By early afternoon, Ryall Wyndham was as wound up as he ever thought he could be—too wound up to function, really, but he wasn’t as worried about functioning as he used to be. It was a big day. Murder or no murder, the Philadelphia social season was in full gear. In the next few weeks, there were enough hunt balls to make you think foxes were about to become an endangered species, and that in spite of the fact that this wasn’t the big season for hunting. Then there were the private debutante balls, the really important parties that marked a girl’s “honest” coming out, in contrast to the mass presentation balls, which were tacky, but everyone “did” them. Ryall would never have admitted it in public, but the truth was, he liked new-money debutantes more than he liked old-money ones. Old-money debutantes had no sense of fun. Half of them got their ball gowns at Sears, and he knew at least one, only two years ago, who had arrived at the Philadelphia Assemblies with a pair of sneakers on under her dress. New-money debutantes liked to make a splash. Ryall was all for splashes. He liked to make splashes himself. This year, the big status symbol for new-money debutantes was to have two dresses for every ball. They danced until midnight, then repaired to the powder room or a convenient bedroom and changed clothes: dress, shoes, gloves, jewelry. It was not only extravagant, but utterly mindless. That was the way it was supposed to be. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would never have made a go of The Philadelphia Story if the general public had ever known what really went on in those big old-money houses on the Main Line.
Today, the important thing was to look solemn, and to make sure not to say anything stupid while on the air. He was due to tape at four-thirty. He was going to be expected to say something about the murder of Charlotte Deacon Ross, and the trouble was that he had a lot to say. Which was that the old cow deserved to be dead, for one thing—God, how he hated those patronizing people, the ones who treated him as if he were their personal publicity agents, but too damned dumb and uncultivated to know the difference between Shakespeare and Dohnanyi. But it wasn’t just that. It was the attitude, that half-distracted look that told you you weren’t really on the same planet with this great, good, and important Goddess. She listened to you like she listened to the stereo when she’d put it on as background music. She’d notice if you were annoying, and she’d do something about you too, but otherwise you might as well have been in the next state. It was too bad he still needed to be careful about what he had to say about these people. He could tell the world a lot about Charlotte Deacon Ross: her rages, smashing crystal and dinnerware on hardwood floors when she wasn’t getting exactly what she wanted exactly as she wanted it; the way she fired help without cause or warning, sometimes in batches of twos and threes; her relationship with her oldest daughter, which resembled the relationship Medea might have had with her children if she’d allowed them to grow up. The only thing Charlotte didn’t do was screw. That made her infinitely different from most of her friends, who engaged in adultery the way they kept up their tennis, but it was mostly a matter of intelligence. Ryall Wyndham might have been a bug on the wall as far as Tony Ross was concerned, but he’d known that man well enough to know that if Charlotte ever gave him cause, he’d be out of that marriage in a shot. There was something for the tabloids and the infotainment programs. Men like Tony Ross do not get divorced, not ever. Men just a rung below them on the ladder sometimes did, but men like Tony did not. It was too damned dangerous, and too expensive. Still, Tony was looking for a reasonable excuse to get a divorce from Charlotte, and even Charlotte knew about it.
Ryall fixed his bow tie. He never wore ordinary ties, because they made him look even more like Porky Pig than he usually did. He checked his cuff links. He’d learned long ago that only French cuffs would do with the people he cared most about talking to. The self-buttoning kind were for middle managers and people who had jobs teaching in community colleges. He went to the door of his bedroom and looked down the short hall to the woman pacing back and forth across his living room carpet. Then he made a face. God, how he hated these women who pretended not to have money when they did. There was something beyond snobbish about an American upper class that prided itself on looking as if it were sleeping in Dumpsters, or worse. He wondered where she had gotten that stretchy-tunic thing she was wearing: Price Heaven, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Marshall’s. Even when he was flat broke and eating ketchup in hot water for lunch, Ryall Wyndham had bought his ties from Asbury’s and his shoes from John Lobb.
He checked himself out in the mirror one more time. If there had been plastic surgery to make you taller, he would have had it. He considered liposuction. He could get it done, but he would have to be careful not to let it get out. He really did prefer the nouveau riche in some ways. They wouldn’t have given a damn if he’d got himself sucked, and some of them would have sympathized.
He brushed off his jacket—a good tweed, from J. Press—and went out toward the living room. She heard the door open and stopped where she was to wait for him. She had a copy of Town and Country in her hands, one of the ones he kept on the coffee table because they contained stories he had written, or pictures of himself in the parties columns. She put the magazine down and straightened up.
“So sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. “I’m afraid I really do just kick back and pay very little attention when I’m at home. I shouldn’t, really. It gets me in the most difficult situations, and more often than you’d like to know.”
“There’s nothing difficult about this situation,” Anne Ross Wyler said calmly. “I surprised you. That happens. I should have called first.”
“No, no. Drop in any time. Really. I love to have company. And at a time like this, I find it perfectly understandable. You must be awash in grief. I know I am. Charlotte was one of my oldest and dearest friends.”
