Holly decided not to know what he was talking about. The conversation was veering dangerously close to the forbidden topics of politics and religion, neither of which had any part in a sales presentation. Smiling, she pushed open the door to the next room. “You know, this paneled dining room is a gem, and it could double as a conference room for your law firm!”
She led him through the dining room and into a small, shabby kitchen. “This will have to be remodeled, of course,” she announced briskly, with the generous profligacy of one who knows the changes will not involve her money. “I’d just gut it and start over, if I were you. With some granite countertops, fluorescent lighting, and custom appliances, this kitchen would be wonderful.”
Bill stared at the battered white refrigerator. It was shorter than he was and its contours were rounded, in this case an indication of great age for a refrigerator. Its door was dented, and the white finish had chipped away in spots, leaving a smudge of gray and suggesting that its presence in the kitchen was a remnant of an earlier, unlamented era, rather than a sentimental gesture of preservation. The thing looked at least forty years old, and along with the rest of the kitchen, it was sadly out of sync with the magnificence of the mansion. Antique was definitely not a desirable condition in kitchen appliances, Bill decided. When on impulse he opened the refrigerator to see if it still worked, he found himself peering in at an array of blue and silver aluminum cans on one shelf and cellophane wrapped packages on the other. They felt reassuringly cold to the touch, and they were obviously of recent vintage. “Pepsis and Twinkies?” he said.
“The breakfast of champions,” said a hoarse voice from the doorway.
They turned to see an ancient old man in a tattered bathrobe standing in the doorway that led to the sunporch. He seemed to be composed entirely of blue veins and wrinkles, but the two bright eyes that peered out from among the folds of skin were as sharp as ever.
“Mr. Dolan!” said Holly in a squeal of delight intended to conceal her horror at finding him on the premises. “How wonderful to see you! I’ve brought somebody by to look at this marvelous house of yours.” She took the old man by the sleeve of his brown bathrobe and propelled him toward Bill’s outstretched hand. “Say hello to Bill MacPherson. He’s one of Danville’s up-and-coming young lawyers. Bill, this is Mr. Jack Dolan, the original owner of this incredible place.”
Bill opened his mouth to say “But I thought the original owner was dead,” then thought better of it. This old gentleman looked dead. He was ninety if he was a day. The spotted pink skin of his face hung down in a cascade of furrows, giving his eyes a hooded look, reminiscent of a species of lizard. Bill couldn’t recall which species of lizard, but he was sure it looked better—and maybe more human—than the tottering specter of wheezing parchment standing before him. “How do you do?” he said faintly. He shook the old man’s hand gently, so as not to make it fall off.
Over the old man’s shoulder, Holly was mouthing the word “later” to indicate that she did indeed have a good explanation for this apparition, and that Bill would hear about it as soon as they could speak together in private. Bill turned back to the old man. “You still live here, then?” he asked gently.
“Just back there,” Mr. Jack jerked his head in the direction of the back of the house where a doorway led from the kitchen into a sunny room with glass walls and a linoleum floor. Bill walked to the threshold. He took in the glass windows, the faded linoleum floor, the unmade sofa bed, and the small space heater standing a few feet from the mattress. “But this is a sunporch. You own the house, but you live on the sunporch?”
The old man favored Bill with a gummy smile. “Don’t own the house. Built it. Don’t own it.”
“Mr. Jack’s son-in-law owned the house until two years ago,” Holly put in quickly. “He used the house as collateral in a strip-mall development deal, and unfortunately the company went bankrupt, and he lost the house to his creditors.”
“But his father-in-law still lived here?”
The old man, who had been following this exchange with rapt attention, nodded happily.
“Well …,” said Holly. “Truthfully, the family had been trying to get Mr. Jack into a nursing home for years, haven’t they?”
The old man smirked at her and nodded. “I like the sunporch. It’s warm.”
“He refuses to have live-in help. When his wife died back in the mid-eighties, he sold everything out of the house in a tag sale and retreated to this one room here adjoining the kitchen.”
“Less work,” Mr. Jack pointed out.
