by Jane Haddam
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Sandy asked. “Could I get you something? Maybe you want one of your tranquilizers?”
One of her tranquilizers? How did Sandy know she took more than one kind of tranquilizer? And who else knew? God, this was really awful. This was a disaster. She was losing it completely. What did they call it in Group? That feeling you get that you’re more stoned on your own than any dope could make you.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Caroline said. She edged around the side of her desk and then around the chair Sandy was sitting in, looking at the ceiling, looking at the floor, looking at nothing. “I just have to go to the bathroom again. I’ll be right back.”
“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can get you?”
“Of course I’m sure, Sandy. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be right back.”
Caroline was at the door to the hall now. She whirled around and plunged out into it, into the dark, and as she did, it occurred to her that it was a metaphor.
She was always plunging out into the dark.
She was always falling into the abyss.
It would be easy enough to blame it on Alyssa and Alyssa’s taste for the sensational, but Alyssa was just as much a victim as Caroline was.
They were both victims of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard.
And of their father.
There was a window open in the ladies’ room, blowing cold polluted air in from the streets of Philadelphia.
Caroline had never been as glad of the smell of carbon monoxide in her life.
4
“ALL I TOLD HER,” Alyssa Hazzard Roderick was saying to her husband Nicholas, her voice thick with the exasperation it manufactured like mucus anytime she had to deal with her sister Caroline, “all I told her was that it was inevitable, which it is, and that there was nothing we could do about it, which we can’t, and which is just saying the same thing all over again, but you know what I mean. Believe it or not, I was trying to do some good for all of us. I thought if I could talk to her calmly off the home turf, I might be able to get her to see reason.”
“Caroline?” Nick asked mildly.
Nick was a decidedly rotund man in his early fifties, a kind of Santa Claus with black curly hair, and Alyssa loved him as madly as she had on the day she’d first met him, when she was twenty-four. That was years and years ago, of course. Alyssa had been forty-five on her last birthday, although she didn’t really look it. Four pregnancies and four miscarriages in four years hadn’t managed to put any weight on her. She was as willowy and fragile-looking as she had been as a teenager. She was also decidedly fond of food. One of the things she liked about Nick was that he was decidedly fond of food too, and disinclined to get all neurotic about it the way so many of the other lawyers in his firm did. One of the other things she liked about him was that he looked so at home here, in this town house where she had grown up. Soon after their wedding, Alyssa’s father had turned the top floor into an apartment for them, and they’d been living in it ever since. Every once in a while Nick suggested that they build a house out in Radnor, since they could afford it, but the suggestion never went anywhere. There were thirty-five hundred square feet on this floor of the house alone. They were very comfortable.
Nick was sitting in a yellow wingback chair next to the great marble fireplace in their living room, paying no attention at all to the legal pad he had in his lap. He had been working on something when Alyssa came in, but he had stopped as soon as he’d seen his wife had need of him. Alyssa liked that about Nick too. There was nothing in his life more important than his relationship with her. Since there was nothing more important in Alyssa’s life than her relationship with Nick, it worked out splendidly.
Alyssa was sitting on the edge of the couch, eating her way methodically through a gigantic chocolate-chip cookie. She had bought two of them in the pastry shop on the corner before she’d come upstairs. Nick’s was sitting on an arm of the wingback chair, untouched.
“The thing is,” Alyssa said, “you really can’t blame Candida. I mean, no matter how embarrassing it’s going to be for us, under the circumstances, it only stands to reason.”
“Does it?”
“Oh, yes.” Alyssa nodded sagely. “I mean, what is Candida, really? She’s just a kind of modern-day courtesan or something. She was Daddy’s mistress and before that she was Thomas Brandemoor’s mistress and before that she had some Greek or other from a shipping family. She lives on men.”
Nick picked up his cookie and took a bite out of it. “We used to have a word for that kind of woman when I was growing up. And it wasn’t ‘courtesan.’ ”
“Call her anything you want, Nicholas, the fact is that she’s got to be pushing fifty. And no matter how shrewd she’s been with money—and my guess is that she’s been very shrewd—well, she can’t be what we’d really call rich, can she?”
“She might not be what you call rich,” Nick said, “but she’s rich enough for me. Kindly remember that I checked her out for the family back when she first took up with Paul. She owns that house she lives in out in Bryn Mawr. It’s got to be worth a million five.”
“That’s very nice, Nicholas, but a really big book would make her more than that. Just think of the advances they pay some of these people nowadays. Ten million five sometimes. I’ve heard of it.”
“I just want you to take off your rose-colored glasses,” Nick said. “You’re always looking for the good side to everybody. So Candida DeWitt is going to write her memoirs. So you make excuses for her.”
“She doesn’t need an excuse to write her memoirs, Nick. People do it every day.”
“I know they do it every day.” Nick sighed. “That’s not the point. The point is that the selling angle for these memoirs is the death of your stepmother—”
“Oh, I know.”
“—and the fact that Candida and Paul were screwing like rabbits the whole last two years of your stepmother’s life—”
“I don’t think Jacqueline was capable of screwing like a pickle-jar top. She was a poisonous woman.”
