Blood in the Water(47)

“Pineville Station has what every parent wants in an education for their child,” Ken Bairn said. “It has a school system where every teacher knows every student. It has small classes where every student gets individual attention.”

“Ken can talk such a good game, you’d even think we’d planned it all this way,” Buck said. “But it was inertia, really. We’d always had public schools right in town. We went on having public schools right in town. Even when the town started shrinking. And we have been shrinking. There’s not much to do here if you’re ambitious.”

“Pineville Station has the perfect mix of friendly small-town values and access to upscale shopping and entertainment,” Ken said.

“He means it’s not that far from here on the interstate to the King of Prussia Mall,” Ken said. “It’s also the reason why people like Delores and Sue Connolly are opposed to Waldorf Pines and all it stands for. If it can be said to stand for anything. Well, maybe I just mean all it brings with it. If your high school class numbers only a hundred and forty-five students, and one of them gives a party and invites everybody but maybe fifteen of you, then it’s suddenly a big deal in a way it would not have been if your school was bigger.”

“Crap,” Ken Bairn said. “You are not going to get me to believe that little Jen Connolly tried to kill herself because she didn’t get invited to a party. I’ve known that girl all her life. She’s not that much of an idiot.”

“It would have been different if what was coming into town was really rich people,” Buck said. “Really rich people send their children to private schools. They live their lives as far out of the limelight as they can get them. They settle in. They keep to themselves. They try to avoid their taxes. They don’t get in anybody’s way as long as nobody gets in theirs. With these people, though—let’s just say they make a point of getting in everybody’s way as much as possible, and their children have absolutely taken over the school.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ken Bairn said.

Over in the back, Larry Farmer coughed. “Not to make too much of a big deal about it,” he said, “but we do have a limited time frame here. We’ve called a press conference. We have to know what we’re saying in the press conference.”

“That’s right,” Ken Bairn said. “And this has nothing to do with that. That party was a year ago. It’s already been on television.”

“They had some wonderful shots of LizaAnne Marsh shopping for dresses in Philadelphia,” Buck said. “She bought two, so that she could change halfway through the party. One of them cost three thousand dollars.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Ken Bairn said firmly. “Larry’s right. We’re going to have to concentrate. We’re going to have to have something to say when we get to that press conference. And it’s not going to be as easy as you think. How we could have made a mistake of this kind is beyond me.”

“The body was burned to ashes,” Larry Farmer said. “I saw it myself. There was nothing to use to identify it with. And as for dental records—well, forget it. We didn’t find half the teeth. What were we supposed to do?”

“Not jumping the gun might have been a good thing,” Ken said. “You could have said the body was unidentifiable.”

“Wait,” Gregor said.

They all turned to look at him.

“Are you saying you had nothing to identify the body with?” he asked. “Nothing at all? Nothing left over in the ashes?”

“No, of course we didn’t,” Larry Farmer said. “If we’d had something like that, we wouldn’t have gone off and identified it as Martha Heydreich’s.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “I know. But you’re actually talking about nothing at all here. Absolutely nothing.”

“Yes,” Larry Farmer said. “I mean, what can you possibly—”

“Jewelry,” Gregor said. “Mrs. Heydreich was a married woman. Didn’t she have a wedding ring that she wore regularly? Would she have taken that off when she was having sex with her lover?”

“Oh, wonderful,” Larry Farmer said. “He gets here and the first thing he does is make us all look like idiots. Of course she had a wedding ring. And no, we didn’t find it. Not that we were specifically looking for it, mind you, but we sifted through everything. If it was there, we would have found it.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Buck Monaghan said. “We should have found a lot of jewelry, not just a wedding ring. From everything we’ve been told about Martha Heydreich, she was usually decked out like a Christmas tree. Necklaces. Bracelets. Rings. She wouldn’t have taken them all off just to hop into bed with somebody.”