Deadly Beloved (17 page)

Tiffany cleared her throat. “No, she wasn’t. We sent her an invitation and she didn’t answer it. She didn’t even RSVP. We followed up on it.”

“And?”

“And I suppose she said she couldn’t come,” Tiffany said irritably. “I don’t know. I didn’t handle her invitation. We had a whole committee to handle invitations.”

“Yes, Tiffany. I remember.”

“I still say we ought to take it seriously. In this day and age, I mean. It could come back to haunt us in the next election.”

“I don’t think so, Tiffany. Didn’t Rosalynn Carter have her picture taken with John Wayne Gacey?”

“President Carter didn’t get elected again either. Julianne, really. You ought to do something about this.”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? Something.”

“Well,” Julianne said reasonably. “I can’t very well give the money back, can I? The woman is dead. Her husband is dead. I’m probably broke. What am I supposed to do?”

“The woman isn’t dead,” Tiffany said. “Did you hear that on the news? Did I miss something?”

Julianne reached into her night table for the Tylenol. “No, no,” she said reassuringly. “It was just a slip of the tongue. I suppose I’ve been thinking she must be dead. Since nobody can find her.”

“She’s probably in Bolivia.” Tiffany snorted. “If it was me doing something like that, I’d take a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars. You can’t get anywhere on that kind of money these days. Maybe you should issue a press release.”

“Saying what?”

“Saying that even though she was a large contributor, you’d never even met her.”

Julianne swallowed a Tylenol dry, and then another. “I think that would only call attention to something it’s unlikely would be noticed any other way. Don’t be silly, Tiffany. It’s late. Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Work on the Karla Parrish reception, then. It’s—what? Soon.”

“I can’t work on the Parrish reception. I can’t think of anything but this. It’s the creepiest thing I ever heard of.”

Four years before, a young woman living near Pittsburgh had killed both her small children because her new boyfriend had promised to marry her if she did. This was not the creepiest thing Julianne had ever heard of. She shifted a little in bed and stretched.

“Go to bed,” she told Tiffany. “Seriously. Or work on something current. Stop worrying about Mrs. Willis.”

“Nobody calls her Mrs. Willis on television,” Tiffany said. “They always call her Patricia. As if they didn’t want you to know she was his wife. Do you think all men are worried that their wives are going to kill them in their sleep?”

“No,” Julianne said. “Go to sleep. Get off the phone. Let me go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”

“I’m going to have another cup of coffee and read the
Inquirer
report again,” Tiffany told her. “It’s the most complete. Maybe they’ll bring in Gregor Demarkian. Then we’d make the national news with this thing, and I could say I was part of it.”

“Go to sleep,” Julianne had said again—and that had been when? Last night? The night before? Sitting at her desk this morning, with the sun coming up outside the windows, Julianne couldn’t remember what she had done when over the last month, or why. What she did know was that she was in the office before seven, with her full war paint on, drinking coffee out of a mug big enough to hold a small lobster. The computer contributor sheets were spread out across her green felt desk blotter. The invitations list to the Karla Parrish reception was propped up against her Rolodex. Her new cat calendar was lying flat against the hardwood next to her phone. Why was it that people still had green felt desk blotters? she wondered. They didn’t blot ink pens anymore. Half the time they didn’t even have pens of any kind anymore. The offices were full of word processors.

Julianne ran her finger down the contributors’ lists again and frowned. She hadn’t realized that these lists were so detailed. There was the name: Patricia (Mrs. Stephen) Willis. There were the amounts and the dates they had been received: $11,000 on the first of June; $14,500 on the twelfth of September; $22,000 this past March. Julianne knew that you had to tell some federal commission or other who your campaign contributors were and what they had contributed, but she hadn’t realized that that information would be this—specific. She started to rub the side of her face and then stopped herself. She didn’t want to smear her makeup. She wished it were time for Tiffany to come into the office. There were things she needed to talk out. Unfortunately, the rules were clear. When an employee can call an employer at four o’clock in the morning, the employer is a saint. When the employer can get an employee out of bed at six
A.M.
just to talk office talk, the employer is a tyrant. Julianne shoved the contributors’ lists away from her and stood up.

