“Everybody’s going to know one way or the other,” Iris Brayne said. “It’s going to be in the morning’s paper. Even if you don’t make a statement. It’s going to be in the paper with a picture from the Associated Press.”
“That way,” Gregor said, pointing toward the door.
Iris Brayne looked at him long and hard, and then quickly at Bennis and quickly away. Gregor knew it would be a mistake to put a hand on her, even just on her elbow, to move her away. He had had run-ins with small-town reporters before. He had had run-ins with big-town reporters, too. If this woman had not been a reporter, he would have been worried that she was on the verge of becoming irrational.
Of course, the only way he knew she was a reporter was because she said she was. She might very well be lying.
Gregor was just making up his mind to do something—or to go to the bartender and ask him to do something—when Iris Brayne stepped away from him. The movement was abrupt and deliberate. She moved not a single millimeter more than she’d wanted to.
“It’ll be in the paper tomorrow,” she said. “All about you and your lady friend and Kayla Anson. I bet it’ll be picked up by the wire services, too.”
She hitched the strap of her bag back up on her shoulder and turned away.
She walked out of the tap room at a small-stepped, hitching half-run, as if she’d suddenly realized that she was going to be late for her deadline.
There were millions of them like this, at small-town newspapers all across the country. Gregor had met them and understood them, just as he had met and understood their better halves, the reporters who liked being where they were. They didn’t bother him, except that they did. Connection and isolation. He couldn’t make it any clearer than that.
“So,” Bennis said. “What was that all about?”
“That” Gregor told her, “is a harbinger of things to come. I’m going to be panned unmercifully in the Torrington Register-Citizen.”
Five
1
Later, Sally Martindale would think about this weekend as a movable apocalypse. She would go over and over the particulars in her mind, the way people do when they are the victims of a preventable disaster. Because this disaster was certainly preventable. It would never have happened at all if Frank hadn’t left her. It would never have occurred to her at all to take money out of Kayla Anson’s account—or anybody else’s—if she hadn’t been left to rattle around on her own in this big, ancient house, if she hadn’t already been forced to sell all the furniture she could get away with just to go on getting by. As far as Sally could tell, it was all Frank’s fault, all of it, even her getting fired from Deloitte. It was true that she had been late more often than not in that last year before they had let her go. It was true that she had been distracted. It was even true that she had known all along what the competition was like, and that there would only be one or two of them asked to stay on to be partners. Nothing mattered except for the fact that Frank was leaving her. She couldn’t think about anything else. She didn’t even see why she should have been expected to.
The particulars that were going through her mind that weekend, though, were about different things. They were about the obvious. She had been careless these last few months—sloppy, really, tense and in a hurry all the time. There was that. There was also the fact that the murder had happened on a Friday, so that she hadn’t even heard about it until Sunday morning. If it had happened on an ordinary weekday, she would have caught it on the radio news on her way in to work. Then it would have been easy to fix what she had done, at least well enough to get away with it just a little bit longer. She would only have had to move a few things around and transfer a few dollars out of other people’s accounts. She would have been careful to pick the right kind of people with the right kind of accounts, the kind she should have been using all along, except that it had seemed so much simpler to use Kayla Anson’s. What she really needed was young mothers with young children—healthy but not reckless, distracted by baby-sitting and classes in Mozart for Toddlers.
The right kind of accounts, she had thought compulsively as she switched the television back and forth from CBS to NBC to ABC to CNN. The story was everywhere. It was just beginning to heat up. She had missed the beginning of it, because she had been so tense that she had just slept through most of Saturday, and then she had driven out to Ledyard again and given it one more try. All she had gotten for her trouble was one hundred dollars poorer. She hadn’t dared to risk any more.