In Margaret Anson’s perfect world, money and merit would go together. The people who really understood opera and art and history would be in charge of everybody else, and recognition would come for taste instead of for overwhelming effort. The truth was, Margaret didn’t really have it all worked out, what she would like the world to be instead of what it was now. She only knew that she hated almost everything about what it was now, and what it had forced her to become. She was with the feminists on at least one thing, although she thought of most feminists as lower-class and overly fond of talking about their genitals. Marriage and prostitution were one and the same thing. You sold your body for money. You handed it over for sex and procreation. Robert hadn’t been much interested in sex, in the end. He had wanted another child, to try for a son, but he could have gotten that much by presenting her with a loaded turkey baster.
When Kayla was small, she had raced around their big apartment in the city, falling from things, jumping on things. Nannies had despaired of her. Maids had tried to stay out of her way. Margaret had seen from the beginning that she was Robert’s daughter and not hers. She had been born with all the vitality and all the crudeness of her father’s less-than-admirable social class.
I will not have her here, Margaret thought now. It was the only thought she could hold in her head. Even this one glass of sherry was making her wobbly. These last two nights of not getting enough sleep had made her something worse.
The body could stay at the funeral home; that’s what it could do. The body could stay there until it went to rot. Margaret had no intention of ever seeing it again. If there was a hell, she hoped that Kayla was in it. She hoped that the flames licked up from the molten lava on the ground and burned great blisters in that stupid girl’s feet. At least she would no longer have to open Town and Country to see her daughter’s face.
Life was not fair, that was what the problem was. Life had not been fair to her, to Margaret Anson.
And if life wasn’t fair, somebody had to pay for it.
Six
1
All murder is random. That was what Gregor Demarkian’s most formidable instructor at Quantico had said, when Gregor was young enough to think that murder was rare, except in war. Maybe the truth was that in those days murder was rare. It was the year before John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. Television was full of happy families. Television news was careful to report only on those people who could be considered “significant.” If the denizens of the local trailer park got liquored up and slaughtered each other at will, nobody in the nicer subdivisions on the other side of town would ever hear about it. If children were beaten to death by their mother’s boyfriends, if they were left to starve and die by their mothers themselves—well, it all happened over there, in that part of town, and there was nothing more you could expect from those people. It didn’t make any difference to you. Gregor remembered sitting at a small desk with a little writing-desk extension on one side, trying to take notes in a spiral notebook. He was not only young enough to still think that murder was rare, but young enough to still be uncomfortable with his size. He sometimes thought he was still growing taller, in his sleep, and that every morning when he woke the world around him was a little smaller. He imagined himself as Alice, growing larger. Any minute now, he would grow too big for his own apartment. His arms and legs would push through the windows and leave him trapped.
All murder is random. At the time, he had thought the man was insane. Murder was deliberate. That’s why people were executed for it. He couldn’t remember how many years it had taken him to understand what had been meant, or how thoroughly he had to agree with it.
Now he let Bennis pull her car up in front of the tiny white clapboard house on Caldwell green, and felt again how foolish it was not to be able to drive. He was an urban animal, but all those years in the Bureau should have egged him into it at one point or another. Lord only knows, he had spent enough of his career as an agent in cars. The problem was that somebody else had always had a car. Now he felt oddly silly—the Important Consultant, being chauffeured around like a ten-year-old with a Little League game.
Bennis put the car into park and leaned toward the windshield to take in the green and what surrounded it. Gregor was fascinated with it all himself. It was so—New England. So exactly what it was supposed to be. The not-quite-rectangular patch of brown grass at the center. The churches on each of the four sides: Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal. The Congregationalist and Methodist churches were white. The Presbyterian and Episcopal were made of flat gray stone. The whole collection looked forbidding and completely empty.