True Believers(132)

Anne Marie was a daughter of the Main Line. She had gone to Agnes Irwin and Bryn Mawr. She had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies. If she had been prettier, she would have been the kind of person he would have expected to find on the cover of Town and Country. But she hadn’t been prettier. It was Bennis whose picture had appeared on the cover of Town and Country the year she was a debutante, and in Vogue, too, that same year, dressed in riding clothes and carrying a whip. Bennis still had both of those pictures, framed, in her own bedroom.

Anne Marie, on the other hand, could spend the next fifty years of her life in a maximum security prison and never be anything but what she was: a Main Line society lady; a volunteer for all things charitable; a devotee of the arts. Her body under the shapeless prison shift was thin and hard and wired strong. Her hair was carefully cut and curled back away from her face. Sometime not too far in the past, it had been dyed, and dyed well.

Henry Lord and Ed Nagelman left the room. So did the two armed men who had brought Anne Marie in. Gregor supposed they had searched her thoroughly before they had ever allowed her to leave her cell, but he wasn’t actively worried about it. He could imagine Anne Marie Hannaford doing a lot of things, but pulling a gun on him and trying to bull through an escape were not two of them.

He had stood, instinctively, as she walked in. Now he sat down as she did, stretching his legs out under the table a little ways. She sat with her legs crossed carefully at the ankles, the way girls were once taught to do at dancing classes, in the days when crossing legs at the knees was a signal that a girl was “fast.”

“Well,” he said, when it became clear she didn’t intend to say anything until he did. “I’m here. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”

“Since the trial,” Anne Marie said.

“That’s right. Since the trial. You asked me to come, Miss Hannaford. I came. It’s Bennis who wants to come.”

Anne Marie looked away. It was, Gregor thought, the first time she had blinked since she had come into the room. Then he realized that that couldn’t be right. She must have blinked a dozen times. It only seemed as if her eyes were propped wide open, as if they were arc lights on an empty roadway.

She stood up and rubbed her arms, seeming annoyed. “I know Bennis wants to see me. I don’t want to see Bennis. What would be the point of my seeing Bennis?”

“She’s your sister.”

“Myra was my sister. Emma was my sister. What difference does it make? I did see her once, you know, at a distance. At the funeral.”

“Funeral?”

“Our mother’s funeral,” Anne Marie said. “They let me attend. Sent me out there with enough of an armed guard to secure Panama City. I could have talked to her then, I suppose. I didn’t want to.”

“I think,” Gregor said, “that she feels that, under the circumstances, it would be a way to say good-bye, or to make amends—”

“Or to feel sorry for me, because that’s what she’s always felt for me. Sorry. I was a good person to feel sorry for. When we were young, she felt sorry for me because she was popular and I was not. When we were older, she felt sorry for me because she was pretty and I was not. When we were older still, she felt sorry for me because I was stuck taking care of our mother and she was making herself famous. Except, of course, that I didn’t feel stuck. I would have done that forever, if my father hadn’t been a son of a bitch. Did you know I could use words like that? Son of a bitch.”

“Everybody can use words like that,” Gregor said.

Anne Marie nodded. “I suppose so, yes. But I’m glad it’s over, if you want to know the truth. I know there won’t be a stay of execution this time. Our bloody-minded governor wouldn’t allow it. It means I don’t have to go on pretending anymore. Pretending I’m sorry. Because I’m not sorry. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe if you tell Bennis that, she won’t want to come.”

“She’ll want to come.”

Anne Marie sat down again. “Tell her to come for the execution. They issue invitations. It has to be witnessed. Teddy is coming for the execution, did you know that? It’s just like Teddy, wanting to see somebody dead.”

This, Gregor thought, was the stupidest situation he had ever been in in his life, and he had spent some time escorting vice presidents of the United States to official FBI functions. He had no idea why Anne Marie had wanted to see him, but she didn’t have anything of interest to say, and so far she hadn’t said anything he wanted to hear. He ought to get up and walk out on her. It would be better for Bennis if Bennis didn’t get a chance to talk to her. It would be better for him if he could get past this feeling that he had no right to make these kinds of decisions for anybody but himself.