Bleeding Hearts(8)

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Sandy asked. “Could I get you something? Maybe you want one of your tranquilizers?”

One of her tranquilizers? How did Sandy know she took more than one kind of tranquilizer? And who else knew? God, this was really awful. This was a disaster. She was losing it completely. What did they call it in Group? That feeling you get that you’re more stoned on your own than any dope could make you.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Caroline said. She edged around the side of her desk and then around the chair Sandy was sitting in, looking at the ceiling, looking at the floor, looking at nothing. “I just have to go to the bathroom again. I’ll be right back.”

“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can get you?”

“Of course I’m sure, Sandy. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be right back.”

Caroline was at the door to the hall now. She whirled around and plunged out into it, into the dark, and as she did, it occurred to her that it was a metaphor.

She was always plunging out into the dark.

She was always falling into the abyss.

It would be easy enough to blame it on Alyssa and Alyssa’s taste for the sensational, but Alyssa was just as much a victim as Caroline was.

They were both victims of Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard.

And of their father.

There was a window open in the ladies’ room, blowing cold polluted air in from the streets of Philadelphia.

Caroline had never been as glad of the smell of carbon monoxide in her life.





4


“ALL I TOLD HER,” Alyssa Hazzard Roderick was saying to her husband Nicholas, her voice thick with the exasperation it manufactured like mucus anytime she had to deal with her sister Caroline, “all I told her was that it was inevitable, which it is, and that there was nothing we could do about it, which we can’t, and which is just saying the same thing all over again, but you know what I mean. Believe it or not, I was trying to do some good for all of us. I thought if I could talk to her calmly off the home turf, I might be able to get her to see reason.”

“Caroline?” Nick asked mildly.

Nick was a decidedly rotund man in his early fifties, a kind of Santa Claus with black curly hair, and Alyssa loved him as madly as she had on the day she’d first met him, when she was twenty-four. That was years and years ago, of course. Alyssa had been forty-five on her last birthday, although she didn’t really look it. Four pregnancies and four miscarriages in four years hadn’t managed to put any weight on her. She was as willowy and fragile-looking as she had been as a teenager. She was also decidedly fond of food. One of the things she liked about Nick was that he was decidedly fond of food too, and disinclined to get all neurotic about it the way so many of the other lawyers in his firm did. One of the other things she liked about him was that he looked so at home here, in this town house where she had grown up. Soon after their wedding, Alyssa’s father had turned the top floor into an apartment for them, and they’d been living in it ever since. Every once in a while Nick suggested that they build a house out in Radnor, since they could afford it, but the suggestion never went anywhere. There were thirty-five hundred square feet on this floor of the house alone. They were very comfortable.

Nick was sitting in a yellow wingback chair next to the great marble fireplace in their living room, paying no attention at all to the legal pad he had in his lap. He had been working on something when Alyssa came in, but he had stopped as soon as he’d seen his wife had need of him. Alyssa liked that about Nick too. There was nothing in his life more important than his relationship with her. Since there was nothing more important in Alyssa’s life than her relationship with Nick, it worked out splendidly.

Alyssa was sitting on the edge of the couch, eating her way methodically through a gigantic chocolate-chip cookie. She had bought two of them in the pastry shop on the corner before she’d come upstairs. Nick’s was sitting on an arm of the wingback chair, untouched.

“The thing is,” Alyssa said, “you really can’t blame Candida. I mean, no matter how embarrassing it’s going to be for us, under the circumstances, it only stands to reason.”

“Does it?”

“Oh, yes.” Alyssa nodded sagely. “I mean, what is Candida, really? She’s just a kind of modern-day courtesan or something. She was Daddy’s mistress and before that she was Thomas Brandemoor’s mistress and before that she had some Greek or other from a shipping family. She lives on men.”

Nick picked up his cookie and took a bite out of it. “We used to have a word for that kind of woman when I was growing up. And it wasn’t ‘courtesan.’ ”