“Umm,” said Bill. He thought cholera would have a hard time surviving in the grime and clutter of the sunporch.
“Anyhow, he refused to move. Perhaps his family thought they could force him out when the house changed hands. According to the foreclosure agreement, Mr. Jack was given one year’s grace period to occupy the house before eviction could proceed.”
“This was two years ago, you said?”
The old man’s cackle turned into a wheeze. “They give me one year of grace. Nobody said which year. I’m staying put.”
The Realtor sighed. “You see how it is. The new owners—Sunshine Properties—couldn’t forcibly move him. Well, they could have, but it would have been a public relations nightmare. So the year’s grace period came and went, but Mr. Jack stayed right here. The company didn’t feel able to do the structural renovations with him in residence. They’d wanted to turn the place into an apartment building, I believe. Or perhaps a clubhouse for an upscale development on the adjoining land. But that land was recently ruled a protected wetland, so it can’t be built upon—not even a parking lot for apartments. That leaves this house virtually useless to them. Keeping it on the company’s books is costing them money like the proverbial white elephant. Now Sunshine Properties has decided to cut their losses, sell the house cheap, and let somebody else worry about it.” She gave Bill a meaningful look and enunciated slowly, “Very cheap.”
Bill shook his head. “So it’s a bargain. Yes, I see that. And my investment portfolio has done really well in the last couple of years, so I probably can afford the house if I want it, but, look here, you can’t expect me to buy this place out from under that poor old man. I mean, really! Take an elderly man’s house away from him. What will become of him then?”
Holly Milton smiled. “We’ve thought of that. The present owners have offered to provide Mr. Jack with a free apartment or small rental home, if he should agree to go—which they rather doubt, but they hope he will reconsider. Anyhow, failing that, they have set forth a very interesting proposition that you might want to consider.”
Mr. Jack beamed up at the prospective new owner. “Care for a Twinkie?”
“Love,” P. J. Purdue used to say, “is like flushing yourself down the toilet. A nice cool ride and a lot of crap at the end.” That pretty much summed up her opinion of relationships, and I couldn’t imagine her ever changing her mind. I wonder if she ever did.
In college we were all terrified of her. She was small, blonde, and vicious. She stalked the halls of the dorm like a drill sergeant’s impersonation of Drew Barrymore: black turtleneck, black nail polish, permanent scowl, sneering at the fraternity honeys and at the aerobic princesses on our hall, or perhaps at the whole idea of their pursuit of happiness in the form of another human being. “You’re in love?” she would drawl. “How quaint.”
In the sexual revolution, P. J. Purdue was the I.R.A. Many a rapturous discussion of rose-petal-pink bridesmaids’ dresses ended in a strained silence when Purdue entered the room with a permanent leer that put one in mind of a peckish shark.
A. P. Hill closed the cover of her journal, wondering what had led her to record her memories of a college acquaintance after all this time, instead of her usual log entries of case work and a to-do list. It was probably this morning’s cryptic phone call, she thought. She was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. Something was up.
She yawned and stretched.
It was nearly ten o’clock. Time for her evening run. Perhaps that would clear the cobwebs out of her brain, she thought. She would do her customary run in the cool night air, and then she’d be back to her usual untroubled self. Introspection was not a habit that A. P. Hill indulged in. When she had problems, she chose to outrun them, and if she had to keep running until she was too tired to think—well, that worked just as well.
After the phone call, thoughts about P. J. Purdue had drifted in and out of Powell Hill’s mind for the rest of the day, as P. J. herself had once drifted in and out of dorm rooms, uninvited and often unwelcome, but oblivious to the havoc she caused, and always a commanding presence that could not be banished for long.
Visions of Purdue’s little chicken-hawk face under a Beatle haircut had haunted A. P. Hill in court all day, and in late afternoon as she drove home, she found herself scanning the faces of people in passing cars, as if she expected Purdue to appear grinning alongside her. It was a disturbing thought.
The feeling of uneasiness was still there in the back of A. P. Hill’s mind hours later as she laced up her running shoes and sprinted down the steps of her apartment building. She always ran in the evening, but when anything worried her, she ran faster and longer. Tonight was shaping up to be a solo marathon, she thought.
