by Jane Haddam
Gregor thought John Jackman was right, but he thought Dan Exter was right too. There was something about Molly Bracken that did not quite fit at Fox Run Hill. Gregor believed that in spite of the fact that he had never met any of its other inhabitants, except for the joggers who always seemed to jog especially slowly when the police were in the community. Walk the walk and talk the talk, that was how the slang went. Molly Bracken didn’t. Every time she opened her mouth, Gregor expected to see gum.
He tried to explain this to Father Tibor Kasparian when Tibor came by at the end of the afternoon, but he only sounded like a snob doing it.
“I wish you could see this place,” he told Tibor. “It’s odd. Strange. Like a neighborhood of haunted houses from a 1950s movie.”
“I thought you said this Fox Run Hill was well kept.” Tibor was rummaging through Gregor’s refrigerator. There wasn’t much of anything in Gregor’s refrigerator, but there was always the hope that Lida or Hannah or one of the other women had left something there. Tibor found a carton of cherry yogurt so old it was growing mold, and threw it out. “I thought you said that this was one of those places where they had groundskeepers and staff and all that kind of person.”
“It is.”
“Then it doesn’t sound to me like haunted houses, Krekor. Haunted houses don’t have caretakers.”
Actually, Gregor thought, some haunted houses did have caretakers—wasn’t Manderley supposed to have had one, even after it burned? That was beside the point.
“It’s just that the houses are so big,” he told Tibor. “Not as big as the house Bennis grew up in, not like that—”
“That was like an institution.” Tibor sniffed. “That could have been a school. I think this Yale University Bennis’s father left it to sold it to some people to make a school.”
“Yes, exactly. These aren’t that big. But they seem emptier. You look at them, I look at them, and imagine big hollow wooden shells, with nothing inside them.”
“You don’t usually get poetic, Krekor.”
“I’m not getting poetic. I don’t like this place. In fact, I hate this place.”
“Because the buildings seem so big and empty?”
“Because everything seems so big and empty,” Gregor said. “The houses, the grounds, the people, everything. I have to talk to more of them on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, they’re just not really there. I keep imagining Mrs. Willis being like the women I’ve met so far at Fox Run Hill, and then the idea that she shot her husband and then blew up her car seems impossible.”
“But she did it. People are people, Krekor. Nothing is impossible.”
“Granted. But the women I’ve met so far in that place don’t have the emotional energy to kick their dogs.”
Tibor left to lead his Bible study group. Gregor went back to looking through reports and making lists: things to check into; people to interview; places to see, as a last resort. Finally he did something he hadn’t needed to do since he was an agent in training. He got all the pieces of paper together and wrote a biography of Patricia MacLaren Willis. Actually, this was something he had been taught to do with the victim, usually the victim of a kidnapping. Gregor had worked kidnapping details for years before he had found his niche as director of the Behavioral Science Department. Unit, he reminded himself now. Since he had left the Bureau, they had decided to stop calling their subdivisions departments and to start calling them units. Gregor didn’t know why, but he suspected it was the budget. If you didn’t spend all the budget Congress gave you, Congress decided you didn’t need so much money and reduced your appropriation. It was therefore death for any director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to save any cash. If he got to the end of the year with money on his hands, he had to find a way to spend what he had. Christmas bonuses and that sort of thing were mostly out. The public had caught on to that one, and they didn’t like it. Having to order an entire new set of letterhead stationery, with new terms and new names and all the rest of it, was really beautiful, because nobody would question why the FBI needed paper. Of course they needed paper. They needed a lot of paper. Gregor Demarkian was a Franklin Delano Roosevelt liberal and probably always would be. He believed in Social Security and minimum wages and the federal safety net. Sometimes, though, he thought he could understand why there were so many people out there who thought government didn’t work.
By the time Bennis came in at a quarter to six, Gregor was hunched over his computer printouts, writing rapidly on a long sheet of yellow lined legal paper with a pencil so dull his handwriting looked as if it were growing moss. Bennis leaned on his shoulder, looked at his writing, and then shook him.
