A Great Day for the Deadly(40)

“I’m sure they wouldn’t call me if they needed information about a funeral,” she had said to Katherine Hale, who had set out to be the sensible one. Of course, there was nothing very sensible about nattering away on the subject of Don’s funeral when he’d just been found murdered somewhere in town. If that really was what happened, it might be weeks before the police were ready to release his body to anyone at all. That was just like Katherine Hale. Katherine had been with Miriam at Manhattanville—and if it hadn’t been well before the age of competitive admissions, she wouldn’t have been at Manhattanville at all. Katherine Hale couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag.

It had been just after Katherine called that Miriam had made her decision. She had no doubt that Don was dead—too many people had agreed on that point to make it anything else but true—but she didn’t want to think about it for the moment. She didn’t want to be questioned by the police about it, either. There would come a time when she could avoid neither of these things. That time would arrive very soon, accompanied by unspoken demands on her to produce the appropriate emotion. Miriam hadn’t the faintest idea what that emotion could be. For the moment, she simply wanted to disappear.

If she’d had a normal marriage, or even a normal May—December arrangement, she would have relied on Josh to get her away from it all. He could have put her into that car she’d bought him and taken her for a ride; Because she didn’t have a normal anything, Josh was not around. He had gotten into that car very early this morning and taken off on his own. Since he couldn’t be with Ann-Harriet Severan—Miriam had taken care of that for the weekend by giving Ann-Harriet a great deal of last-minute, must-rush extra work—Miriam hadn’t any idea at all where he had gone.

If you want to find a banker on the weekend, the last place you look for him is at the bank. Miriam’s father had taught her that. That was why, as the sound of church bells died away in the air over her head, she was standing at the bank’s back door, fishing keys out of her purse. It was very cold and very bright, the kind of day that looks warm when you’re standing inside. Outside, the wind was high and stiff and rigid and threatening to get worse. Miriam got the key turned and the door open and pressed herself inside.

The back hall was where the rest rooms were, and the storage closets, and the stairs to the basement. Miriam passed through it, listening to the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor and feeling a little foolish. Back at home, she had tried to convince herself that getting dressed to go into the bank on a day it wasn’t open was silly. Anyone else who had come in to do some extra work would be lounging around the office floor in jeans. She hadn’t been able to convince herself. She’d never come in to the bank on a weekend before. If she had extra work to do, she took it home. Before coming out, she had struggled into yet another Chanel suit and another layer of makeup—and then she had wasted time resenting it all.

She made absolutely sure the back hall was empty—she even checked the ladies’ room, although not the men’s; she didn’t have the courage to check the men’s—and then started up the stairs to the office floor. From up there, the sound of a soft voice talking drifted down at her. It was only one voice, so Miriam assumed it was talking into a phone. She reached the landing, paused to listen, then went up the rest of the flight. She reached the second floor and paused to listen again. The voice was low and hummingbird sweet, but strong. It was the voice of a girl of twenty-two.

The floor of the upstairs office hall was made of checkerboard marble. There was no way Miriam could walk down it without being heard. She didn’t bother to try. From where she was standing, she could see the door to Ann-Harriet’s office, pulled back and propped open. Every once in a while, she could see Ann-Harriet’s arm, drifting gracefully through the area the open door revealed.

“But this is terrible,” Ann-Harriet was saying. “How could something like this happen?”

There was a seductive note in that voice, but it wasn’t the right seductive note. Whomever Ann-Harriet was talking to, it wasn’t Josh. Miriam began to walk down the hall toward the open office, going slowly, thinking herself into an Alfred Hitchcock frame of mind.

“Just a minute,” Ann-Harriet said, “someone just came in.”

There was the sound of a chair being pushed back and then of heels on carpet. Ann-Harriet’s head appeared in the open doorway. She caught sight of Miriam, nodded, and disappeared again.

“It’s the boss,” Miriam heard her disembodied voice say a moment later. “I don’t know if she’s heard about this or not. I’ll call you back later.”