28 Hearts of Sand (16 page)

Kyle picked up the letters again. He glanced through them again. He put them down again.

“Was Virginia like this when we were all growing up?” he asked. “This doctrinaire.”

Tim was surprised. “You were married to her.”

“I know I was married to her, but that doesn’t tell me much, does it?” Kyle said. “I get along with Virginia. I always have. Married or divorced, it never made any difference. But lately, it’s like she’s turned into petrified wood.”

“She’d say I’ve turned into petrified wood,” Tim said.

“I know. She’d be right. You both have. I don’t think either of you understands how completely alike you are.”

“And now Chapin is dead,” Tim said, “and there’s a world-class detective consultant the town is paying God only knows what to do something about it.”

“Have you met the Great Detective?”

“No,” Tim said. “I have been keeping up on the gossip. He’s apparently closeted himself in the records room of the police department and is reading through every scrap of paper he can find. The word is that our particular local police force isn’t much good at collecting evidence and analyzing it.”

“Have you had a call to go and talk to him?” Kyle asked.

“No, of course not,” Tim said. “Why would I?”

“They’re going to have to come along and talk to everybody who was involved in that other thing, even if ‘involved’ only means that they were part of the same deb party circuit as the principals. Didn’t the local police come and talk to you after the murder?”

“For a couple of minutes,” Tim said.

“They got me for a couple of minutes, too,” Kyle said. “But it’s all going to come back around. If I were you and I were going to worry about something happening to the clinic, I’d worry about the blowback from that.”

Tim watched him stand up, moving carefully so that he didn’t tip over books and papers and make something fall. Tim got the impression that Kyle was almost completely exhausted, that he’d had so little sleep for so long, he was about to fall over. For a moment, Tim was actually frightened.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “I know you’ve got perfect health insurance and you don’t come here, but if you need something—”

“I’m fine,” Kyle said, looking even less fine. “Do you still give the same answer, when people ask you why you do what you do?”

“The same answer?” Tim asked.

“I remember it from the first interview I read,” Kyle said. “Something in Latin, about—”

“Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,”
Tim said. “‘For the greater glory of God.’”

“That’s it,” Kyle said. “At least it’s a reason.”

“You really are sick,” Tim said. “Do you have something I don’t know about? Because you look like you’re about to fall over.”

“I am about to fall over,” Kyle said. “I’ve been working late forever, and I’ve gotten to that age. I’m just overworked, and I don’t think any good can come of this.”

“Can good come of this thing with Chapin?” Tim asked. “She was murdered. Of course no good can come of it.”

“Well, somebody thought some good could come of it,” Kyle said. “It’s the only reason why anybody ever murders anybody else.”

“Oh,” Tim said.

“Listen,” Kyle said. “Why don’t we go somewhere off the premises? Somewhere no one can hear us talking? I think I may have a solution to your problem.”

“To the problem of the Health Care Access thing?”

“Exactly,” Kyle said. “Let me just hit a restroom and we’ll go somewhere and talk.”

3

Hope Matlock had ridden the train into New York dozens of times when she was in high school and college. It was one of the things they did as a group, over and over again, because it annoyed the hell out of their parents. She could remember herself on those trains, looking out windows as Westport and Stamford and Greenwich rolled by, mentally counting up her money in her head. She’d never had as much money as the rest of them. She’d always been afraid that they would want to go somewhere where she couldn’t handle the freight.

Today she had been worried about money, too, and she was right to worry. The trains were a lot more expensive than they had been thirty years ago. They were nicer, too, but Hope only cared about the expense. Everything in Manhattan had been more expensive, too, especially the buses and the subways. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that if the day didn’t work out, she wasn’t going to have enough to get back to Grand Central Station.

As it turned out, the day had worked out fine. It was quarter past six, and she was sitting in a Metro-North car, watching the towns go by again in reverse order.

