Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  “The Crystal Room.”

  “It’s just a table, Joey. It’s not the whole room. It’s just us and the Lockwoods and three other couples.”

  “And all the women are on this benefit committee.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Shit.”

  The chair scraped again. Joey was putting it back under the table. Molly took a deep breath and turned around. The tears were so thick in her eyes, she could barely see. The muscles in her arms were so tense, they felt like wire.

  Joey was standing near the French doors, on his way out.

  “I’ll be back at six,” he said.

  “You’re always back at six,” Molly told him.

  “I’ll go to this damn dinner with you as long as you don’t expect me to talk to anybody.”

  “Maybe if you talked to the people here, you’d learn something,” Molly said.

  “Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t talk to the people here. Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t be married to you.”

  “Maybe if you learned something, I wouldn’t make you stay married to me,” Molly said.

  Joey hesitated one more second at the doors. Then he turned away from her and walked off. He lumbered like an animal past the domed niches and the long columns of plaster cherubs playing among bunches of plaster grapes. The front door opened and shut again. Molly heard the heavy metallic click of the safety lock snapping home. Joey always left and came in by the front door. It was as if coming in through the garage door would say something about him that he didn’t want to hear.

  Molly went back to the table and picked up her coffee cup. She brought the cup to the sink and washed it out and put it in the white plastic-coated-wire dish rack. Then she dried her hands off on a dish towel and went through the French doors herself, through the foyer, into the living room.

  Now that Joey was gone, she was back to normal. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t tense. She didn’t feel ready to laugh or cry or kick something. She was just thinking about dinner tonight and Sarah Lockwood and what it would be like to know a debutante. She twirled around a little in front of the fireplace, imagining what she would have looked like in a long white dress, holding a single perfect red rose.

  On the coffee table in front of the love seat, there was a stack of antiabortion pamphlets. When Molly saw them, she stopped twirling and picked them up and smiled. Joey got worried sometimes when she talked about abortion. He knew only about the one in New York—he thought that abortion had messed up her insides, making her barren—and he thought she was turning into one of those fanatics, the kind who shot abortion doctors or torched clinics or sat out all night on the Mall in Washington, holding a sign with a black-and-white photograph of a bloody fetus tacked across it.

  Molly knew that she was much more likely to torch this house than any abortion clinic. She thought about it often, burning small square pieces of paper in crystal ashtrays, watching the paper blacken and curl, watching the flame twist and rise.

  “At least this way you’ll be settled,” her father had told her all those years ago when she was locked in the bathroom of the Fox Run Hill Country Club on the morning of her wedding, refusing to come out. “It doesn’t matter who you’re married to as long as you’re in control of the situation. It doesn’t matter what your husband is if you’re the one who has the money.”

  I should have been smarter about it, she thought now. I should have stayed in that bathroom and reduced my wedding dress to rags. I should have refused to go through with it.

  It was a strange thing though, Molly thought. Men—both strong men like her father and weak ones like her husband—always made her feel the same thing. They made her feel that she couldn’t ever, ever, ever say no.

  4.

