Bleeding Hearts(117)

Daggers. Jacqueline. Living rooms. Stab wounds. Prosecutors. Money. Blood.

It was very cold. Fred Scherrer had been moving quickly. Now he was standing right in front of the Hazzard town house, looking up at its shiny black door. Around him, the city seemed to have deteriorated. One or two of the buildings looked abandoned. There was a vacant lot full of rubbish up the street. Paul had been so proud of this house and his ownership of it. It had been a form of instant background. Fred didn’t think Paul had been capable of preventing himself from lying about how he had gotten hold of it. He wondered how much longer Paul would have been able to hold on to it in the middle of all of this. Philadelphia was falling apart. New York was falling apart. It was all going to hell.

Fred went up the stairs to the front door and pressed the bell.

Philadelphia and New York could do what they wanted to do.

He was going to get this straightened out in his head.





2


Caroline was in her studio when the doorbell rang, bent over her drafting table under the hot light of a flexible lamp. She should have been at work, but she hadn’t been able to face it. First Daddy, then Candida. The local press was having a field day. The national press was probably being just as bad, but Caroline hadn’t checked. She hated television. It was a propaganda machine for codependence.

Caroline would have felt annoyed with herself for not going in to work—not guilty; she had purged herself of guilt—except that James hadn’t gone in either. She had heard him call Max this morning and cancel all his appointments. Alyssa hadn’t left the house either, but there was nothing unusual in that. Alyssa went out only for social reasons anyway. They were all there together and not talking to each other. It was exactly the way it had been after Jacqueline died.

Caroline needed an arch support anchored at the north end of the trellis. She picked up the compass, placed the point of the pencil where it needed to be, placed the swing point where she thought it had to go to give her the sweep she needed, and drew. She got it wrong.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang again. Caroline got up, let herself out of the studio, and went to listen at the stairwell. If nobody else answered the door, she wasn’t going to. She didn’t want to talk to people today. She was sure somebody would answer though. She knew James and Alyssa far too well.

The doorbell rang for the third time. James came jogging out from the back of the ground floor, from the direction of the basement stairs. He must have been in the kitchen.

“Coming,” he shouted as he came.

Caroline leaned far over the railing and saw James stop as he reached the door and go for the eyehole. Then he stepped back and started to open up.

“Fred,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

Caroline watched Fred Scherrer come into the foyer. His coat was open and his hands were bare. He looked cold. James closed the door behind him and began walking toward the ground floor living room.

“I’m staying over a couple of days in case they need me for the investigation,” Fred was saying. “At least, that was my idea. But they don’t seem to need me for the investigation and I was getting a little nuts. I guess I wanted the walk.”

“You ought to be glad you didn’t come over yesterday,” James told him. “There were about six reporters stationed out there all afternoon and half the night. I hope they all die of frostbite.”

“Who is it?” Alyssa’s voice came bouncing out from the same direction James had come in. Caroline thought they must have been back there together. She wondered what they could have been up to.

Alyssa appeared in the foyer.

“Oh, Fred,” she said. “It’s you. I was wondering why we hadn’t heard from you. It seemed only natural that you’d come over.”

After that the three of them went off into the living room, and Caroline couldn’t see them anymore.

Up on the landing, Caroline stepped back and tried to think. She didn’t want to see Fred Scherrer any more than she wanted to see anybody else. She didn’t like Fred Scherrer. After Jacqueline had been murdered, Fred Scherrer had been a first-class pain in the ass. Still, he was tricky, there was that. You could never tell what he was up to. It didn’t make sense for her to leave him down there with James and Alyssa, where she couldn’t hear them.

Caroline went back into the studio and looked around. Her drafting table was a mess. Her black leather tote bag was sitting on the floor next to her drafting table stool, open. Caroline took her equipment off the drafting table and put it in the tote bag. Then she snapped shut the tote bag’s magnetic clip and hoisted the bag onto her shoulder. She felt her efforts were halfhearted. She was usually obsessively neat about her studio. Now her drafting table was still a mess and she was going to turn her back on it and walk out.