Deadly Beloved(81)
“There’s nothing much to know,” Kevin said. “And it’s going to be old-home week down there next year. Evelyn and Henry are doing this too. It’s going to be Fox Run Hill all over again.”
“Molly doesn’t like Evelyn and Henry,” Joey said. “She thinks Evelyn is too fat. And she thinks Henry is a prick.”
“Does she?” Sarah said.
Kevin put the check in the chest pocket of his shirt, folded up, out of sight. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad you’re doing it. It will be good to see you and Molly down there next year. Or this year. Whenever you decide to build.”
“I still think somebody ought to check into whether or not the Willises had a vacation house,” Joey said. “You don’t want a person like that wandering around in the open, do you know what I mean? Even if it is a woman. It isn’t safe.”
“I’m really sure she isn’t after you,” Sarah said.
“The next thing you know, she’s going to try to blow up the president of the United States, and then there are going to be days and days and days of Dan Rather moaning about how we never do things right and get them settled beforehand. You just wait. And don’t forget: If she was gunning for Julianne Corbett, she didn’t get her.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.
“She didn’t get her,” Joey insisted. “Corbett is still alive. Which means maybe they ought to have a guard on Corbett.”
“Maybe she was gunning for that photographer who took the awful pictures of starving people,” Sarah said, “or maybe she was gunning for that woman from the animal rights movement who got blown up. Or maybe it wasn’t Patsy Willis at all. Really, the way people go on about this, you’d think space aliens had landed on the ninth fairway at the Fox Run Hill Country Club.”
Joey Bracken got out of his chair and went to stand at the sliding glass doors that led out to the patio, and that also looked around the back toward the Willises’ mock-Tudor.
“Maybe that’s what happened,” he said solemnly. “Maybe aliens landed at the country club. It sure as hell feels odd enough around here since Patsy offed Steve.”
2.
There was a newsstand in the hospital lobby with its entire top front rack covered in copies of Bride’s magazine. The picture on the cover showed a young woman with a long train swirling out from behind her to make a mountain of lace at her feet. She was holding a bouquet of flowers that was bigger than her head, and she looked scared to death. Julianne Corbett forced herself to look away from the display and smile at the nurse at the visitors’ desk. In this day and age, she probably wasn’t really a nurse, but she was dressed like one, and Julianne was too old to adapt. It didn’t matter that she intended to go to Washington to work on health care reform. In her mind, hospitals were still what they were when she was small, staffed by nurses and nothing but nurses, except for a few aides in candy-stripe pink and white. These days, even the real nurses didn’t wear caps anymore. Everybody’s uniform had been streamlined. Nobody wanted to be what they were.
The woman, nurse or otherwise, behind the visitors’ desk was leaning forward. “Here comes Dr. Alvarez,” she was saying. “Dr. Alvarez can tell you everything you want to know. I don’t know if you can bring all those—people—with you upstairs though.”
All “those people,” as the woman referred to them, were Julianne’s regular contingent when she was on any kind of official expedition. Besides Tiffany, who was indispensable at any time except during a sexual tryst, Julianne had three stenographers, a photographer, a bodyguard, and an aide. They were supposed to provide a buffer between her and the public, and they were also supposed to act as witnesses. If some nut came up and started hitting her with an umbrella, she wanted to make sure that when they all landed in court she wouldn’t be the one who was blamed. In the old days, this sort of caution would have been absurd, but nothing was absurd anymore. Nothing was unthinkable anymore either.
Dr. Alvarez was a young woman with very dark hair wrapped into a knot at the back of her neck. She had glasses with thick black frames and thin lenses. Julianne thought that she could never have been pretty, even as a child, and that now she didn’t seem to care. As she came across the carpet of the lounge, she held out her hand and said, “Congresswoman Corbett? I’m Dr. Teresa Alvarez.”
“Dr. Alvarez.” Julianne took the hand. She had always hated shaking hands, but she had learned to do it. She gave this one a sharp, hard pull and then dropped it. “I’m glad to meet you.”