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Act of Darkness(93)

By:Jane Haddam


“I just didn’t want to get involved,” she told Patchen lamely. “I didn’t want people to think—”

“You put pantyhose in there,” Patchen said. “You ruined everything.”

“Patchen, I didn’t put anything in there. I didn’t go inside.”

“Somebody put pantyhose in there.” Patchen turned around to look at the beach again. “I told Gregor Demarkian about that. I told Gregor Demarkian everything. He’ll believe me.”

Clare was completely bewildered. Patchen must have been watching the hall. There was no other explanation for this conversation. But it was more than that. Clare wasn’t worried that Gregor Demarkian would suspect her of murder. She thought they understood each other. But Patchen, Patchen—

And then, Clare saw it. The studied childishness, the deliberate air of confusion, the quasi-metaphysical mumblings—all of it, every bit of it, was a cover for pure, unadulterated malice. Clare had always thought of Patchen as silly and trivial, and because of that, she had never taken the time to study her. But she had been wrong. Patchen was not silly and trivial at all. She was a single-minded machine for the operation of triumphant narcissism, and that narcissism had a nasty edge of envy to it. Patchen Rawls was one of those people who was happiest not when she won but when she could watch other people losing.

Ten minutes before, Clare would have said there was nothing in her Washington experience that would ever be any use to her in her life to come. Now she saw that she had been wrong about this, too. There was at least one thing she had learned from Harvey Gort and all his kind that could come in very useful indeed.

Clare kicked off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been sitting out here thinking. Thinking about changing jobs, if you want to know the truth. I’ve been considering a cause very close to my heart.”

“It can’t be a real cause,” Patchen said. “You wear leather.”

“Oh, I think this is a real enough cause. When I was in college, I wanted to go into PR. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, it turned out the kind of people I wanted to do PR for couldn’t pay me too much money. They don’t have too much. But I’ve been a lobbyist for years now, and I’ve got money. I wouldn’t have to go for the biggest salary now.”

“So?” Patchen sounded supremely bored.

“I was thinking of volunteering. Bringing what I know to the aid of the Senior Citizens’ Defense Fund.”

Patchen sat up straight, rigid, wary. “What are you getting at?” she demanded. “What are you trying to pull?”

“I’m not trying to pull anything, Patchen. It’s just that, being here this weekend, watching you, has given me an idea. The Senior Citizens’ Defense Fund is on a campaign to get laws passed that would stop doctors and relatives from—well, what they want is to make it illegal to remove a feeding tube from any patient, comatose or otherwise.”

“It’s a silly law,” Patchen said. “Sometimes there’s no other way—”

“To kill someone? Yes, Patchen, I know. I also know we don’t call it killing any more. We call it ‘dying in dignity.’ But you know, I can think of a campaign, a television and print campaign, that might turn that around. I read the stories about your mother. They were—a little vague. Oh, so sophisticated. All that talk about bioethics and cost-benefit analysis and what happens when an old person will just go on costing and costing their family without any hope of the cost ever stopping except by death. And you, prattling about how your mother would be in pain, and then she took four days to die. Four days, Patchen. Can’t you just see what I could do with that in a thirty-second spot?”

“Those people can’t afford thirty-second spots.” Patchen was shrill. “They don’t have any money. They spend it all making their lives go on and on and on when they’re useless, just no use to anybody anymore and—”

“I’ve got the money for thirty-second spots, Patchen.”

“You bitch,” Patchen Rawls said.





[3]


There was a mirror in the Mondrian study, which was why Victoria Harte had gone there. It had been a bad day and, as always at the end of bad days, she had an irresistible need to look at herself, to make sure she was who she thought she was. The police were all over the house now, even in her bedroom, but that didn’t matter. She kept a Shaker sewing basket full of extra makeup supplies under the side table next to the living room sofa. When their little group had finally broken up—dispersed more by their weariness at their tension in being together than by any need to get anything done—she had come down here and upended the basket over the desk. The vials and tubes and jars and boxes had scattered everywhere, and some of them had fallen on the floor. She hadn’t bothered to pick them up.