But how could she outrun P. J. Purdue? In law school it had been all she could do to keep up with her.
There was something about the careless brilliance of Purdue that was both fascinating and annoying. A. P. Hill had known that despite their nearly identical grade point averages, Purdue was the smarter of the two. She had resented that fact, perhaps. It still annoyed her to admit it, even to herself, because it didn’t seem fair that she’d had to work so hard for her success, while Purdue breezed through with considerably less effort. She knew, though, that ultimately she did not envy Purdue. There was never a doubt in anyone’s mind about which of the two overachievers was the more likely to succeed in the real world beyond law school: Amy Powell Hill. For all Purdue’s quick intellect, there was a fragile quality about her that suggested she was too easily bored, too distracted by life itself to endure the daily grind of the treadmill that put beginning lawyers on the road to success.
A. P. Hill sprinted off into the soft darkness of the suburban Danville street, savoring the quiet and the feel of cool night air in her nostrils. The trick was to push yourself so that you had to concentrate on taking one more breath, one more step. If you were lucky, the stitch in your side and the sharp twinge in your lungs would drown out whatever troubles you had taken with you when you set out to run.
Purdue was smarter, quicker, better. The old thoughts settled into a rhythm matching her heartbeat as she ran. Smarter. Quicker. Better. A. P. Hill told herself with more insistence that she did not envy the mental capacity of P. J. Purdue. There was more to success than mental agility. She knew that her own capacity for diligence, hard work, and an eye for painstaking detail would take her far. If Purdue had ended up making the most money, she could live with that. She just wished she could get over the feeling that whatever Purdue was doing would turn out to be more fun than A. P. Hill would ever have.
She tried to outrun this thought for a mile and a half, but when it showed no sign of leaving her consciousness, A. P. Hill gave up. She touched her toes a few times in the deserted street while she caught her breath, then she jogged back to her building at a slower pace. It was late, and she still had laundry and paperwork to do before she could call it a night. It would take half a pot of tea to keep her awake enough to finish her chores.
When A. P. Hill rounded the corner of her street, she saw Edith sitting on the front steps of the building, reading a supermarket tabloid in the glow of the streetlight. Catching sight of her, Edith grinned and waved the paper aloft. “Found your friend!”
A. P. Hill was curled up on her sofa with her legs tucked up under her. “I don’t believe it!” she said again.
Edith shrugged. “Well, it is a supermarket tabloid. I don’t believe some of it myself. Clintons Adopt Alien Baby … Elvis and Liberace Frozen in Michael Jackson’s Wine Cellar … Sure. Okay. But some of the rest of it is just plain hard to swallow.”
“It’s incredible,” Powell Hill said again. She did believe it, though. The news story had a cold ring of plausibility that fit the phone call she’d received earlier in the day. A. P. Hill found herself thinking, So that’s what she meant. But why had she called?
The tea in A. P. Hill’s William & Mary coffee mug had long since grown cold, but she sipped it anyhow, too preoccupied to notice the flat, bitter taste. She picked up the tabloid for the tenth time and peered at the grainy black-and-white picture of a young woman with short, light-colored hair. The headline read PMS OUTLAWS TERRORIZE SOUTHERN BARS. The PMS Outlaws. One of their early victims had given the pair this name, and it had stuck. According to the article, two young women, believed to be escaped convict Carla Larkin and her attorney, Patricia Jane Purdue, had eluded law enforcement personnel after Larkin’s escape from a western North Carolina prison six weeks earlier. Since then they had been on the run, stealing money and cars from men they picked up in roadhouses.
“Are they sure it’s her?” she murmured. “This picture could be anybody.”
Edith nodded. “They’re sure. She was Carla Larkin’s lawyer. Did you finish the article? It says that Carla Larkin had left prison to go to a doctor’s appointment—”
“Wait! Carla Larkin was a prisoner? What was she convicted of?”
“Armed robbery. Assault. Something unladylike. She wasn’t a sophisticated embezzler or a country-club shoplifter, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was doing some hard time in a state prison.”
