Deadly Beloved(98)

“So go,” Evelyn said.

Henry went. He went more slowly than she could ever remember him going, but he went. He kept his back rigid and his head at that odd little angle. He seemed to be waiting for her to do something or say something she hadn’t done or said yet, but Evelyn didn’t know what it was.

As soon as he was gone, Evelyn stepped out onto her back patio and looked up at the afternoon sky. The sky was blue and cloudless and somehow threatening. The air was hot and heavy and thick with moisture. Fox Run Hill was much too quiet. From back there Evelyn couldn’t see anything or anyone of importance. The backyards for all the houses were carefully designed for privacy, so that a couple could screw stark naked next to the built-in charcoal grill and nobody would be able to tell. Somebody could scream and scream and scream out there and no one in the whole community would know it was happening.

If I were going to kill my husband, that’s how I’d do it, Evelyn thought. I’d bring him out here and leave him lying next to the hydrangea bushes. I’d bury him in the compost heap. I’d leave him for the lawn service. Except that I wouldn’t kill my husband. It wouldn’t make any sense.

Evelyn went back into the house. She stepped out of her own front door and looked down the curving road at the Tudor where Patsy and Steve had lived. She thought of that Volvo backing down the drive and then gliding down the road, Patsy with her hand stuck out a window, waving at Molly Bracken. She thought of herself sitting in Patsy’s breakfast room one morning, looking at a picture in a sterling silver Tiffany frame.

“Those are the people who mattered most to me,” Patsy had said at the time, and then gone on to whatever it was she had had to say that was more important than that.

Evelyn gave a last long look at the mock-Tudor and then went back into her own house.

It was funny, she thought again. It really was. But it didn’t seem as if it could mean anything.

Evelyn went back into the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea. She could hear Henry rattling around upstairs. He expected her to come up and try to placate him, but she didn’t want to.

Funny, funny, funny, she thought to herself again, and then: I wonder if it means anything.

Evelyn did not wonder if her marriage to Henry meant anything, because she knew it didn’t mean a thing.





2.


For Evan Walsh, the news of the explosion in Liza Verity’s apartment meant everything and nothing. He noticed it on the television when the news bulletin came on, but he was in one of those periods where he was counting every breath Karla took, so he didn’t notice it with his whole mind and attention. Pipe bomb in central Philly, he thought, and then he bent more closely down over Karla’s chest and watched it rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, perfectly rhythmic, perfectly serene. If there hadn’t been any of those tubes and wires, if this had been any other kind of room but a hospital room, anyone who didn’t know better would have thought that Karla was just ordinarily asleep. She looked no different from sleeping princesses anywhere. Evan walked around her bed and checked her covers. He put his hand on her newly short hair and stroked against the stubble. He wished for things that made no sense: that they had not cut her hair; that they had let him buy her something nice and frilly to wear instead of this plain cotton hospital gown that looked to him like a shroud. Karla would not have seen herself as the frilly sleepwear type, but Evan could see her in lace and latticework. He could see her in satin as well as flannel.

Karla was breathing, breathing, breathing. That was all. Evan went out of the room and down the hall to the nurses’ station. There were all these stories in the newspapers about the overcrowding in Philadelphia’s hospitals, but this ward seemed to be nearly empty. There was nobody standing at the counter at the nurses’ station. Evan went around the back and looked through the window in the door to the office. Shelley Marie and Clare were sitting in there, looking at magazines and watching television. Evan knocked.

Shelley Marie looked up, nodded, and came to the door to let him in. It was against all kinds of regulations, but Evan was a known figure on the ward by then. Except for one real dragon of a head nurse, they all tried to take care of him. Shelley Marie opened up and shooed him inside. When he was in, she shut and locked the door again.

“There’s been another bombing,” she said, her tone half hushed and half excited. “Clare and I have been watching a news story about it. This time the victim was a nurse.”

“It was a nurse from a different hospital,” Clare said. “She wasn’t anybody we knew.”

“I’d at least met her,” Shelley Marie said. “At one of those all-city in-service things or something. Anyway, she’s familiar. She’s another friend of Congresswoman Corbett’s too.”