The outskirts of Alwych began rolling by, the big red barn that was now a farmers’ market every Saturday afternoon in the spring and summer, the “smaller” houses with their postage stamp lawns where new people lived when they really couldn’t afford to live in Alwych. Hope waited to see the facade of Lanyard’s going by. Then she began to get up and move into the aisle, even though the conductor had yet to call the stop.

She knew better than to look into her pocketbook where people could see her. She was afraid that she’d held it much to close to her during the trip. The conductor came through and had to squeeze by her, which was embarrassing. The train began to slow and other people began to get up out of their seats. Hope shoved the embarrassment down her throat and made for the door.

When the train came to a stop, Hope got off onto the cement platform and then made her way to the stairs to the depot. She got to the depot waiting room and made for one of the benches at the front. She sat down and closed her eyes. She was still hugging her pocketbook. There was sweat on her forehead. She could feel it. She was having trouble breathing. This was all she needed. She’d pass out here and be hauled off to the emergency room or Tim’s clinic, and somebody would steal her purse.

She was willing herself not to pass out when a familiar voice said, “Hope? Is that you? Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” Hope said, opening her eyes and looking into Evaline Veer’s. Evaline was bending over her.

Hope sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I was just getting myself psyched up for the long walk home.”

“Walk?” Evaline said. “You walked all the way here from your place? Whatever for?”

“Parking around the depot is ridiculous,” Hope said. She meant parking around the depot was expensive, and she didn’t have one of those monthly parking passes. “And I knew I was going to be back before dark.”

“Oh, you went in to the city,” Evaline said.

“Just for lunch,” Hope said. “I’d forgotten how tiring it was. And now I’m back and all I want to do is go to sleep.”

“Well, go to sleep in your own bed,” Evaline said. “I’ll walk you out to your place and make sure you’re settled. You really don’t look all that well.”

“I”m fine, really.”

“Nonsense,” Evaline said. “And the walk will do me good. I’m beyond agitated, I hate to tell you. Gregor Demarkian got here.”

“I heard it on the news this morning,” Hope said.

“Yes, well. I still haven’t met the man, and he’s already made my life one huge complication. I’ve had Jason Battlesea on the phone all day, reporting in when so much as a leaf falls in the forest, and then of course there had to be an
Incident.
There always has to be an
Incident.
”

“What kind of incident?” Hope asked, stalling for time. She really didn’t want to get up and get moving just yet.

“Oh, the alarm went off over at the Waring house,” Evaline said. “I know we’re all supposed to be on hyperalert since the murder, but that alarm goes off all the time and everybody knows it. The police had to go check it out anyway, of course, and then Caroline Holder came roaring in, being her usual Waring self. And then Caroline came to see me, right at the end of the day, as if I had nothing to do in the world except listen to her screech about how the police are complete idiots.”

“I remember going off to college and then to graduate school and coming back, and almost nobody ever talked about Chapin,” Hope said.

“Oh, of course they did,” Evaline said. “They just didn’t talk about it around us. I think they’re all crazy, all the Warings. Holding on to that house all these years. What did they think was going to happen? Chapin was going to walk through the front doors one day and then—what? Go on trial for murdering two people in a bank robbery?”

“I don’t think they did,” Hope said. “Mr. and Mrs. Waring, I mean. I don’t think they wanted her to come back.”

“I always thought they wanted her dead.” Evaline said, “I’d have wanted her dead if I was them. But you knew them better than I did.”

“It wasn’t the way everybody is always saying it was,” Hope said. She was getting her wind back. She felt better. “Everybody talks about it as if we all knew about the robberies when they were going on. But we didn’t. I didn’t. And I don’t think Tim did, either.”

“And you think I knew?” Evaline said. “Is that it?”

Hope shook her head. “I think it was a secret, just between the two of them,” she said. “I think they liked having a secret so they could laugh at the rest of us.”

“Well, that would have been in character.”

“Do you know what the very worst thing about the murder is?” Hope asked. “The very worst thing is that you can’t stop thinking about it.”

