Hearts of Sand(12)

Hope stopped at the telephone. There was a stout boxy stool near the television stand. She sat down. She picked up the metal flip address book. She pushed the little level to W. She hesitated between “home” and “cell” and finally picked cell. This was an emergency.

Kyle Westervan’s voice came on the line sounding both angry and hungover. She cleared her throat a little.

“Kyle?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

“I haven’t been stalking you,” Hope said. “I haven’t called at all.”

“But you were going to,” Kyle said. “I knew you were going to. Why can’t you leave it the hell alone?”

Hope hesitated. “That isn’t what I was calling about,” she said.

“Really?” Kyle said. “Because it’s what everybody else has been calling about. I’ve had Virginia up my ass like some gay man’s chipmunk. And she’s not even supposed to be talking to me.”

“Yes,” Hope said. “Well.”

“Well, what?”

“I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had. About your offer. If it’s still open.”

“What?”

“I know I said no before, but circumstances have changed.”

“Circumstances have changed,” Kyle said. “For Christ’s sake. Yes, of course circumstances have changed. That asshole is arriving any day now, and the place has been crawling with feds ever since Chapin’s body hit the floor. Chapin was always a pain in the ass. She was a pain in the ass from the day she was born.”

“I thought you said that whatever this is hasn’t got anything to do with Chapin.”

“It hasn’t got anything to do with Chapin.”

“Well, then.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. When Kyle’s voice came back, it didn’t have the flippant nastiness Hope had come to think of as “normal.” It was low and hard and very serious.

“Listen,” he said. “Forget about it. Forget we ever talked about it. You never knew what it was about anyway.”

Hope took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “You mean the offer has been withdrawn.”

“The offer has to be withdrawn,” Kyle said. “Like you said, the circumstances have changed.”

“Then it was about Chapin Waring,” Hope said.

“No,” Kyle said. “It wasn’t, but everything is about Chapin Waring now.”

The phone went dead in her ear. Hope hung up at her end.

She got up off the stool and headed back to the kitchen. She didn’t have a lot in the refrigerator, but she had some, and she needed to eat.

She was going through the dining room when she felt her heart begin to squeeze. It wasn’t bad this time. She’d get to her pills in the kitchen and that would take care of it.

She got to the kitchen and stopped. The newspapers were still spread out on the kitchen table. Chapin Waring’s face still stared up at the ceiling from almost every page.

The squeezing in her heart stopped. Her lungs filled with air. It wasn’t her heart, or her weight. It was the fear.

And now that the fear was gone, she felt just fine.

2

From the beginning, Caroline Waring Holder had been convinced that she could make everything come right if she could only get herself to concentrate.

“If you’re going to have a funeral for her out there, I’m not coming,” Caroline’s sister Cordelia had said before Chapin’s body was even cold.

Cordelia was in Chicago, and she called herself Dr. Cordelia Frame. If she had any connection to the infamous Chapin Waring, nobody had to know about it.

“It’s not like I’m going to be able to get out from under this completely,” she said. “They’ll figure out who I am sooner rather than later. That doesn’t mean I have to make it any easier for them.”

Caroline wanted to scream. “It’s not like I asked her here. It’s not like I wanted her here. The two of you have seen more of her than I have over the last thirty years.”

“I haven’t seen anything of her,” Cordelia said stiffly, “and if you tell anybody I have, I’ll sue you for slander.”

“I’ve worked very hard myself,” Caroline had said. “I hate it when you act like you’re the only person in the world who has anything to lose.”

“Well, playing fifties housewifey in the Connecticut suburbs isn’t exactly in the same league as making a name for yourself in medicine.”

“The first I heard of it was when I went to a meeting that night, and Lisa Freedman and Deirdre Nash kept going on and on about how they’d seen her all over town. By then she must have been lying dead in the house on Beach Drive.”