  BY NINE FORTY-FIVE THAT morning, Sarah Lockwood had counted up the numbers seven times, and each time she had come to the same small set of conclusions. In the first place, the debt they owed on credit cards now totaled $115,646.28. In the second place, the monthly bills for those credit cards came to $3550. If she added that to the mortgage on the house ($4500 a month) and the payment on the car ($580 a month) and the utilities ($640 a month) and the association fee for Fox Run Hill ($900 a month), their monthly payments came to $10,170—and that didn’t include food or club dues or eating out or any of the other things Sarah considered essential. It didn’t include new clothes or gas for the car. It didn’t include printing for Kevin’s résumés or postage for sending them out. It was the kind of debt that made people disappear into the night and take assumed names in distant states. Sarah imagined them blowing into town in some two-bit burg just outside Cleveland, getting jobs at the local diner, renting a mobile home on the edge of a swamp. Sarah had absolutely no idea how people lived when they didn’t have money. Just the little things took her breath away. Cooking every night, no matter how tired you were or how much you wanted Chinese food or how sick you felt with the flu. Waiting three years to buy a new living room couch, even though the old one was fraying. Driving used cars. Sarah kept thinking of Matilda, who had maided for them until they could no longer pay her. Matilda had come every morning in sprigged-print dresses so thin they seemed to wear out as you looked at them. She had walked in thick-soled black leather shoes that always seemed to have holes in the toes. She had put her hair up in gold bobby pins that shone in the sun and came apart whenever she bent over to pick something up from the floor. There was something else Sarah’s calculations hadn’t accounted for: twice-weekly visits to the hair salon and the dues at the Fox Run Hill Health Club. If you didn’t take good care of yourself, things happened to you. Your hair got gray. Your face got creased with lines. Your body got thick and lumpy. You got old.

  Out in the kitchen, Kevin was washing dishes. Sarah could hear the clink-clink of glassware going into the wire rack. Ever since Kevin had lost his job, he had been crazy about doing the dishes. He hated seeing dirty dishes sitting in the sink. Sarah couldn’t count the number of glasses he had broken already, throwing things around out there. Lalique crystal. Steuben. Royal Doulton bone china. Sarah could still see herself, going from store to store in downtown Philadelphia, pulling out her gold MasterCard and her gold Visa card and all the rest of them. For a few years there she had been very well known to the people who ran the better jewelry stores and glassware specialty shops in Philadelphia. She had imagined herself to be the kind of woman she had imagined her great-grandmother to be. Known everywhere. Exacting in her standards. Meticulous about detail. A real grande dame of the real Main Line.

  Actually, Sarah thought now, she knew exactly how people lived when they didn’t have any money. She had grown up in a family without any money—just that big house in Bryn Mawr with the portraits on the walls; just the yearly invitation to the Philadelphia Assemblies and the obligatory listing in the Philadelphia Blue Book. In the end, they’d had a listing in the Social Register too. When you don’t have two dimes to rub together, you can’t afford to be a snob—although, God only knew, people on the Main Line were snobs about the Social Register. Sarah remembered nights sitting at the long table in the formal dining room in her father’s house, eating bread and gravy off all that Royal Doulton, because the food money had been spent on horseback-riding lessons for herself and her sister. She remembered sitting in the dark on the second floor in the middle of a heavy snowfall, wishing she had enough light to read—because the money that should have gone to pay the electric bill had gone instead to pay her subscription fees to Philadelphia’s most prestigious junior dance. She was only eleven years old that year and she had already figured out what was important. She understood that nothing else mattered as long as you were able to live richly among rich people.

  Now she was fifty—fifty—and she no longer lived richly among rich people. She lived here, where people had just enough to feel important but not enough to really understand what kind of mess she was in. People from Fox Run Hill saw her at the country club or the health club, a tall woman with
ash-blond hair and a deep tan and the kind of body Anglo-Saxons get when they do too much exercise—and they made instant evaluations. Sarah Lockwood the debutante. Sarah Lockwood the Main Line Society lady. If I were a Main Line Society lady, Sarah thought, I would be living on the Main Line and moving in Society. Instead, I am living here, moving among nobodies, a failure. Any minute now I am going to be an even bigger failure. I am going to be a bankrupt.

  Kevin was still clinking glasses in the dish rack. Sarah got up and moved through the family room to the kitchen, past the miniature date palm trees in their clay planters, past the Braque etching in its plain blond wood frame, past the broken little statue of Aphrodite on a seashell they had bought that time they took their vacation in Greece. She might be in debt, Sarah thought, but at least she was in debt with good taste. She knew what to buy and how to make it work for her.