“Gregor, for God’s sake, come on. We’re due downtown at a cocktail party at seven. Remember? I told you—”
“I remember,” he said. He did too. He just didn’t want to. He hated cocktail parties. He hated parties of all kinds, except the ones they gave on Cavanaugh Street, where he was allowed to pile a plate high with food and take it off to sit on the sidelines with Father Tibor.
“Gregor, you’d better get dressed. You’d really better. I was intending to take a cab—”
“Anything, as long as you aren’t driving.”
“Well, I’ll have to drive if you don’t get up and hurry. What is all this stuff anyway?”
Gregor got out of his chair and began to wander toward the bedroom. “Has Donna Moradanyan made it up with Russ yet?” he asked. “Is there still going to be a wedding? I notice nobody took the decorations down.”
“Donna says the next time she sees Russ, she’s going to shoot him,” Bennis said.
Gregor turned on the light in his bedroom. When he had first moved into this apartment, years ago, he had kept it very stark. The bare minimum of furniture, the bare minimum of carpeting and kitchen equipment, an absolute absence of the personal. Now he was better. He had a painting in the living room and a nice rug under his bed and his pictures of Elizabeth (before her last illness) on top of his bureau. The bedroom was even messy, so that it looked reasonably lived in. For a while after Elizabeth had died, Gregor had become obsessively, depressingly neat. He had now gotten over it.
He found a gray suit and a blue suit and a whole line of white shirts hanging in his closet, fresh from the dry cleaner’s. He found clean socks rolled into a ball and a tie in the top drawer of his dresser. He laid everything out on the unmade bed and started to get dressed.
“What’s all this writing about?” Bennis asked him again. She was standing right outside the bedroom door, shouting at the crack.
Gregor put on his socks. “Patricia MacLaren Willis,” he said, “except from what I’ve been able to uncover, nobody called her that. They called her Patsy.”
“Patsy Willis. Not bad.”
“Not Patsy Willis, Patsy MacLaren.” Gregor shrugged his arms into the sleeves of his shirt. “This is paper research you’re listening to, don’t forget. She was the last surviving member of a fairly well-heeled family from the Main Line, not enormously rich like the Hannafords—”
“Can it.”
“—and not social, but with enough money in the bank so that even after both her parents died their estate was able to put her through Vassar without having to resort to scholarships or loans. She graduated with the class of 1969.”
“Not a really great year except at places like Berkeley,” Bennis said. She’d graduated with the class of ’73.
“Whatever. Anyway. Patsy MacLaren graduated, and then she went off to do the Indian meditation thing for a year with her college roommate. It took two years, actually. We have a statement from one of the administrators of her trust at the Morgan Bank—former administrators, to be precise. This isn’t the kind of trust you would have approved of, Bennis. Patsy MacLaren was eating capital.”
“I’m surprised the administrators let her get away with it.”
“They had to. Capital was all there was. I said her parents were well-heeled but not rich. According to the
bank, Patsy went through a really heavy period of sixties rebellion, complete with LSD and long hair and even a try at going back to the land, and by the time she got back from India and all those places, she didn’t want to have anything to do with what she called ‘the ravages of capitalism.’ I’m quoting now. The man I talked to was still a little annoyed about it all.”
“Check the buttons on your shirt,” Bennis said automatically. “You always do them up wrong. What happened to Patsy—what? MacLaren? What happened to her after that?”
Gregor already had his pants on and his belt buckled. He looked at his shirt and discovered he had buttoned it wrong. He undid it and started over again.
“She went to graduate school,” Gregor said. “At the University of Pennsylvania. In some kind of liberal arts. I think it was English, but I’m not sure. She went for three years.”
“Did she get a degree?”
“Not as far as I’ve been able to make out.”
“What happened then?”
