Blood in the Water(43)

When the radio finished, Fanny went to her computer and began to look around the Web sites. The only one that had anything up was WKVT, and it was very sparse. DNA testing had revealed that the unidentified body in the Waldorf Pines case belonged to a man. The police had dropped the charges against Arthur Heydreich in the murder of his wife. There was no news on whether or not they would drop the charges against Arthur Heydreich in the murder of Michael Platte. Fanny had to go back and read the story twice. She thought her head was going to explode.

There, she thought, sitting at her kitchen table and rubbing her hands together. There. What had she tried to tell everybody? It was wrong to jump to conclusions, no matter how obvious those conclusions seemed to be. You never really knew what was happening until all the evidence was in. People were going to be embarrassed when they realized they had made this mistake. They were going to be ashamed of themselves.

And what about Arthur Heydreich? He’d been left sitting there in jail for weeks, with nobody to visit him. Fanny had wanted to visit him, but she hadn’t had the courage. She had always lacked courage, all her life. She had always been very sensitive to injustice, but she had never been able to do anything about it. It had made her cry, that was all. The people at Waldorf Pines who had been talking about Arthur Heydreich made her cry, too, but there were so many of them, and she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do about them anyway. People were just people. They did what they did, and nothing much ever changed them.

She saw the strange, ugly car come around the curve when she went out to check her mailbox. It was much too early to check her mailbox, but she was feeling restless and at loose ends. She was at loose ends most mornings, but it usually didn’t bother her. Today, she was finding it hard to stand still.

She saw the ugly little car stop at Arthur Heydreich’s house and then, a moment later, Arthur Heydreich getting out. He was wearing what Fanny thought of as his “always suit.” She was sure he had more than one of them, but they all looked alike. She couldn’t tell them apart.

Arthur walked up the driveway and to his front door. He leaned over and picked something up from the edge of the step that Fanny couldn’t see. Then he opened the door and disappeared inside.

Fanny found herself suddenly, oddly breathless, as if something had sucked all the air out of her world. She went back into her own house and tried sitting down. She tried sitting down at the kitchen table. She tried sitting down on the love seat in the living room. She really could not sit still today, and she couldn’t breathe.

She got up and went to the front door again. She went out to her driveway and looked up the road. The front of Arthur Heydreich’s house looked blank, as if nobody had ever lived there, and nobody ever would.

If Charlie had known what she was going to do next, he would have had a fit and a half. This was not the kind of thing Charlie approved of people doing.

But then, Fanny thought, Charlie had no right to complain if he wasn’t around for her to ask for his advice.

Fanny stepped out onto the road. It was impossible for anybody to go anywhere in Waldorf Pines without being watched by somebody, but Fanny found she really didn’t care. What was it that these people were supposed to do to her if they didn’t like the way she behaved? There were a lot of complicated things about the residential agreement, but she had never understood those.

She walked up Arthur Heydreich’s driveway to his front door and stared for a moment at the button for the bell. She had not thought out what she was going to say, and she didn’t know if she was going to say anything he wanted to hear, anyway. She looked around her at the leaves and the grass and the houses, everything just a little gray and dark, because it was autumn. She turned back to the door and pushed the button for the bell.

For a moment, there was no sound at all from inside the house, and Fanny felt stupid. Of course Arthur Heydreich wouldn’t answer his door. He wouldn’t want to see people. He probably felt persecuted. He had a right to.

Fanny considered going back home. She considered her shoes, which were canvas and looked drowned by the wet on the morning lawns. She looked up again and pressed the button again. This time, there were footsteps behind the door.

Fanny thought he’d call out from behind there and demand to know who it was. Instead, the door swung back and he was just there, his tie undone, his jacket off. If Fanny had expected to see prison pallor or the start of a nervous breakdown, she was disappointed. Arthur Heydreich looked the way Arthur Heydreich always looked. He looked sensible. He looked sane. He looked calm.

“Yes?” he said.