Hearts of Sand(56)

“She’s a grown woman,” Virginia said.

“Grown women have been known to harbor grudges. I’m just telling you that this could work out very badly. It could be exactly the kind of story we were all worried about when this started. You may be running for office, but it wouldn’t be good publicity for me, either. Or for Tim. Or for Hope. Or even for Evaline. The papers like stories about psychopathic preppies way too much.”

“I know,” Virginia said.

She looked down at the paper again. There was a sudden silence between them. It was a deep and abiding silence, and it was the way they ended nearly all their conversations since they’d gotten their divorce. When they were married, there had been a different kind of silence that came between them. Virginia had liked that one better.

She started to look for something to say that would get them both off the hook when Kyle started up again.

“About that other thing,” he said.

“What other thing?”

“Let me just say that I think you’d better have your ass completely and irrevocably covered on that one,” Kyle said. “It doesn’t matter what your rationale is. It doesn’t even matter if you’re right. It’s going to look like hell, and it’s going to kill you politically. Even in the state of Connecticut.”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m going to get off the line now,” Kyle said. “There’s no point in you and I playing that particular game. We know each other too well.”

Kyle hung up. Virginia looked at the phone for a minute and then hung up herself.

It was true that she and Kyle knew each other too well, but there were a lot of people who knew her too well. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.





FIVE

1

Gregor Demarkian had finally made up his mind about what he had to do next at about midnight. He started by putting in a call to Juan to pick him up at six o’clock in the morning. That much English, Juan seemed to understand. Then Gregor had looked up the address he wanted and gone in search of Darlee Corn and a printer.

As it turned out, Darlee Corn did have a printer, although she made it clear that she didn’t usually make it available to guests.

Gregor took two copies of what he would need in the morning and headed off to bed. He set his alarm clock for four. He packed his attaché case with everything he could imagine he might need. Then he went to bed and tried to sleep against the drumming insistence in his mind that everybody who was ever involved in this case had been something worse than idiotic.

He got up at four o’clock in the morning and showered and shaved. He found the best suit Bennis had ever given him, then went down to the front door to wait for Juan. Darlee Corn was up and about, but nobody else seemed to be. The large dining room was empty, although hot serving stations were set up on a long table at the side. He grabbed a coffee in a paper cup.

Juan parked the car at the curb. Gregor got into it and handed over one copy of the detailed directions he had pulled off Google.

Juan took his time getting through Alwych, so that by the time they reached I-95 it was full-on rush hour, but he followed the directions he’d been given right to the quarter mile. Gregor began to relax. Somewhere around Greenwich, he decided he could stop monitoring their progress. He opened his attaché case and began going over what he had.

It was useless to tell himself that he had no more information than anybody else had had in all these years. The issue was never what you had, but how you interpreted it. He had gone over and over everything in everybody’s set of notes, and he had ended with Sherlock Holmes. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.

Gregor knew where Chapin Waring had been, and who had helped her stay out of sight, because there was only one possible answer. There was only one person who would have run interference for her all those years, and there was only one person who would have gone back to the house on Beach Drive after she was dead and let the security alarm ring.

They got to a neighborhood of row houses, each one of them two stories tall. The place reminded Gregor of the old Archie Bunker television show, except that the population was obviously neither white nor working class. It might be actually African, rather than African-American. It might be Caribbean. The people on the street looked relaxed and pleased with themselves. The corner markets were full of brightly colored vegetables.

Juan pulled the car up in front of one of the houses smack in the middle of a block. Gregor looked down at his own set of directions and double-checked the address was correct. Talk about the changes that had happened in the last thirty years. Gregor wondered how the man got out of his house to do his shopping. He wondered what happened to the house when it was empty because its occupant was away.