Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  Breakfast was there to eat. Linda Melajian had arrived with it on her arm, the plates marching from wrist to shoulder like the discs of a Vegas warm-up artist’s balancing act.

  “Here we go,” she said, putting the plates down in front of them. “Are you sure you want to eat this stuff? He looks sick already.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Then the door to the Ararat opened, and Gregor Demarkian was not so sure. Standing there, in one of those spaghetti-strap sundresses with the contrasting T-shirt underneath, was Bennis Hannaford, looking about as good as Bennis Hannaford ever looked, which was like a combination of the young Gene Tierney and the young Vivien Leigh. John Jackman saw her and blushed. Bennis Hannaford saw John Jackman and turned away, as if he didn’t exist. She went to a table on the other side of the dining room and sat down next to the wall. Then she picked up a menu and studied it, as if she didn’t already have it memorized. Linda Melajian shook her head.

  “Bennis still isn’t talking to Mr. Jackman, I take it,” she said. “Well, I’d better go over and find out what she wants. Ever since all this wedding stuff started with Donna, Bennis has not generally been in a good mood.”

  Bennis’s broken arm was sticking out from the side of her body like a maypole with a tilt. It was held up by this contraption of tape and stretchy bandage that looked about as comfortable as a pair of porcupine-skin underwear. Maybe she would be in a better mood if she were allowed to wake up with her arm healed, Gregor thought. He also thought he might be wrong. Bennis was Bennis. Bennis was a law unto herself.

  “You know,” John Jackman said. “I think I’m with Tibor and all the rest of them. I think you should stop kidding yourself and just marry the woman. You’re never going to find anyone better.”

  Gregor was going to point out that he hadn’t found Bennis—Bennis wouldn’t marry him if he asked her every day for a month while getting down on bended knee—but nobody ever listened to him about this anyway, so he decided not to try.

  He dug into his pile of scrambled eggs and closed his eyes to blot out all signs of Donna’s coming (or not coming) wedding.

  Then he thought about Patsy MacLaren.

  FOUR

  1.

  IT HAD BEEN ON Molly Bracken’s mind for almost a week, and once she saw Evelyn Adder packing Henry’s clothes into the tall garbage pails in the walled-in little utility area behind the brick Federalist, it didn’t make any more sense to wait. It didn’t make any sense to proceed either. Molly knew that. It wasn’t a real crisis or an honest break in time. It was just the point beyond which she didn’t want to go. The “papers” Joey had picked up from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood were sitting on the side table in the family room in Molly’s big Victorian, right next to the photograph of Molly in her wedding dress in the silver Tiffany frame. All Molly could think about was the fact that she wasn’t like these women, not at all. Her life did not depend on her husband’s money. She wasn’t stuck here, like Evelyn Adder. Except that Evelyn didn’t look like she was stuck here. Maybe Evelyn didn’t care if she had to leave. Whatever it was, Evelyn was outside, packing all of Henry’s Ralph Lauren Polo and Armani down in among the table peelings, and she looked less heavy and ungainly and miserable than Molly had ever seen her.

  “I tried calling them three times this morning,” Molly had told Joey before Joey had stomped out—presumably to go to work, but really, Molly thought, to go anywhere at all.

  “Don’t you know enough not to buy land unless you’ve actually seen it?” she had demanded of him.

  He had gotten red in the face, as red as he ever got, and begun to throw pro-life pamphlets at her from the stack she had left on top of the refrigerator.

  “You think you know everything,” he yelled. “You think just because your father has built a few houses, you’re the greatest real estate expert since, since—I don’t know who. You think you picked it all up in your sleep.”

  “I didn’t have to pick it up in my sleep,” Molly said. “It’s something they tell you about on public service programs on Sunday morning on PBS. For God’s sake.”

  “It was supposed to be a birthday present,” Joey shouted. “It was supposed to be a surprise. For you.”

