Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  “Stephen doesn’t know how to treat much of anybody.”

  “Stephen knows how to treat reporters, and that’s all I care about. If I were you, Kevin, I’d worry about the Markey woman. She’d been on the phone to me six times already since eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “Lobbyists get paid for bugging senator’s chiefs of staff at eight o’clock in the morning. Or three, which they think is even better.”

  “Is she beginning to make an impression?”

  “She has to make an impression, Kevin. She bought into the cocktail party, and just now she bought into the seminar Fourth-of-July weekend. We’re going to get a quarter of a million dollars in soft money out of that organization before the year is out.”

  “And they’re going to get a bill without competency exams.”

  “No,” Dan said. “They’re not.”

  This, Kevin thought, must have been the way the Poles had felt at the end of World War II, when they’d found out they’d been sold lock, stock, and barrel to the Soviet Union. It was not, of course, he himself who was being sold—it was Clare Markey—but he could sympathize. If there were competency requirements in that final bill, she was going to get killed.

  “How the hell,” he asked Dan, “are you going to manage that?”

  “I’m going to manage it,” Dan said, “because I have to. Without the competency requirement, that bill’s going to look like just another government handout, and to the social workers, too. You know how the heartland feels about handouts. You know how they feel about social workers.”

  “I know how they feel about doctors,” Kevin said drily. “That was something we hadn’t counted on back in college, was it?”

  “You’ll be all right,” Dan said. “You’re a publicly acknowledged exception. And we went over this before. Without government money, your standard of living is going to go through the floor, yours and every other doctor’s. People can’t afford to pay what you want to charge and the insurance companies are going to start refusing to at any moment.”

  “Right. Being a medical man turns out not to be the ultimate stickup operation after all.”

  “Kevin—”

  “Never mind,” Kevin said. “I’m sorry. I’m not even too sure why I called. I saw that article in the paper and I got—nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because Janet is a trooper, but her mother isn’t.”

  There was a pause on Dan Chester’s end of the line. Kevin wondered what Dan thought about at times like this and then stopped wondering. Trying to second-guess Dan always gave him a headache.

  “Victoria Harte,” Dan said, “is not somebody I’m going to worry about. Try to remember, Kevin. It doesn’t matter what she knows. It only matters what she can prove.”

  [5]

  FOR PATCHEN RAWLS, THE world was an enormously simple place. There were two kinds of problems, the practical and the moral. With practical problems, all that mattered was getting what you were owed: script approval, an extra million, the right wardrobe mistress, the new trailer. Her name had been a practical problem once, when she was first starting out as an actress, in New York. She had been born Mary Rawls in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and she had seen, as soon as she got to Manhattan, that “Mary” wasn’t going to do a thing for her. It was such an ordinary name, people forgot it, or mistook it for someone else’s. She was always running into visiting firemen who thought they had seen her in a production of Camelot or a road show of Carousel, when it was really Mary Rawley or Mary Reels they had seen. Because name recognition was everything, she had known she was going to have to change hers, and she had. She had picked “Patchen” off the spine of a book in the Endicott Booksellers on Columbus Avenue, and had been perfectly happy ever since. It was the name of some poet whose work she couldn’t read, but that didn’t matter. She had learned from at least a dozen people that the poet was a well-respected one and on the right side of most things, or at least not on the wrong one. He was considered both sensitive and intellectual, and with his name some of that reputation for sensitivity and intelligence began to rub off on her. It was a situation her high-school English teacher back in Pittsburgh was probably choking on. Her best friend from college was probably ready to slit her throat. That was just fine. Patchen Rawls had never considered herself as stupid as other people said she was.

  Moral problems were much more complicated than practical ones, because they had to be broken down into two groups. First, there were the easy questions, the things everybody with any sense knew to be true. Pollution, for instance, ought to be outlawed and brought to a halt at once, no matter what it did to the economy or the country’s standard of living. People had too many things, anyway. Women who wore furs ought to be put in jail, or at least harassed on the street. Animals were innocent, and people were wicked. Plants were beautiful and peaceful and never made war. Every lumberjack in the country deserved to be taken out and shot—although they couldn’t be, because everyone knew capital punishment was wrong. Patchen had a whole list of convictions like this, covering everything from smoking to day care, from the double-nickel speed limit to gay rights. She had the world neatly divided into two sets of people, the Nazis and the resistance. There were gay activists and homophobes, self-affirming career women and brainwashed housewives, happy little day-care geniuses and sniveling little home-raised brats, people who wanted more public housing and people who wanted to see the poor living in the streets. Most of all, there were the people who believed in God and the people who knew He didn’t exist. The people who believed in God were always Nazis.