  Kevin was standing directly in front of the sink, holding up a blue crystal sugar bowl as if he had never seen it before. Like her, he was tall and tan and blondish, overexercised and thin. Like her, he was very, very tense. The difference was that Kevin had always been tense. Sarah could remember the first time she saw him, standing in a navy blue blazer that didn’t quite fit, at the samovar end of a long buffet table set up on the lawn of her friend Margaret Delacord’s house. He had been brought home from Dartmouth by one of Margaret’s brothers and then dressed up for this occasion. She should have married one of the boys from her own circle. She should have married one of the boys whose bank account she knew better than his golf scores. That was what all the bread-and-gravy dinners and lightless winter nights had been about. Old name with no money married much money with new name. A Philadelphia Main Line tradition.

  But she really couldn’t have married anybody else. It didn’t matter what Kevin’s background was, or what his bank account had been on the day she met him, or what his prospects for employment were now. From the moment she had first seen him, Sarah had felt him as a part of her. Blood and skin and bone, muscle and nerve: Going to bed with Kevin Lockwood was a form of narcissism, an implosion as well as an explosion. Sarah thought of it as reaching a state of perfection, an essence of Sarah, like one of Plato’s ideas. Even after all this time she was always on fire for him. She would come awake at four o’clock in the morning and peel back the covers so that she could look unrestrained at the curve of his arm, the knobbed column of his spine. Even now, with her head full of figures and an ache full of fear beginning to grow like a puffball at the back of her head, what she really wanted to do was to run her fingers over all the hair on his body, even the hair that was so carefully hidden between his legs.

  Kevin saw her come in and put the blue crystal sugar bowl in the dish rack. He put the plaid terry-cloth dish towel down on the counter next to the sink. The muscles in his shoulders were still powerful, although he was slighter than he had been when Sarah first met him. His eyes were harder too, deep blue and cold.

  “Well?” he said.

  Sarah shrugged. “I’ve been over it and over it. It always comes down to the same thing.”

  “You’re sure.” It was not a question.

  “I don’t see how we could ever be sure,” Sarah said carefully. “Why don’t we just say ‘likely.’ Nothing else seems ‘likely’ at the moment. Nothing else seems possible.”

  “We couldn’t borrow any more money.”

  “Nobody would lend it to us.”

  “We couldn’t hold out a few more months to see if I got another job.”

  “We’ve held out for eighteen months as it is. If we don’t do something soon, I’m going to have to start missing payments. And you know what that will mean.”

  “This will be quick enough so that we don’t have to miss payments?”

  “We have about three weeks. We could do a lot in three weeks.”

  Kevin nodded. “But we don’t just want to make payments,” he said. “That wouldn’t do us any good. We want to clear out that credit card debt.”

  “I know.”

  Sarah put her palms flat on the kitchen counter and pulled herself up until she was sitting on it. She had on a bright white golf skirt and a red short-sleeve jersey polo. She had on no underwear at all. The kitchen was dark and cool and shadowy.

  “Jesus,” Kevin said.

  Sarah kicked off her espadrilles. “We can start tonight at the dinner,” she told him. “I can talk to the women and you can talk to the men.”

  “Some of them may have heard I got fired.” Kevin put his hand on Sarah’s knee.

  “None of them will have heard that you got fired. They don’t use words like ‘fired’ in the circles you move in. They say things like ‘left to pursue other interests.’”

  “It comes to the same thing.” Kevin inched his hand higher, to the flat side of her thigh, sinewy and hard.

  “None of them will know it comes to the same thing,” Sarah told him. She was beginning to feel what she wanted to feel. She was dizzy as hell. “None of them will know anything. You can tell them anything you want to tell them. All you have to do is tell them what they want to hear.”

  “That I have a deal for them.”

  “That we’re going to invite them here,” Sarah corrected him. “That we’re going to give a party and they’re going to be allowed to come.”

  “And you really think that’s going to be enough.”

