Conspiracy Theory (24 page)

The newsstand owner took her money and grunted. Kathi ignored him. She thought he might be a spy, but Michael didn't agree with her. In the long run, it probably didn't matter. She had tried to give him some of America on Alert's pamphlets, and he had called her a lot of unpleasant names.

Out on the street again, she stopped and began to page through the newspaper, looking for the financial section. She was not very interested in the death of Charlotte Deacon Ross. It might mean that the police would have to back off on America on Alert, since there was no reason at all why patriots would want to harm a silly Society woman who spent her life planning parties, but the police could always find some way to justify doing what they wanted to do. Besides, she was prepared for everything and anything to come of the murder of Tony Ross, which had been carried out in the way it was carried out precisely because that would make it possible for the authorities to “do something” about the threat that America on Alert posed for them. Nothing was an accident. Nothing was a coincidence. Everything was planned.

She got to the financial section and saw, immediately, what Michael had been talking about. The headline reached across most of the page, something she'd noticed that newspapers tended not to do on any page except the very front one.

Suddenly, her throat felt very scratchy. Her stomach felt raw. There was a bench in a little shelter where the bus stopped. She went to that and sat down, the paper still open in front of her face. She wasn't reading the story. She knew what it would say. Michael always pointed out that this was the Il-luminati's most treasured tactic. They wanted the people to be prosperous, but not sure of their prosperity. If people began to feel that there was nothing to worry about, they'd always be able to find work and enough to eat and enough to have the things they wanted, they would stop being docile. That was what happened in the sixties, when everything began to go completely out of control. Now they were more careful. They made sure there were always downturns and layoffs. They threw some of their least important companies into bankruptcy. They cut jobs right before Christmas and placed the news very prominently in the newspapers and on the television news—but never on the front page, and never as the lead story. The trick was to let people know at the same time you had them distracted by trivialities. That way they'd become uneasy and afraid, but not be able to figure out who was the cause of either, or what to do about it. The wind around her legs was very cold. She hadn't noticed it before. A bus had stopped, and people were getting out. She didn't notice them, either, and when the driver finally pulled the door shut in disgust, she didn't realize he had been waiting for her.

If she hadn't been taught to understand the plan, if she hadn't learned all about why things like this happened and what they were used for, she would have broken down right on this bench and cried for an hour.

Anne Ross Wyler had been depressed and jumpy all morning, long before she heard the news about her sister-in-law. Morning was not the best time in this neighborhood. Even in the half-light of a grey and overcast day, it was too easy to see the buildings around Adelphos House as what they really were: abandoned, or worse; haunted the way houses can only be haunted if their ghosts are still made of flesh and blood. Besides, Anne thought, getting herself coffee in the Adelphos House kitchen while she pretended not to look at Ryall Wyn-dham's column left lying faceup on the kitchen table, there was nobody around. The whores and the junkies were all night people. So were the pimps and dealers. Even the pawnshop didn't bother to open until noon. Annie had gone in there once to see what it was like. She'd ended up disappointed. She'd expected sin and sexuality, some kind of apocalyptic vision. She'd always secretly suspected that the people who lived on the streets lived more exciting lives than the one she had been brought up to live. They had adventures, and passions, and pasts. The truth was a thin layer of grime on the glass of display cases and mundane articles—class rings, ancient typewriters, gloves with the fingertips worn almost to nothing—waiting for buyers who would never materialize. Except, Annie had realized, that they would have to materialize. Somebody had to buy these things, or the pawnbroker would make no money.

She poured coffee into the first mug she could find in the first cabinet she opened. She never noticed what she ate and drank from, any more than she noticed what she wore. She put the mug on the table and sat down in front of Ryall Wyndham's column. It was illustrated by three small pictures, all murky, of women in evening dress.
Mrs. Carter Lindford at The Philadelphia Opera Gala
, one of them said. She remembered Mrs. Carter Lindford as a girl named Abigail Hull Drake, who used to spell out her whole name like that on English essays when they were both at Madeira. People went on doing the same things over and over again, without thinking about why they were doing them. They went to school where they were expected to go. They went to college where they were expected to go. They went into law or banking or university teaching because that was the kind of thing the people they knew did. They thought they believed in God, but except for the one or two of them who converted to Catholicism or got born again and caught up in Bible study, most of them really didn't.

The first story in Ryall Wyndham's column was a progress report on the investigation into Tony Ross's murder. It said less than similar stories that had appeared in print and on television in the last few days, but it said it with an air of insinuating archness that was meant to indicate that its author knew much more than he was telling. All of Ryall Wyndham's writing sounded like that. It was what he sold to the people who read him, the illusion that they were on the inside of a world they were sure was barred to them forever, secret, out of sight.

The second story in Ryall Wyndham's column was about a dinner party at the house of somebody Annie had never heard of. If Wyndham had to stick to real Philadelphia Society for his columns, he'd make it into print about once a month. She looked at the picture of Ryall Wyndham himself up at the top near the headline and the byline. The picture was almost vanishingly small, and even more murky than the others, and she could get no impression of the man beyond what her memory served her. She tried to imagine what he had looked like in the back of a car being sucked off by Patsy Lennon, and couldn't do it. She couldn't imagine any man like that, and she had seen a few in the act.

The coffee was terrible. She didn't care. She had long ago learned to live with it. She was hungry, but it was too much trouble to go looking through the refrigerator to see if there was anything she wanted to eat. There might be, or there might be just the raw vegetables Lucinda liked to stock up on for making chicken soup. She wondered why she couldn't make herself sleep later. There was nothing to be done this early in the day, and by the time she got to the point where there was something to do, she was exhausted. She fiddled with her
Freedom FROM Religion
button. There was a part of her that was terrified that she would one day accidentally wear it upside down. Then she turned to the paper's front page.