“She ran out of money, and soon after that she got married. There was a notice in the newspaper. That was the only way the administrators at the bank knew anything about it. There wasn’t any reason that they should. The trust was folded by then. I still would have thought that simple courtesy would require—”
“Did she know any of these administrators at her bank?” Bennis answered. “She might never have met any of them. She wouldn’t have had to. I know people with trust funds in nine figures who’ve never seen a single one of their trust officers.”
“I’ll check on that.” Gregor got his jacket and pulled open the door. “Anyway, Patsy MacLaren got married to Stephen Willis, who was acknowledged by everyone at the time to be a young man on his way up. A few years later they built the house in Fox Run Hill, and that was that.”
“What do you mean, that was that?”
“I mean that was all she ever really did,” Gregor replied. “She became a housewife. She bought furniture. She played golf. She didn’t even volunteer for things, as far as I can tell. She subscribed to a lot of magazines. She gave money to political candidates, including some to this Julianne Corbett person who’s giving this party.”
“Did she really?” Bennis started fussing with Gregor’s tie. “I don’t think that’s very surprising, Gregor. Lots of people gave money to Julianne’s campaign. She won her seat by a really large margin.”
“In this case there are coincidences I’d like to check into though,” Gregor said. “Patsy MacLaren’s roommate at Vassar was named Julianne Corbett.”
Bennis looked startled. “Really? Is it the same Julianne Corbett?”
“I don’t know. But here’s something else: The roommate Patsy MacLaren went to India with was also named Julianne Corbett.”
“I know that Julianne has been to India,” Bennis said. “She talks about it sometimes.”
“The only reason I’m letting you drag me off to this thing,” Gregor said virtuously, “is that I think Congresswoman Julianne Corbett has some answers to some questions that I have about Patsy MacLaren. This is going to be a fact-finding mission.”
“This is going to be an ordinary political cocktail party that everyone is going to be pretending isn’t a political cocktail party,” Bennis said firmly, “and you’re not going to get to talk to Julianne beyond a handshake. Not unless you arrive with your checkbook open and a letter from a PAC in your pocket. Your tie’s fine now, Gregor. Let’s get out of here.”
Gregor stood back and looked at Bennis. He didn’t really look at her very often anymore. Maybe what he meant was that he didn’t look at her for real very often anymore. He was so used to having Bennis around that she was just Bennis, a hovering presence trailing cigarette smoke and dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Now she was dressed in a long black thing with beads all over it and her hair was up on top of her head in a way that looked as if it was meant to be there. Bennis often wore her hair on top of her head, but haphazardly, so that it looked windblown.
“You look nice,” Gregor said uncertainly. The beads seemed to make the dress cling—oddly?—to Bennis’s body. The effect made Gregor feel that he ought to blush.
“You look very, very nice,” he went on incoherently. “I mean, I think I like your dress.”
“Good.” Bennis looked amused. “I think I don’t like what time it is here, and I think we’d better be going. Are you going to have any problem with that?”
“No.”
“Try to remember that this is supposed to be a party for Karla Parrish, the photographer,” Bennis said. “She went to Vassar with Julianne Corbett too.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “So your Julianne Corbett did go to Vassar.”
Bennis pushed him out of the bedroom. “Go. We’re going to be late. We can talk about all of this later.”
2.
Of course they couldn’t talk about any of this later. Parties weren’t like that, and cocktail parties especially weren’t like that. This one was in a town house in Society Hill, a large brick structure with electrified carriage lamps on either side of its front door and bright new white paint on all its window frames. Gregor remembered investigating a murder in this part of town, the murder of a once-rich man. Gregor wondered whom the town house belonged to. He supposed it could belong to Julianne Corbett herself, but he doubted it. She hadn’t been in office long enough to have that kind of money.
Cabs were three deep in the street. The front doors of the town house were propped open. Gregor saw a dapper young man in a high collar and a black dinner jacket bustling back and forth with a clipboard, looking ridiculously happy.