“I don’t care if she was Mrs. Attila the Hun. The point, Alyssa, is that it is extremely unlikely that Candida is going to write these memoirs simply to make a little money. If she needed a little money, we could give it to her. Did you get the impression, when you talked to her, that she would be willing to accept a settlement?”
The chocolate-chip cookie was lying, half eaten, in Alyssa’s lap. She had tucked her feet up under her and was now sitting more or less in the lotus position on the edge of the couch. Nick was so intelligent about these things; he really was. He was so good at starting at the beginning and thinking things through to the end. Maybe that was what he got from being a lawyer.
Alyssa picked up the cookie and took yet another bite of it.
“Candida,” she said slowly, “didn’t really seem to be after much of anything. At least, not much of anything from me. She just—announced it all. Like a town crier giving the news.”
“But it was her idea for the two of you to meet?”
“Oh, yes,” Alyssa said.
“Why you? Why not Caroline, or James? Why not Paul?”
“I don’t think Candida and Paul are speaking, exactly,” Alyssa said. “That’s because of all that stuff with the police when Jacqueline died, which Candida has a perfect right to be upset about, because Paul behaved like an ass. I don’t know if she’s ever met James. And as for Caroline—”
Alyssa and Nick shot each other very, very meaningful looks. They both knew Caroline better than they wanted to.
Nick said, “Even assuming it makes sense that of all the people in the family, she’d call you, isn’t it a little odd that she’d call anybody at all? Why didn’t she just sell her book—is the book sold?”
“What? Oh, yes. I mean, it’s not written yet, you know, but I think there’s an agreement already signed for the book when it’s finished. From Bantam, I think she said.”
�
�There, then. She’s sold the book. Why didn’t she just go ahead and write it? Why warn the family of a thing of this kind?”
“Maybe she was just being straightforward and above-board.”
Nick sighed. “This is Candida DeWitt we’re talking about. She didn’t play field hockey at Westover. She managed to get an amicable palimony settlement out of a Greek shipping tycoon. Don’t talk crazy.”
“Maybe it was a compulsion with her, then. Maybe she’s one of those people who just can’t keep their mouths shut.”
“If she were one of those, she’d be dead by now,” Nick said. “I’m sorry, Alyssa. I probably like all this as little as Caroline does. It doesn’t feel right to me. Did Caroline have anything useful to say when you talked to her?”
To Alyssa’s mind, Caroline never had anything useful to say. To be incoherent and hysterical was the essence of being Caroline. She got up and brushed the crumbs of the now-demolished cookie off her skirt. The maid would vacuum in the morning the way she vacuumed every morning.
“Caroline”—Alyssa made her way to the drinks cart to pour herself a glass of wine—“was being positively apocalyptic, complete with pop-psych jargon, of course. God, I’m sick of pop-psych jargon. It’s been a bore ever since Daddy took up with it.”
“It’s made a very nice pile of money for everybody involved,” Nick commented. “How do you mean, Caroline was apocalyptic? Was she making threats?”
“Oh, no. Caroline never makes threats. She doesn’t even threaten suicide anymore now that she went into therapy. No, you know, she was just talking about the cosmic significance of it all.”
“The cosmic significance of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”
“Of course not. The cosmic significance of Jacqueline’s dying. In Caroline’s mind, Jacqueline did it deliberately. She knew Caroline had just started therapy, so she got herself killed to avoid the inevitable confrontation. I’m putting it badly. But it doesn’t make much sense even when Caroline explains it herself.”
“But what did she think of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”
Alyssa shrugged. “She was against them, of course. I mean, we all are, aren’t we? No matter how understanding I’m being, I’d just as soon not see all that raked up again. Do you suppose she’ll get on talk shows, talking about the sex?”
“She might.”
“It would make Daddy absolutely livid. Caroline’s going to make Daddy absolutely livid too. She was nattering on and on about what she was going to say to him as I left. I don’t envy him that conversation, I tell you. Why he puts up with it, I don’t know. Daddy’s always telling those people who come to those seminars he runs that they shouldn’t put up with anything at all.”
“Well,” Nick said judiciously, “he hasn’t been giving very many seminars the last few years.”
“That’s true,” Alyssa said.
“Maybe he doesn’t feel up to holding out against your sister Caroline. She can be something like a force of nature.”
“That’s true too,” Alyssa said.
“Why don’t you pour me a glass of wine while you’re up,” Nick told her. “Some kind of sherry if you have it. You should try not to let this upset you too much, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know what you mean, all right.” Alyssa found a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and poured Nick an oversize glass of it, just the way he liked.
Really, she thought. Families were such a pain. So very impossible. So very—so very there. If it were up to her, she would redesign all their personalities. Daddy and Caroline would be interested in opera instead of psychology. James would be terribly respectable and very concerned about the poor. The only one she would leave the same would be herself. She might not be perfect, but she was very, very, very, very sane.
She handed Nick his glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and drifted away in the direction of the front window, which looked down the hill into what must once have been a thriving urban enclave but was now not more than a collection of concrete overpasses, twisting into the blackness like prophecies of ugliness. Maybe they should move out to Radnor someday. Maybe they should move permanently away, to somewhere like Bermuda.
