Home>>read Hearts of Sand free online

Hearts of Sand(28)

By:Jane Haddam


Virginia sighed. Her desk was clean. There was no reason she had to be here at all. She just didn’t feel like moving.

Susan coughed politely. “I’m nearly packed up,” she said. “We can go back to Connecticut anytime you’re ready.”

Virginia made the strangled noise she saved for agreeing to something while she was feeling frustrated.

“It’s very odd,” she said. “I was thinking about all of this the night Chapin Waring died. We had that fund-raiser at the Atlantic Club.”

Virginia let it go. Most of the time, she did not express her deeply held conviction that her brother was not only not a saint, but some kind of Machiavelli with an agenda none of them had figured out yet. Virginia was just as committed to the things she believed in as Tim pretended to be about the things he did. And over the last several years, those things had coalesced in Virginia’s mind as: putting a stop to everything Tim is doing.

Tim’s motives always seemed to get a pass, and nobody questioned the saintliness of what he was doing even though so much of it was damaging and hurtful. If it was left up to Timothy Brand, no woman would ever again be able to get a safe and legal abortion, no gay couples would ever again be allowed to marry or adopt children, and—she wasn’t sure what the “and” was.

Susan had started to busy herself taking files out of filing cabinets, probably in order to take them off and copy them.

“You know,” Susan said. “You’re not going to be able to get out from under this forever. You have to go back to Connecticut to campaign, and you have to go back to Connecticut to talk to Jason Battlesea. He isn’t going to let you get away with nothing more of a statement than the one you made on the night they found Chapin Waring’s body.”

2

For about an hour that morning, Hope Matlock felt better. In fact, she felt positively happy. Summers these days were always bad news, because there was never any teaching to be had in the summers. Summer courses went to full-time people who wanted to make a little extra money on the side.

She thought she would read e-mail and look around a little before she performed her ordinary summer-morning ritual of checking the bank account and counting the money. There was not a lot of money to count, but she thought she might be able to get through July without any actual problem. That was what was stopping her from doing anything drastic.

She made coffee from one of those coffee pods. She had another six in the box, and after that she would have to get the freeze-dried stuff. She logged on to her computer and then on to the Internet. She thought she was probably one of the last five people on earth who still had dial-up. The computer made those weird connecting-to-the-Internet noises that AOL seemed to think would make users less frustrated and angry with how long it took. Then the Welcome Screen came up and the little voice said, “You’ve got mail!”

Hope opened her e-mail to find just what she was expecting, plus one from Caitlin Hall. Caitlin Hall was, nominally, her boss. Letters from Caitlin at odd times of the year were never good news. Hope had her contracts for the fall. This probably meant that she was going to lose one of them.

Hope took another long sip of coffee and waited. She still had the material she’d collected a few days ago. It was lying on the dining room table. She could go in and get it and start doing something about it today. It might be dangerous, what with this Gregor Demarkian arriving today—but what did she mean by dangerous? Half the people she thought of as her friends barely spoke to her these days.

She moved her mouse and clicked on Caitlin’s e-mail. She waited while it took forever to open. If she called AOL to complain about how slow her service was, they would tell her she should move off dial-up and sign on to broadband, or whatever it was these days.

The e-mail form came up blank. Then it sort of shivered. Then there was a message, although not much of one.

I’ve got an ADP, Thursday nights 6 to 9, eight weeks, English 101, starting next week.

2100.

Can you do this?

Hope stared down at the e-mail.

It was, in a way, a kind of miracle. Part-timers never got summer courses. And never meant never. Hope had been teaching at the same place for close to fifteen years. She’d had exactly one summer course in all that time. ADP meant “accelerated degree program.” The courses lasted only eight weeks, and there was a lot on the Internet. Hope loved working on the Internet.

She clicked on the Reply button and said:

Of course! Yes! I’d love to!

Twenty-one hundred dollars might not sound like a lot of money, but it was twenty-one hundred more than Hope usually had in the summer. She could stop worrying about paying her gas and electric bills. She could start thinking seriously about doing a massive Costco shop.