True Believers(141)

“You,” Ian said, “are making mountains out of molehills. Because if you think I killed Bernadette Kelly, you’re crazy. There are other ways of getting out of trouble if you have to. I’m not about to go around offing people with arsenic and risk a death sentence. And besides, you can explain Bernadette Kelly, but what about the rest of them? That gay boy. And the nun. And now—what? What’s going on down the street?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe it’s another one,” Ian said pleasantly. “What did you think I did, Edie, drop in over at St. Anselm’s and off somebody on my way here to pork you? One of the other nuns, maybe, or one of the altar boys. If they still have altar boys, after everything that’s happened there.”

“I’m not saying you killed anybody.”

“Well, you’re saying something, Edie. Maybe you ought to come right out and just say it. Because if you think you can blackmail me, you’re very wrong.”

“I thought you didn’t want publicity. I thought you said it was dangerous.”

“Dangerous isn’t the same as lethal.” Ian got out of bed and grabbed for his pants. He had no robe here—he had never kept any of his clothes in this house—but his underwear was lying right on the floor at the side of the bed. He wore boxer shorts with prints on them. It was one of the things Edith had found most fascinating about him when they had first met.

“I think you’re underestimating the problem,” Edith said. “You can’t really think that nobody is going to find out. Not now. The new Cardinal isn’t like the old one. He’s going to do an audit one of these days, and he’s going to find those extra names you put on the victims’ list. And he’s going to know it was you. Even Bernadette Kelly knew it was you.”

Ian stopped with his trousers halfway up his legs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Everybody else will,” Edith told him.

Ian pulled his pants the rest of the way up and buttoned them. Then he reached for his shirt. “I think it’s time we cooled this off a little,” he said carefully. “You’ve gotten too wound up in it. You’re under too much stress. We need a vacation from each other.”

“Every time somebody came up who could expose you, they died,” Edith said. “Did you notice that? Bernadette Kelly. And that gay boy, as you call him, who was the lover of one of the victims on that list. I’m not a detective genius, Ian. If I found out, everybody else will.”

“I think you’re insane,” Ian said. “I think you’ve walked straight into one of your fantasies and can’t find your way out. You’ve got no idea if that gay boy was the lover of one of the pedophilia victims, and even if he were, what would he know that could hurt me? And what about the other one, the nun? I’ve never even met the nun. And what about what’s going on down there now?”

“There are four extra names,” Edith said carefully. “On one of the lists of victims, there are four extra names. They change the calculations. You slipped it by the old Cardinal Archbishop because he was practically senile, and now you’re stuck with it, and everybody who knows anything about it has died.”

“If that’s the case, Edie, I’d be more worried than you are to have me in the house. If I’ve already killed at least three people, I might not be fastidious about killing one more.”

Edith looked at Ian standing at the side of the bed. He had started to put on his shirt, but it was still unbuttoned. It was a good shirt, cotton oxford, with a button-down collar. Sometimes it seemed to her that Ian dressed entirely out of a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, or maybe John O’Hara.

She walked out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. She turned on the light and closed the door. She had jogging things hanging in the cupboard. She put those on, because she couldn’t stand the idea of going back down the hall to her own bedroom. Everything in this house was cramped and old. Everything was—ordinary. Her jogging things were bright red. The pants had racing stripes down the outsides of the legs.

Dressed, she came back into the hall and listened. Ian was still in the bedroom. She could hear him swearing under his breath.

“I’m going down to the kitchen,” she called to him.

He didn’t answer, but she didn’t expect him to. For days now, she had known what was going on, what was happening to them. She had been in enough love affairs in the course of her life to understand when one had suddenly become unglued. The energy was gone. The passion just seemed hallucinatory. Except that she had never been in this particular love affair for energy, or for passion. The truth of it was, Ian disgusted her, physically. He was the kind of pale, half-soft man who made her feel as if he were oozing.