She wasn’t going to issue a press release. Of course she wasn’t. That would be silly. On the other hand, what might not be silly was a little damage control. Because Tiffany was right. You could never tell what would damage you these days.

Julianne looked out the less dirty of her windows and down to the street. She went back to her desk and picked up the invitations list for the Karla Parrish reception. She had been reading about Karla, even in the middle of all this fuss about the death of Patricia Willis. If it hadn’t been for that death, the reception would have been really big news. That, Julianne remembered, was the kind of luck Karla always had. Just when she was about to make a big splash, someone else came along and made a bigger one, and Karla’s splash was lost in the tidal wave. When they were all in college together, Julianne remembered, the bigger splash had always come from Patsy MacLaren.

Julianne ran her finger down the column of names and found the one she was looking for. She took a pencil out of the caddy on her blotter and underlined both the name and the phone number. Then she pulled the phone closer across the desk and started punching numbers into the phone pad.

The phone was picked up almost immediately. It was answered less immediately, by a husky voice that seemed to belong to someone who did not intend to be in a good mood. Julianne looked at her little digital clock and winced. It was 6:12
A.M.

Julianne sat down and took a deep breath. “Bennis?” she said.

On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford made a noise that could have been a death rattle.

Julianne shook out her overteased hair. “Bennis, listen to me, this is important. I want you to get in touch with that friend of yours for me, Gregor Demarkian—”

As soon as the news got around that Stephen Willis had died, Molly Bracken knew she would have to find some way to use the information. It was terrible living day after day in this big Victorian house. It was so boring, Molly could hardly stand it sometimes. Joey went to the office every day, playing out this little charade they were involved in, but Molly had no place to go but to shop. She did go to pro-life rallies every once in a while, but they didn’t want her there without Joey, and she could feel it. Somebody said the Catholics were different. They were used to women doing things on their own because they were used to nuns. To Molly, the Catholic Church was just the old neighborhood in a fancy building. It meant standing there in the middle of all the old ladies from Italy and Poland, with their sachet and garlic smells, with their moaning over rosaries. Molly had joined the Episcopal Church as soon as she had moved out to Fox Run Hill, and made Joey join it with her. Someday, when she was old, she hoped to get to the point when she couldn’t even remember having been ethnic in any way at all.

The first thing Molly had done when she found out how Stephen Willis had died was to make sure she met the detectives who had come to investigate the case. There was a black man from Philadelphia (how had he ever gotten past the guard at the gate?) named John Jackman, who was incredibly good-looking, like Eddie Murphy only better. There was the policeman from the town, who was not good-looking at all. Molly hadn’t quite been able to hold on to his name, because he had seemed so negligible. Exeter, she thought. Or Exter. Whatever. What was the point of a man who didn’t look good and didn’t have any money? The detective Molly had really wanted to meet, though, was Gregor Demarkian. Ever since the rumor had first started going around that he was going to come out there to look into Stephen Willis’s murder, Molly had lain in wait for him, ready to pounce, ready to tear off a piece of something famous. That was how anybody got anything in this world, she was sure of it. You found somebody who had it and got hold of some for yourself. You—appropriated it. That was the word. It made Molly squirm when she thought of it, as if it were a word with four letters, something she wasn’t supposed to say.

Molly had not been as lucky with her waiting as she had hoped she would be. She had talked to the two policemen, and given them information she was sure would make them want to come back to question her later, but Gregor Demarkian hadn’t come up her long curving drive and rung her doorbell. Nobody had come, and Molly had spent the afternoon sitting on her window seat, watching the action and wishing she knew how to get back into it. Mostly, she wished she had spent more time with Patsy MacLaren Willis. Dowdy, dour, unimportant—Patsy had always seemed like the least interesting person having dinner at the Fox Run Hill Country Club on any particular night, and half the time Molly hadn’t even gone over to her table to say hello. She could kick herself for that now, she really could. She was going to have to be much more careful in the future. You never knew where people were going to end up.

