Now she went into the bedroom and closed that door. Bennis Hannaford wasn’t moving around down there, poking into all the private things. She wasn’t even taking out a cigarette and lighting up, although Margaret had it on good authority that Bennis smoked, like some half-witted factory worker with no self-discipline at all. There were times when you went right to the edge of the universe and looked over the side. You found out that there was nothing there but darkness and fear, so deep and so wide and so pure that you couldn’t even move in it.
Down in the living room, Bennis Hannaford coughed, long and hard and chokingly.
Margaret locked the bedroom door and went to sit down on her bed—and that was when it struck her, for the first time, that she should not have let Bennis Hannaford come here.
3
Annabel Crawford had bought a lot of fake IDs in her life, but this one—with its State of Ohio logo and bright-colored picture—was the best one yet. It was so good that the bartender of the Lucky Eight barely looked at it before setting her up with a St. Pauli Girl Light, and that in spite of the fact that Annabel knew she looked nowhere near twentyone. She barely looked eighteen. It was a kind of curse that had happened to her and to no one else in her family. She was very short and very fine-boned and very small. She was also very flat-chested. All of the slightness taken together made her look like a child, and year after year, in one boarding school after another, Annabel’s teachers had called her out and rechecked her records just to make sure she was old enough to be there. It was Annabel Crawford’s boast that she had been expelled from more boarding schools than anybody else in the history of American private education, and she may have been right.
At the moment, all she was being right about was the beer, and the attention of a boy named Tommy Haggerty, who had just graduated from Choate. Unlike Annabel—who had so few high school credits she couldn’t qualify for Quinipiac Junior College—Tommy was just back for the weekend from Princeton, and until Annabel had brought up the story of her last expulsion, Princeton was all he had wanted to talk about. Annabel was beginning to think she had made a mistake in picking him out from all the other boys at the club this afternoon. He was giving every indication of wanting to get as drunk as possible as quickly as he could, and that always ended up being boring as hell for Annabel. What Annabel liked to do was have a couple of beers and a couple of joints and then drive out to Bantam Lake to neck. If you knew what to look for, you could find a place out there that was totally hidden in the trees. Annabel had lost her virginity at Bantam Lake on the day after she turned sixteen, and she had never looked back. It seemed incredible to her that anybody would ever do anything else when they were out with a boy.
The Lucky Eight was a roadhouse, freestanding and made of wood out on Route 209. The lake was only half a mile away, driving toward Washington Depot. Tommy had brought them out here in his brand-new bright red Corvette, which was what his father had given him to congratulate him on getting into Princeton. All the kids Annabel knew had gotten their cars as congratulatory presents on getting into the Ivy League.
Annabel poured beer into her glass, very carefully. She was trying to make it last. She was trying to will Tommy into making his last, too, but she wasn’t getting anywhere. His glass and his bottle sat in front of him, empty, for the third time already that night.
“So,” he said. “First there was a horse—”
“No, no.” Annabel waved her glass in the air. “It was Kayla, you see. You can’t just do anything with Kayla. She gets suspicious.”
“I think that’s natural.” Tommy sounded drunk. “I mean, a girl in her position. All that money. I bet she has to be suspicious.”
“Maybe. But I didn’t mean she was suspicious of people. I meant she was suspicious of me.”
“For good reason, I bet.”
“Well, I’ve known her all my life, for God’s sake. It’s not as if I have anything to hide. I knew her for years and years before Daddy bought our house out here.”
“In New York,” Tommy said helpfully. “At Brearley.”
Annabel took a long sucking swallow of beer. This was really hopeless. Tommy was already beyond the point where he was going to be of any use to her, and then what was she going to do? He’d end up passing out in the bathroom and she would have to drive him home, in spite of the fact that she didn’t have a legitimate license from any state. She rubbed the side of her face with the flat of her hand and tried to think. Tommy was snaking his hand up under the skirt of her metallic green minidress, but he seemed to have lost his sense of direction, or his focus, or something.