“I was being metaphorical. I think she was the right age.”
“Mallory’s decided she doesn’t want to be a debutante. She wants to sell her dress to Annabel Crawford.”
“I think a fair number of girls don’t want to be debutantes these days. I don’t think there’s anything unusual in that.”
“There’s nothing unusual about it. It’s just a disaster, that’s all. She can’t see that yet, but she will. And then I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
“Maybe she just doesn’t want to live a social life.”
“Oh, they all think they don’t want that when they’re seventeen. They all think they’re too pure and noble, and they just want to be authentic, and all the rest of it. It’s all rot. You know it’s all rot. They change their minds as soon as they grow up, and then if you haven’t forced them, they’re doomed.”
Peter looked back at the television. There was an announcement on, highlighting a coming retrospective on the Monica Lewinsky affair. All Monica All the Time, Kayla had called it, when she’d gotten fed up with the way the story seemed to jam even her favorite radio stations. He had a sudden vision of her, the last time he had seen her alive: her hair blowing a little in the wind, her wide eyes so perfectly blue. Then he thought that that might be a trick of his memory. That might not have been the last time he saw her alive.
“Well,” he said, looking down into his drink.
Sally finished hers. “I know how desperately important it all is, so of course I do a lot of work to make sure it comes out right. That only makes sense. Wouldn’t you agree that that only makes sense?”
“Sure.”
“Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get what you want. You have to understand that. I know you understand it.”
“Anybody would understand it.”
“No, not anybody would,” Sally said. “Those people, the ones who belong here, the ones who got into the club because their grandparents belonged and their mothers came out here, they wouldn’t understand it. Annabel Crawford. Kayla Anson. Everybody says you were sleeping with Kayla Anson.”
“Do they?”
“Mallory even says it’s true.”
“It was true. For a time.”
“It wouldn’t have lasted,” Sally said. “She wouldn’t have stayed with you. Those kind never do. When it comes time to marry they always find one of their own.”
“Nobody was talking about marriage.”
“I’ll bet you were thinking about it,” Sally said. She caught the eye of the bartender and signaled him. “I don’t think Mallory is ever going to marry. She’s never going to marry one of them. Too fat. Too stupid. Too sullen. Way too sullen. She takes a Nobel Prize in sullenness.”
“What an ugly thing to say about your own daughter.”
The bartender had arrived with another frothing drink. Sally signed for it and took a long pull on it. Then she hopped off her bar stool and brushed out the wrinkles in her skirt.
“I’m not saying anything everybody else isn’t saying. I hear it all, sitting in that goddamned bursar’s room. And it suddenly hit me today, that I’ve gone through it all, I’ve done everything I could and more than I should have and it’s not going to matter. It’s not going to matter at all. It’s all going to be for nothing.”
“Right,” Peter said.
“Like you and Kayla Anson,” Sally said.
She picked up her drink and started off with it, swaying a little as she went. It was the first time Peter realized that she was drunk.
No, Peter thought, he really did not like Sally Martin-dale. She was a dangerous woman, at the moment. She had lost her nerve.
Peter did not think it was possible for him ever to lose his own.
2
Her name was Zara Anne Moss, and she had graduated from Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury in the class of 1992. Faye Dallmer kept repeating that information to herself, over and over again, as if it had some kind of special significance. She wasn’t too sure what that might be. They had given her a lot of information about Zara Anne, these policemen who had come to sit in her living room this early evening. They had told her things she had never expected to know. Zara Anne was much younger than she had thought she was, for instance. Zara Anne had been part of a local dramatic group for two years and taken the lead in a production of The Glass Menagerie. Zara Anne had spent a year at Trinity College in Hartford and been required to leave when her grade point average dipped consistently below a D.
There were so many policemen in the living room, Faye didn’t know what to do about them all. There were policemen from Washington, where Zara Anne’s body had been found. There were policemen from Watertown, where Faye’s house was. There were state policemen. Faye concentrated on the one civilian, the big man she now knew to be Gregor Demarkian.