Blood in the Water(5)

Caroline walked back to the wall of windows and looked out again. The yellow caution tape was blowing in the wind. The trees were all bright with color. The fairways were not quite green enough. It wouldn’t be a bad landscape if it hadn’t been so pretentious, so self-conscious, so uncomfortable. There was mock Tudor everywhere, and odd Gothic arches where they didn’t belong. The whole place look like an Olde Tea Shoppe set up by somebody with no taste, no knowledge of history, and far too much money.

She wondered where Michael Platte was this morning, and then she wondered why she bothered to wonder. They were all off in the same places, these people. They were shopping, endlessly. Or they were at expensive restaurants where the food tasted like sawdust. Or they were at “charity” events where no charity was ever done but everybody got their pictures in the paper the next morning. They probably got their pictures on the Internet instantaneously. Waldorf Pines had a Facebook page these days. It was as if they thought nothing was really real unless people they didn’t know could witness it.

“They don’t even do affairs right,” Caroline said.

Susan made another little squeak. “I never believed that,” she said. “Did you? Did you believe it?”

“That Martha Heydreich was having an affair with Michael Platte? Is having, I suppose. I don’t know. Everybody says so.”

“But people say things,” Susan said. “You know that.”

“I do know that,” Caroline said. “I’ll admit, it seems completely impossible. The woman is—well. ‘Sexy’ isn’t the word for it, anyway. Not that men won’t have sex with women who aren’t sexy. It’s always astounded me what men will have sex with. At least she doesn’t seem to be ruining her marriage over it, if it’s true.”

“Oh, no,” Susan agreed. “He’s very fond of her. It’s nice, isn’t it, to see a couple devoted to each other that way? That’s not usual. Especially around here.”

“That’s not usual anywhere,” Caroline said. “Oh, well. I still think it’s peculiar. And you’re right. Maybe it’s all just something people made up. But they do spend a lot of time together. You see them everywhere around here. And you can’t miss them. Not with that car of hers.”

“Maybe we should give them a few more minutes,” Susan said. “You know how it is early in the morning. People have a hard time getting started.”

“They don’t have a hard time getting started when they’re doing something they really want to do,” Caroline said—and then she just gave it up.

It was a nice day. She could think of things to do. She could work out the invitation design and settle on a list of possible favors by herself. Then she could call a meeting for something on a Saturday and they’d all be more than willing to troop in and okay her decisions. They were always willing to okay her decisions. They only wanted to be named as members of the committee and have their pictures taken when the time came.

She’d once thought that all that mattered to them was money, but this wasn’t true. All that mattered to them was to be seen by other people to have money. They had not learned—if they were lucky they would never learn—that money is never enough if that is all you have.

Caroline went out the side door and down the narrow hallway to the kitchen. The smell of coffee was strong and insistent. They did do very good coffee in this dining room, although you could opt for the designer variety if you wanted to. Designer coffee. Designer tea at three hundred dollars a cup. Back in the Bryn Mawr house, she’d had Red Rose every morning and loved it. She had Red Rose every morning now.

She wondered what the boys were doing, out there somewhere, having jobs, loving women, maybe even getting married.

She wondered if they thought about the day she told them she would never see or speak to them again.

3

If there was one thing LizaAnne Marsh knew was absolutely pie-assed retarded—just first rate crapuscular gay—it had to be this thing about school starting at eight fifteen in the morning. Eight fifteen. Really. Even people who had to go to work to get money didn’t have to be there at eight fifteen. Not unless they had a really crappy job that was just mopping up after people or working at McDonald’s or doing something lame like being a cop. And that hardly counted. Real people didn’t have jobs like that. Real people had careers.

LizaAnne put her tray of eye shadows back on her vanity table and looked at her lashes in the mirror. LizaAnne liked to wear really thick eye shadow and then a line of black right under her lashes, but that was something else that was wrong with eight fifteen in the morning. You couldn’t get yourself up like that at eight fifteen in the morning without looking like somebody really stupid, like Martha Heydreich, and then people started making fun of you in the halls and in the gym and then … well, then. LizaAnne had never been on the wrong side of that “then,” and she didn’t intend to start now.