Flowering Judas(64)

Or it might have been wrong about both of them. There was that.

Tony was just coming in to the lobby from the elevators. Gregor caught his eye and shook his head slightly. Tony looked at Darvelle Haymes and nodded.

“I was just going to have a cup of coffee,” Gregor said. “Why don’t you join me?”

Darvelle Haymes looked into the dining room and then back at the reception desk, and sighed. “I suppose I might as well,” she said. “It’s not like everybody in town hasn’t seen me here already.”

“Everybody in town?”

Darvelle jerked her head back toward the reception desk. “The girl on this morning is Molly Dankowski. Her sister Mary Beth goes to school with the head of my agency. The guy is Eddie Berman. He lives across the street from me and his mother is the worst gossip in town. They’ll have me grilled under a heat lamp and carted off in handcuffs before the day is out.”

The hostess came by with a little stack of menus and gestured them toward a table near the windows. Gregor followed her, and Darvelle followed him.

“Is it always like that around here?” he asked, when they two of them had been seated. “Does everybody talk about everybody else all the time?”

“Sort of,” Darvelle said. “Oh, I know it’s not the way it was when I was growing up. It’s not that small anymore. There are probably plenty of people you never even hear about. But people are going to hear about me. For the last twelve years, half of them have been thinking that I killed Chester Morton and hid his body somewhere. Now they think I killed Chester Morton and hung his body off that billboard last week. I just killed my baby twelve years ago.”

“Did you have a baby twelve years ago?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Darvelle said. “I’ve never been pregnant. I hear there are tests for that kind of thing, and if you want me to, I’ll take one, I don’t care how embarrassing it is. I’m sick of this. I really am. I’m sick of it even though I know for certain it’s my own fault that the rumors are there. Or, you know, mine or Chester’s.”

The waitress came by. Gregor asked for coffee, and so did Darvelle Haymes, but they didn’t need to. The waitress had a pot at the ready, just like Linda at the Ararat.

“I’ll leave you two to make up your minds,” she said.

Gregor waited until she was well and truly gone. “So,” he said. “Why is it your fault, or yours and Chester’s, that people think you were pregnant twelve years ago.”

Darvelle looked into her cup of coffee. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “You have to understand, Chester isn’t the kind of guy I usually dated. He wasn’t then. He isn’t now. I’ve been working almost all my life. I’ve had to work. And even back then, I sort of had my whole life mapped out, what I’d work at, how much money I’d save, when I’d be able to buy my own house—I did buy my own house, by the way, and I’m in no danger of foreclosure. I work hard. I don’t spend money on silly crap. I make a plan and I stick to it.”

“That’s very admirable.”

“Yes, well, thank you, I guess. But the thing is, back around twelve-and-a-half years ago, I met Chester. I was going to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College to get my associate’s degree. At the time, I thought my best bet would be going into some kind of human resources work with a corporation somewhere. That’s before I found out that human resources is the great corporate sinkhole, where they put people they’ll never let within a mile of top management. But I didn’t know that then and I was getting this degree, and so was Chester, and we met.”

“In a class?”

“In the cafeteria. We had a class, but we were just sitting in the same room. We didn’t get to talking until we met up in the cafeteria. Anyway, it’s like I said. He wasn’t what I was used to. His family had money. Still does. It might not be a lot of money compared to people in Philadelphia and New York, but around here it’s what passed for rich. And Chester had moved out of his family’s house and into the trailer because they were just driving him crazy. They’d drive anybody crazy. I don’t know if you’ve met Charlene yet, but she’s a loon.”

“I’ve met Mrs. Morton once,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t for very long.”

“Well, trust me, she’s a loon. And one of those women who want to hang on to their children until death, if you know what I mean. So Chester had moved out. But even though he’d moved out physically, he hadn’t really moved out mentally. He wasn’t used to taking care of himself. He didn’t really like it. He didn’t like the trailer park or the people there. He didn’t like the trailer. He didn’t like not having the cash to throw around the way he was used to. I think, if he hadn’t met me, he might have moved back home sooner rather than later. But he did meet me, and Charlene hated me.”