Ever since Joey had left that morning, Molly had been sitting at her kitchen table, nursing a coffee with milk into frigidity. Out on her patio, the sun was bouncing a wicked glare off the aluminum arms of the patio furniture. She really ought to get painted wrought iron patio furniture, Molly thought, the kind everybody else had—but she didn’t like the patio much, and it was hard to remember to buy green and white metal chairs when she had sweaters to look at or eighteen-karat-gold chains to consider. She ought to give a party too, Molly thought. She ought to give one now so that they would all have an excuse to get together and talk about the Willises.

The doorbell rang and Molly stood up. Her kitchen wall clock said it was 9:15. No wonder she was bored. Mornings after Joey left were the worst times of the day. Molly padded out toward the front door and then stopped. The bell had rung again, but it wasn’t the front doorbell. She went out into the mudroom and to the door to the garage.

Sarah Lockwood was standing in the garage, wearing a blue linen skirt and a white shirt, carrying a pair of blue canvas espadrilles in one hand. It was hot out there. The heat rose up and hit Molly as soon as she stepped beyond the protection of the air-conditioning. Sarah’s hair was damp with sweat and humidity. It looked much darker than it usually did.

“Oh,” Sarah said when she realized Molly had opened up. “There you are. Did I get you at a bad time?”

I’m really going to have to get some of those little linen skirts, Molly thought absently. Everybody else has them. Molly was also the only person with a house in Fox Run Hill who owned leggings, but she didn’t think of that. She stepped back and waved Sarah inside.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said. “I was just sitting over a cup of coffee and letting it get cold. Sometimes I think I ought to take up volunteer work.”

“I did volunteer work for years,” Sarah said. “I hated it. I think it’s very much nicer to be in control of your own time.”

Sarah was going through the mudroom into the house. Molly made a face at her back. The kind of places Molly wanted to volunteer didn’t take anybody who walked in the door and wanted to sign up. You had to wait to be asked, and Molly could wait forever, in the present arrangement of things. She closed the door to the garage and followed Sarah inside.

“How pretty you’ve made everything,” Sarah was saying, looking around at the kitchen cabinets and the tiles on the kitchen floor. “I would never have thought of putting terra cotta into a Victorian like this. But of course I’m hopeless at decorating. We had to have somebody come in and do our house so that I didn’t ruin it.”

Molly had had someone come in and do this house. She couldn’t decide if Sarah was being sincere or not. Sarah never seemed sincere.

“I could put some coffee on,” Molly said. “And I have Perrier. Could I get you something?”

“A glass of Perrier would be nice.” Sarah sat down on one of the breakfast room chairs and looked up at the ceiling. Because a Victorian was supposed to be a formal house, there were no exposed beams here. Sarah dropped her espadrilles on the floor and stretched her bare legs into a long, straight line.

“They’re back again this morning,” she said, tossing her head side-ways to indicate the Willises’ house. “I saw them come in this morning. You’d think they’d have looked through everything in that house by now.”

Molly put a glass of Perrier water down in front of Sarah. “Was Gregor Demarkian there? Do you know who I mean—”

“Of course I know who you mean. Everybody in Philadelphia knows Demarkian. He wasn’t there, as far as I could tell.”

“The paper said he’d been called in to consult on the case.” Molly threw her old coffee away, got a clean cup, and poured herself some hot. “I think that means he’s the one investigating it, but I’m not sure. I talked to him yesterday.”

“Did you? About what?”

“About Patsy. Doesn’t it all seem really strange, now that you look back on it?”

“It seems really strange now,” Sarah said. “I mean, people I know don’t shoot their husbands to death every day. Although I know a few people who ought to.”

“I mean,
they
seem really strange,” Molly said, coming back to the table with her new coffee. “Patsy and Steve. I never thought about them before this happened, but they weren’t really normal, were they?”

“Of course they were.” Sarah was impatient. “They were as normal as anybody. They were dull.”

“They were dull enough,” Molly agreed, “but they weren’t normal. I mean, he was never around, was he? He was gone for weeks at a time.”