“Joey bought land from Sarah and Kevin Lockwood,” Molly said. “I just found out about it this morning. He didn’t even look at it. I take it Henry didn’t look at it either.”
“No, he didn’t. I’m surprised about your Joey though. Isn’t your family in real estate?”
“He didn’t consult anyone. She really was a Main Line debutante, you know. Her family really is some kind of high society. She has cousins and things that are in the papers all the time.”
“A lot of people are high society who don’t have any money,” Evelyn said. “I didn’t know that before I went to college, but I do now. It’s breeding that’s supposed to matter to those people, whatever that means. I think it’s like high school.”
“It is? What is? College?”
“High society. I think it’s like the clubs we had when I was in high school. The only point of them was to keep some people out. Like this place. Like Fox Run Hill.”
“Well, of course we want to keep some people out of here,” Molly said. “The muggers, for instance. And the rapists. All that street crime in Philadelphia.”
“The clubs wanted to keep out the dorks and the nerds and the dogs,” Evelyn said, “but that wasn’t what it was really about. I mean, those people were out anyway. It was the borderline cases who mattered.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I went to a meeting of the country club membership committee once where they were talking about this couple. She was a schoolteacher and he was at some community college, they had enough money to live here because they were careful with it, and it was like listening to the talk in the girls’ bathroom when I was seventeen. Did you see her shoes? Artificial uppers. So tacky. And we’re all—what? Forty-eight?”
“I’m twenty-eight,” Molly said.
“Whatever.” Evelyn raised a hand in the air. “It all goes together. Fox Run Hill. Getting married. It’s all positioning. That’s all it is.”
“That doesn’t sound very romantic.”
Evelyn put the last lid back on the last garbage can and wiped her palms against the matte brown surface of her skirt. Her skirt looked like burlap, Molly thought. Where did fat women get clothes that looked like that? The fourth finger on her left hand was blank. Molly wondered if she had done that recently, on purpose, or if she had just had the ring taken off when she grew too fat to wear it.
“I’m not very romantic,” Evelyn said. “The only reason I can’t imagine myself doing what Patsy Willis did is that I can’t imagine myself going through all that trouble afterward. If I had done what she’d done, I think I would have just stayed there in the house and let whatever came for me come.”
“I think she must have been so angry, she could hardly stand it,” Molly said. “I think she must have been blind with rage. How else would you do something like that?”
“I don’t think people who are blind with rage buy silencers,” Evelyn said. “That is what it is she was supposed to have done.”
Molly went over to the edge of the utility area and leaned across the wall. She could just see the mock-Tudor house from there. It seemed to rise up out of the mist like a ghost mansion. The windows were dark and blank. All the other houses on this street were lit against the advent of the gathering storm.
“You know what I’ve been thinking? I’ve been thinking that I’d love to get into Patsy’s house. I’d love to get in there and look around. Maybe I’d find something.”
“What? You’ve been in there a dozen times. We all have. Fake beams. Too much furniture.”
“Maybe there’d be an aura left over,” Molly said. “Maybe we’d go in there and Stephen’s ghost would come out and try to tell us something. It wouldn’t hurt to try. You could come with me.”
“To see Stephen’s ghost?”
“To see whatever there is to see,” Molly said.
Evelyn stopped fussing with the garbage cans and came to stand next to the wall too.
“Your timing is off,” she said.
Molly looked at the driveway. A car had pulled to a stop in it. Now another car was coming up behind. As she watched, three tall men got out and began to stretch their legs.
“The police,” Molly said with distaste. “What are they doing here?”
Evelyn Adder laughed. “Molly,” she said. “At the moment, I think they’re probably the only ones around with any right to be here.”
2.
It was very difficult to do everything the way it was supposed to be done. Evan Walsh had known that as a general principle for years, but it applied with even more force to working with Karla Parrish, and especially to working with Karla Parrish now. By Evan’s estimation, they had managed to keep up this deception that Karla was still in a coma for a little over fourteen hours. He didn’t know how long they were going to be able to continue keeping it up. For one thing, Karla wasn’t that good an actress. For another, she had to act harder and harder all the time, because the longer she stayed conscious, the more conscious she seemed to be. Then there was the little matter of food, which was what they were working on now. Karla had been fed through tubes the entire time she was out. The tubes were still in her arms, pumping glucose or whatever it was directly into her bloodstream. This did not seem to make any difference to the fact that she was very hungry, and that what she was hungry for was French fries.