“It doesn’t look anything at all like you look now,” Gregor conceded, “but nothing looks like you now. You wear too much makeup.”
“I’ve always worn this makeup. You can check. I wore it in graduate school. I wore it when I worked in state government.” Julianne waved her hands at the newspaper photograph of Patsy MacLaren Willis. “I’ve never in my life gone around looking like that.”
“You did at Vassar,” Gregor said. He went through his photographs again and came out with one that was longer and taller than the others. It was the photograph of six girls standing in a too-formal, too-impersonal-looking living room, the common room for a dormitory somewhere. One of these girls was clearly the Patsy MacLaren of the first photograph. Her willowy delicacy was unmistakable. One of the others was what Gregor would have recognized anywhere as a younger version of Liza Verity. Liza Verity hadn’t changed much in growing older except to get a little thicker and a little grayer. Karla Parrish hadn’t changed at all. Gregor pointed at a fourth figure.
“There,” he said, “is what Patsy MacLaren Willis looks like. That woman there.”
“And you think that woman is me,” Julianne Corbett said.
“I know that woman is you. I can check this picture against the official picture in the senior section of the yearbook, but I know it’s you.”
“You can’t check it,” Julianne said. “I didn’t have a picture in the senior section of the yearbook. It cost money and I couldn’t afford it.”
“I’m surprised your friend Patsy MacLaren didn’t offer to pay for one. From everything I’ve managed to dig up about her, it sounds like the kind of thing she would have done.”
“It was the kind of thing she would have done,” Julianne Corbett agreed. “But I wouldn’t have let her. I wouldn’t have let anybody. I wasn’t built like that.”
“All right.”
Julianne Corbett shifted a little in her chair. “If you think you’re going to make this one of your grand murder plots, give it up,” she said. “I didn’t kill Patsy MacLaren. I didn’t even want Patsy MacLaren to die. She died of dysentery.”
“I know.”
“It was terrible, really.” Julianne Corbett shook her head. “It was all Patsy’s idea to go to India and Pakistan and places like that. I wanted to go to Europe. But Patsy had been to Europe. She thought it was too bourgeois. She wanted to seek enlightenment.”
“Did she find it?” Gregor asked.
Julianne laughed. “She didn’t find anything. Neither of us did. Practically the first thing that happened to us in Pakistan is that our packs got stolen, and Patsy had to wire home for money. Money for both of us, of course. I didn’t have anyplace to get money. And it was all awful. Really awful. Everything was dirty and everyone was poor. And we had so little cash we kept eating from the stalls and the stalls weren’t safe. Not for people like us. Not for people who had never been exposed to those kinds of germs.”
“So Patsy got sick.”
“We both got sick,” Julianne corrected Gregor. “I got sicker.”
“And Karla came to try to help out,” Gregor said.
Julianne got up and walked to her office window. Rain was being blown in gusts against the glass.
“Karla was taking photographs,” she said, “and she came to see us by a kind of prearrangement, except that instead of being in the hotel we were supposed to be in, we were at the hospital, and Patsy was dying. So Karla tried to do all the practical things. I’m usually very good at practical things, but I wasn’t that time. I was sick.”
“You didn’t tell the embassy that Patsy had died.”
Julianne turned away from the window. “Patsy MacLaren was a friend of mine,” she said positively. “I didn’t kill Patsy MacLaren.”
“I never said you did.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I said you became Patsy MacLaren,” Gregor said gently. “Not all the time, not every minute of every day, but when you needed to. You called yourself Patsy MacLaren when you dealt with the trustees who handled Patsy’s money, so that you could use that to put yourself through graduate school.”
“I worked when I was in graduate school,” Julianne Corbett said quickly. “I had two fellowships.”
“I’m sure you did. It was probably a very good thing, because Patsy MacLaren didn’t have all that much money, and what was being spent was the principal. You used the principal. And you used Patsy MacLaren’s name when you started seeing Stephen Willis.”