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Skeleton Key(112)

By:Jane Haddam


Now she got out of the car and looked around. It was cold, this late in October. Tomorrow was Halloween. If Linda Giametti could see this house, she would not know that there was something about it that was better than her own. She would like the size, but she would think that its age spoke against it. She wouldn’t be able to understand why Sally hadn’t opted for vinyl siding. Maybe the truth was that you could never get out. You always ended where you started, even if it seemed you didn’t.

Mallory was in the kitchen. Sally could see her moving around in there. She looked at the sag in the porch rail near the kitchen door and the jack-o’-lantern near the front one and opted for the sag. Everything in her life sagged these days. What difference did it make?

The kitchen door actually let her into the pantry. Sally put her pocketbook on the floor and called out, “Mallory?”

“In here.”

Sally picked her pocketbook up again. She didn’t know what she was doing. She wasn’t thinking straight. She went into the kitchen and saw Mallory with her back to her, working at the big black eight-burner restaurant stove.

“Well,” she said.

“Ruth Grandmere called,” Mallory said, without turning around. “She said it was important. In fact, she said it was urgent.”

Sally pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sat down. It was an Eldred Wheeler chair and an Eldred Wheeler trestle table. The set had cost something like fifteen thousand dollars, new.

Mallory turned around and faced her. “I think you’ve been caught,” she said.

“Maybe,” Sally said carefully. “Maybe not. As of this morning, they knew somebody had been taking the money. They didn’t know it was me.”

“From Kayla Anson’s account.”

“Oh, from all the accounts, or a lot of them. I never took from men. They pay too much attention. I never took from women lawyers, either. The housewives were the best. Most of the time, they didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.”

“Do you know how much?”

“Before today?”

“You took some money today?” Mallory looked startled. “After you already knew they knew that something was wrong?”

“I was going to fix it,” Sally said. “I thought that if I could only do it right, if I could go out to Ledyard and really make a stand—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“If I could do it right, I could fix it. So I took—I don’t know. Some money. Fifteen hundred, maybe. Or twenty-five hundred. I can’t remember.”

“How can you not remember?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Jesus.”

Sally started to rub her face again. Mallory was pacing back and forth. This was all so complicated. Mallory just didn’t understand it.

“It was because it wasn’t fair,” Sally said finally. “They just—those people—the Ansons and the Crawfords and the Ridenours—those people just are, if you know what I mean. They don’t have to do anything. They just are. But people like me have to work at it. And luck isn’t evenly distributed.”

“I think,” Mallory said, “that you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

“If life were fair, I would have won today. I would have come home with a whole pile of money and I would have been able to put the money back, and there would still be enough left over, you know, to get us by. Because I really don’t know what to do, Mallory. I really don’t. We barely had enough to get through last winter, and now it’s worse. I’m behind on everything. People call here all the time, the credit card companies, those people, they call all the time. You don’t know what it’s like. And I don’t know what to do. And now this. I suppose they’ll put me in jail.”

“I don’t think so,” Mallory said. “Not as long as you pay the money back.”

“I can’t pay the money back. It must be ten thousand dollars by now, counting today. Maybe even more.”

“You can sell the house,” Mallory said. “That will pay back the country club, and it will pay off the credit card bills, and it will leave you enough for another house—”

“A smaller house,” Sally said, feeling suddenly savage. “A more sensible house. Just like your father wanted us to have. While he moved into a duplex penthouse on the Upper East Side and bought a place on the Vineyard for his sweetie pie.”

“Listen,” Mallory said. “This is not about my father. This is a crisis.”

“He caused the crisis.”

“Maybe he did. But you don’t want to go to jail. And I don’t want you to go. And there’s no reason why you should. We can sell the house. We can get something smaller. We can make do. I can go to nursing school—”