Act of Darkness (13 page)

“Were you disappointed?”

Dan shrugged. “I should have expected it. I didn’t give him much of anything but questions. He wants to talk to Stephen.”

“Of course he does.”

“You don’t seem to realize how dangerous that could be, Janet. I haven’t let Stephen talk to anyone in weeks,”

“Except Patchen Rawls.”

Dan Chester flushed brick red, then paled just as quickly. “Speaking of Patchen Rawls,” he said, “she’s down there. Don’t you think you ought to take care of that, before the party starts?”

“Is there going to be a party?”

Dan cast a baleful look in the direction of the de Broden place, even though he couldn’t see it. He liked the de Brodens even less than she did. “If it were up to me,” he said, “we’d have a brass band out here playing Hurray for Hollywood.

Then he spun away from her and went stalking back to the house, presumably in the direction of something political to do.

Janet plucked at her hairpins, fussed with her hair knot, rubbed her face. Then she turned toward the beach and sighed a little. It was time she did a little stalking of her own, although it wasn’t in character. She headed across the sand to the water.

When she got to the wet pack at the edge of the tide, she put her hand on Patchen’s shoulder and said, “Miss Rawls?”

Patchen Rawls looked up. “You shouldn’t do that to someone who’s meditating,” she said. “It could be dangerous. You could have pulled me out of a trance state. I could have been lost in a time crack.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think you have very good karma,” Patchen Rawls said. “You must have been a mass murderer in your previous life. That’s the only thing I can think of to explain you.”

Janet sat down on the sand. “Listen,” she said, thinking of Stephanie, thinking of the children at the Emiliani School. She found it impossible to think about Patchen Rawls.

“Listen,” she said again. “It’s time we had a good long talk.”

Victoria Harte had been standing at the sliding glass doors in her main-floor bedroom when Janet went down to talk to Patchen Rawls, and now, half an hour later, she was still standing there. Of course, Janet was still talking to Patchen Rawls. Victoria wondered what they were saying. Janet, as always, was being reasonable. That was Janet’s great talent. And Patchen was losing her self-control. That was Patchen’s great talent. How she could ever have been impressed with that woman, Victoria didn’t know. She must have been going through a divorce.

Victoria watched as Janet stood up, brushed off the back of her beach dress, and headed toward the house. Patchen Rawls sat where she had been, looking, even at a distance, frustrated and angry. Victoria had a sudden and vivid image of Janet at the age of twelve, calmly explaining to the daughter of the most important producer in Hollywood why they weren’t going to be friends anymore. The daughter of the producer had been left with exactly the same look on her face that Patchen Rawls wore now: utter incredulity sliding into fury, because she was not the sort of person people did things like that to.

Victoria turned away from her window, went to her door, and waited. When she heard Janet come in at the end of the hall, she stuck her head out.

“Janet.”

“Hello, Mother.”

“I saw you out on the beach. Talking to that woman.”

Janet smiled, in a tired, almost cynical way—but only almost, because Janet was not capable of being really cynical. “I don’t know if I’d call it talking. It was a very odd conversation.”

“She probably tried to sell you on crystal healing. Or poltergeists.”

“Not exactly. She’s a strange woman. I don’t think she has any practical sense at all. And she certainly doesn’t know men.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I couldn’t get it across to her that Stephen would do anything for sex except jeopardize his chance at the presidency. I couldn’t get it across to her that he’d never leave me. He won’t leave me, will he, Mother?”

“No, he won’t.”

“That’s the way I read it, too, given all the circumstances. Were you looking for a little company?”

Victoria nodded. Then she closed the door and locked it and came in to sit on the sofa.

“Do you think she’ll leave? I did everything but threaten to poison her food, but I couldn’t convince her not to come.”

“I don’t know, Mother. I don’t think things like that would have convinced her not to come. I’m not sure anything would have. It’s like I told you. She’s a very strange woman.”

“All Stephen’s women are strange.”

“She’s stranger than most. Sometimes I think she might not be quite sane. She was in my room this morning, you know.”

“What?”

