“I’m sorry for what I saw on the news this morning. About your friend. About Miss Hannaford.”
“Thank you. But she’s all right, you know. She’s just got a broken arm.”
“They didn’t say on the news. They said some woman tourist from New York was dead.”
“Caroline Barrens, yes. She wasn’t a tourist though. She was the representative of some kind of PAC. Health care reform. Single payer system. That kind of thing.”
“Yes,” Evelyn nodded. “Well. I was thinking. That it might make sense, you know. The pipe bomb.”
“I wish it made sense to me.”
Gregor Demarkian sounded sincere. Evelyn relaxed a little more. She liked this man’s face. She liked it a great deal. It was lined and soft and gentle. It was much better than Henry’s. Maybe if she left Henry she could marry Gregor Demarkian. Maybe this Bennis Hannaford person wouldn’t mind.
“Well,” Evelyn said. “The thing is. Patsy was a big supporter of Julianne Corbett’s. Did you know that?”
“I know she’s on the contributors’ lists for Julianne Corbett’s campaign,” Gregor said. “Those are the public lists, you know, the ones you have to publish by law.”
“I didn’t know about the money,” Evelyn admitted, “but Patsy really admired Julianne Corbett. She had pictures of her all over the house. Did you find the pictures in the house?”
“No.” Gregor Demarkian was watching her very carefully now. “No, we didn’t.”
“Well, Patsy had them. And she was always saying that Julianne Corbett was the woman she would be if only she had made different choices in her life. Julianne Corbett was what she would be if she was only at her best. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“I wish it made more sense to me. She was very intense about it. And Sarah Lockwood said she didn’t understand it at all, because Julianne Corbett was so low rent, because of all the makeup she wears, you know, and the jewelry and the hats. Does she wear all that stuff in person?”
“She did last night. Except I don’t think she was wearing a hat. I don’t really remember.”
“I thought maybe that that stuff was just for the public, you know, a way of creating a personality people will remember and then when they went to vote you might be the only one they’d heard of. Patsy said it didn’t matter to her what Julianne Corbett wore, she was a wonderful woman. And Patsy said that anytime she looked at her, she wanted to change her life. And maybe she did.”
“Maybe she did,” Gregor Demarkian agreed.
“But I was thinking of something else,” Evelyn continued. “I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t Patsy who blew up her car. Maybe it was somebody who hated Patsy and everything about her and they blew her up first and now they’ve decided to blow up this woman she idolized. Do you see?”
“But there wasn’t a body in the Volvo when it blew up,” Gregor said. “There was no one in the car.”
“Maybe there was supposed to be. Maybe the bomber is just inept. Maybe Patsy is afraid now and she’s in hiding.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded. “I think she’s in hiding. What about her husband? Do you think somebody other than Patsy MacLaren Willis shot her husband?”
Evelyn looked back at the brick Federalist. Henry was no longer in the driveway. The house looked blank. She adjusted the hat on her head again.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I completely forgot about Stephen. I mean, he was never around, do you know what I mean? He had some job that made him travel for weeks at a time and he was just never here. I’d heard that was going to change though. He was getting promoted or something and he was going to be able to stay put in the Philadelphia office instead of traveling all the time. Had you heard that?”
“Yes. Yes, I had.”
“Nobody else could have killed him though.” Evelyn felt suddenly depressed. She motioned back at the Federalist. “I live there. I was sitting in my window seat almost all that morning. I saw Patsy leave. With all those clothes, you know.”
“She was carrying clothes?”
“She had tons and tons of them loaded into the Volvo. But it was just her. Nobody else came out of the house with her. She left all on her own.”
“Did she take anything with her besides the clothes?”
“Nothing that I could see. I don’t want you to get the impression that I was spying. I wasn’t spying. I sit in my window seat a lot at that time of the morning. Mostly, there isn’t anybody at all around except maybe people coming out to get their newspapers. The newspapers are supposed to be delivered right to your doorstep, but they end up on the lawns a lot.”