Now she pulled into the parking lot at the side of the club and looked at the long, low mock-Tudor building. She was finding it very difficult to breathe. Her chest hurt. Her muscles seemed to be knotted tight, so that when she tried to move, everything on her body resisted. This building had been put up in the twenties, when the first of the serious New York money began to move north—serious old money, that was the ticket. Down on the Gold Coast it was all stockbroker fortunes and people who’d made a million overnight. They liked everything shiny and new and very up-to-date. Sally liked things like that too. She’d just learned never to say so when she was with people up here, who all seemed to think that a cramped littie house where the plumbing was falling apart was more impressive than any other kind, as long as it had been built in 1676.
If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to run away to New York, Sally told herself. Then she bit her lip and put her head down on the steering wheel. She had lottery tickets, of course. She had diem every day. She had to have them. It was the only thing in her life that gave her hope. She wished she knew what people did for money, how they got it how they handled it. She wished she knew where money came from. All her life, even when she was working, it had seemed to her that it had just fallen out of the sky.
Mallory had been sitting at the kitchen table when Sally first heard the news of Kayla Anson’s murder, and Sally had felt Mallory watching her every move.
“I don’t understand what your problem is,” Mallory had said. “You barely knew her. I barely knew her. She wasn’t one of my contacts, Mother.”
Sally had considered telling Mallory all about it, about which account she had taken the money from and about what would happen to that account now that the account holder was dead, but she was stopped by the cold flatness in Mallory’s eyes, the thing that was very near hate. Was it true that her daughter hated her? It seemed to be, although Sally knew she ought to be careful about this, because Mallory was still an adolescent. Adolescents went through phases where they thought their parents were beneath contempt. Even so, Sally didn’t want to tell Mallory anything, not now and maybe not ever. She didn’t want Mallory to see her any more clearly than she already did. Besides, the feeling was somewhat mutual. Mallory might hate her, but she hated Mallory, or at least spent some of the time wishing her dead. Sally only wished that her own mother had been for her what she was being for Mallory—her own mother, who thought the height of success was to be able to buy a sofa and love seat combination at Sears.
“I’m going into my office,” was all she said, gathering up her pocketbook and keys. She thought for a moment that she ought to change into something more professional, and then decided against it. Nobody dressed up to spend Sunday at the club, no matter what they were doing there. She didn’t want to be conspicuous, or conspicuously odd.
“You never go into the club on Sundays,” Mallory said, “except when I’ve got something on, and then all you do is police me.”
Sally kept her head against the steering wheel and began to count. She couldn’t go inside when she was this obviously upset. They would pick it up right away. She tried to call up Kayla Anson’s face and found only Kayla’s cousin Annabel instead—and this in spite of the fact that she had just seen Kayla’s picture on the news. She had the radio on and turned to a classical music station. In a couple of minutes, the station would break for the hourly news and she would have to hear the whole story again. She made herself take a deep breath, and then another, and another. She counted to one hundred and then started from one hundred and counted backward. She heard a car pulling into the lot somewhere behind her. She couldn’t sit here like this forever.
The car belonged to Marian Ridenour—one of those young mothers with young children. Sally sat up and watched them all pile out of the Volvo station wagon, two young girls and, a tiny boy. The girls were dressed in cham-bray jumpers with very white turtlenecks under them. Sally took her keys out of the ignition and opened her own car’s door. The cold poured in on her and made her shiver. Marian Ridenour’s husband worked for Goldman, Sachs. Sally couldn’t remember what he did, only that he got paid a lot of money—and that Marian was his second wife.
She waited for Marian and the children to be out of hailing range, and then started into the club herself. She took the front entrance, even though it was more likely to get her seen, because there was something about going around to the side that smacked to her of sneaking. The last thing she needed was to have somebody see her here and conclude that she was hiding in some way. If she had any chance at all, it was to do what she had to do before anybody else even thought about the account that Kayla Anson, like all the other members, kept at this club.