“I’m going to get some work done on my book,” she told Margaret.
Margaret sniffed. “You’ve been working on that book forever. You’re never going to finish it. And I don’t see why you’d want to finish it anyway. Even if you could find somebody to publish it, why would you want somebody to? It’s like you’re invading your own privacy. You’d certainly be invading mine.”
Elizabeth was going to say that if she changed the focus just a bit, and put it on Henry, she could surely find a publisher for it now. True crime sold very well. She didn’t say it because she didn’t want to end up in another argument. Maybe later this afternoon, she’d go to mass. It was a way to get out of the house without having to meet anybody she knew, except in circumstances where it would not be rude to refuse to talk. That sounded good. The part about getting out of the house sounded especially good.
She went to the den and shut the door. She booted up the computer and watched the icons flicker onto the desktop. She opened AOL and signed on without thinking about it. Then, just a split second too late, she realized what she’d done.
The picture on the AOL welcome screen was a cliche out of dozens of crime and horror movies. It reminded Elizabeth, at once, of the opening scenes of The Amityville Horror. It was dark. There were police and ambulance personnel and a bright yellow police line. Somebody was being carried out of a house in a body bag.
“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, and then, in that annoying way AOL had recently become accustomed to: “Find Out What It Means to Famous Case.”
Elizabeth tapped the fingernails of her left hand against the top of the desk. The sound they made was faintly metallic. “A famous case” could be any case at all. John Wayne Gacy was a famous case, and it had happened in Philadelphia, too. The police could be hauling bodies out of some house Gacy had had contact with that they didn’t know about before. The welcome screen kept changing, from news to entertainment to lifestyle to Elizabeth didn’t know what. None of the headlines delivered any real news. All of them were designed to make you want to go someplace else, follow a link, stumble your way to even more advertisements. The only reason Elizabeth kept on with AOL was that she’d been on it so long it felt like too much trouble to change: all that unsubscribing to newsletters and e-mail discussion lists and resubscribing under a new e-mail address; all that time spent getting used to a different system. She moved the mouse and clicked back to the original set of headlines. They still told her nothing very informative.
What she wanted to do—what she should have done—was to open the word processing program and forget about the Internet altogether. What she did instead was to close the AOL welcome window and type in the URL for CNN, because the one thing she could be sure of on the CNN site was that its lead story would have enough of an explanation to go along with it that the reader would be able to understand what it was about. CNN opened and she saw the same picture she had seen on the AOL news window, only bigger, and easier to make out. The police seemed to be surrounded by an army of people, stretching out into infinity. There was more than one body bag.
“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, as if the writers for CNN were the same people who wrote for AOL. And maybe they were. Elizabeth hadn’t kept track of corporate takeovers and consolidations any time lately. She read the little paragraph under the headline.
“In the early hours of this morning, Philadelphia police and rescue workers walked seven body bags out of the basement of a house in South Philadelphia. The body bags are believed to contain body parts of victims of a serial killer . . .” and then moved her mouse to click on “more.” Not only did all these places have the same writers, they had the same site designers, too.
The new window was just loading—she had to get a new computer, everything took forever to load these days—when the telephone rang. She didn’t pick it up. Ever since Henry had been arrested, they’d depended more and more on the answering machine. The new CNN window had more pictures: more police; more body bags; Gregor Demarkian.
Elizabeth stared for a moment at Gregor Demarkian, and then Russ Donahue’s voice came out of the answering machine. “Mrs. Woodville? Mrs. Beaufort? This is Russ Donahue. I called to say that we don’t know as yet if what the police found last night will have any bearing on Henry’s case, although the rumors all tend to point in the direction of—”
Elizabeth picked up the phone. A shrieking buzz hit her ear, meaning the answering machine had noticed the pickup. Why couldn’t they fix something like that?