“I don’t know what you mean by could she have,” Tom Fordman said. “Do you mean did she have the time? I’d guess so, sure. It’s not that far from Main Street to the Hadley house. And I’d guess she’d have the psychology, too. I’d bet anything there are dozens of people Alice would like to kill.”
“Starting with Miss Marbledale,” Eddie Block said. “Alice had Miss Marbledale as a teacher in school.”
“But here’s the thing,” Tom Fordman said. “You wouldn’t think she’d have the strength to do it, if you know what I mean. She’s a small woman, Alice is, short, I mean, not skinny. And she’s middle-aged. And she’s not exactly what you’d call physically fit. I keep thinking it must have taken a lot of strength to do what was done to Annie-Vic.”
“It might have,” Gregor agreed. He looked down at the folder. At some point while he was unaware of it, he had put it down on the desk nearest his chair. He tapped the top of it. “Is there any way I can find somebody to drive me around a little? I want to go out to the hospital and talk to the doctors who treated Miss Hadley when she was brought in. And I want to go out to the house where the attack happened. And then I’m going to want to talk to some people.”
Somewhere on the other side of the room, the phone rang and Tina picked it up. Eddie and Tom looked at each other and then at Gregor Demarkian. Gregor thought they must have known that he didn’t drive. That was why Gary Albright had come all the way into Philadelphia to get him. It was possible that they hadn’t really believed it until right that minute.
“Well,” Eddie Block said. “It’s a police case, so we could probably get you where you want to go, if nothing else came up.”
“Nothing much else ever comes up,” Tom Fordman said.
“We could take you around in the patrol car,” Eddie Block said.
“As long as Gary doesn’t mind,” Tom Fordman said.
They looked back and forth at each other. Gregor thought about hiring a car and a driver for the next week, but it occurred to him that doing that would make him look like an even bigger snob than Annie-Vic.
Gregor was just about to suggest some kind of compromise, he wasn’t sure what, when Tina Clay came over to them.
“Listen,” she said. “I think there may be some kind of emergency.”
3
The “some kind of emergency” was happening at the Hadley house, and if Tina Clay hadn’t been as confused and concerned as she was, they could all have walked. People had been saying that—that the house was close to Main Street—since Gregor had first been asked to look into the incident, but for some reason he hadn’t really visualized what that meant. The house was not just “close to” Main Street, it was not far off it, up a steepish hill on a tiny side street lined with the kind of two-story frame houses that comprised the heart of every small town in the Northeast. The houses were single family, too, or at most two-family conversions with a second door stuck hastily on the side. Gregor could imagine a time during the Great Depression when the families in those houses had been the luckiest ones. The poor people would have lived off and away from things, in the country, in the hills. It was only after World War II that the bias against living in town had begun.
They started out from the police station. The town was quiet, there were a few cars on the street, and those mobile news vans were parked along the curbs, but there were few people out anywhere and nothing like traffic. Eddie Block was careful not to put on the siren when they started for the Hadley place. There wasn’t that far to go, and he didn’t want to attract the attention of the news crews. Then, in a blink, they were there, so fast that Gregor hadn’t really had a chance to assimilate the fact that there was “something” happening that might connect to his case. They were parked at the hedge outside an older house with half timbering accented by brick and stone, set well back from the road. Another car was parked there, too. It was a dark Volvo station-wagon of the kind Gregor associated with certain towns on the Main Line, and there was a very young woman with blond hair leaning against the side of it and sobbing.
Eddie and Tom were in the front seat. They got out first. Gregor waited a moment while they walked over to the young woman and then got out himself. He could see how this had been the house of the richest family in town, even though they wouldn’t have been rich by city standards. He suspected that people in Snow Hill still thought of the Hadleys as “rich.” They would have just enough to be enviable.