“It doesn’t mean anything,” Caroline insisted. “In the first place, we don’t know he was killed with the same weapon, because we don’t know what the weapon was that killed Jacqueline. In the second place, it was a famous case, in all the newspapers. It would be easy to copycat that kind of crime.”
“Maybe,” Fred Scherrer said. He sounded skeptical.
“If I’d thought Daddy had killed Jacqueline, I wouldn’t have gone on living in this house,” Alyssa said. “Talk about creepy. Did you lock your bedroom door every night before you went to sleep?”
“Of course I didn’t,” Caroline said. “For God’s sake, Alyssa, you’re being ridiculous. Daddy wouldn’t have any reason to kill me. Or you or James either. We didn’t have any money to leave him. And he wasn’t screwing somebody he hoped we wouldn’t find out about.”
“There’s another way these two crimes are alike,” Fred Scherrer said. “The murder of Jacqueline Hazzard and then the murder of Paul Hazzard. Have you noticed? None of the three of you has an alibi for either one.”
Caroline had put her tote bag down right next to her on the floor. Now she reached over and picked it up. She tried to carry cans of plain, unadulterated apple juice around with her at all times. She bought them at an organic deli half a block from the place she worked. The organic deli also carried potato chips that had been broiled instead of fried. They were peculiar.
Caroline found a can of apple juice and took it out. It had an earth-friendly snap top that left no garbage when it was opened. She opened it and put the can down on the arm of the couch. Then she put her tote bag carefully back on the floor.
“Do you know what I think you’re doing?” she asked Fred Scherrer. “I think you’re trying to work us all up. I think you’re trying to say things we’re all going to regret.”
James laughed. “Hell,” he said. “That’s what defense attorneys do.”
“He’s not being a defense attorney in this case,” Caroline said. “He’s being a suspect, and that’s the point. He isn’t trying to solve Daddy’s murder. He doesn’t have to. The police will do that. He isn’t trying to solve Jacqueline’s murder either. He knows all he has to know about that. He’s trying to get out from under what happened to Candida, that’s what he’s trying to do.”
“Caroline, be reasonable,” her brother told her. “As hard as it may be to go against your nature, at least try to be reasonable. The same person who killed Dad had to have killed Candida. No matter what did or didn’t happen to Jacqueline, even you have to see that.”
“No,” Caroline said. “I don’t have to see it.”
“Caroline likes coincidences,” Fred Scherrer said, still looking at the wall of weapons. “Big coincidences.”
“You’re just here to stir us all up,” Caroline said placidly. “It’s a form of codependency—”
“—oh, for Christ’s sake,” James exploded.
“—but it’s a very toxic form of behavior,” Caroline went on, ignoring him. “It’s really very destructive. It’s almost always resorted to out of fear. I wonder what you think this is going to get you.”
“I wonder what you think this is going to get you,” Fred Scherrer said, intrigued. “Do you ever actually talk like a human being? Or is your whole head stuffed full of this kind of jargon?”
“Her whole head is stuffed full of cotton wool,” James said.
Over on the love seat, Alyssa stirred. Then she stood and walked over to the couch where Caroline was sitting. Caroline moved aside, but Alyssa wasn’t coming for her. Alyssa was leaning against the back of the couch and looking out into the street. Caroline turned sideways so that she could see too.
“Quiet, everybody,” Alyssa ordered. “We’ve got company.”
“What kind of company?” James asked. “If it’s more reporters, I’m going to have them arrested.”
“It’s Demarkian and those two policemen,” Alyssa said. “The ones who were all on the news together Saturday night. They look very grim.”
“You’re dramatizing yourself,” Caroline said. “It’s called the soap-opera syndrome. It’s a form of addiction.”
Alyssa wasn’t listening to her. None of them were. None of them ever did. Caroline looked out at Gregor Demarkian and the other two men climbing the steps to the town house’s front door. By now, she thought, they all really ought to know better.