Ever since Joey had left that morning, Molly had been sitting at her kitchen table, nursing a coffee with milk into frigidity. Out on her patio, the sun was bouncing a wicked glare off the aluminum arms of the patio furniture. She really ought to get painted wrought iron patio furniture, Molly thought, the kind everybody else had—but she didn’t like the patio much, and it was hard to remember to buy green and white metal chairs when she had sweaters to look at or eighteen-karat-gold chains to consider. She ought to give a party too, Molly thought. She ought to give one now so that they would all have an excuse to get together and talk about the Willises.
The doorbell rang and Molly stood up. Her kitchen wall clock said it was 9:15. No wonder she was bored. Mornings after Joey left were the worst times of the day. Molly padded out toward the front door and then stopped. The bell had rung again, but it wasn’t the front doorbell. She went out into the mudroom and to the door to the garage.
Sarah Lockwood was standing in the garage, wearing a blue linen skirt and a white shirt, carrying a pair of blue canvas espadrilles in one hand. It was hot out there. The heat rose up and hit Molly as soon as she stepped beyond the protection of the air-conditioning. Sarah’s hair was damp with sweat and humidity. It looked much darker than it usually did.
“Oh,” Sarah said when she realized Molly had opened up. “There you are. Did I get you at a bad time?”
I’m really going to have to get some of those little linen skirts, Molly thought absently. Everybody else has them. Molly was also the only person with a house in Fox Run Hill who owned leggings, but she didn’t think of that. She stepped back and waved Sarah inside.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said. “I was just sitting over a cup of coffee and letting it get cold. Sometimes I think I ought to take up volunteer work.”
“I did volunteer work for years,” Sarah said. “I hated it. I think it’s very much nicer to be in control of your own time.”
Sarah was going through the mudroom into the house. Molly made a face at her back. The kind of places Molly wanted to volunteer didn’t take anybody who walked in the door and wanted to sign up. You had to wait to be asked, and Molly could wait forever, in the present arrangement of things. She closed the door to the garage and followed Sarah inside.
“How pretty you’ve made everything,” Sarah was saying, looking around at the kitchen cabinets and the tiles on the kitchen floor. “I would never have thought of putting terra cotta into a Victorian like this. But of course I’m hopeless at decorating. We had to have somebody come in and do our house so that I didn’t ruin it.”
Molly had had someone come in and do this house. She couldn’t decide if Sarah was being sincere or not. Sarah never seemed sincere.
“I could put some coffee on,” Molly said. “And I have Perrier. Could I get you something?”
“A glass of Perrier would be nice.” Sarah sat down on one of the breakfast room chairs and looked up at the ceiling. Because a Victorian was supposed to be a formal house, there were no exposed beams here. Sarah dropped her espadrilles on the floor and stretched her bare legs into a long, straight line.
“They’re back again this morning,” she said, tossing her head side-ways to indicate the Willises’ house. “I saw them come in this morning. You’d think they’d have looked through everything in that house by now.”
Molly put a glass of Perrier water down in front of Sarah. “Was Gregor Demarkian there? Do you know who I mean—”
“Of course I know who you mean. Everybody in Philadelphia knows Demarkian. He wasn’t there, as far as I could tell.”
“The paper said he’d been called in to consult on the case.” Molly threw her old coffee away, got a clean cup, and poured herself some hot. “I think that means he’s the one investigating it, but I’m not sure. I talked to him yesterday.”
“Did you? About what?”
“About Patsy. Doesn’t it all seem really strange, now that you look back on it?”
“It seems really strange now,” Sarah said. “I mean, people I know don’t shoot their husbands to death every day. Although I know a few people who ought to.”
“I mean, they seem really strange,” Molly said, coming back to the table with her new coffee. “Patsy and Steve. I never thought about them before this happened, but they weren’t really normal, were they?”
“Of course they were.” Sarah was impatient. “They were as normal as anybody. They were dull.”
“They were dull enough,” Molly agreed, “but they weren’t normal. I mean, he was never around, was he? He was gone for weeks at a time.”