Hearts of Sand(92)

Evaline had expected to see Tim somewhere here at this largest of the official picnics, but he was nowhere to be found. She didn’t know why she so desperately wanted to see Tim. She just knew that the sight of him would have been reassuring.

Virginia was over at the bandstand, talking to constituents and signing autographs.

Evaline tried to wave discreetly when Virginia looked in her direction, but of course it was useless. Evaline was so short, and almost everybody else was taller. Even some of the Girl Scouts were taller.

Evaline finally managed to catch Virginia’s eye. When she was sure Virginia understood, she started drifting away toward the edges of the crowd. She ran into a few people who wanted to shake her hand and congratulate her on her speech. She avoided another—a man named Michael Kerr—who would certainly want to tell her what was wrong with it. She got all the way to the west end food tables, picked up a corn on the cob and put it on a plate, and waited.

It took Virginia a little time, but she got there.

“I’m exhausted,” she said, picking up corn on the cob herself. “I didn’t get any sleep last night, which I suppose was inevitable, but it hasn’t been much good this morning. I keep waiting for the thing to explode.”

“For what to explode?” Evaline asked.

Virginia shrugged. When she shrugged, it was a monumental event. She was, after all, nearly six feet tall. She got a skewer of peppers and chicken and said, “It’s the usual thing to suspect the wife, or the ex-wife, first. And here I am. The ex-wife.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Evaline said, a little shocked. “You can’t really think they’re going to do that. You wouldn’t have killed Kyle. And you couldn’t have. You were doing that thing at the hospital and then you were doing campaign things.”

“Even if it’s true that my alibi is absolutely ironclad, it won’t matter. Do you remember the Chandra Levy thing? Do you honestly think anybody cared whether that congressman was actually guilty or not? Of course not. It was a much better story to hammer it home as ‘Representative Implicated in Intern’s Murder.’”

“Maybe Mr. Demarkian will find the murderer today,” Evaline said, “and the police will arrest somebody. And you’ll be out of it.”

“I don’t know if I would actually be out of it, even then,” Virginia said. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt. And then, you know, it’s Kyle. We were married. We got along, more or less, even after we weren’t married anymore. We saw each other several times a year. There was no harm in him at all, you know. He was a thoroughly nice man. He was nicer than I am. That’s why we could never stay married.”

“I’d think it would be easier if he was a very nice man,” Evaline said. “But then, I’ve never been married. So I don’t know.”

“I think it’s odd how many women I know in my generation who never married,” Virginia said. “And yes, I’m including you loosely, even if you are a bit younger. And it’s not just women. Tim never married either.”

“I suppose Chapin never married,” Evaline said. “Although I don’t really know that. Aren’t a lot of them married, the ones who disappear for a long time? There was that woman who had something to do with a revolutionary group, or something.”

“There was nothing revolutionary about Chapin Waring,” Virginia said. “When we were in high school, and even when we were in our first year of college, we all thought she was a force of nature. But she wasn’t, really. She was just a mildly charismatic teenager with very little impulse control and a wild streak a mile wide. And she was a lightweight. If she hadn’t committed those robberies, she would have flunked out of college in her junior year, married some stockbroker, and gone crazy about exercise so she wouldn’t get fat.”

“Maybe,” Evaline said. She felt a little uncomfortable. Other people were coming up to the buffet table now. Evaline began to drift a little toward a line of benches near the swing sets, hoping Virginia would go with her.

“I always blamed Chapin for Marty’s dying,” Evaline said. “I blamed all of you, really. Not for all of it. Not for the robberies. I assumed that you all had to know about it and you all had to have participated in it. And then later I thought that that couldn’t have been right.”

“I wouldn’t worry yourself about it,” Virginia said. “You weren’t the only person who thought we must all have known. The FBI probably still thinks we must all have known.”

“But I did blame you all for the accident,” Evaline said. “I know it was Marty himself driving, and I know he was drunk, but you must have known he was drunk, too. And nobody tried to stop him.”