Deadly Beloved(103)

“But they do usually get record of a death. I thought I was really onto something, but the woman I talked to at the embassy shrugged the whole thing off. She said it wasn’t unusual for deaths not to be formally reported to them, especially when the American in question was being buried abroad. And she pointed out that we were dealing with a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears college girls here. They might have thought they had reported the death to the embassy at the time that they inquired about shipping the body back to the States. If you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean. Patsy MacLaren was buried and nobody notified anybody back here.”

“That’s it.”

“Karla Parrish went to Africa.”

“If that’s who that was, yes. If Karla Parrish ever wakes up, we can ask her.”

“What happened to Julianne Corbett?”

“She came back to the States. She took another Pan Am flight. She went back to Bethlehem and stayed with her family for a while, but it didn’t work out. It seldom does when a working-class girl like that has been off at a place like Vassar. She applied to graduate programs at Penn and came up to Philadelphia to enter one.”

“And at the same time, Patsy MacLaren—who was supposed to be dead but who wasn’t dead—Patsy MacLaren was also taking courses toward a degree at the University of Pennsylvania.”

“No,” John Jackman said.

Gregor raised his eyebrows. “No?”

“We checked all that with the university,” John Jackman said. “The woman who ever afterward called herself Patsy MacLaren did tell people that she was in a graduate program at Penn at the time she met her husband. She certainly told her trust officers that. For all I know, she told Stephen Willis that. But she was never really registered.”

“The money for her tuition was paid directly out of the trust to her?” Gregor asked.

“According to the lawyer, it was paid directly to the university when they submitted a tuition bill, but I checked that out, Gregor. That was easy. All whoever this was had to do was wait till the end of the first week of classes, formally withdraw, and pick up the money at the cashier’s office. No questions asked.”

“Which is what Patsy MacLaren did.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know what she did with the money?”

“No,” John Jackman said. “I don’t.”

“Do you know what she did with herself?”

“No.”

“Do you know where she might have lived?”

“I don’t think she lived anywhere, Gregor. I don’t think she existed except for the purpose of getting money out of that trust fund. It’s too bad she wasn’t just a little richer than she was.”

“Why?”

“Because with really big estates, trusteeships are a personal thing. Trustees know the people they’re handling the money for. I sent a guy over to that bank; there wasn’t a person in it who had ever met Patsy MacLaren, dead or alive, ever. There were a couple of people who knew her father. That was it.”

“Is there any money left?”

“No,” John Jackman said. “There was never all that much money, just enough to get Patsy through college and graduate school and a couple of years of hacking around. She spent it and the bank stopped worrying about her.”

“So the money Patsy MacLaren took out of her checking account on the day she blew up her car wasn’t money from her trust fund,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“It was Stephen Willis’s money,” John Jackman said emphatically. “I’ve got the paper on that stuff too, if you want to look at it. As far as I can tell, Patsy MacLaren had been bleeding her husband dry for years.”

“And doing what with the money?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know that either,” John Jackman said. “Spending it, I suppose. Maybe she’s got it with her now, wherever she is. Maybe that was the whole point. Marry the man, bleed him dry, kill him, and take off. Shazam.”

Gregor looked skeptical. “Most people don’t wait twenty-five years before they kill him and take off. She must have decided it was worth it to stay married to him at least part of that time.”

“I know. Why did she marry him at all? This can’t be the real Patsy MacLaren, can it? Somebody did die of dysentery in India.”

“Somebody definitely did die,” Gregor said. “No, no. You have to assume the obvious here. The point of keeping a fictional Patsy MacLaren alive, at least at that point, had to be to drain the rest of what was in her trust fund. The interesting point here is that this fictional Patsy MacLaren stayed alive. For twenty-odd years.”