  As if that was supposed to change things. Molly wanted to throw a dish at him, or even the heavy plastic-coated metal dish rack next to the sink. She wanted to scream.

  “They’re gone,” she said instead. “There isn’t a car in their driveway. They’ve disappeared in the middle of the night with your cashier’s check and probably not only yours either.”

  “They’ll be back,” Joey said confidently. “They own that house. They own all that stuff.”

  “The house is mortgaged to the hilt. The stuff was probably bought on credit cards. They don’t own anything, Joey. They’re just as fly-by-night as any wino down in central Philadelphia.”

  “I know what happened to Stephen Willis,” Joey said. “Patsy just couldn’t stand it anymore. That’s what happened to him. He was just like you.”

  Joey hadn’t even known Stephen Willis. Stephen Willis wasn’t home enough for anyone at Fox Run Hill to know him really well. And Patsy was Patsy.

  Joey slammed out of the house. Molly listened to the sound of his car starting up in the drive. When she heard the car roll off the drive onto the street, she went to the back and began to look out at Evelyn Adder, lumbering away among the garbage cans. The day was starting out nasty. The sky was dark and full of clouds. The air was full of a rain that wouldn’t quite start to fall. The joggers on the winding road had plastic jackets on over their T-shirts in spite of the fact that it must be hot.

  Nylon, Molly thought absently. Those jackets are nylon, not plastic. I shouldn’t be so stupid.

  She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt herself. The T-shirt was a funny kind of blue called pool and had cost twenty-four dollars from the J. Crew catalogue. Molly went out to her mudroom, slipped on a pair of flip-flops in the same color, and went out through the garage and around to the back.

  “Evelyn?” she said. “Evelyn, what are you doing?”

  Evelyn looked up from her work around the garbage cans. Molly had never noticed it before, but Evelyn had a really striking face. It wasn’t pretty, the way fat women’s faces were supposed to be pretty. It was unusual. And her eyes were a very dark and metallic green.

  “I,” Evelyn said, “am trying to see how far I can make him go.”

  “You mean Henry,” Molly said.

  “That’s right. I want to see what I’d have to do to make him leave me.”

  “Well, this should do it,” Molly said. “I’d be furious if Joey did something like this.”

  “But Joey wouldn’t do something like this. Joey doesn’t have any money. I don’t have any money,” Evelyn said. “That’s always been the point. Henry has the diet books.”

  “Diet books sell very well,” Molly said. “I see them whenever I go into the bookstore. They sell very, very well.”

  “I know,” Evelyn said. “But I’m beginning to think they don’t sell well enough. I came from a steel town, you know.”

  “No,” Molly said.

  Evelyn looked up into the clouds. “This was the point of it all, in the town I came from. Getting married. Getting a house. The boys I knew always talked about winning the lottery, but the girls I knew always talked about getting married. Meeting a rich boy. Moving out onto the Main Line. Henry wasn’t rich when I met him, but I thought he was. He was my professor.”

  “Professors don’t make any money,” Molly said. “My father says so.”

  “Next to steel workers these days, they make a lot of money.” Evelyn was matter-of-fact. “I couldn’t go home now. Henry knows that. I’ve been thinking I’d move down to College Station.”

  “You mean you want to live next to Penn State? Why?”

  “I thought I’d get another degree. In something practical. Of course, I’d have to lose the weight too. There’s that. I’d have to joi
n one of those diet programs or something. People don’t like the idea of hiring women like me, and eventually I would have to get hired.”

  “I think you ought to take Henry to divorce court and really rip him apart,” Molly said virtuously. “That’s the least you should get out of being married to a man.”

  “I’d probably have to lose weight for that too,” Evelyn said. “I can just see Henry and the judge right now. ‘Just look at her, your honor. It was all her fault.’”

  Molly cocked her head. “Were you always like this? Fat, I mean. Is it something hereditary?”

  “I was skinny as a rail the day Henry and I got married. It was Henry who was fat.”

