Act of Darkness(91)

She went through the foyer, through the twin living room space on its other side, then around the corner to the back hall and the kitchen. She tried the kitchen door half expecting it to be locked. Dan had had that look in his eye, and Janet knew he often locked himself in when he was staying at Great Expectations. But the kitchen door was open and she pushed through it, to find Dan sitting at the kitchen table. She had expected him to be drinking coffee. Instead, he had one of the huge plastic “super soda” glasses the cook collected from McDonald’s and left strewn here and there around the house. It was filled with something dark and thick that looked like Scotch.

Janet shut the kitchen door and locked it herself. The room felt big to her, too big, and hostile—the way all the world had felt, really, since Stephanie had died. Dan looked too small. It was odd to think how much she had counted on Dan, all these years, how much she was counting on him even now.

“Dan,” she said, and quailed a little, because she sounded so desperate. “For God’s sake. What do you think you’re doing?”

Dan must have heard her come in. He wasn’t comatose, and he wasn’t the kind of man to lose himself in thought to the point where he was unaware of the world around him. Still, he hadn’t looked up when she came in, and he didn’t exactly look up now. He just twisted his head more or less in her direction and smiled.

“I,” he told her, “am getting drunk.”

“Don’t be silly,” Janet said quickly. “You can’t get drunk now.”

“Why not? I don’t see what else I can do.”

“You can get out of here, for one thing. You ought to get out of here. Before—”

“Something radical happens? Janet, my dear, I think something radical is going to happen whether I get out of here or not. I don’t think it’s up to me.”

Janet walked away from the door, to the kitchen windows. They were small—the architect must have thought it wasn’t important to light a room that would be used primarily by servants—but they looked out on the beach, too.

“You ought to call the fireworks off,” she said. “With Stephen just dead, it’s going to look bad. I don’t know what you were thinking of.”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything. It was your mother’s idea. She said the last thing she wanted at this point was the town of Oyster Bay mad at her on top of everything else.”

“I don’t care what the town of Oyster Bay thinks. I don’t care about anything. I don’t even care about Patchen Rawls.

“Ah, yes,” Dan said. “Patchen Rawls.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Sure. She’s out on the portico, meditating. Or chanting something, at any rate.”

Janet bit her lip. “It isn’t working, is it? They aren’t taking the hint.”

“You mean they don’t think Patchen Rawls killed Kevin and Stephen? No, Janet. They’re better than that.”

“Maybe I should have gone for Clare Markey instead.”

“Maybe you should have left the whole thing alone. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

“You know why.”

“Yes,” Dan said. “I know why.” He knocked back a good third of his drink, as much as one or two ordinary glasses of Scotch, and then put it down on the table to stare into it. Janet had seen men do that countless times, and never understood why they did it. Right now, Dan put her in mind of Patchen’s endless prattle about predestination and crystal balls.

“I wonder,” Dan said, “what’s going to happen to us when all of this is over. Do you think we’ll still be speaking to each other?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. You’ll go back to California and lock yourself up in that great big house and lock Victoria up there with you, and then in a couple of years you’ll come out and do the great philanthropic shuffle. Open a home for retarded children. Fund an endowment for the study of Down syndrome. Organize a telethon—”

“What will you do?”

“Well, that depends, doesn’t it, on what happens in the meantime. I’ve been sitting here telling myself I’ll be lucky just to get the chance to retire and go fishing. I’ve got quite a bit of money in the bank, you know.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Of course, depending on what happens tonight, I may not feel like that in the morning. I may decide I want to go on with what I’ve been doing. Find another candidate. Build another career. That’s all I ever have done, you know, in all my adult life. Even before. I managed the campaign of the boy who was student council president my senior year of high school.”