“So you weren’t curious to find out what happened in the cases you had been working on?”
He shook his head. “Maybe they told me. I’ve forgotten. When you’re in a burn unit, young lady, your mind is not apt to be concerned with much of anything beyond the next dose of pain medicine. Pray that you never find that out the hard way.”
Before Elizabeth could pursue the matter, Emma O. took the floor again. “You have more friends than I do, Rose,” she declared. “You have visitors from the newspaper just about every day, bringing you magazines and wanting to tell you all the gossip from work. Everybody is terribly worried about you for being an alcoholic, and about Seraphin because she’s beautiful and she won’t eat. But when you have Asperger’s, people never much like you in the first place, so you’re on your own, because nobody cares if you get well or not.”
Warburton saw a chance to insert therapy into the discussion. “Emma, we are trying to treat your depression, but you know that Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder. You can’t just take a pill and make it go away, but you might be able to modify your behavior. How do you think you can change yourself to make people like you?”
Emma O. shrugged. “I have no idea what makes people like other people, except for the beauty thing, and in my case I don’t think there’s much chance of that. I can’t do crowds and parties like Rose does. I just don’t see the point of parties, and I can only focus on one person at a time, which means that even when I attend parties I always bore one person to death and antagonize the rest.”
“What’s so hard about parties?” said Rose. “If you’re nervous, just have a few drinks to loosen yourself up.”
“Rose loves parties,” said Emma. “She’s fun, even when she’s dead drunk, but I can’t do it. I can be clever with words, even occasionally funny, but I guess it isn’t the same. Anyhow, when people start to get tired of me, I just go away and I never bother them again.”
“Oh, honey, that goes double for me,” said Richard Petress. “When relationships start to cause me more pain than gain, I just walk right on off, and I do not look back.”
“Is that a good way to be?” asked Warburton.
Hillman Randolph said, “Sometimes you don’t have any choice.”
A. P. Hill glanced at the directions scribbled on today’s page of her planner. Third house on the left. She was driving along the tree-lined streets of an old neighborhood of Colonial-style houses. She looked out approvingly at the well-kept yards and the neatly tended flower beds. The houses were not identical, but they all blended into a harmonious unit, giving the area character without the cookie-cutter effect. So this is where Sally Gee had ended up.
Even if today’s inquiry turned out to be a dead end, thought Powell, the trip would be worth it just to find out how Sally was doing.
It looked like a comfortable, happy neighborhood, thought Powell Hill, nodding at a couple of boys on bicycles who stopped to let her pass. She was glad. She had wanted Sally Gee to live happily ever after, and from the looks of the neighborhood, she had as good a chance at succeeding as most people could ever hope for. Sally was a good person, though. She would always carry happiness with her, and that counted for a lot. Still, there had been times when the other girls in the dormitory had feared that Sally’s crusading personality might lead to a shallow grave in a war zone or to a tent hospital at some jungle outpost. Sally Gee had such a terrible combination of innocence and social conscience that she could have ended up anywhere.
A. P. Hill had spent the half-hour drive from her hotel to the suburbs of Richmond remembering her student days on campus, when Sally Gee had been dorm president and general guardian angel to the immediate world. She was only two years older than the incoming freshmen, but somehow she seemed to stand midway between them and the remote adult authority figures who controlled their lives. Sally, self-appointed foster mother of the third floor, dispensed tea and advice at all hours, advised her charges on course selection and relationship problems, and generally kept an eye out for those likely to find trouble in one way or another. For A. P. Hill, who studied too much and laughed too little, Sally would prescribe a movie every couple of weeks. She always asked Powell to go with her as a favor. “Please,” she would say, “Jim has football practice [or a golf game, or a term paper to write], and he can’t go with me. Would you come along? I hate to see movies alone.” The film was always a comedy; the outing was always fun. A. P. Hill was well into her junior year before she realized, thinking back, that she had received the favor, not granted it. Sally Gee cared about everybody. Anyone’s unhappiness diminished her. She was beloved, the girls told one another, but so vulnerable. They worried.
Sally had been enshrined in campus legend as the girl who had received an obscene phone call and didn’t know it. She had been on her own in the residence hall one afternoon when the pay telephone rang. Sally, ever the good citizen, ran to answer it, ready to deliver a message to whichever of her hallmates the caller wanted, but when she said, “Hello. Third floor,” a hoarse male voice had replied, “I’m going to jack off now.”
After a moment of shocked silence, Sally said earnestly, “Oh, no, you mustn’t! Think how upset your parents would be!”
On the other end of the line the heavy breathing ended in a gasp. “What?”
“If you killed yourself. Think how devastated your folks would be. I’m sure they’d blame themselves. Whatever is troubling you, I’m sure it will pass.”
Sally and the caller had continued to have a lovely conversation, with her assuring him of all the joys of living, until at length the young man averred that he did indeed feel … relieved.
“Can I call you again?” he asked after another pause.
“Oh, yes!” said his ministering angel. “Any time you are feeling this way again, just call Third and ask for Sally.”
