“I know, I know.”
“Was she at the reception?” Julianne’s campaign staff had given a reception for her two hundred largest noncorporate contributors, just to stay in touch.
Tiffany cleared her throat. “No, she wasn’t. We sent her an invitation and she didn’t answer it. She didn’t even RSVP. We followed up on it.”
“And?”
“And I suppose she said she couldn’t come,” Tiffany said irritably. “I don’t know. I didn’t handle her invitation. We had a whole committee to handle invitations.”
“Yes, Tiffany. I remember.”
“I still say we ought to take it seriously. In this day and age, I mean. It could come back to haunt us in the next election.”
“I don’t think so, Tiffany. Didn’t Rosalynn Carter have her picture taken with John Wayne Gacey?”
“President Carter didn’t get elected again either. Julianne, really. You ought to do something about this.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Something.”
“Well,” Julianne said reasonably. “I can’t very well give the money back, can I? The woman is dead. Her husband is dead. I’m probably broke. What am I supposed to do?”
“The woman isn’t dead,” Tiffany said. “Did you hear that on the news? Did I miss something?”
Julianne reached into her night table for the Tylenol. “No, no,” she said reassuringly. “It was just a slip of the tongue. I suppose I’ve been thinking she must be dead. Since nobody can find her.”
“She’s probably in Bolivia.” Tiffany snorted. “If it was me doing something like that, I’d take a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars. You can’t get anywhere on that kind of money these days. Maybe you should issue a press release.”
“Saying what?”
“Saying that even though she was a large contributor, you’d never even met her.”
Julianne swallowed a Tylenol dry, and then another. “I think that would only call attention to something it’s unlikely would be noticed any other way. Don’t be silly, Tiffany. It’s late. Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Work on the Karla Parrish reception, then. It’s—what? Soon.”
“I can’t work on the Parrish reception. I can’t think of anything but this. It’s the creepiest thing I ever heard of.”
Four years before, a young woman living near Pittsburgh had killed both her small children because her new boyfriend had promised to marry her if she did. This was not the creepiest thing Julianne had ever heard of. She shifted a little in bed and stretched.
“Go to bed,” she told Tiffany. “Seriously. Or work on something current. Stop worrying about Mrs. Willis.”
“Nobody calls her Mrs. Willis on television,” Tiffany said. “They always call her Patricia. As if they didn’t want you to know she was his wife. Do you think all men are worried that their wives are going to kill them in their sleep?”
“No,” Julianne said. “Go to sleep. Get off the phone. Let me go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m going to have another cup of coffee and read the Inquirer report again,” Tiffany told her. “It’s the most complete. Maybe they’ll bring in Gregor Demarkian. Then we’d make the national news with this thing, and I could say I was part of it.”
“Go to sleep,” Julianne had said again—and that had been when? Last night? The night before? Sitting at her desk this morning, with the sun coming up outside the windows, Julianne couldn’t remember what she had done when over the last month, or why. What she did know was that she was in the office before seven, with her full war paint on, drinking coffee out of a mug big enough to hold a small lobster. The computer contributor sheets were spread out across her green felt desk blotter. The invitations list to the Karla Parrish reception was propped up against her Rolodex. Her new cat calendar was lying flat against the hardwood next to her phone. Why was it that people still had green felt desk blotters? she wondered. They didn’t blot ink pens anymore. Half the time they didn’t even have pens of any kind anymore. The offices were full of word processors.
Julianne ran her finger down the contributors’ lists again and frowned. She hadn’t realized that these lists were so detailed. There was the name: Patricia (Mrs. Stephen) Willis. There were the amounts and the dates they had been received: $11,000 on the first of June; $14,500 on the twelfth of September; $22,000 this past March. Julianne knew that you had to tell some federal commission or other who your campaign contributors were and what they had contributed, but she hadn’t realized that that information would be this—specific. She started to rub the side of her face and then stopped herself. She didn’t want to smear her makeup. She wished it were time for Tiffany to come into the office. There were things she needed to talk out. Unfortunately, the rules were clear. When an employee can call an employer at four o’clock in the morning, the employer is a saint. When the employer can get an employee out of bed at six A.M. just to talk office talk, the employer is a tyrant. Julianne shoved the contributors’ lists away from her and stood up.