Hearts of Sand(54)

“Yes, I know that.”

“And the police called us after they talked to you,” Charlotte said, “because they said you said you didn’t care what happened to it, and you wouldn’t do anything about it. Do you realize what’s going to happen if that gets into the papers?”

“If you want to do something about it, you’re welcome,” Caroline said.

“Cor and I talked about it. We think you should call a funeral home and have the body sent there, and then set up for a service at the house. I don’t mean a public service, of course. It would be a zoo. But you could have the casket there in the living room, it’s big enough, and whoever is pastor at the Episcopal Church these days could come and do something, and then you could bury it with all the rest of the Warings. I mean, we’ve got a huge plot out there, and there would be room for it.”

“At the house,” Caroline said.

“Of course.”

“And out near Mother and Daddy at the cemetery.”

“That’s where she would have been buried if none of this had happened. It would be perfectly natural. There wouldn’t be anything odd about it. And you wouldn’t have to announce it to the public. It could be just you and the reverend.”

“While the two of you stay off wherever you are and pretend it isn’t happening.”

“We’ve been over this before,” Charlotte said. “We really can’t come out for a funeral. It would be too complicated.”

“Then I don’t see why my solution isn’t the one that makes sense,” Caroline said. “Let the police have her. Let them bury her wherever they want.”

“At some point in this thing, you really have to start being reasonable. This is going to get out and then we’re all going to look like monsters. Is that what you want?”

“What I want,” Caroline said, “is to be left alone by all of you. And that includes the police.”

“Well,” Charlotte said, “I’m just trying to tell you to be careful. Of course, it didn’t occur to me right away, because why would it, but now—well, with everything that’s been happening. And people in the house and all of that. Well, I’m sure you get my drift. And it’s not like it was the first time. They’ve got all this technology now. They’ve got cell phone records and security cameras and cell phone towers and I don’t know what else.”

“They can even pick up cell phone conversations while you’re having them,” Caroline said.

“Oh, God,” Charlotte said. “I’d forgotten about that. I’d better get off the phone. All I’m saying is that you have to take care of yourself. Because even if you don’t care about yourself, you’ve got children and a husband to worry about. Any kind of really adverse publicity will just kill you.”

“And you,” Caroline said. “And Cordelia.”

“Well, of course, but I wasn’t thinking of us. We’re not there, so—”

“You know,” Caroline said, “if I actually admitted to knowing what you were talking about, I’d have to stop talking to you. Not just now. Forever.”

“Honestly,” Charlotte said. “You’re so melodramatic.”

“I was eight when all that happened,” Caroline said. “Try to remember that.”

“How could I not remember that?”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Caroline said.

Charlotte went on squawking. Caroline clicked the phone shut again. Her brain felt as if it were boiling inside her skull. Honest to God, she thought. Honest to God. Honest to God. Honest to God.

She put her forehead down on the steering wheel again and closed her eyes. When she looked up, the locksmith’s van was just pulling into the driveway. She took a deep breath, counted to ten, and tried to drive everything out of her mind but the locks.

She didn’t want to kill the locksmith just because he was handy, and she could no longer control herself.

3

Virginia didn’t support the programs she supported because she was kinder or more nurturing. She supported those programs because they made sense, and because they were moral. You didn’t leave people to die in the street, no matter what way they ran their lives, and you certainly didn’t leave their children to die in the street. You treated people like people. You didn’t consign them to little boxes with labels on them and say that their lives could never be more than the labels said they could.

She had always found The Right Thing To Do perfectly obvious. This morning, she was thinking about them because the newspapers that had been delivered to her front door were full of stories about Tim’s clinic and the danger posed by the “assault” on it by the Office of Health Care Access and the Office of the Health Care Advocate. Virginia wanted to kick somebody. Then her phone rang.