It was a bad picture of Charlotte, one of those posed portraits women had taken when they were chairwomen of charity committees. The pearls were fake—Annie knew the difference between Charlotte's fake pearls and her real ones, but she would have suspected even if she hadn't—and Charlotte's skin looked sallow, as if she had recently been ill. It was not the picture Charlotte would have chosen if she had known she would appear on the front page of a newspaper, but Charlotte would never have wanted to appear on the front page of a newspaper. Seeing that picture, somebody who didn't know her would assume that Charlotte was a grade-
A
bitch. They would be right.

The problem, Annie thought, was that she felt a little too sick to her stomach. She was sure that if she'd had something inside her to throw up, she would have done it. Instead, she licked her lips, and then bit them. Something had happened to the nerve endings under her skin. She
had no
nerve endings under her skin. Her head hurt. Her body ached. She couldn't read the words on the page. Everything was blurry.

Outside, it started to rain. Annie could hear the drops hitting the panes of the kitchen windows, harder in that section of the wall where the gutter had collapsed and not yet been replaced. She got up and took her coffee with her. The house felt too quiet around her, just as the street felt too quiet around the house. Sometimes they had one or more of the girls staying over, waiting for a ticket home or to go to a treatment program, but this was not one of those times. Later on there would be scheduled activities and events: an encounter group; a self-assertiveness class; a class on how to use a computer. Annie wanted noise, distraction, company. Even the gunfire of a gang war in the street would have been better than this silence.

Lucinda was in the front parlor—the living room, she called it, and Annie tried to call it that too. The curtains were pulled back to let in what little sun there was. The glass of the windowpanes shone, newly polished. Lucinda had been working. She had taken all the books off the shelf so that she could dust.

“Well,” Annie said.

“Did you just get up?” Lucinda asked her.

Annie came into the living room and sat down on the couch. It was an exceptionally long couch, big enough to fit half-a-dozen people. She remembered thinking, when she bought it, that Adelphos House would have crowds of young women on the premises all the time. They would need some place to sit.

“You left the paper on the table,” Annie said. “You had it open to Ryall's column.”

“Did you read it?”

“Ryall's column?”

“The paper.”

“I read the front page,” Annie said. “Why didn't you wake me up?”

Lucinda had finished dusting the shelves. She put her dust cloth and the Pledge on the floor and began to pick up books and put them back. “I didn't see any point,” she said. “You can't do anything about it. It wouldn't have changed anything if I'd made you get up even earlier than usual and you ended up even more tired than usual when tonight came. And I didn't want to leave it, right there, where you'd just sort of walk in on it, without warning. It wouldn't seem right, somehow.”

Annie wanted to say that she had walked in on it without warning. Whatever else could she have done when she wasn't expecting what she eventually saw? She looked over her shoulder at the street. It was empty. The three houses that faced this one directly had all lost all the glass from their windows. One of them leaned, slightly, backwards.

“I didn't actually read the front page,” Annie said. “I read the headline. Then things got blurry. Did you read it all?”

“Most of it.”

“Do you want to tell me what it said?”

Lucinda stopped working. “What do you think it said? She was killed.”

“Shot? The way Tony was shot?”

“With a rifle, yes. Or police believe with a rifle. Like that. You know they're never very specific in the paper.”

“When?”

Lucinda blinked. “Last night.”

“No,” Annie said. “What time last night?”

“Oh, I don't remember. Six, I think. Or the police arrived at the scene at six. Or something like that. Why is the time important? Are you worried about being a suspect?”

“No.” This was true. There was no reason for anybody to suspect her of anything. She had none of the usual motives. She would inherit nothing because Tony had died. She most certainly would inherit nothing because Charlotte had. She hadn't spent enough time with her brother or her sister-in-law in recent years to hate them. She turned her face away from the street. Lucinda had gone back to putting books back on shells.

“There's a lot in the article about domestic terrorism,” Lucinda said. “And there's a sidebar on the inside page, all about acts of violence by domestic terrorist groups. About this murder of an FBI agent out in Indiana or somewhere. Some group that called itself a posse.”

“The Posse Comitatus,” Annie said. “It's this obscure provision in a law. I remember them, vaguely.”

“I don't.”

“They were another one of those groups,” Annie said. “The United Nations is evil. Any day now, it's going to take over the U.S. and we'll all be part of a One World Government. The world is secretly run by a cabal of the Vatican, the Freemasons, the British monarchy, and the Kremlin. Like that man who's been sending us that newsletter every once in a while.”

“Michael Harridan.”

“Whoever.” Annie still had the coffee cup in her hand. It was nearly empty. She had forgotten all about it. She put it down on the coffee table. “The thing is,” she said, “I don't think the police are going to buy that explanation anymore, the domestic terrorist one. Why would domestic terrorists want to kill Charlotte?”

“Because she raised money for the UN?”

“Lame,” Annie said. “That's not the way those people think. They'd choose something about the government, or somebody like Tony, somebody with influence.”

“There's that priest who was here the night it all happened,” Lucinda said. “His church was bombed. Doesn't that sound like domestic terrorism?”

“It sounds like religious bigotry and violence, but I don't know if it sounds like domestic terrorism. He had some little church on a side street. Why would a domestic terrorist bother to blow it up?”

“Because he thought it was part of this One World Government?”

“It's more likely some half-educated idiot who's never heard of the Eastern churches and thinks they're practicing witchcraft on Cavanaugh Street. And there's no reason to think the incidents are connected, just because they happened on the same night. There must have been a dozen acts of violence in Philadelphia and on the Main Line that night.”