Deadly Beloved(99)

“One of the newscasters is saying it looks like some kind of political plot,” Clare said. “You know, a string of assassinations. Although why anybody would want to get to Julianne Corbett that way is beyond me. I mean, she’s not that kind of politician.”

“She’s not even one way or the other about abortion in particular,” Shelley Marie said.

“Maybe it’s something else altogether,” Clare said. “They’ve got that Gregor Demarkian working on it. He was on television not two seconds ago. Isn’t he a specialist in serial killers?”

“He used to be a specialist in serial killers,” Shelley Marie said. “When he was with the FBI. He’s retired now.”

“He doesn’t look like he’s retired to me,” Clare said. “He’s all over the place. So maybe this is a case of a serial killer.”

“Killing a series of what?” Shelley Marie asked. “I thought serial killers killed young women with long brown hair parted in the middle. Or old ladies who carry canvas shopping bags.”

“They do,” Clare said. “Maybe this one kills middle-aged women who—who what?”

“Middle-aged women who have gotten dumpy,” Shelley Marie said positively. “They were all dumpy. The woman with the animal rights movement who died when Evan’s friend got hurt. And this nurse they keep showing pictures of. And this Patricia Willis—”

“But she isn’t dead,” Evan put in. “She’s the one everybody thinks is doing it. Isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Shelley Marie said.

Clare sighed. “They say she blew up her own car, but I can’t see it. I mean, every other time one of these bombs has gone off, somebody’s been dead, haven’t they? So it doesn’t make any sense that that car just blew up and nobody died. Maybe she was in it but she got blown so much to pieces, they never found the body.”

“Don’t be silly,” Shelley Marie said. “That can’t happen. You know that can’t happen. You see the messes they bring in here sometimes, and they always know they’ve got a body.”

“Car wrecks,” Clare said solemnly.

There was a coffeemaker on the corner of the desk, one of those drip-through electrical ones with the glass coffeepot that rested on a kind of hot plate. Evan poured himself a cup of coffee and looked at the television set. The news bulletin was long gone. Two middle-aged white people were wrapped in each other’s arms instead, whispering things to each other about how they really shouldn’t. Unlike the middle-aged women dead so far from bombs, these two were not heavy or out of shape. They were, however, very saggy. Their skin wrinkled and stretched and folded and shook when they pretended to passion.

Evan used one of the little plastic containers of non-dairy creamer the nurses kept in a basket next to the coffee machine—it was incredible how terrible their eating habits were; with all the health propaganda that got spewed out in a hospital, you’d think they would know better—and sat down in the one empty chair. The chair swiveled underneath him and made him feel dizzy.

“Well,” he said.

Shelley Marie held up her magazine, a copy of Glamour with an article in it called “How to Keep Your Wedding from Ruining Your Honeymoon.” It was incredible to Evan how stereotypically everyone behaved. According to the best minds on the faculty at Vassar, all that moon-June-spoon business went out of style years before, as soon as women began raising their authentic voices against the oppressive assumptions of consumer capitalism.

“She’s breathing very well,” Evan said stiffly.

Clare patted him gently on the knee. “She is breathing very well,” she said, “and if it’s any consolation, she seems to be doing much better than most people who end up in her condition. I heard one of the doctors say just the other day that there isn’t a single sign of brain damage yet, and that probably means there won’t be any. And that’s very good news.”

“A lot of people who end up in comas for a long time are really disabled when they come out,” Shelley Marie said. “But Miss Parrish seems just to have been knocked out in a particularly unlucky way. I mean, she doesn’t seem to be out for any structural reason or whatever.”

“Ms.,” Clare said. “I think she likes to be called Ms.”

“I just wish it weren’t so uncertain,” Evan said. “I wish we could say, well, in two weeks or four weeks or six months, something would happen. Anything would happen.”

“Well,” Clare said, “we can’t say that.”