She had spent the rest of the afternoon in the afterglow of good works, and that evening when Jim, her fiancé, came to pick her up for the evening, she could not resist regaling him with her triumph. They were walking out side by side that evening, tiny sweet-faced Sally Gee and big Jim Klingenschmitt, a linebacker who was built like a thumb. As they neared the front door Sally looked up at Jim and said, “Oh, Jim, I must tell you: the saddest thing happened today. A boy called the third floor and he was so depressed about life that he was going to jack off.”
Several minutes later, after Jim Klingenschmitt had stopped waving his arms and shouting, and after the threat of the fire extinguisher and the campus police had dissuaded him from charging upstairs and ripping the third-floor pay phone off the wall, he sat Sally down on a secluded sofa in the long parlor and carefully explained to her that the phrase “jacking off” was not a euphemism for suicide.
Sally took the news philosophically. Her intentions had been good, after all, and this one unpleasant setback did not deter her from being a mother hen to the rest of the residents. Her one concession to reality after that incident was that for the next month all male callers for Sally Gee were first routed past P. J. Purdue.
Purdue and Sally had been the yin and yang of their residence hall community. They lived at opposite ends of the hall. Purdue dispensed cigarettes in lieu of tea, and her advice tended to be more terrorist than motherly, but they balanced college life well between them. In order to survive college, sometimes you need guerrilla tactics and sometimes you need tea and sympathy. As A. P. Hill pulled into the driveway of the green-shuttered Williamsburg colonial, she found herself wondering for the first time if Sally and Purdue, the saint and the terrorist, had ever sought advice from each other.
Sally G. Klingenschmitt, as she had been known ever since the Sunday after graduation, had not changed much. She was still small and slender enough to pass at a distance for a teenager. Her silky dark hair showed only a trace of gray at the temples, and her earnest brown eyes were as warm and intense as ever. She hugged Powell Hill at the door and ushered her into a snug living room, replete with chintz and pol
ished mahogany. It smelled of lemon polish and fresh-brewed coffee. Above the mantlepiece hung an oil painting of a radiant Sally, blue gowned, sitting formally erect in a leather wing chair while Jim hovered protectively behind her. It was, thought A. P. Hill, a good likeness of the couple spiritually as well as physically.
By the time Powell had been settled in on the rose-patterned sofa and plied with coffee and raisin cookies, she felt eighteen again, ready to put herself and her problems into the capable hands of the dorm president.
“It’s good to see you again,” she said, suddenly loath to come to the point. “How’s Jim?”
“He’s great!” said Sally, beaming. “He’s head coach this year at the new junior high school, so I get a lot of chances to try out new cookie recipes. But it’s wonderful to see you, too, Powell. I teach kindergarten now, which is a joy, of course, but sometimes it’s so nice to talk to a grown woman for a change. And you’re a lawyer now! I always knew you would be, Powell. Never doubted it for a minute.”
A. P. Hill smiled her thanks. The fact that Sally G. had probably never for a minute doubted the Tooth Fairy, either, did not take the shine off her good wishes. “I came to talk to you about Purdue,” she said at last. “You’ve heard?”
Sally shook her head, her eyes wide with apprehension. “No. She’s not dead, is she?” Her voice was a horrified whisper. “Poor Purdue! She was always such a wild one. Brilliant, of course, but so wild. So doomed.”
“She’s still alive,” said A. P. Hill. “And I’m trying to see that she stays that way. I need to find her quickly.” She opened her purse and took out a tabloid clipping about the PMS Outlaws. The accompanying photo, unflattering but definitely P. J. Purdue, said it all.
Sally read the article, wide-eyed with astonishment. When she finished, she looked up at Powell Hill and shook her head. “I’d heard she became a lawyer, and so I thought surely she had outgrown her rebel phase.”
“Apparently not.”
“No,” Sally agreed. “Purdue always was like a terrier with a rat about her hates. She’d never let go of an insult or an injury.”
“I know. She may think this is about rescuing her client from prison, but I’m beginning to think that the fugitive part is just an excuse. Otherwise, they’d be keeping a lower profile on the run. She called me to say that this was more fun than practicing law. Then a few days ago in Tennessee, she used my name as an alias.”
“So she’s determined to drag you into it.”
“It looks that way. I just wondered who else she’s contacted. You?”
“No. I wish she would. Maybe I could talk her into getting some help.”
“Think back. Is there anyone whom she was close to, or anyplace she might want to go to hide or to get help?”
Sally traced the rose pattern on the sofa with one slender forefinger as she considered the question. “Her parents are dead, aren’t they? And she lived somewhere in southside Virginia with her grandfather.”
“The judge. I spoke to him. He’s very old and frail, and he doesn’t seem to know about any of this. Since the crimes all happened outside Virginia, nobody in law enforcement has been to see him about it. I didn’t tell him. Anyhow, I don’t think she’ll go there.”
“Seeing his disappointment would be worse than jail for Purdue,” said Sally. “I remember thinking how much was expected of Purdue academically, and how little she ever achieved socially. Nobody seemed to care about that. As long as her grade point average was first rate, the judge seemed to think she was fine.”
