28 Hearts of Sand (32 page)

She walked all the way out to Beach Drive. She felt winded the way she had when she was a child and fell off the low slides at Waldham Park.

“Got the breath knocked out of you,” her mother used to say, making it sound like something so vilely stupid that no decent person would admit to it.

After a while, she had hated those slides so much, she refused to go on them.

“That’s why you’re always too fat,” her mother had said. “And you’re going to be as fat as a pig when you get older. You don’t take any exercise. Decent people take exercise.”

But it wasn’t true she had been fat then. She had been a little chunky. She couldn’t help that. That was her genes. Her mother was a little chunky, too, and her father was downright squat.

The day was hot. Hope found a place on the parade route where there was a bench she could sit on. She thought she should have brought a folding chair, but she was pretty sure she would not have been able to carry it all that distance. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap and looked into the empty road.

When she was younger, she used to come down here with Chapin and Virginia and Marty and Tim and Kyle. They would use Chapin’s house, or Tim and Virginia’s, and sit at the end of the driveway to watch the parade come by. The smaller children would stay on the lawn and come to the edge of the driveway only when there was something to see. You always had to worry about them darting out into traffic. On the last Fourth of July before everything fell apart …

But no, Hope didn’t remember that. Everything fell apart in June that year, she was sure of it. The robberies. The accident. Marty’s funeral out at the New Hope Cemetery where the reporters all wanted to take pictures of Chapin instead of Marty’s parents. She could remember standing at the edge of the grave with that big hole dug into the ground and somebody droning on and on about an eternal life nobody really believed in. She had a bandaged arm. She had bruises all over her face. She looked a mess, and her mother told her so, even as she was making everything ready for a decent funeral appearance.

“You don’t see Chapin all battered up like that,” her mother had said. “You don’t see Virginia all battered up, either.”

“They were in the backseat,” Hope had said.

This was true. Virginia and Tim and Chapin were in the backseat. Marty and Kyle and Hope herself were in the front. It was an old car, which her mother called “vintage,” because she didn’t want to admit that Marty could barely afford anything else. There was a long front seat without any buckets. None of them ever wore seat belts.

“I don’t care where you were,” her mother had said. “What will the Warings think of us?”

It was years before Hope understood how odd that sentence had been—how odd it was for everybody to worry about the Warings, and the Brands, but not about the Veers, who had lost a child. She remembered Evaline at the funeral, standing close to the casket with a furious, mulish scowl on her face, not looking at anybody. It was years afterwards before Evaline would talk to any of the people who had been her brother’s friends. The first person she talked to was Hope—because, she said, Hope was the only one of them who had ever cared if Marty lived or died.

The parade was over, and Hope didn’t remember any of it. She didn’t remember the marching bands. She hadn’t even heard them. She didn’t remember the floats or the Girl Scouts or anything else. The road all around her was nearly devoid of people. Everyone was going on to one of the picnics. Or maybe it was earlier than that. Maybe the speeches were still going on at the War Memorial.

She waited for a while and then stood up. She had to. She couldn’t sit all day on this bench, with nobody else around. She started up Beach Drive and back toward town. It was very hot, and she felt very dizzy.

If she was honest with herself, she had to admit that everything had started to fall apart long before Marty died, and long before the robberies became a public issue. Only Chapin looked as if she didn’t care one way or the other.

Hope looked around. She had reached a street she didn’t recognize. It was a “nice” street, with houses set back from the sidewalks. The houses were smaller than the ones on Beach Drive, but most houses anywhere were smaller than those. The houses were also newer than the ones in Hope’s own part of town, but that wasn’t strange either. The houses in Hope’s part of town were some of the oldest ever built on the Continent.

Hope wished she knew more or less where she was. There had been so much construction in Alwych in these last thirty years. The lots were smaller and the houses were bigger, and the houses were full of people nobody had ever known.

