Deadly Beloved(79)

“Would you have met every woman in your class?” Gregor asked.

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t necessarily know all of them by sight either. It’s just… odd.”

“Maybe you knew her by her maiden name,” Gregor said, “MacLaren.”

“What?” Julianne Corbett said.

“MacLaren,” Gregor repeated. “Her full name was Patricia MacLaren Willis. She was usually known as Patsy.”

“Patsy,” Julianne Corbett repeated.

“Is something wrong?” John Jackman asked.

“Let me get this straight,” Julianne Corbett said. “What you’re trying to tell me is that this woman who murdered her husband out in Fox Run Hill and then blew her car up with a pipe bomb in a municipal parking garage, this woman was the same Patsy MacLaren who graduated from Vassar College in 1969?”

“That’s right,” Gregor said.

“That’s wrong,” Julianne Corbett said. “Mr. Demarkian, I knew Patsy MacLaren. I knew her quite well. She was my closest friend. We were so close, in fact, that I was with her on the night she died—in New Delhi, India, four months after we graduated.”





FIVE


1.


SARAH LOCKWOOD KNEW SHE had to be careful. At this stage in things—the almost-but-not-quite, the just-next-to-done—anything could happen to screw it all up, and the last thing she wanted was for something she did or said to bring the whole thing crashing down on her head. Because of that, she was even grateful to Patsy Willis for killing her husband and bringing a pack of detectives down on their heads. The detectives made Kevin nervous, but Sarah saw them as a distraction. Joey Bracken was so fascinated by the things that were going on in the Tudor across the street, he was barely looking at the papers Kevin had spread out in front of him on the breakfast room table. The papers were the most impressive Sarah had ever seen. God only knew where Kevin had gotten them. They went on for pages and pages of utter incomprehensibility. There were maps too, but Sarah knew where Kevin had gotten those. They had been copied out of an ancient edition of the World Book Encyclopedia they had in the basement and then run through the computer so that they would look official. Now one of them had a “lot” outlined in red highlighter and marked with an X. Joey’s cashier’s check was paper-clipped to the page just above the X’s top left tip. Joey was leaning sideways in his chair, trying to see if something was happening at the Tudor, although nothing was. It was too late in the day for policemen and too late in the week for anybody to be much interested in Patsy Willis. The explosion in Philadelphia at Julianne Corbett’s party had taken everybody’s mind off spousal murder.

“Do you think she did it?” Joey Bracken was saying, his pen poised above the paper he was supposed to sign like a safe poised to fall on Daffy Duck’s head in an old cartoon. “Tried to blow up Julianne Corbett, I mean. They all say she probably did it.”

“I don’t see why Patsy would want to blow up Julianne Corbett,” Sarah said. “From everything I’ve heard, she worshiped the woman.”

“Yeah, I’d heard that too,” Joey said. He sounded eager. Sarah thought he looked awful being eager. His eyes bugged out. The fat line across his stomach seemed to pulse. It made Sarah crazy to think that Joey and Molly had more money than she and Kevin did. Joey looked like he ought to try out for the starring role in a movie about a guy who spends his whole life in a diner and Molly—

—but Molly wasn’t there. Sarah got up from her chair at the table and went into the kitchen, looking for Perrier water, looking for a way to calm down. She also took some nuts out of a cabinet near the stove, because unlike most of the people she knew, Joey Bracken ate most of the time. He had been in her kitchen for half an hour now and he had already gone through an entire bowl of potato chips and half a cheese roll.

“The way I see it,” Joey was saying, “is that she’s not quite right in the head. Patsy, I mean.”

“That’s the way we all see it,” Kevin said. “Jesus Christ. We wouldn’t want to think she was right in the head. We wouldn’t be able to go to sleep next to our wives.”

“What?” Joey Bracken said. “Oh. Oh, yeah. I never thought about it like that.”

Joey Bracken’s cashier’s check was for thirty thousand dollars. It was made out to himself, as if he had asked a lawyer for advice about it—but Sarah didn’t think he had. She thought he had just asked somebody he worked with at his bank. She wondered what Joey really did there. She couldn’t believe he had a serious job. He was just too stupid. She wondered what Molly’s father did too. Maybe it was Molly’s father who had the money, and he was with the mob, which was the kind of organization Sarah could imagine Joey succeeding in.