The coffee was finished. Caroline brought the percolator to the table. She sat down in front of her own place mat with her own set of silverware. It was her own silverware, too, brought from the house, carefully wrapped in that fuzzy warm blue cloth from Tiffany’s. Caroline used to have a service for thirty-six in this pattern.
“I wasn’t thinking about the police,” she said. “I was thinking about the people. The people who live here. They’ve been skittish with each other since this started. Now it’s going to be worse.”
“Why would it be worse?” Susan asked. “They’ll still know who killed them. You said that yourself. You said they used to think that it was Arthur Heydreich who killed them, and now they’ll think it was Martha.”
You had to go over and over things with Susan. You had to explain and explain and explain again, and then you had to start all over from the beginning.
Caroline had toast and jam and butter on the table. The toast was in a silver toast rack. The jam and butter were in small ceramic bowls. She did not allow jars and boxes from the supermarket on her breakfast table.
She tried it again. “The police will know that,” she said, trying to say it slowly, and trying not to scream. “And the people at Waldorf Pines will hear it from the police. But it’s much the way it was before. They’ll only partly believe it. With some other part of their brains, they’ll wonder if the police couldn’t be wrong. And this time, of course, they’ll wonder all the more, because the police were wrong the first time. Then they’ll do the even more natural thing, and start to suspect each other.”
“I don’t see why that’s the natural thing,” Susan said.
“It is the natural thing, nonetheless,” Caroline said. “It’s the way people are. They’ll suspect each other, and they’ll gossip about each other, and then all sorts of things will come out that wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s why it’s so important for us to just stay away from these people as much as we possibly can. And since that’s what we were already trying to do, it ought to be easier for us than it will be for some people.”
Susan was still standing there, shifting back and forth on her feet as if she were in the first form and being reprimanded by the head of the Lower School.
“Are you going to give up organizing the cotillion?” she asked. “That’s where we see other people most of the time.”
“I know,” Caroline said. “Part of me doesn’t understand why they’d want to have their wretched cotillion after all this. I mean, think of it really. They don’t want a real cotillion, a private thing for private people. They want something they can splash all over the newspapers, and maybe even have television cameras for. You’d think they’d have had enough of publicity with all that’s been going on with the murders. Have you been remembering to go in and out the back way?”
“I’ve hardly been out of the complex at all,” Susan said. “And yes, I did remember, only the back way and then with a scarf and sunglasses, although what good the sunglasses are supposed to do, I never did understand. I didn’t understand it with—with—you know. I never did see the good it was supposed to do. I was always recognized anyway.”
“You were recognized because they were looking for you,” Caroline said. “Nobody is looking for you now. Nobody expects to find either of us in Waldorf Pines, and the newspeople aren’t chasing that story anyway. It really is just a matter of keeping our heads. Nobody is interested in us.”
“They would be interested in us if they knew who we were,” Susan said.
“But they don’t know who we are. And there’s no reason for them to find out.”
“They’d be interested in us if they knew about us.” Susan walked over to the percolator stand, as if there was something there to see. “It’s not the same as if we had nothing to do with them at all. Martha and Michael, I mean. We did have to do with them. We couldn’t help it.”
Caroline took a piece of toast out of the toast rack. They’d been talking for so long, it was cold. She hated cold toast. She hated this house, if it came to that. Everything was too obviously expensive. Everything was too florid and overdone.
She took a butter knife and went at the butter, real butter, whipped to make it possible to spread. Caroline did not believe in margarine. She did not believe in anything contrived or fake.
“There is nothing,” she said, very carefully, “to connect us to either Martha Heydreich or Michael Platte except what inevitably arises from the fact that we lived in the same housing estate. There is no reason why anyone, anywhere, should make any other connection between us. And there is no reason why anybody, anywhere, should connect either one of us with—with what happened before. I suppose there are people who would like to do it for spite, but they don’t know we live here and they have no reason to connect us to this place. Not even my children know we live here.”