Skeleton Key(48)

“By talking to you.”

“By working this whole story up in your head. And it is a story. Because you know they’re going to be back.”

“Why should they be back?”

They had been standing in the kitchen by then. Zara Anne had been all pouty and furious and rumpled. She was always rumpled when she got up in the morning. It was as if she had a disorganized soul.

“Kayla Anson’s been murdered,” Faye told her. “In her car. The one you said the Jeep was chasing. Not just happened to be behind. Chasing.”

“Somebody stole the Jeep and then they killed her,” Zara Anne said. “You’re just jealous I knew it before you. Wic-cans always have to be careful about their powers. Other people get jealous.”

“I’m not getting jealous of your powers,” Faye said.

“I could feel it the whole time they were driving by,” Zara Anne said. “I’ve got the sight that way. I could feel the badness coming right out of that Jeep. That’s why I didn’t go and tell you about it. That’s why I just waited until you came home. I didn’t want you chasing that Jeep with all the badness in it.”

“You’re going to bring a million reporters out here, do you understand that?” Faye asked her. “You’re going to bring Geraldo Rivera and Ricki Lake and I don’t know who else. You’re going to turn this place into a circus.”

“It will be good for the movement. It will be good for people to see that we aren’t just making it up.”

“You’re going to get a reporter from the Weekly World News to camp on our doorstep. They’ll find aliens landing in my pumpkin patch. It will be nuts.”

“You’re only jealous because it’s me instead of you. That’s all this is. You think you have a right to be the big important one all the time.”

“Fine. Wonderful. Then we’ll let it all be you. When they start inundating this place, and clogging up the parking lot so that nobody can get to the stand, you can just move out and take a room at the Super 8 in Waterbury. You can clog up their parking lot and talk to reporters there.”

“You’re just jealous because it’s me instead of you,” Zara Anne said again.

The beets were all put out on the stand. She had a box of zucchini the size of jousting lances at the back that needed to be put out, too. Had she ever really made love to Zara Anne? Had she really done all those physical things, and allowed them to be done to her, that should only be done between two people who were very much in love?

And never mind the fact that Faye Dallmer hadn’t been in love with anybody since her marriage went bad, or maybe even before.

Zara Anne was up at the house, wrapped in a quilt, watching television.

Faye just wondered what it was she really knew.





3


In the next day or two, they would release the body from the morgue and bring it to the Hitchcock Funeral Home in Watertown. That was where Margaret Anson had arranged to have the funeral, in spite of the fact that Kayla’s lawyers were very much against it. Kayla’s lawyers wanted the funeral to be in New York. In this one thing, Margaret had had the moral authority to resist. They couldn’t very well tell a mother where and how to bury her own daughter, even if they thought the mother had never liked the daughter at all. In fact, Margaret knew, they knew that. They had all been thoroughly briefed by Robert, before he died. They all considered her the prime bitch of the Western world. It didn’t matter, in this case. They didn’t want to see them-selves on the pages of People magazine, charged with persecuting the grieving mother.

Funerals and bank accounts—that was what this was going to come down to. That, and the reporters already camped outside her door, sitting there stretched along Sunny Vale road like a dismembered centipede. It was all over the place already, as she knew it would be, but she was ready for them. She had locks for the windows as well as the doors, and shades she could pull down tight. Right now the whole house was closed off. The gate at the bottom of the drive was locked. She could sit here in the big keeping room off the kitchen with her glass of sherry and not be bothered by them at all.

What kept coming back to her, what she couldn’t get rid of, was the day of Kayla’s delivery, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. By then, the hospitals had given up using twilight sleep. They were committed to using nothing at all.

“We want a drug-free delivery,” her doctor had told her confidently. “It’s what’s best for the baby.”

It was always what was best for the baby. The whole long stretch of that pregnancy, it had been as if Margaret herself had ceased to exist. No pain was supposed to be too great, no inconvenience too shattering, if what resulted was what was best for the baby. Margaret thought she had hated that baby from the third month of its gestation. She had hated the morning sickness and the bloating. She had hated not being allowed to take Contac when she had a cold or allergy medications when the pollen got high. She would have had an abortion if she could have done it without Robert knowing about it—but that would have been impossible, because Robert knew about everything. She would have gone ahead and taken the Contac and the antiallergy pills, except that she was afraid of the birth defects. She was afraid of what it would do to her life, to her self, if the baby she was carrying was born with too much damage. By that time she had hated Robert, too, of course. She had come to see him for what he was. She had come to understand that he would never mean anything more to her than money.