“And,” Evaline said, “you’re right, I can’t stop thinking about it. Although mostly I remember what came just before we knew about the robberies. I remember the police coming to the door of the house to tell us about the accident, and that Marty was in the hospital. I remember thinking that the hospital was a good sign, because you didn’t take someone to the hospital if he was dead. And then he was dead. It turned out that you did take somebody to the hospital if he was dead, because the morgue was in the hospital basement.”

“Is it?” Hope said.

“Not the real morgue,” Evaline said. “We’ve got a state facility for that. It’s just the place we put bodies while we’re waiting for a transfer. That’s a terrible thing to think of, isn’t it? A transfer. Like you’re hauling meat. Marty was transferred to the funeral home that used to be next to the Congregational Church. I don’t even remember what it was called anymore.”

“They took all of us to the hospital that night,” Hope said. “Chapin was in the backseat and she was barely even scratched. I remember Tim getting out from the back and walking around the car. Just walking around it and around it. And the car was all crumpled up. They made a big deal in the papers about how Marty had been drinking that night, but I didn’t think it made any difference. We were always drinking in those days. Nobody thought anything of it. It wasn’t like now.”

“No,” Evaline agreed. “It wasn’t like now.”

“Sometimes I look back on it and I realize that they must have been acting crazy because of the two people who were killed,” Hope said. “Chapin and Marty, I mean. They were high as kites and we hadn’t taken anything. We’d just had a few drinks, these pink cocktail things Chapin liked to make. But at the time, it just seemed like Chapin being Chapin.”

“I know what you mean,” Evaline said.

“I’m not surprised someone stabbed her in the back,” Hope said. “She was always stabbing everybody else in the back.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say anything like that too loudly around here at the moment,” Evaline said. “That Mr. Demarkian is here now. You could turn yourself into a prime suspect.”

Hope was definitely feeling better now. Her lungs were full of air. Her muscles were willing to move on their own.

She got up off the bench very carefully, holding on to the armrest with one hand and praying to God she wouldn’t tip the thing over. She had her other arm still clutching her pocketbook to her chest.

“There you go,” Evaline said cheerfully. “Let’s walk home, then. Maybe we can walk over to my house and get my car.”

THREE

1

Gregor had his dinner out on the terrace. He brought his laptop and his phone and all the papers he had brought with him and spread himself out across two chairs, a chaise, and the round metal table.

He’d been staring at the black blank space that was the Waring house for half an hour before he decided that he was being an idiot. He picked up the phone and called Bennis. He listened to the ring and ring that went on long enough to make him wonder if she’d left her phone someplace, and then she picked up.

“I was wondering when you were going to call,” she said.

“I’ve been calling,” Gregor said. “I’ve been calling every chance I’ve gotten. I wish you were here.”

“I thought you didn’t like me interfering in your professional life.”

“I didn’t say I wanted you to interfere. I just said I wished you were here. And I do. And it’s only partly because I miss you.”

“Are all the people awful?” Bennis asked. “I thought about it after you went up there, and it occurred to me that you were probably headed for Connecticut’s version of the Main Line. And all the people would be awful.”

“The people are strange enough,” Gregor said, “but that’s not the big issue. The big issue is that I have nobody to talk to.”

“I thought they always hired you drivers and you talked to them,” Bennis said.

“I do sometimes,” Gregor agreed, “but in this case, my driver does not seem to speak any English. His name is Juan Valdez—”

“Wait? Like the coffee guy? From the commercials?”

“I knew the name was familiar,” Gregor said. “Well, that’s his name. I don’t know if he’s legal or illegal. I don’t know if he understands a word I say. He sits in the front of the car and gives me a lot of rapid-fire Spanish and I have no idea what it means, and then he drives me around. He must understand something, because we always get where we’re going. But he’s symptomatic of this whole thing, if you ask me.”

“Symptomatic how?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “let’s just say that I’ve felt as if everybody I’ve met came from central casting. Juan Valdez seems less like a person than the worst kind of stereotype. It’s been like that with a lot of these people. I met a woman named Caroline Waring Holder—”