrest her. Wasn’t it always the mother’s fault if the child turned out badly?

That was what she had been thinking about, sitting here all these hours. Michael had turned out badly. That was the conclusion she had reached this morning. But if Michael had turned out badly, it had to be for a reason. People were not just born bad. She must have done something. She must have said the wrong thing at the wrong time and turned some switch in his head, and now she ought to be grateful that it hadn’t been worse.

“He’s going to say I imagined it,” she told the psychiatrist. “He’s going to tell the police that I just made it all up, that it never existed, that the shoe box never existed, that the money never existed. I think he wants to keep the money. I think that’s what that’s about. He kept the money he found before.”

The psychiatrist hadn’t said anything. Eileen had read enough women’s magazines to know that he wasn’t supposed to. She wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do.

“The other money wasn’t so much,” she said. “It wasn’t any huge amount. It was just a couple of thousand dollars. And there was a key. Gregor Demarkian asked me about the key, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell him. It was Martha Heydreich’s key. Stephen didn’t find it.”

The psychiatrist still said nothing, and Eileen found herself drifting off. It was very peaceful, sitting in the chair the way she was. She felt as if she were floating in a vast ocean, and nothing and nobody would ever be able to find her. She would float away, and when she had floated away far enough, there would be mermaids singing. There were mermaids in the
Odyssey.
There were mermaids in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She had never paid enough attention in school.

When she got back to her room, the sun was shining. There were birds making fretful noises outside her window. They had given her a pill. It had made her sleep. She lay down in her bed and drifted off again.

Here was something she liked more than any of the rest of it. She liked the way this made her feel that she could sleep and sleep, sleep and sleep, forever, without anybody being able to wake her up. She would be like a princess in a tower, and some day a prince would come to kiss her awake. What she really wanted was for no prince to come at all. She would just sleep. And if a fairy godmother ever asked to know where she was, people could say that she’d left on vacation, and never come back.

Stephen’s voice at the end of the hall had been strident, insistent, a little panicked.

“She tells all these stories,” it said. “She tells them and she has no idea whether they’re true or not. She tells them and then she can’t remember if she made them up or not, and then everything goes to hell.”

A little while after that, Stephen came down to the room and sat in its one, hard-backed visitor’s chair. He had his jacket unzipped. His hair was very mussed. He sat with his legs apart and his forearms on his knees and watched her for a while, as if it would be useless to talk to her. The light in the window came and went and came again. There were clouds out there. Eileen could tell.

“I don’t know what you said to them,” he said, “but they had a warrant when they came to my office. A warrant when they came to my office. Can you imagine? It will be all over town before you know it. I could have been arrested.”

Eileen reminded herself that she was on a deep sea. The law of the sea said she did not have to answer questions. She would never answer questions again.

“They found the money,” Stephen said. “It was sitting right there in my desk drawer. I hadn’t had time to do anything with it yet. Do you think when you do these things? Do you ever think at all?”

Eileen almost said that she was thinking right then, right that minute, but if she’d done that, it would have started a conversation. She didn’t want a conversation.

“There’s all kinds of shit hitting the fan at the moment,” Stephen said. “I hope you’re satisfied. I hope this is what you wanted.”

What Eileen wanted was Michael back. Michael just the way he always was. Michael as she had loved him from the very first moment she had seen him in the flesh. Sometimes she thought she could still feel him moving around in her body, the ebb and flow of him that last two months or so before he was born. Sometimes she thought she could see him in his playpen the very first year, slamming soft toys one against the other as if his life depended on tearing them apart.

Stephen had gotten up and gone after a while, and then there had been nothing but the bare empty room and the silence that choked it. The day had gone on without incident, except that a nurse had come in to bring her lunch, and a nurse had come in to bring her dinner, and yet another nurse had come in to bring her pills to swallow. Of course, there was a nurse always on watch just outside the door, because they were all afraid she would make another attempt to kill herself.

She had known, stringing the rope up this morning over the beam, that the beam was only decorative. It would not hold. She would not die. She would step off the stool and into the air and then she would fall, creating a mess in the kitchen, making a noise. When Stephen came home, he would find her lying there, and she would give him no explanation.

She had no explanation for anybody now, either, except the obvious one. She had seen Michael with Martha Heydreich on the night he was murdered. That was it. Everybody at Waldorf Pines had seen the two of them together. She had stood on her own deck and watched them walking across the green, far away, almost at the pool house, and for a moment she hadn’t recognized them.

