THREE
1.
THE NEWS ABOUT STEPHEN and Patsy MacLaren Willis was all over the neighborhood as soon as it hit the news and, as far as Evelyn Adder could tell, it had been all over the neighborhood ever since, jumping from one house to another like a flu bug in January. The husbands were all worried about Stephen, or about Patsy-and-Stephen, however you wanted to put it. It seemed impossible to them that a woman like Patsy, so bland, so cordial, so nice, should want to kill anyone, especially with a silencer, especially when he was asleep in his own bed. The women were just excited. They had discovered it first, of course. It was Molly Bracken who had found Stephen’s body, at 5:01, when she went running over to the Tudor from the Victorian and found the garage door unlocked. She had gone inside, called Patsy’s name, and then looked carefully around Patsy’s big, empty house. Sarah Lockwood, who told Evelyn this story, seemed to think it was completely natural. Maybe, Evelyn had thought at the time, Sarah goes running around to people’s houses on a regular basis, and just drops in whenever a door is open, whether she’s been invited or not. Evelyn didn’t know anything about Molly Bracken, but the whole thing seemed strange to her. She would never have done anything like it, especially if it involved Patsy MacLaren Willis. Patsy was—strange, or that was the word for it, and too quiet, and remote. She had made Evelyn half-crazy for years. Evelyn hated not knowing whether people liked her or not. She was always expecting an ambush, especially from women, especially from women like Patsy, who were sensible about everything from food to clothes. For some reason Evelyn found people like Molly Bracken less intimidating, as if she could see the insecurities that propped up all that makeup, the self-doubt that provided the fuel for all that anxious talk. It was people who thought well of themselves whom Evelyn couldn’t stand.
Henry couldn’t stand the reports about Patsy and Stephen, but he watched them, right through dinner, with the television blasting in the family room while he ate his steak filets and baked potato at a folding tray set up in front of the set. Evelyn had a tossed green salad with balsamic vinegar and a nonfat banana yogurt with wheat germ sprinkled along the top. She had a folding tray too, which was usually an absolute no-no. According to Henry, she was supposed to be “retraining,” and while she was “retraining” she was not allowed to do anything else while she ate her food. She was supposed to sit at the kitchen table and concentrate on her plate, with no distractions. She wasn’t allowed to read or watch television or listen to the radio. She wasn’t allowed even to think about anything except her food, and what it felt like in her mouth, and what it tasted like, and whether this was what she really wanted or not. She almost never had to ask that last question. She already knew the answer. Of course salad with balsamic vinegar wasn’t what she wanted, and neither was non-fat yogurt with wheat germ. She wanted a pair of little steaks just like Henry’s and a baked potato with butter and sour cream and chives in it. Henry’s baked potato had all those things. Now that he was thin, he was allowed to eat.
“I think it was damned stupid of Molly Bracken to go into that house just because she found the door open,” Henry said when Molly was interviewed on the CBS affiliate. “That door could have been left open for any reason. There could have been a burglar.”
“How could there have been a burglar?” Evelyn asked reasonably. “There’s the gate. We have security guards.”
“France had the Maginot Line,” Henry said—cryptically, as far as Evelyn was concerned. “Think about the Gordian knot. Security can be breached.”
“I still don’t see that Molly should have worried about a burglar. I wouldn’t have.”
“Would you go into that house just because you found a door open?”
“Of course not.”
“There, then.”
“But it wouldn’t have had anything to do with there being a burglar,” Evelyn went on patiently. “It’s just that I never really knew Patsy all that well. I wouldn’t have wanted to intrude.”
“It seems like none of us knew Patsy very well. It seems like the woman was crazy.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Well, what else would you call it? When a woman kills her husband and then blows up her own car?”
“Maybe she was just angry with him,” Evelyn said, pushing a piece of lettuce around the small round bowl that contained it. “Maybe he wasn’t nice to her and she just lost it.”
“Women don’t kill their husbands just because their husbands aren’t nice to them. Christ, Evelyn, if women did that, there wouldn’t be a husband left alive in America.”