It was so hot, the air felt thick and patterned. It would be better if there were a bench somewhere along here, but Alwych didn’t have benches except in the middle of town. Why had she come out here to begin with? She wasn’t sure.

It was really very hot. It was very, very hot. Hope’s head hurt, but it felt as if it were floating about her neck, way into the stratosphere, so that it had nothing to do with her. She was nauseated, but the nausea was halfway up her chest, not in her stomach. She needed to stop moving and sit down. If she didn’t do that, she was going to fall down. She felt enormously stupid. She hadn’t had to walk all the way to Beach Drive. She could have walked to the train station. The War Memorial was only a little ways from there. She could have stayed home. That would have been an even better idea.

Hope stopped still and closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She was swaying. She could feel it. She didn’t know what would happen if she fell down. She didn’t know if anybody in any of these houses was at home. She had her cell phone, but she wasn’t sure if it was working or not.

On the day of Marty’s funeral, Hope had thought she was going to pass out right there in the church. She had stood in the pew for the singing and Chapin had been there right beside her, with that horrible smirk on her face, that horrible smirk that said she knew everything that had happened, and that nothing she didn’t know mattered at all.

There was a sound of a car, and Hope thought she was hallucinating it.

Then she turned and saw a sedan parked at the curb, with its motor idling.

SEVEN

1

In the beginning, Gregor Demarkian was sure that Hope Matlock was going to fall down dead on the sidewalk. She was swaying the way people did when their hearts were giving out and their heads were like balloons and just as stable. Jason Battlesea thought something was wrong, too. He stuck his head out toward the passenger side window as soon as he pulled to the curb.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Should we be getting her to a hospital?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

He pushed the button that rolled down the window and stuck his head into the thick, humid air. Hope Matlock had come to a stop, if she could be said to have been walking before that. She looked at him with puzzlement.

“Are you all right?” Gregor asked her. “Do you need medical attention?”

The look on Hope Matlock’s face said he might as well have been speaking in Mandarin. She stood swaying where she was and looking. She answered nothing.

Gregor made a decision. He looked around behind him to make sure the back passenger door was unlocked. Then he twisted his arm around and popped it open.

“Why don’t you get in,” he said. “We were headed over to your house in any event. We can drive you home.”

There was more swaying, and more of that faraway vacant look. Gregor came close to deciding that she hadn’t heard him. Then Hope shuddered, and moved.

She was, Gregor thought, a very lumbering person. She walked by swaying back and forth and sort of pitching herself forward.

Hope got into the backseat, folding herself up very carefully. She had a small purse. She put it on the floor. Then she closed the door behind her and waited.

“We can take you to the hospital, Miss Matlock,” Jason Battlesea said. “Gregor Demarkian here has a few questions he wants to ask you, he says it will sort of clear things up, but we can take you to the hospital instead if you need to go. You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine,” Hope said, rasping a little.

Gregor thought “not looking well” was something of an understatement. The woman’s face was both flushed and gray. Gregor hadn’t even known that was possible. There were large round beads of sweat on her forehead.

“I’m fine,” she said again.

Jason Battlesea got the car into drive and pulled away from the curb. “You’ll be better in the air-conditioning,” he said. “Do you have air-conditioning in that house of yours?”

“I’m fine,” Hope Matlock said yet again.

This time, Gregor thought she was approaching telling the truth. Sitting down and the cold air were doing her good. The gray was leaving her complexion, even if the flush was not. She took a great deep gulp of air that sounded as if she hadn’t had oxygen for hours.

“We were surprised to see you,” Jason Battlesea said, moving through the side streets and the neat little neighborhoods of neat little houses. “We came this way because we wanted to avoid all the fuss left over from the parade. I never would have thought anybody was crazy enough to walk this way. I mean, it’s out of your way, isn’t it? And you’re on foot.”

Hope looked out the window. “I just started walking,” she said. “The parade was over and I wanted to go home. I don’t think I was paying attention to the way I was going.”