  Sarah inched forward on the counter and into Kevin’s hands. In her mind she could see Molly Bracken’s face over the broccoli at the Food Emporium, eyes getting wider and wider, smile getting more and more eager. Even the dark roots of her hair had seemed to pulse, as if an electric generator had gone off inside her head, as if at any minute she would start to glow.

  “Yes,” Sarah said now. “It will be enough. It will be enough for the women, and they’ll make it enough for the men.”

  “You can be a sexist little bitch,” Kevin said.

  Sarah twisted herself against him. Her clothes had begun to feel too tight, too hot. Everything was too hot. They had made love for the first time on the first day they had ever met, that day at Margaret Delacord’s parents’ lawn party—and that was thirty years ago, for God’s sake. People didn’t do things like that then. People didn’t steal magnums of champagne from the open bars at post-deb receptions and get drunk on the floor of four-car garages in a thick envelope of summer heat. People didn’t forge weekend permission slips and sneak away from college dormitories to spend night after night in cut-rate motels, making the sheets burn with sweat and cigarette ashes. People didn’t stop planning and scheming and hoping and studying just to give themselves over to the moment. At least, people like Sarah didn’t.

  “Sarah?” Kevin said now.

  Sarah got her hand under his shirt and stroked the hair on his chest. She pulled at his shirt buttons until they came undone.

  “I love it that you stopped wearing undershirts,” she told him.

  “Everybody stopped wearing undershirts,” he shot back.

  The next thing she knew, he had lifted her up off the counter and put her down on the floor. She could feel the cool smoothness of ceramic tiles against her back. Her red jersey polo was gone and she couldn’t remember it coming off. The air conditioner was turned up high and she was freezing. She felt pliant and stiff at once, like folded meringue.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kevin said. “Are we really going to get away with this?”

  “Yes,” Sarah told him.

  Then she pulled off her skirt by herself and threw it over her head.

  5.

  BY THE TIME PATSY MacLaren had finished her errands and arrived in West Philadelphia, it was noon. The back of the Volvo was now loaded with packages wrapped in plain brown paper. Patsy’s thin silk blouse was damp with sweat across the shoulder blades. Out on the street, people were moving slowly. College students were walking around with their shirts unbuttoned and their blue jeans cut off high on the legs. She was only a few blocks from the University of Pennsylvania. This was not P
hiladelphia’s best neighborhood. She would have gone somewhere else if she had had a choice, but she hadn’t. She circled one block and then the next. She found a high-rise parking garage and turned into its entry lane. The man in the little glass booth was half asleep. Patsy had to honk the horn to get his attention.

  The man in the little glass booth was used to people just driving through. All you had to do coming in was take a ticket. It was going out you had to talk to somebody about, so that you knew what you owed and you could pay. Patsy waited patiently while the man readjusted himself, shifted from one foot to the other, slid back the little glass window, leaned out. Then she said, “Do I have to get a special ticket for all day? Or do I just settle that when I come out?”

  The man in the little glass booth blinked. He was old—so old, Patsy wondered if he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She leaned closer to the driver’s side door so that he would be sure to see her. She stuck her head out the window so that she could be sure he would hear.

  “For an all-day ticket—” she said again.

  “You can’t have an all-day ticket,” the man interrupted her. “It’s already noon. You won’t have been here all day.”

  There was a certain logic in this. Patsy counted to ten in her head. “Is that a rule?” she asked him. “To get an all-day ticket you have to come in in the morning?”

  “It’s not a rule,” the man said. “It’s just common sense.”

  “But if it’s not a rule, I could buy an all-day ticket now,” Patsy pointed out. “There wouldn’t be any reason not to.”

  “Sure there would be a reason not to,” the man said. “It wouldn’t make any sense.”

  Patsy tapped the windshield with her fingernail, meaning to point to the sign that hung from the rafters just a little way ahead. “It would be cheaper,” she pointed out. “If I’m going to stay here for at least six hours, and I am, it would be cheaper to buy an all-day ticket.”