  It was because of the people who believed in God that moral questions had to be divided into two groups, that there had to be “hard questions” at all. Some of these people were drowning in superstition, and some of them were drowning in fear, but whatever they were drowning in they were managing to take a remarkable percentage of the rest of the country along with them. Things that ought to be perfectly simple, and private, and nobody’s business but your own, suddenly became complicated. You couldn’t come right out and tell the truth about them, because the God people twisted your words around and made you sound like Lizzie Borden. That was what had happened to her when she had given an interview to People about her mother. Patchen had been right about her mother. The old woman had been seventy, and the hip she had broken was never going to properly mend. What did it matter that she hadn’t been in a coma or brain dead or whatever you called it? Patchen didn’t think any rational person wanted to live when she knew she was going to be handicapped for the rest of her life, and she said so. Well, good Lord. You’d have thought she’d admitted to dumping nuclear waste in a game-preserve reservoir. She’d had pickets following her around for a month. It was just like Victoria Harte said. Most people were hopeless, locked into the hocus-pocus nightmares of their own imaginations. You had to walk right over them or you wouldn’t get anywhere at all.

  Victoria Harte.

  Patchen looked down at the collection of crystals and copper bracelets she had strewn across the coffee table and frowned. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and she couldn’t remember where the day had gone. It was always like this when she traveled. Getting to the airport and across the country and from the airport to the hotel seemed to eat up half her time, and then dealing with the hotel seemed to eat up the other half of it. Unlike Victoria Harte, Patchen didn’t stay at the Old Washington or travel with an entourage, although she did carry the home numbers of her astrologer and her channeler. She liked to stay in the kind of place real people stayed in, like the Sheraton or the Holiday Inn, in much the same way and for much the same reasons she preferred to wear jeans instead of designer dresses when she wasn’t at work. The problem was, the Sheraton and the Holiday Inn didn’t provide the kind of services the Old Washington did, and that she sometimes needed, as she needed them now. She needed them to ensure the privacy she would have to have if she expected to ge
t Stephen into her bed on this trip, and she needed them to get in touch with Victoria Harte.

  Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte.

  Victoria Harte had been Patchen Rawls’s mentor, politically and theatrically. More than anyone else, Victoria ought to understand that marriage was an outdated institution, and shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the natural course of natural passion. At the moment, Patchen Rawls was convinced that the natural course of natural passion was going to cause Stephen Whistler Fox to divorce his wife and marry Patchen Rawls instead.

  Patchen got off the couch she’d been sitting on, went to the door of the smaller of the two bedrooms that opened off the living room of this suite, and knocked.

  “Gerri?” she said. “Are you there?”

  Gerri was her personal secretary, and Gerri was always there. There was the sound of bare feet on carpet, and the door opened.

  “I’m answering mail,” Gerri said. “What do you want?”

  Patchen bit her lip. She hated it when Gerri talked to her like—well, like just anybody. Sometimes she thought Gerri didn’t even respect her very much. She’d even tried to bring it up once, right out into the open, but the conversation had somehow ended up being about the Harmonic Conversion instead.

  “It’s about Victoria Harte,” Patchen said. “I need to get in touch with her.”

  “Do you?” Gerri’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead, all the way to her hairline. “Last we knew, Victoria Harte was not answering your calls. Her secretary called a little while ago to find out if you were going to the cocktail party,”

  “Yes, I know, Gerri. But that’s just silly. She must have come to her senses by now.”

  “Come to her senses about what? The fact that you’re trying to get her son-in-law away from her daughter?”

  “Don’t be judgmental.”

  “I’m not judging anything, for Christ’s sake. I’m stating a fact.”

  “If that marriage wasn’t already dead, Stephen wouldn’t have been interested in me in the first place. I’m not trying to do anything, Gerri. Things just happened.”

  “Right.”

  “I want to talk to Victoria Harte.”

  “Well,” Gerri said slowly, “if you wanted to tell her you weren’t going to that cocktail party tonight—”

  “Of course I’m going. Stephen needs me.”

  “—or that you weren’t going to Long Island Fourth-of-July weekend—”

  “I have to go to Long Island Fourth-of-July weekend. I promised Stephen. That’s the weekend we’re going to, you know, get things settled.”

  Gerri looked at her curiously. “Do you really think so? That it’s going to be settled your way, I mean?”

  “Of course I do. It has to be settled my way.”

  “Has to?”

  “The only thing that could stop it is that slimy little Dan Chester. And you know what Amenhet-Ra said. I’m going to find a way to destroy my enemy.”

  “Right,” Gerri said again. “Well, why don’t you get what’s-her-name to channel a message from Amenhet-Ra to Victoria Harte. That’s about the only way you’re going to get in touch with her. She wants your head and Stephen Fox’s both. If I were you, I’d be careful what you eat or drink if she’s been near the food.”

  “Gerri.”

  “I’ve got to finish this mail and pick up your dress at the cleaners. Will you let me get back to work?”

  Patchen had to let Gerri get back to work, because Gerri shut the door in her face. Patchen stood looking at it, nonplussed. Gerri was invaluable, of course, and the best secretary Patchen had ever had when it came to dealing with the detail, but there were times Patchen really didn’t think it was working out.

  She went back to the couch, and sat down again, and picked up one of the crystals. She was just jumpy, she thought. It was all that negative talk—all those bad emanations—about her and Stephen. That was what had done it. Of course Stephen was going to divorce Janet and marry her. He had to. It was in her horoscope.

