“Maybe whoever committed the murders stayed in the pool house all night,” Bennis said. “Then, you know, the next morning—”
Gregor took the coffee cup and half drained it. “I suppose that’s just possible, but that’s not what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Exactly what was supposed to,” Gregor said. “And that’s what makes me so angry.”
FOUR
1
Martha Heydreich’s picture was all over the news. This was not so surprising. It had already been all over the news, on the days after the murders were discovered, when everybody was convinced that the second body had to be hers. Fanny Bullman still found it hard to watch. The news stories were so different now. And there was something that just felt so … wrong about the whole thing. Fanny tried to think of Martha Out There, Somewhere. She came up blank. She’d never been able to understand Martha at the best of times. Now, the woman just seemed bizarre. Characters in books did the kinds of things Martha was supposed to have done. Characters in movies did them. People who lived in places like Waldorf Pines just got up and went to work and did the chores and thought about sex.
There were no chores to do in the house now. Everything was quiet. Dinner had been made and eaten and the dishes put away. Homework had been done at the dining room table and carefully checked. Clothes had been chosen and fought over and laid out in the bedrooms upstairs for tomorrow morning. Debris had been picked up in the family room. Three dropped socks had been picked up from the stairs. The children were settled in for the night in their beds, even if they weren’t asleep. The lunch boxes were set out on the counter in the kitchen, waiting to be filled in the morning. No matter what happened, or when it happened, or how it happened, life in a place like Waldorf Pines was always the same.
Fanny went to the sliding glass doors of the family room and stepped out onto her deck. Across the way, she could see lights in Arthur Heydreich’s family room. He had the curtains open over there. It could have been any night anytime anywhere. It could have been last July, except that it was definitely getting colder, and Fanny felt a little frozen standing on the deck in her bare feet.
She went back into the house and locked up. She went to the front door and made sure that was locked, too. She thought about all the things that could possibly go wrong. There were a lot of them.
Fanny looked around her foyer. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere. She went up the stairs and into the hall and down the hall to the master bedroom. Josh was sleeping. She could hear him breathing. Mindy was humming something to herself.
Fanny closed the master bedroom door behind her and looked around. Her parents had never had a master bedroom like this, even though they had always had much more money than she and Charlie did. Her father always said a house like this was not worth the trouble it caused. Fanny did not think it was the house that had caused the trouble.
She went to the back of the master suite and into the little hall with the walk-in closets on both sides. She opened Charlie’s closet and stared at the things inside. There were clothes there. There were shoes there. There were belts and ties and cuff links and handkerchiefs and a little stack of pajamas that Charlie never wore. There was a built-in drawer full of boxer shorts. Three times a week, Fanny washed all the clothes and ironed them and folded them and put them up here in their proper places in their proper closets. If she opened the closet on the other side of the hall, there would be clothes like these in stacks there, too.
Fanny walked farther into the closet and looked around. She reached out for the suit jackets on the hangers and pulled at them. Suit jackets fell to the ground. She pulled at more. More fell to the ground. Suit pants were still hanging, still folded over the hanger arm where they had been hidden under the jackets. Fanny pulled and pulled and pulled some more. She pulled until all the suits, the pants as well as the jackets, were on the floor.
The heap of clothes at her feet looked awful. They looked like the aftermath of a fire. She reached out for the ties and pulled half a dozen of them at once. The ties fell to the floor on top of the suits. She opened the built-in drawer and took out the boxer shorts in big stacks. She put her hands on the handkerchiefs and tipped them over. They cascaded past empty hanger rods and landed on top of everything else, spilling out, being somehow too white next to everything else that was around them.
I could light a fire here, Fanny thought. I could take a match and drop it on these clothes, and they would burn. Nobody would see me do it. There are no security cameras here. I wouldn’t need kerosene or gasoline or any of that stuff. I wouldn’t need anything but an ordinary kitchen match.