“Well,” said Powell Hill, “she might have been fine if she were male. With women, though, academic achievement is never enough.”
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” Sally tapped the tabloid article. “I can just feel Purdue’s hostility bubbling through this. It’s rage—but directed at whom?”
A. P. Hill shrugged. “Men, I guess. That’s nothing new. Remember the blind-date rating chart beside the hall phone? The time she met the flasher in the quad and critiqued his performance?”
“Poor Pat Purdue. She was such an idealist. I know she sounded like a tough little cynic back in college, but think about it. She wouldn’t have been so angry at men if her expectations for them had not been so high. You know … ‘Someday my prince will come.’ ”
“Well, she didn’t find him,” said A. P. Hill, glancing again at the tabloid photo of P. J. Purdue and Carla Larkin. “Now she is him. And I need to find her, before she tries to change from Prince Charming into Steven Seagal and gets herself blown away by the police.”
Sally Gee nodded thoughtfully. “How can I help?”
“You haven’t heard from her, have you?”
“No. A couple of Christmas cards. Purdue manages to send out cards about every other year. Once we got one in March. But really I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. I saw her a couple of times for lunch while I was working on my master’s and you two were in law school, but you were her classmate in law school. Surely there are more recent friends you could ask?”
“Not that I know of,” said Powell Hill. “She lived in an apartment. Alone. She antagonized most of the men in the class at one time or another, and she wasn’t attractive enough for them to forgive her for it. I guess I was her friend—or as close as she got to having one. She tolerated me because she considered me smart enough to be a worthy opponent.”
“That seems to be what you are now,” said Sally. “A worthy opponent. Catch me if you can.”
“I don’t know that I want to catch her. I’d like to keep her from throwing her life away, but it may already be too late for that. At least, I’d like a chance to talk to her. That’s why I’m trying to figure out where she’s headed. I thought you might remember something that would help me to find her.”
“It’s been a long time,” said Sally. “And if anyone else had come asking for a lead to Patricia Purdue, I’d have told them to go and find you.”
“We didn’t keep in touch.”
“How about her coworkers? Wasn’t she in a law firm before …” Sally tapped the page of the tabloid. “Before all this?”
“I called them first thing. Nobody’s talking. They’re afraid that they’ll be implicated in whatever lawsuits her victims manage to bring before the court.” A. P. Hill shrugged. “They’re right. I probably wouldn’t talk either, if my law partner went off the rails.”
“You said you’ve heard from her, though, since she became a fugitive?”
“She called my office. Yes.”
Sally Gee looked thoughtful. “Why?”
“To gloat, I guess. She claims she’s having fun. Why?”
“Well, I was just thinking that maybe you won’t have to find P. J. after all. Maybe she’s going to find you.”
A. P. Hill nodded, thinking, That’s what I’m afraid of.
“If I were you, Powell, I’d keep an open line, and I’d think very hard about what I was going to say to her.”
Bill MacPherson put a plastic Realtor key chain on Edith’s desk. “Spoils of war,” he told her. “The paperwork is finally to the point that the sellers consider it a done deal. They mean that they can sue me for all I’ve got plus a kidney if I suddenly come to my senses and try to back out of this deal.”
Edith looked up at him suspiciously. “You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”
“Can’t afford to. Besides, everyone keeps telling me what a brilliant investment I’m making. Anyhow, according to Holly the Realtor, it’s okay for us to start moving into the house now. I stopped by the liquor store for some cardboard boxes, and I thought we could start packing up the office today. If we can manage to be out by the end of the month, we’ll save on rent.”
He looked around at the shabby secondhand furniture, the battered file cabinets, and the threadbare area rug. “We’ll need all the paperwork, of course, but some of this furniture can go straight to the dump.”
“Right,” said Edith. “I’d say that decision was long overdue. Have you g
iven notice to the building manager?”
Bill reddened. “I wish Powell Hill were here. She’d handle him without batting an eye. I’ll tell you what: You type it and I’ll sign it.”
“The man won’t bite you,” said Edith. “He looks like a pit bull, but he doesn’t bite. I will type the letter though. We want the departure to be legal. I’ll tell you what I won’t do, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell your mother. You’re on your own there.”
Bill smiled. “I’m not worried about her reaction. She’ll love it. She’ll probably try to hold her book-club meetings in the parlor. I just want to wait until we’re settled in, that’s all. Knowing my crazy relatives, more of them will descend on us to try to help us decorate.”
Edith’s gaze rested on the stuffed groundhog that graced the bookcase in Bill’s office. “Heaven forbid,” she murmured.
“I think we can haul everything in my car. It might take a few trips, but we can manage.”
“Are you paying me overtime for this?”
“Sure,” said Bill. “Just keep track of your hours.”
“In that case, I’ll get my cousin to bring over his pickup truck. We ought to be able to get the desks and file cabinets over there in two loads.”
“How much should I pay him?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Edith. “You’ve got house payments, remember? Just offer him gas money.”
Chapter 10
MacPherson & Hill
The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel Page 15
