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Hearts of Sand(78)

By:Jane Haddam


“Did you? Why would you do that?”

The squirming now felt like some kind of fit. Hope didn’t know what she was going to do if she didn’t learn to keep herself in check.

“I needed the money,” she said finally. “And he would pay for things. If you told him things. If you gave him an interview about the robberies, you know, and knowing Chapin and that kind of thing. And if you had pictures.”

“And you’d been going to see him for quite some time?”

Hope blushed. “No, no,” she said. “He asked me right after it all happened, of course. He asked all of us, but none of us agreed to it. After a while he stopped asking. Then after Chapin was murdered, he started asking again. And I—well, I didn’t get any summer teaching, and summer is always really bad, so this time I said yes. And I went into the city, you know, and talked to him.”

“What did you talk to him about?”

“About what you’d expect,” Hope said. “Growing up with Chapin. What Chapin was like. What I knew about the robberies. Except I didn’t know anything about the robberies. I think I was disappointing all around. He wanted to know what it was like to grow up in one of the ‘thirteen richest families,’ but I hadn’t grown up in a rich family at all. My family had lots of history, you know, but we never had very much money. I got to do everything because my mother really worked at it, that’s all. And I was only part of Chapin’s group because of Marty. She just put up with me.”

They had reached Beach Drive. They were all the way on the wrong end of it, but just being here made Hope feel better.

“When I heard Kyle was dead, I thought—well, I thought there might be some connection. You know, that something I said, when I talked to him, might have set something off. I couldn’t think of what it could be. We just talked a bit about all the old stuff. I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. It felt strange that he’d give me money for it.”

“Did you give him any pictures?”

“I brought some with me,” she said, “but they weren’t the kind of thing he was looking for. He wanted pictures of people in their deb dresses and people riding horses and all that kind of thing. My mother did the best she could, and I even came out, but mostly we couldn’t manage it. I spent four years in boarding school as the only person in my house who wasn’t boarding her horse.”

The Switch and Shingle was right up ahead. Hope felt so relieved, she almost cried. She turned into the drive and slowed to a crawl again. The hedges went by her on either side, looking dark and blank, like the trees that lined the drive at Manderley.

The house came into view, lit up at the front door and in several of the windows on the second floor. Hope cut the engine.

“I was just worried,” she said again, “that it was something I said, something I did, going to see Ray Guy Pearce. I thought, you know, that I may have said something I didn’t realize, and now—now Kyle is dead—and—”

“I can absolutely assure you that Ray Guy Pearce did not kill Kyle Westervan,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It would have been entirely impossible. I can’t be exactly that positive with the murder of Chapin Waring, but I’d give you odds that he wasn’t in any way involved. I don’t think you have to worry about the kind of information Ray Guy Pearce was looking for.”

“Really?” Hope said.

“Really,” Gregor Demarkian said.

He opened the passenger side door and got out onto the gravel driveway. “Thank you for chauffeuring me around,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Hope said automatically.

Gregor Demarkian slammed the passenger side door shut and walked away without looking back.

Hope took a few moments, and then she turned the car around very carefully.

She drove slowly back down the drive, trying to ignore the hulking darkness all around her. She got out onto Beach Drive and found that it was a little more crowded now. There were people on foot on their way out to see the fireworks.

She wondered what time it was.

What felt like a few moments later, but must have been longer, she began to wonder where she was. She was back on the two-lane blacktop. She didn’t remember getting there.

She pulled off to the side of the road and cut the engine.

She put her head down on the steering wheel and closed her eyes. She had forgotten to turn the headlights off. They were gleaming into the distance, like lighthouse beacons. She kept her eyes closed and her head down.

Then she started to cry.

3

Jason Battlesea called Evaline Veer and from the moment Evaline hung up the phone until the moment the midnight fireworks began to go off, she brooded.