  Besides, Patchen was twenty-seven, and Janet Harte Fox was old.

  [6]

  USUALLY, WHEN JANET HARTE Fox knew she had a political party to attend, she left the Emiliani School early, just after four, when games were over and prayer classes had not yet begun. Leaving early was one of the small prices she paid for being allowed to do what she wanted with her time. There were dozens of these small prices in her life, all of them thought up by Dan Chester and almost all of them having to do with the Emiliani School. It was Dan’s opinion, and therefore Stephen’s, that if she wanted to “do a little do-good work with retarded children,” she ought to do it at Kevin Debrett’s clinic in McLean. The Emiliani School was a cluster of refurbished buildings in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in the District of Columbia. It was dangerous getting there from Foggy Bottom, and just as dangerous getting back. Worse, in Dan’s opinion, was actually being there: the Emiliani School had a “rep.” It had been founded by a little cluster of retired sisters from the Order of St. Francis as a place to bring up children with birth defects whose mothers, alerted in advance by amniocentesis, had originally intended to abort them. Because what amniocentesis most often pinpointed was Down syndrome, most of the children at Emiliani had that. Janet was always secretly amused that old Sister Mary Ambrose, who had founded the school in the first years after Roe v Wade, had named it after St. Jerome Emiliani, patron saint of orphans.

  Now it was twenty minutes to six, there was a cocktail party at seven, and Janet was still at Emiliani, sitting at a long table in the writing classroom on the first floor of St. Charles Borromeo Hall. Next to her was a seven-year-old girl named Mary Alyse, who was working with great concentration on a large sheet of paper, making letters with a purple crayon. At the front of the room, near the blackboard, was Sister Mary James, an ancient nun in a habit so abbreviated it looked like a waitress’s uniform. That she wore a habit at all was dictated entirely by the preferences of the children, who liked to know, in as clear a way as possible, who was a nun and who was not. Within the limited framework of their experience, that distinction was very important. Nuns, even nuns they had never met before, could be trusted on sight. Other people required a period of testing.

  Mary Alyse had drawn a large, wavering upside-down V in the middle of her paper. She sat back, contemplated it, and sat forward again. Then she drew an even wavier line across the V’s middle and sat back again. She smiled.

  “A,” she said, with confidence.

  “That’s right,” Janet said. “A.”

  “I write,” Mary Alyse said.

  “That’s right,” Janet said again. “You did write. And you’re going to go on writing.”

  “No.” Mary Alyse frowned furiously and struggled to her feet. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now.” She looked appealingly at Sister Mary James, and broke into a smile when sister nodded. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now,” Mary Alyse said again. “I say thank-you.”

  “Say thank-you for me, too,” Janet said.

  Mary Alyse gave Janet a very dubious look. She had been taught that everyone talked to the Blessed Mother, everyone talked to God, everyone went to Mass and tried to be good—or, at least, that everyone nice did. Janet could see her trying to work it out—surely Janet could say thank-you to the Blessed Mother herself?—and then abandoning the effort. Mary Alyse’s face was taken over by an infinitely wise look that said Here is another of those things people say but don’t really mean. She leaned over, gave Janet a tremendous hug, and scampered out of the room.

  Up at the front, Sister Mary James put her chalk back on the chalk shelf, dusted her hands against the coarse brown cloth of her habit skirt, and said, “I told you she would do it. It was only a matter of time.”

  “I wish all of them could do it,” Janet said. She swiveled a little in her chair, toward the tall window that looked out on the asphalted playground. There were children out there, running and jumping in the heat, teasing and petting
Sister Mary Vianney, who had playground watch. In a little while they would be called in for prayers and supper, then read to in the convent’s big living room before being sent off to bed. If the nuns insisted, the children would hear a new story, rewritten and illustrated by one of the sisters from a narrative in the Bible. If the nuns were being indulgent, though, the children would get what they wanted, a story they’d already heard a hundred times and wanted to hear again. According to Sister Mary James, Down syndrome children, like all children everywhere, wanted their favorites read to them “just one more time” into infinity.

  In fact, Janet thought, the first thing you learned by spending time at Emiliani was that Down syndrome children were like children everywhere, exactly like, except for an intellectual slowness that made them take longer to learn some things than they would have if they hadn’t had the syndrome. Janet was beginning to think this slowness was less “stupidity,” as dear old Dan would put it, than most people thought. Patchen Rawls was stupid. The woman couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag and didn’t have the brains to realize she ought to try. Mary Alyse tried very hard, all the time, and practice was beginning to make perfect. Unlike Patchen, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to use a copper bracelet to cure arthritis.

  Unlike Patchen Rawls, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to steal another woman’s husband, either.

  Janet’s handbag was on the floor next to her seat. She picked it up, rummaged around inside, and came out with a comb.

  “I saw an article about your husband in the paper this morning,” Sister Mary James said. “He’s sponsoring a bill to get a program going for children with Down syndrome. Did you talk him into that?”

  “No,” Janet said. Then, realizing how rude she must have sounded, she added, “I didn’t know anything about it until four days ago. He and his chief of staff worked it out between them.”