Janet smiled again, a thin wintry smile. Victoria bit her lip. It hurt her to see Janet like this, hurt her to see Janet in so much pain. And that’s all Janet had had, for years now, with Stephen Whistler Fox.

“She went in just after I came down this morning. I was in the foyer and I saw her. And heard her. You know how you can see all the way to that end if you’re over by the Braque etching—”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, I was there. I’d come down intending to go out to the beach, but then I remembered I’d forgotten something. So I came back in, and I was just standing near the Braque when I saw her come out, humming to herself. I’ve been wondering ever since what she was doing up there.”

“Did you ask her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Janet shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d get a straight answer. Nobody ever does. I suppose she was looking through my things. It was wretched even to think about.”

“I don’t think you ought to take this so cavalierly,” Victoria said slowly. “Dan Chester thinks she’s responsible for Stephen’s attacks, you know.”

“Who told you that? Melissa?”

“Melissa is very good at what she does, Janet. And for once, I don’t blame Dan. That woman’s got some very strange friends. I’ve met a few of them. I think some of them may be involved in organized crime.”

“And Patchen Rawls knows it?”

Victoria snorted. “Patchen Rawls wouldn’t know Armageddon if it happened in her backyard. But she doesn’t have to know what they are, Janet. She only has to know what they can do for her.”

“I’m not worried about Patchen Rawls, Mother. I don’t think she’s trying to kill Stephen. If she’s going to try to kill anybody, it’s going to be me.” Janet considered it. “Or Dan Chester,” she added.

Victoria cocked her head. “I take it Ms. Rawls thinks Dan Chester is the principal reason Stephen won’t divorce you?”

“Something like that.”

“It’s the kind of thing she would think. Janet, what are you going to do about all this? You can’t go on the way you’ve been. Don’t you ever think about divorcing him?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I’ve never thought about divorcing him, Mother. Not even for a day. I just wish—”

“What?”

Janet sighed and rested her head on the back of her chair and closed her eyes. “I wish it had worked out differently. I wish Stephen hadn’t been in politics. I wish Stephanie had lived. I wish, I wish, I wish. Sometimes that’s all I do. I lie in bed and think it all through. I make it all different.”

“That’s not a very healthy way to live, Janet.”

“I know. I don’t think I care.”

“Do you care about this other thing? About Stephen being president, and you being First Lady?”

“No. It isn’t going to happen. No matter what Dan thinks.”

“You’ve got a better opinion of the American electorate than I do.”

Janet smiled again, fondly and indulgently this time. Victoria felt herself tense. Since the death of Stephanie, Janet had gone through moods like this often, drifting in and out of desolation like a cork being sucked from one bottleneck pool to another by a gentle tide. While Janet was lost in desolation, Victoria was always afraid. There was a breaking point in her daughter’s head somewhere—everybody had a breaking point—and over the past month Victoria had begun to think Janet had reached it. She was playing with those hairpins too much. She was saying too little. Especially about the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children.

That act was a deliberate, cynical fraud, and Victoria Harte knew her daughter.

Janet hated frauds even more than she hated Dan Chester.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WAS USED
to dealing with trouble on a professional basis. It was an attitude he wasn’t often aware of, but it was there: the expectation that, if something went wrong, the machinery to rectify it would already be in place. Procedures, authority, technical support: for most of his adult life, he had counted on these things the way most people counted on the use of their hands. He didn’t think about them. He simply took command and forged ahead and got the job done—or usually got the job done. There had been one terrible period in his life, during the days of Elizabeth’s last crisis, when he had
not
gotten the job done, and the job had been important enough to need doing. But he tried not to think about that.

After Dan Chester left the Mondrian study, Gregor had turned to the medical file, flipped through it, and found what he had been sure would have to be there, a paraphrased account of the senator’s symptoms. It was written in the usual medical jargon, meant to be “scientific,” rendered only obfuscated and dim. Fortunately, he’d had long experience reading this kind of thing. He even had a certain amount of talent for it. And the facts, once untangled from declarations of “perceived cardiovascular hyperparalysis” and “apparent pulmonary function cessation,” were interesting.

