Home>>read Conspiracy Theory free online

Conspiracy Theory(14)

By:Jane Haddam


Lucinda hadn’t had the faintest idea what Grandma meant. The people on White Jasmine Drive looked rich enough to her. Not only were their driveways paved and their houses made of brick, but they had cars parked out front and black people to clean up after them. Lucinda held on to the thought anyway. She never lost the conviction that Grandma Watkins was right about everything, from rich people to heaven, and she never would. It was why she didn’t talk slang, like everybody else she knew, not even in front of other poor people. Grandma wouldn’t say ain’t to save her life. Even at work, where white trash were supposed to play an elaborate ritual straight out of a bad MGM screenplay and central casting, Grandma Watkins sounded like she’d just been graduated from Miss Hellman’s School for Young Ladies. Sometimes she didn’t even sound southern.

“You go north,” Grandma Watkins said. “Not that they’re much better in the north, but they’ve got different rules than they’ve got here. There’s a little more room to make your move. You go north and you can go to college.”

Now Lucinda stood up from the kitchen table and picked up the coffee cups and little plates she’d used to serve Father Tibor Kasparian. There were times when she became extremely self-conscious about her life story. She knew how it was supposed to end—the bad MGM screenplay version, the one from central casting. She was supposed to go north to college and do brilliantly. She was supposed to become famous and go back to Mount Hope in a limousine. Or something. Whatever it was, it hadn’t worked out that way. She wasn’t athletic, like Larry Bird. She wasn’t a brilliant writer, like Truman Capote. She wasn’t ambitious and dedicated, like Julia Roberts or Helen Gur-ley Brown. In the end, she had had to face up to the fact that she was a bright, hardworking girl, but not a superstar, and not the material from which media stars are made. She’d gone north, the way Grandma Watkins wanted—but to Gettysburg College, not to Vassar or Smith. She’d found her room to make her move, first into a master’s of social work at Penn State, then into a doctorate in sociology at Temple. If she’d had a different personality, she might have ended up on the faculty of some small college somewhere, happily settled into a routine of teaching and giving little dinners and pottering around her own brick house, only just far enough from the campus so that she wouldn’t have to do what she hated most in the world, drive in bad weather. She had a fantasy about that life that was so real, she almost felt she’d lived it. The problem was, it made her feel ashamed even to think of it. She did not have a different personality, and because she did not, she had landed here, at Adelphos House, where, no matter what else she was doing, she was providing some help to the girls who lined the darker side streets of the inner city. Most of them were younger than sixteen. Most of them were addicted and sick at the same time. All of them were angry, so that helping them was a matter of getting past that barrage of invective that was their first response to anything but a john offering money, and was sometimes their response even then. Through it all, Lucinda kept waiting for something to happen, she wasn’t sure what.

If there was one thing Grandma Watkins had been dead right about, it was that thing about the rich people. The white people on White Jasmine Drive had barely been middle-class by Main Line standards. They’d had the kind of houses you saw in the neat little suburbs for factory workers, the ones that ringed the city close. The real rich people were farther out, and Lucinda could still remember the moment she had first seen one of those houses, spread out across a hill in Radnor like a movie-set castle. Her gut instinct was to call it an institution, a school, a mental hospital, anything. It was impossible that a single private family could have enough money to live in that house. Then there had been other houses, whole big lots of them, some tucked back behind gates and out of sight, some right where anybody could stare at the windows and doors, the long curving drives, the vast stretches of green lawn that nobody ever played on. That was when her own anger had started, white hot and hard. How could people—lots of people, a hundred of them at least, she’d seen the houses—how could all those people have all that money at the same time that the girls walked the side streets for twenty bucks a blow and got AIDS and died before they were twenty-four? How could all those people have big green lawns at the same time that the schools in Philadelphia didn’t have enough books for all the students, and didn’t have enough plumbing, either, so that the toilets backed up into the halls at least once a month and the walls themselves were disintegrating under onslaughts of ooze from broken pipes that nobody had the money to fix? It hadn’t helped, much, that when she’d first come to Adelphos House, Annie had taken her out to Bryn Mawr to see her brother and his wife. They were looking for money, and the brother had money. He had also had a butler, three maids in uniforms that Lucinda had been able to count, and a wife so intensely, poisonously bitchy that Lu-cinda had come very close to stabbing her with a butter knife. It was harder to make the brother out. He seemed to hate being where he was, but Lucinda had the impression that he felt that way everywhere, and with everyone.