“Is that young man some kind of assistant to Julianne Corbett?” Gregor asked Bennis as they stepped out onto the sidewalk and into the crowd.
Bennis readjusted her beaded evening purse on her shoulder and peered at the young man. “Never saw him before in my life. I’m sure he’s nobody working for Julianne. He has a starched collar, for God’s sake.”
“Is that irretrievably passé?”
“It’s the kind of thing college boys do when they’re working too hard to be elegant. God, what a crush. Do you see Karla Parrish?”
“I wouldn’t know Karla Parrish from a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle.”
“What about Julianne, then? You know what Julianne looks like.”
Gregor did know what Julianne Corbett looked like, but he couldn’t see her. He saw only tall women with anxious faces who all seemed to be holding their stomachs in, and taller men with pouchy wine-and-cheese guts who should have been holding their stomachs in but didn’t seem to care. The ecstatic young man was the only one wearing a dinner jacket. All the rest were in ordinary suits, but expensive ones. The flashy young men had Giorgio Armani. The older and more sober ones had Brooks Brothers and J. Press. Everybody in the place except Gregor and Bennis seemed to have a Rolex watch. Gregor had a Timex, bought at Sears for $17.95. Bennis didn’t wear a watch.
“Come on.” Bennis took him by the arm and dragged him up the front steps. The closer they got, the thicker the crowd became. It was like a New York City bus at rush hour, with everybody bottled up near the doors and refusing to budge. Bennis was good at this though. She elbowed him through a knot of people discussing tax shelters (“You know what it’s like with taxes. Every time they raise them on serious money they leave a loophole, and Bill Clinton isn’t going to be any different…”) and then through another knot of people discussing therapy. The knot of people discussing therapy seemed to be extremely concerned with something called borderline anxiety syndrome.
“We tried doing grief work with that,” one of the women said, “but it didn’t really do it. I think we’re going to have to go to regression therapy before we really get it worked out.”
“What’s borderline anxiety syndrome?” Gregor asked Bennis.
“God only knows. It probably has something to do with being afraid of your cat. Look. There’s Julianne. Let’s go over and say hello.”
“Don�
�t these things usually have receiving lines? I think it would have been much more sensible—”
“Come on,” Bennis said in exasperation.
It was impossible to miss Julianne Corbett. She was not tall, but she was outrageous, a mass of hair and jewelry and makeup. Her lipstick was crimson. Her eyeshadow was sapphire. Her eyeliner was jet black. She was a mass of intense colors from one side of her face to the other, and she was a mass of colors beneath that too. Gregor didn’t think he had ever seen a garment quite like the dress Julianne Corbett was wearing. It reminded him of those stained-glass-window cookies they had made in school when he was a child. It seemed transparent and opaque at once and lit up from inside. Gregor saw magenta and lemon yellow and bright kelly green, and then his head began to hurt.
Julianne Corbett was holding out her hand to him, her face stretched into a wide professional politician’s smile.
“Hello, hello,” she said. “I’m so glad Bennis brought you. You’re just as impressive in person as you are in your photographs.”
Gregor didn’t think he was impressive in his photographs. He thought he mostly looked like a dork.
“These are the photographs that are impressive,” he told her, gesturing to the walls around them, which were hung with huge blowups of black-and-white shots. The photographs were not the kind of black-and-white shots he would have called appropriate for a party like this one. They were of starving children and displaced body parts, of civil war and famine and death. They were enormously powerful, but Gregor didn’t understand how people could look at them and go on eating what they were eating. Canapés were passing through the crowd on silver trays. A waiter stopped and offered one to Gregor. Gregor declined.
“The really impressive pieces are in there.” Julianne Corbett gestured through a second set of double doors into what was probably the living room. This was the foyer, with its curving marble staircase and its checkerboard marble floor. Half the town houses in Society Hill had checkerboard marble floors. “We saved the really strong shots for the inside room. We didn’t want to blast people with them as soon as they walked through the door. Have you been inside yet?”