It was one of the odder things about Martha Heydreich that if you saw her unexpectedly, and couldn’t get a clear look at the color of her clothes, you almost wouldn’t know who it was.

3

Horace Wingard was getting ready to shut up the office. He’d stayed late tonight, because he always stayed late, and because tonight was not a good night to seem to be ignoring the finer details of his job. The announcements about the search for Martha Heydreich were everywhere. He’d had three or four people stop in to comment on them tonight. Miss Vaile was still at her desk, typing away at the computer. He wasn’t sure why she hadn’t gone home. He wouldn’t keep her this late unless he was in the middle of a true emergency, and this was not really an emergency. It was, he thought, the difference between acute and chronic disease. Acute disease was an emergency. Chronic disease was just something you put up with, because you had to. Because it was there.

Most of what Horace had been doing for the past several hours was just make work and unnecessary. He had gone over the figures for the maintenance of the golf green. Keeping the turf in shape was getting more expensive every day. He took out the folder with the specs for repairing the pool and went over that yet again, although there was nothing he could do about it anytime soon. The pool was a big selling point at Waldorf Pines. It was heated, and supposed to be open and ready fifty-two weeks a year. They were going to have to rethink the club dues soon, no matter what kind of fuss it was going to cause.

When he finished with the figures, he went to the computer and looked up the data on the new people asking to buy houses at Waldorf Pines. There were not very many houses for sale. Even when the complex had first opened up, there had been nice long waiting lists of people who had wanted a house here. People were afraid of themselves and each other these days. That’s why they wanted the gates and the locks and the security cameras. He was a little surprised that none of the three couples with applications in had dropped out of the process.

You had to at least pretend to be exclusive, Horace thought. That was one of those things he had learned on his way up. People always cared most about who was being kept out. That was why Horace didn’t mind LizaAnne Marsh. LizaAnne was crude about it, and she was rude about it, but she was not dishonest. People could complain about her all they wanted to, but she was only saying what all of them thought.

Horace put everything away and looked around the room. Everything was in its place. All the issues were resolved for the night. He got up and started turning off lights, going from one to the next like an old-fashioned lamplighter on a street that had just been fitted for gas.

When the office was dark, he turned back to look at it. People at Waldorf Pines thought they had secrets, but they didn’t really. Horace Wingard knew all about them. He had made it his point to know all about them. He went out into the anteroom and closed the door behind him. Miss Vaile looked up from her computer.

“Are you going home now, Mr. Wingard?”

“I thought I might as well,” Horace said. “There isn’t anything to do around here any more tonight. Although we might look ahead to problems for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Figuratively speaking,” Horace said. “Over the next few days, perhaps. Or the next few weeks.”

Miss Vaile cocked her head. “Do you really think he has the answer, then? Gregor Demarkian? Do you really think he knows what happened in the pool house?”

“I have no idea,” Horace said. “But it wasn’t that I was thinking about. I was thinking about other things.”

“I’ll admit,” Miss Vaile said, “I’ve been worried. First the murders, then the mistake about the murders, then Mrs. Platte trying to commit suicide. It feels like everything’s out of control. It’s not a feeling I like.”

“It’s not a feeling I like, either, but I think that it is under control, as best it can be. As long as there is a solution of some sort, I don’t think we have to worry about that in the long run. No, it’s something else, something I’ve been expecting for some time. I have notified upper management. They are prepared for it coming.”

“Are they?” Miss Vaile said. She looked momentarily confused. “Should I be? Is this something I’m going to have to contend with?”

“We’ll all have to contend with it for a while,” Horace said. “But I’m not sure that, in spite of the bad publicity, well, I’m not sure that the bad publicity will be all that bad. People are very odd that way, these days. Fifty years ago, it would have mattered outside the bounds of its real importance. It would have been a matter of principle. But these days, the only principle is money, and there is certainly enough money.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” Miss Vaile said.

Horace smiled, and went to the coat rack to get his coat. Except for the very top of the summer, he always wore a coat, and the coat he always wore was a Chesterfield. He always wore gloves, too.

“Do you remember a man named Henry Carlson Land?”

“Do I remember him?” Miss Vaile said. “He’s still in all the papers. He gives press conferences from prison. You have to wonder how so many people could be so fooled so much of the time.”

“They weren’t fooled,” Horace said. “At least, a lot of them weren’t. The small fry were, I suppose. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. It’s the great vice of most small investors. They don’t really want to be bothered with their money. But the rest of them, the banks, and the brokerages—well, those people knew. They were just trusting to their ability to make it out in time. And most of them were wrong.”