In the first place, as Dan Chester had said, the attacks started with a tingling sensation over the entire surface of the skin, as if—to lean on Chester again—the senator’s entire body had “gone to sleep.”

In the second place, the gone-to-sleep feeling escalated into something far more painful, something the senator described as “being stabbed by a hundred million sewing needles.” This was quoted directly, and footnoted to indicate that the words were the senator’s own. Possibly, Gregor thought, the symptom was so bizarre, the scientific types hadn’t been able to come up with a polysyllabic substitute for it in time for the writing of the report.

In the third place, the senator’s vital functions began to shut down, or the senator began to believe his vital functions were shutting down. His heart stopped beating. His lungs stopped pulling in air.

In the fourth place, the senator lost the use of his muscles. This part was written in language even more circumlocutory than usual, but as far as Gregor could tell it wasn’t meant to describe paralysis in the ordinary sense. The senator didn’t feel his muscles “lock,” the way someone would if they were frozen by fear. He didn’t feel them at all.

In the fifth place, at no time did the senator lose consciousness. He was aware of everything that was happening to him from beginning to end.

In the sixth place, when he fell, he felt pain, even if he didn’t come out of the paralysis until several minutes later.

Gregor closed the folder and tapped his finger against it, irritated. It was this last point, number six, that was so disturbing. All the others were consistent with a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness, or at least of mental breakdown. Only the pain, which either shouldn’t have been there at all or should have shocked the senator out of whatever trance state he’d been in, didn’t add up.

Gregor dumped the medical reports back in their folder and stood up. Somewhere out in the hall—or maybe somewhere out in the house; with all that open space, who could tell?—a clock he’d never noticed struck the hour. He was hungry, and he thought he’d heard something about lunch being laid out “near the pool.” He suppressed his inclination to wonder about a woman who would build a pool right next to a perfectly good sound and concentrated instead on a lunch “laid out.” It probably meant some kind of buffet everyone would have to attend if they wanted to avoid starvation, and that was good. He thought it was high time he saw how these people operated when they were all together.

By the time Gregor reached the pool patio—clomping across the sand between it and the deck in the brown wool suit and wing-tip shoes he had never bothered to change—lunch had indeed been laid out, and most of the principals were present. Only Victoria Harte was missing. Because everything about the elaborate buffet showed her hand—among other things, there was a cake decorated to look like the Great Seal of the United States, but heart-shaped instead of circular—
missing
might not have been the right word for it. Gregor clamored onto the polished slate of the patio itself and surveyed the offerings set out on the long table: an icesculpture American bald eagle melting quickly into the caviar it was supposed to protect; a whole tray of tiny individual quiches made to look like heads of George Washington; a huge cake of pate de fois gras food-colored to resemble Betsy Ross’s flag, with molded hard-boiled egg slices for stars; a huge basket of bread slices cut into Pilgrim’s hats. It was the parody of a party scene in a Judith Krantz novel—or maybe Victoria Harte’s latest slap in the face of Oyster Bay. For some reason, Gregor found he had a stronger sense of the real Oyster Bay out here on the pool patio than anywhere else at Great Expectations. The town seemed to ooze in on him from every side, spreading a mental deep freeze, hard-shelled and smooth as a pearl.

Gregor’s first instinct was to head directly for the man he knew from television as Stephen Whistler Fox, standing now at the head of the buffet table, flanked by his wife and the actress Patchen Rawls. But Stephen Whistler Fox looked pinned and helpless, and so jumpy he might have been carbonated. There were more interesting tableaux on the pool patio. Bennis was talking with Dan Chester and signaling frantically to Gregor for rescue. Gregor made no move in her direction. He knew Bennis, and he’d already talked to Dan Chester.

The man and the woman near the ice-sculpture eagle caught his eye and held it. By process of elimination, Gregor knew they had to be Dr. Kevin Debrett and the lobbyist Clare Markey. By Clare Markey’s posture, Gregor knew something in their conversation was going terribly wrong. He headed for them, moving slowly, feeling as if the mere act of breathing was overexertion in this hot sun.