Deadly Beloved(66)

“Did you see Mrs. Willis when she started to pack things into her Volvo?”

“I think so. I saw her when the Volvo was almost empty, and then she began to go back and forth into the house for the clothes, and I thought she was putting together her dry cleaning.”

“Weren’t there a lot of clothes for dry cleaning?”

Evelyn shrugged. “It’s spring. People do that in the spring. Take all their things to have them dry-cleaned, I mean. There wasn’t anybody in the whole neighborhood then except Molly Bracken picking up her paper.”

“Do you know what time this was?”

“I think so. It was six-thirty or so when Patsy left. I heard my cuckoo clock go off. And I sat there a long time, until my husband woke up at ten minutes to eight, and nobody else came out of the Willis house. Nobody at all.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yes,” Evelyn said, feeling embarrassed again. “Well.” The pair of police detectives seemed to be hovering just behind Gregor Demarkian’s back. They made Evelyn feel uncomfortable. “Well,” she said again, backing up a little. “I have to go now. We just got back from shopping, my husband and I did. I have to unpack the groceries.”

“Thank you for coming forward,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Evelyn continued to back up. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help. I really am. I didn’t know Patsy all that well. I don’t know anybody here all that well. I don’t go out much.”

“You’ve given us some very valuable information.”

That was supposed to make her feel good about herself. Evelyn knew it. It wasn’t working. She backed up faster.

“I’ve got to go,” she said again, and then she was practically running down the drive, jogging back across the road, puffing up her own drive with heavy pumping motions that made her thighs hurt and her feet feel like glass about to break in a thousand pieces. Henry was nowhere to be seen. Evelyn hoped he was hiding out at the back of the house, sulking in privacy.

She made it to the top of her drive and into her garage. She went through her garage and into her mudroom. For most of this last little run she had had to hold her hat on her head. Now she sat down on one of the benches and took the hat off. Underneath it, lying against the top of her skull, she had a twelve-pound pork roast she had shoplifted from the meat bin at the Stop ’N Shop while Henry had been off on his own pawing through the fresh vegetables and lecturing nobody and everybody about the benefits of dietary fiber.

Evelyn put the pork roast in the box she used to keep her slippers in. She put the box under the bench she was sitting on. The pork roast would have to thaw. She could come back for it when Henry was out of the house, and then her only problem would be cooking it and getting rid of the smell of it before Henry caught her.

Evelyn loved pork roast. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of it. She loved the thick fat that lined the outside of herself.





2.


If Liza Verity had kept her promise to Congresswoman Julianne Corbett, she would have been at the reception for Karla Parrish when the pipe bomb went off. Instead, she had allowed herself to be bullied into working late for the first night in almost two years. Liza had spent the evening monitoring an EKG machine attached to a six-year-old boy with a rare heart abnormality. The boy was supposed to have open-heart surgery in two days, and he was terrified. This was important work and Liza was happy with herself for doing it, but she was also aware that she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t had to have an excuse that Julianne was sure to accept. She herself wasn’t sure why it had become so important to her not to attend that reception. Maybe it was just that one more Really Successful member of the old Jewett House group was more than she could bear. Maybe it was just that she hadn’t wanted to look dowdy and bought-her-dress-at-Sears in the middle of all those people who had paid thousands to look good while they were having cocktails. Maybe it was just that she was sick to death of Julianne.

Whatever it was, Liza had worked all night, gone home at six in the morning for four hours’ sleep, and then come back to the hospital to do her regular shift. Now it was noon and she was sitting at a table in the hospital cafeteria, trying to drink enough very strong coffee to keep herself awake. Her uniform felt scratchy and cheap. The coffee tasted horrible. She hadn’t eaten in so long, her stomach hurt, but she was much too tired to eat. On the other side of the table, a very young and very new RN named Shirley Bates was reading through the latest edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, exclaiming every second or so about just how horrible all this violence was getting to be.