“Do you know what I think?” Alyssa asked Nick without turning around to face him. “I think it was the worst possible thing that Caroline never married. It’s made her too caught up in herself.”
5
JAMES HAZZARD SOMETIMES WONDERED what he would have done with his life if he had been born fifty years earlier than he had. He had visions of what it had been like during those fifty years. He had received them from the ranks of black-and-white movies he kept in the media room off his office. MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, Fox—every one of them had made its contribution to the image of the Gypsy fortune-teller, that fat old woman in dirty clothes, hunched over a crystal ball in a filthy trailer parked on a darkened patch of ground at the edge of town. Every one of them had seen fit to make the prophecies real and the Gypsy women embodiments of evil. Maybe they had to do that because, being Hollywood, they were pathologically afraid of older women. Maybe they were just being silly. Surely any Gypsy fortune-teller whose prophecies were real could make a million dollars on the stock exchange and not have to live in a filthy trailer.
James Hazzard’s office was in a four-story brownstone in one of the few nice residential neighborhoods left in central Philadelphia. A discreet brass plaque fastened to the center of the pearl-gray front door was all there was to mark the building as a place of business. The plaque said
JAMES HAZZARD
ASTROLOGER
in upright Roman letters identical to the ones used to announce the existence of the society gynecologist next door. James Hazzard’s suits came from Brooks Brothers. His shoes were custom-made at John Lobb in London and sent to him by Federal Express. He had been in a filthy trailer once, when he was a sophomore at Brown, but that was just to get laid. The girl involved had had as much prophetic insight as a Pet Rock. James didn’t have much prophetic insight himself, but he did have a talent for reading people. He knew what they wanted and what they hoped for and—best of all—what made them afraid. When the time came to put up or shut up, he always knew what to say.
James’s office was a large room that took up most of the space on the brownstone’s second floor, carpeted in pearl gray like the door downstairs, painted in cream, hung with house plants that spilled green leaves out of planters into the vast empty overhead space made by the twenty-foot ceiling. Science, that was the ticket. All of the people who came to James Hazzard liked to believe they were disciples of science, although of an alternative and More Humane kind. They wanted to feel connected to the force of the universe and get in touch with their feminine side. They wouldn’t have sat still for one minute in a dirty trailer, or by the side of an old woman who had not taken care of her teeth. They were all desperate and they were all miserable and they were all scared to death.
Now it was seven-thirty and James’s last appointment for the evening had just walked out the door. Her name was Katha Parks, and she was a kind of meta-example of fear and trembling. She had the most successful catering business on the Main Line, a personal income of well over two million a year, a Ferrari Testarossa, a vault full of jewelry, and a vacation house in Montego Bay—and she was frantic. That was the only word James had for it. Frantic. She worked out three hours a day. She never let more than eight hundred calories pass her lips in any twenty-four-hour period. She refused to see her maid until she’d put on her makeup. It was crazy. And, James thought, the richer and more successful they were, the crazier it got. That was why people like Katha Parks were willing to pay $1500 an hour for a personal charting session with James Hazzard himself.
James made his way around the huge marble copy of a drafting table he used instead of a desk, went to the office door, and looked out into the hall. Light spilled down the stairwell from the third floor. James went to the rail and called up.
“Max? Are you still there?”
> “I’m still here,” Max called back.
James winced. Max was sounding definitely swish, angry-swish, the way he did when some fool woman came on to him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. James didn’t mind the swish in itself—he was a cosmopolitan man with a tendency to regard sex as a pleasant activity no matter whom he did it with, or of what sex—but he did mind what it represented, which was an impending explosion. It had been a long day. James wasn’t ready to deal with Max in one of his revolutionary-warrior moods. He wasn’t ready to deal with a telephone operator with a bad attitude. He wanted a strong cup of coffee with a shot of Scotch in it followed by a long, pleasant dinner at the Harmony Café.
James went around the stairwell and climbed to the third floor. The light on the landing was not on—Max was always saving electricity and being a Friend of the Earth—but the light coming from Max’s office was enough. James went in and found Max sprawled out in the swivel chair behind his desk, looking like a cross between a college student and a life-style ensemble in one of the better sportswear catalogues. Max was a devotee of $100 jeans and $600 plaid lumberjack’s shirts. James sometimes thought Max kept Ralph Lauren Polo in business all on his own.
“Coffee just perked two seconds ago,” Max said, not looking up. He was frowning at a stack of papers in front of him. James recognized columns of figures and got bored. “Pour some for yourself, will you? I’ve got to finish up here before we talk.”
“When you finish up here, are you going to tell me what pissed you off?”
“Dina Van Rau pissed me off. You’re going to have to raise the admission prices to the seminars. To at least three fifty a head. There’s no way around it. Expenses are up and the profit margin is down.”
“I’ve been thinking about John Calvin,” James said. “About the theology that said some people were born saved and other people were born damned and you could tell the difference because the saved people had more material wealth. Does that sound familiar to you?”