  “Then what happened? Did you just eat and eat? Were you hungry?”

  “I have no idea if I was hungry. I’m not hungry now. The funny thing is, I haven’t been hungry for a couple of days. Henry bought some land from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood.”

  “He did?” Molly straightened up.

  “I’ve been trying to decide ever since he did it if the land is real and awful or if it just doesn’t exist at all. I tend to think it’s real and awful. That at least gives them a leg to stand on in case there are lawsuits, which there probably will be. Henry likes lawsuits. They give him something to occupy his time.”

  “Joey bought land from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood,” Molly said. “I just found out about it this morning. He didn’t even look at it. I take it Henry didn’t look at it either.”

  “No, he didn’t. I’m surprised about your Joey though. Isn’t your family in real estate?”

  “He didn’t consult anyone. She really was a Main Line debutante, you know. Her family really is some kind of high society. She has cousins and things that are in the papers all the time.”

  “A lot of people are high society who don’t have any money,” Evelyn said. “I didn’t know that before I went to college, but I do now. It’s breeding that’s supposed to matter to those people, whatever that means. I think it’s like high school.”

  “It is? What is? College?”

  “High society. I think it’s like the clubs we had when I was in high school. The only point of them was to keep some people out. Like this place. Like Fox Run Hill.”

  “Well, of course we want to keep some people out of here,” Molly said. “The muggers, for instance. And the rapists. All that street crime in Philadelphia.”

  “The clubs wanted to keep out the dorks and the nerds and the dogs,” Evelyn said, “but that wasn’t what it was really about. I mean, those people were out anyway. It was the borderline cases who mattered.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I went to a meeting of the country club membership committee once where they were talking about this couple. She was a schoolteacher and he was at some community college, they had enough money to live here because they were careful with it, and it was like listening to the talk in the girls’ bathroom when I was seventeen. Did you see her shoes? Artificial uppers. So tacky. And we’re all—what? Forty-eight?”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” Molly said.

  “Whatever.” Evelyn raised a hand in the air. “It all goes together. Fox Run Hill. Getting married. It’s all positioning. That’s all it is.”

  “That doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  Evelyn put the last lid back on the last garbage can and wiped her palms against the matte brown surface of her skirt. Her skirt looked like burlap, Molly thought. Where did fat women get clothes that looked like that? The fourth finger on her left hand was blank. Molly wondered if she had done that recently, on purpose, or if she had just had the ring taken off when she grew too fat to wear it.

  “I’m not very romantic,” Evelyn said. “The only reason I can’t imagine myself doing what Patsy Willis did is that I can’t imagine myself going through all that trouble afterward. If I had done what she’d done, I think I would have just stayed there in the house and let whatever came for me come.”

  “I think she must have been so angry, she could hardly stand it,” Molly said. “I think she must have been blind with rage. How else would you do something like that?”

  “I don’t think people who are blind with rage buy silencers,” Evelyn said. “That is what it is she was supposed to have done.”

  Molly went over to the edge of the utility area and leaned across the wall. She could just see the mock-Tudor house from there. It seemed to rise up out of the mist like a ghost mansion. The windows were dark and blank. All the other houses on this street were lit against the advent of the gathering storm.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking? I’ve been thinking that I’d love to get into Patsy’s house. I’d love to get in there and look around. Maybe I’d find something.”

  “What? You’ve been in there a dozen times. We all have. Fake beams. Too much furniture.”

  “Maybe there’d be an aura left over,” Molly said. “Maybe we’d go in there and Stephen’s ghost would come out and try to tell us something. It wouldn’t hurt to try. You could come with me.”

  “To see Stephen’s ghost?”

  “To see whatever there is to see,” Molly said.

  Evelyn stopped fussing with the garbage cans and came to stand next to the wall too.

  “Your timing is off,” she said.

  Molly looked at the driveway. A car had pulled to a stop in it. Now another car was coming up behind. As she watched, three tall men got out and began to stretch their legs.

