“I’m leaving,” Annabel called out.
“Drive carefully,” Jennifer called back.
Annabel went out and got into the Corvette and started it up. The radio was on. A woman announcer was giving a littie capsule report on “the murder in Washington Depot.” She said something about “tragedy” and something about “the only child of entrepreneurial pioneer Robert Anson.” Annabel turned her off.
Now that she was out here, on her own, without her mother nattering to her, Annabel suddenly realized that this was all for real. Kayla was really dead. It had happened and it would not un-happen. The whole thing seemed worse than impossible. People didn’t just die. They didn’t get murdered in the Northwest Hills, either, where nothing much ever happened in the way of violence except wild turkeys chasing small cats. In all the years and years Annabel and her family had been coming to Litchfield County, there had only been one murder, not counting this one. A few years ago, a boy had gone into the convenience store in Four Corners and shot his ex-girlfriend and then himself. They were both in high school and she had wanted to be free to date other people.
If it had happened in Waterbury, that would be a different thing, Annabel thought—but that wasn’t really true, of course. It wouldn’t have mattered where it happened. It wasn’t where it happened that was bothering her.
If it was really real, she thought to herself—and then it struck her. This was it. This was what was bothering her.
She didn’t know what was really real. She had no idea what she was talking about when she said something was really real. She had no idea what “real” meant.
It seemed to her that she had lived her whole life in a fog.
3
It was well after noon before Peter Greer decided that he had to go to sleep—to bed, to sleep, to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom off the loft, where he kept a small bottle of contraband prescription sleeping pills. The first news of the murder had come across in a bulletin on WTNH. The next thing he knew, it seemed to be all over everywhere, on CNN, on the major networks. It made sense, of course, because she had been who she’d been, because she’d had so much money. It was the money that really made all the difference.
Years ago, when he had been growing up in Litchfield County, Peter Greer had made decisions for himself, decisions he had known, even then, that he would never change. Unlike Kayla Anson and her friends, Peter had not been part of the country-club and private-school segment of Litchfield County. His parents had had a small Cape Cod house in Morris, and he had gone to Morris Elementary School and to the regional high school, just like everybody else. He couldn’t even remember when he had first realized that there was a difference, or that the difference would matter in the long run in ways nobody ever admitted to themselves out loud. He did remember walking down South Street in Litchfield and looking at the big houses there, the white ones set back from the road with their tall columns and curving front drives. He did remember sitting on the Litchfield Green and listening to them talk, the ones they called the pink-and-greens, who went to Rumsey Hall and then got sent away to prep school. Their voices were so different from the ones he was used to, it was almost as if they were speaking anther language.
There were people who said that Peter Greer was an opportunist, and a social climber, but it wasn’t exactly true. It was true that he had always intended to live in that Litchfield County instead of in the one that he was used to. He thought anybody on earth would want to make that change, once they understood what it was about. It was even true that he intended to make as much money as possible, without having to be tethered to a desk like the Wall Street bankers who kept houses out here for the summer. In his better moments, he imagined himself becoming his generation’s version of Steve Fossett, a multimillionaire adventurer, taking up mountain climbing or around-the-world sailing as a hobby in his old age.
What he really wanted, when he thought about it, was a kind of rest—the end to his own dissatisfaction, the end to this feeling he had had all his life that he wasn’t getting enough, wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t respected enough to be able to relax and let it all go. It was as if he were strapped to the front of an express train and being pushed ever onward, ever faster. He had worked for years to be valedictorian of his high school class, and when he had achieved it he felt only that it would have been better if his grade point average had been five points higher than it was, if it had been perfect. He had worked those same years to make sure he got a scholarship big enough so that he could go to Amherst without piling up debts he would never be able to pay. Then, when he got to Amherst, he thought only that he should have tried for Harvard. It went on and on, on and on, and there didn’t seem to be any way he could stop it.