“And Purdue was her attorney.”
“Right. Larkin had to go to a clinic for a psychiatric evaluation—escorted by a guard, of course—and Purdue was accompanying her. When they reached the doctor’s office, P. J. Purdue pulled a pistol and a roll of duct tape out of her briefcase and held the guard at gunpoint while Carla Larkin disarmed the guard, taped his mouth shut, and shackled him to the doorknob with his own handcuffs. Then they took off in Purdue’s car, and the rest is tabloid history.”
A. P. Hill shuddered. “Why would she do such a thing?”
Edith contrived to look vague. “Opinions vary,” she said carefully. “But most of the stories refer to the two of them as a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde.”
A. P. Hill wasn’t interested in the salacious details. To her the career implications were horrifying enough. “Assisting a convict in an escape from prison,” she murmured. “That’s a felony! She’ll lose her license to practice law. She’s thrown away her career. Her whole life. She must be crazy!”
“I guess she has fouled things up pretty royally,” said Edith. “But I don’t see what you’re so upset about. I thought you’d have a good laugh over this. I figured you’d say you were sorry, and put on your ‘concern face,’ but secretly you’d gloat a little that you turned out better than she did. Bill told me the two of you weren’t exactly friends in law school.”
“Well, no, we weren’t. But this is a shock. I mean, her whole career. What a waste.” A. P. Hill shuddered. Then another thought hit her. “Bill! Does he know about this yet?”
“Not from me,” said Edith. “I didn’t see him again after he went off house hunting. I didn’t find out about this until after work when I saw this paper in the check-out line at the supermarket and recognized the name. Small world, isn’t it?”
“She warned me,” murmured A. P. Hill, scanning the article yet again as if she expected the words to rearrange themselves into a more sensible story. “Purdue said to watch the media for news of her. I wonder why she called me, though?”
“Well,” said Edith. “Sooner or later, she’s going to need a lawyer.”
Chapter 4
“Much madness is divinest sense.”
—Emily Dickinson
“Good morning,” said Bill MacPherson to his law part
ner. “I’ve bought a house.”
“Mmm,” said A. P. Hill from the depths of the Washington Post. Her hand reached out from behind the wall of newsprint and groped for her coffee cup.
Bill obligingly shoved it into her grasp. He tried again: “You told me we needed a new place, so I got right on it. It’s a very nice house, and I found that I could afford it. It has attractive tax benefits, too. Good price.”
“Mmm.”
According to the MacPherson & Hill office hours posted on the door, Bill had come in late; actually he had arrived a bit earlier than his usual time because he wanted to catch Powell before she went off to Richmond for the week. As always, A. P. Hill was there first, but today she seemed more preoccupied than ever. She barely stirred when the door opened, and she did not look up when he came in.
She was sitting at her desk, barricaded behind an open copy of the Washington Post, surrounded by other newspapers. In addition to her regular reading material, she had acquired a stack of other periodicals, including several supermarket tabloids and the current issues of People and Newsweek. She was so absorbed in her reading that she merely grunted when Bill wished her good morning, and her answers to his subsequent conversational gambits had been monosyllabic. For a morning person, Powell Hill was acting in a most peculiar way. Since Bill was definitely not a morning person, he fumbled with the canister of tea bags, and made only feeble efforts to communicate with her.
Bill microwaved himself a cup of tea while he considered the matter. According to a note on the reception desk, Edith had gone out to buy doughnuts, so he was left alone to cope with his partner’s puzzling abstraction. When, in diffident tones, Bill made his announcement about the new house, he was anticipating an explosion. He had expected his news to be pounced upon with cries of alarm and demands for a cast-iron explanation of his fiscal impetuousness. (“You bought a house? In an hour?”) But so far his efforts to apprise his partner of their new quarters had been met with a bewildering indifference. In the past A. P. Hill had displayed more interest in some of his necktie purchases than she was currently showing toward this monumental investment. Perhaps she thought he had simply made an offer to rent office space. He decided to feed her the details of the purchase in small increments, leaving the subject of price for last.
The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel Page 4
