“Do you really think you’ll be able to do that? After all this? After what the publicity is going to be like? After this weekend?”
Dan grinned. “Well, Janet, let me put it to you this way. Teddy Kennedy is still in office, and Richard Nixon is making a comeback. If you play it right, the great American voting public will let you get away with anything.”
“There have been people—”
“Who didn’t play it right,” Dan said. Then he stood up and stretched and picked up his glass of Scotch to drain it. Janet blinked. He had just downed twice as much as most men were able to drink in a night, and it hadn’t even made him wobbly. He put the glass down on the table and shook his head, hard, as if to clear it. It made his hair fall, into his eyes.
“Don’t think,” he said, “that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing. I find it—touching—that you’d go to so much trouble just to get me to save my own neck.”
Janet found herself thinking that he was going to come over to her, whisper in her ear, start a conversation where everything would be stated and nothing would be repressed. He seemed to be in the mood for it. He even started toward her. A second later, he must have changed his mind. He backed up again, whirled around, and headed for the door.
When he got the bolt thrown and the door open, he turned back to her and bowed, solemnly, with no hint of mockery at all.
Then he said, “You’re very, very good at what you do, Janet, but I am much, much better.”
Then he disappeared.
Janet Harte Fox stood at the window, with the rumble of celebration preparations going on behind her, and thought she had just heard what she hadn’t wanted to hear.
[2]
Patchen Rawls was not out under the portico, meditating. She was out on the deck in the back, sitting cross-legged on the pressed wooden boards, holding a conversation with herself about the safekeeping of extraordinary karma in a treacherous universe. At least, Clare Markey thought Patchen Rawls was holding a conversation with herself, and that that was what the conversation was about. It was hard to tell. Clare had been sitting on the deck herself, alone in the single chair someone had left out after dark, when Patchen arrived. At first, she’d thought Patchen was still rattled by what Victoria had done to her in the living room and needed a sympathetic ear. Now she wasn’t sure what Patchen wanted.
“The soul is holistic and the body is made of parts,” Patchen said. “That’s what the problem is. We should think with our souls. Instead, we think with our bodies. We disrupt the universe and unbalance the ecology of our spirits.”
“Mmm,” Clare said. She wasn’t entirely sure what a soul was, but she knew what she’d been doing before Patchen came out. She hadn’t been thinking with her mind. She hadn’t been thinking with her body, however that was done. She’d been giving free reign to her emotions, and those emotions had presented her with a fait accompli.
She did not have to go back to Washington to quit her job, because she had already quit her job in all the ways that counted. All she had to go back to Washington for was to clean out her office, clean out her bank accounts, and pack.
And tell Harvey Gort what he could do with his organization, his politics, and his foul language.
If the police hadn’t been tying up most of the phones in the house most of the time, she would have been talking to Harvey right now. Considering how she felt, it was probably a good thing for the future of her reputation that she wasn’t.
Did she need a reputation, if she wasn’t going to have a public life?
Over at the edge of the deck, Patchen Rawls stirred. “I saw you,” she said suddenly. “Did you know that?”
“Saw me?”
“Going into Stephen’s room. I told that Demarkian person about you. I told him everything.”
Patchen had been sitting with her back to Clare from almost the first moment she’d come out. Now she turned around, swiveling on her bottom so she didn’t have to stand. She came to a stop in just the place where the outdoor lamp shed its light directly on her face. The lights bounced into her eyes and out again, making them look like midget beacons.
“You were in Stephen’s room,” she said. “You were there almost at the right time.”
“I wasn’t in Stephen’s room,” Clare corrected. “I passed by it and saw his door open and looked in.”
“You saw my things.”
“Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I did.”
“You messed them up. You went in and messed them up.”
“No,” Clare said. “I didn’t.” Would it be possible to explain to Patchen Rawls why she had not gone in, and why she had said nothing about what she had seen later, after Stephen was killed? Would Patchen understand damage control, or protecting a professional position? At that point, Clare had still thought she was going back to work, that career was everything. It wasn’t until later that she’d decided, she wanted to chuck it all.