  “The police,” Molly said with distaste. “What are they doing here?”

  Evelyn Adder laughed. “Molly,” she said. “At the moment, I think they’re probably the only ones around with any right to be here.”

  2.

  It was very difficult to do everything the way it was supposed to be done. Evan Walsh had known that as a general principle for years, but it applied with even more force to working with Karla Parrish, and especially to working with Karla Parrish now. By Evan’s estimation, they had managed to keep up this deception that Karla was still in a coma for a little over fourteen hours. He didn’t know how long they were going to be able to continue keeping it up. For one thing, Karla wasn’t that good an actress. For another, she had to act harder and harder all the time, because the longer she stayed conscious, the more conscious she seemed to be. Then there was the little matter of food, which was what they were working on now. Karla had been fed through tubes the entire time she was out. The tubes were still in her arms, pumping glucose or whatever it was directly into her bloodstream. This did not seem to make any difference to the fact that she was very hungry, and that what she was hungry for was French fries.

  “McDonald’s French fries,” she had told him first thing that morning, as soon as they had managed to get rid of the nurse. “Just like in Paris.”

  It was true. The only thing Karla had wanted to eat in Paris was McDonald’s French fries. Evan would make reservations at fancy restaurants, even at the Brasserie Lipp, and Karla would pick at her food until she could get McDonald’s French fries. If they had had McDonald’s restaurants in war zones, Karla might never have come out to visit civilization. Still, Evan thought, it couldn’t be right to feed her McDonald’s French fries when she had just come out of a coma. He wished he knew more about comas. He wished he had spent the last few days at the library, reading up on comas, instead of sitting here doing—what? Worrying?

  “McDonald’s isn’t even making French fries this early in the morning,” Evan told her. “They don’t start making lunch until eleven o’clock. Would you want one of those hash brown potato things?”

  “No,” Karla had said. “God no. French fries.”

  “Okay. But—”

  “I know,” Karla had said. “I’ll wait. Do me another favor. Go out and get me some papers.”

  “And leave you alone?”

  “Well, Evan, you can’t very well run errands for me if you aren’t willing to leave me alone.”

  “I know,” Evan said. “But you were t
he one who said you were worried about, you know, a recurrence of what happened—”

  “If anybody knew I was awake. Yes, Evan, I know. But nobody does know I’m awake. Except you. Unless you told somebody.”

  “Me? No. Of course I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Good. Then go out and get me the papers and come back with them and then do something about the French fries. God, but I’m hungry. I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry. Have you ever been to Morocco?”

  “No,” Evan said.

  “I think that’s where we’re going to go when we get out of here,” Karla said. “It’s the only place in the world where they’ve got something I like as much as McDonald’s French fries. You can go to these little places in the old city of Tangier and eat appetizers for hours. And drink wine. You don’t know what I would give right now for an enormous bottle of wine.”

  “You don’t drink,” Evan said. “I’ve never seen you drink.”

  “You’re right. I don’t drink. But something like this calls for it. Do you know that I’ve been in six civil wars and never been hurt once?”

  “Is it six?” Evan asked.

  “And here I am, back in Philadelphia, and what happens? And all because of Patsy MacLaren, for God’s sake. I think she’s crazy, Evan.”

  “Who?” Evan said.

  Karla lay down flat in the bed and closed her eyes. “I think I’m going to pretend to go to sleep now. I might even sleep. Go get me the papers.”

  “If you really do go to sleep and something startles you, you’re going to get found out,” Evan said.

  But Karla was asleep again, already. It was one of the ways Evan could tell that she was still in very bad shape. One minute she would be sitting up, bright-eyed and energetic. The next minute her eyes would be closed and she would be out, just gone, lost to the world. There were big dark circles under her eyes too, and her skin was too white. Evan thought that as soon as she ate those French fries, she was going to heave them right back up again, but he also thought it was useless to argue with a woman who could fall fast asleep in the middle of your peroration.