“Well, you must not have been,” Jason Battlesea said. “You could have killed yourself. Even a young person who was relatively healthy—I’m not saying you’re not healthy, Miss Matlock—could get heat stroke in this weather.”

She was looking out the car window as the streets went by. They were going by very quickly.

“When we get home, I want you to put your feet up,” Jason Battlesea said. “Is there any air-conditioning in your house?”

“It doesn’t need air-conditioning,” Hope said. “These old houses, they were meant to keep out the weather.”

“The weather is ninety-three degrees and humid as hell,” Jason Battlesea said. “Do you at least have ice? Lots of nice big ice cube trays full of ice?”

“Of course there’s ice,” Hope said, but she didn’t sound certain.

“I’ve got Jack and Mike coming over. Mr. Demarkian here wanted them on hand. I’ll have them pick up some ice at Lanyard’s or somewhere. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

Hope was still looking out the window. Her eyes did not look glazed, but they did not look focused, either.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said finally. “I’m all right. I’m going to be all right. I just need to sit down at home and rest for a while.”

Gregor pulled down the visor in front of him. There was a mirror clipped onto the back of that. It made it much easier for him to see Hope in the backseat. He got the side of her face, now fading from the flush. She looked, oddly enough, very cold.

Jason Battlesea had pulled into yet another road. This one distinctive in that most of the houses on it were right up next to the pavement. They were also all old. He pulled up in front of a small brown one.

Hope got her door open quickly and started to get out.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. Gregor was tired of hearing it.

“I just need to lie down,” Hope said. “I need to lie down for an hour and then I can talk to Mr. Demarkian.”

Gregor sighed. “You know you can’t lie down for an hour,” he said, “and you know I’m not going to let you.”

“Why not?” Jason Battlesea said. “Do you want to kill her?”

“I don’t want her to kill herself,” Gregor said, “and that’s where this is going.”

“Hope Matlock is going to kill herself,” Jason Battlesea said.

“No,” Hope said.

“I don’t think you are either,” Gregor said, “at least not as long as we’re here. But I’d really like you to tell me why you killed Chapin Waring and Kyle Westervan before you decide to give it a shot.”

Hot air was coming in through the open passenger door. Hope put her face in her hands and bent over.

It took a little while before Gregor realized that what he was hearing was sobs.

2

When they got her inside, the first thing Gregor could think of was how small the house was. It wasn’t square-foot small. Gregor could tell from looking at the outside that no matter what size the building was when it was first erected, it had been added on to over and over again through the years. There was a lot of it sprawling out along the road and back toward what looked like a stand of trees.

It was the rooms that were small, the ceilings lower than the modern custom of at least eight feet, the total dimensions cramped and strictly limited by thick walls with doors in them.

They came through the front door directly into the living room. There was a great wing chair near the fireplace. Jason Battlesea helped Hope Matlock into that, and she went without protest. She was bent over when she went into the chair. She stayed bent over once she was settled in it.

Gregor looked around and saw that there were papers and books everywhere, as if someone had taken the contents of a small office and thrown them over the furniture without caring where they landed.

Hope had stopped sobbing, but she was still crying. Gregor could see her shoulders going up and down above the face she still had hidden in her hands. He walked through the living room into the dining room. This room, too, was full of papers and books. Nobody could have found a place to eat at the dining room table.

He went through the dining room into the kitchen. This room was just a mess. There were dishes piled up in the sink. There were bags of chemicalized snack foods on all the counters and on top of the refrigerators. On an impulse, he opened the refrigerator. There were things in there in bowls that looked like they might have been there for a decade. He opened the little freezer compartment above that and found big bags of something called Pizza Rolls, a stack of Swanson Hungry Man TV dinners, and a big bag of frozen chicken nuggets.

When Gregor got back to the living room, Jason was waiting for him, scowling. “You can’t go looking around the place as if you owned it,” he said. “We don’t have a search warrant.”