Ryall caught the sharp uptick of the left eyebrow. He’d been expecting it. Annie Wyler was famous for her eyebrows. He ignored it. He did not ignore the fact that he got a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction from the fact that he’d anticipated it.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said. “You look positively exhausted. And I don’t blame you a bit, of course. Two family funerals in the same week. I don’t know what’s happening to the Main Line. Even a few years ago, it was the safest place on earth. You could go anywhere there, even at night. Of course, Charlotte and Tony had security, but that was because of Tony’s position. He had to worry about international terrorists. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it turns out that international terrorists have begun to target Society. I’ll be scared to death to go out in the evenings, and it’s my life’s work.”
Anne Ross Wyler sat down, without looking behind her to see if a chair was there. Ryall felt his mouth purse up and did what he had to do to straighten it out again. He hated this about these women too. He hated the way they just expected things to be where they needed them to be, and the way the things were always there. Any normal person would have looked around to make sure she wasn’t about to fall on her ass.
“So,” he said. “What can I get for you? Coffee? Tea? I’ve got some excellent Ceylon, just arrived. I order it from a company in Bangkok. It’s the only place on earth you can still get decent Ceylon, I don’t care what anybody says.”
She was staring at him, placidly, waiting. Why didn’t she talk? God, he hated this about them too, the way they never got wound up, the way they just let you go on until you’d made a complete fool of yourself. Somebody ought to be appointed to teach some manners to the women of the old Main Line.
“Well,” he said.
Anne Ross Wyler took her tote bag off the floor and put it down on her lap. She reached inside it and came up with a long manila envelope. She opened the envelope and came out with a small handful of snapshots. Whatever was she going to do? Ryall didn’t think she would be bringing him family snaps of Tony and Charlotte to use in the column. She didn’t like the column, and she hadn’t seen too much of Tony and Charlotte over the last few years. She couldn’t stand Charlotte. There was something else he’d love to tell the world: How these old families stuck together in spite of the fact that they found each other’s company poisonous; the way Charlotte Deacon Ross had alienated even Tony’s long-suffering relatives. Surely, Anne Ross Wyler was long-suffering. She was also that creature he despised most in the world: the victim of social conscience guilt. She probably thought she was so damned holy, running a house for prostitutes, giving up on parties and expensive clothes just so that the rest of the people she knew would feel utterly and irredeemably inadequate.
She took the handful of snapshots and leaned over to put them down, one by one, on the coffee table. Ryall leaned over to look at them and stiffened.
“Do you know what these are?” she asked.
“They’re very murky snaps,” Ryall said. “It’s not possible to see much of anything in them, is it?”
“It is if you blow them up.” She reached into her tote bag again and came up, this time, with an eight-by-eleven glossy.
“It’s still murky,” Ryall said, after he’d had a chance to get a look at it. Still, it wasn’t as murky as the other one. It was just—but not absolutely—identifiable. “Maybe you ought to take lessons on how to operate your camera. You seem to need instructions on using a flash.”
“I was there, you know. I took these pictures myself. I stood just three feet from you on the night my brother Tony died and watched you take Patsy Lennon into that car.”
“I don’t know anybody named Patsy Lennon.”
“I’m sure you don’t. God only knows what name she’s using on the street these days. Did you know she was just thirteen?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ryall said. “If you’re insinuating that these are pictures of me, I’ll ask you to leave right this minute. I don’t think I’ve ever been this insulted in all my life.”
“I’m not going to leave,” Anne Ross Wyler said, “and you’re not going to throw me out. I was there. I stood on that stretch of sidewalk and watched you pick up a minor—more than a minor, what’s technically a child—and get her into your car to blow you. I moved in and looked through the windows and saw her.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You had a rental car. Don’t bother to whine. I checked.”
“You didn’t find my name on a rental agreement,” Ryall said. “I assure you, I did not rent a car.”
“Do you mean you did it under an assumed name? That won’t be hard to unravel. Maybe I’ll ask that Mr. Demarkian to do it for me. Don’t bother to protest, Mr. Wyndham. You’re not James Bond. I’m sure you’ve left traces a backward four-year-old could follow.”
“You’ve got nothing at all but a lot of murky pictures. It’s impossible to identify anybody in them, except of course the girl, who, I’ll admit, looks very young. But if you seriously think you can get me arrested on that kind of evidence—”
“Oh, no,” Anne said. “I don’t want to get you arrested. What would be the point? I followed you afterwards, you know. I followed you right up to the gate of Tony’s house. I know what you saw.”
“What are you trying to do? You know what would happen in books at a time like this, if what you’re alleging is true. I’d kill you now and dump your body in the incinerator.”
“You won’t kill me. And this building doesn’t have an incinerator.”
“Well, Mrs. Wyler, I really don’t see the point to your visit here. You don’t want to get me arrested. You’re not trying to get me to kill you. What do you want?”
“I want you to keep your mouth shut.”
“About what?”
“About everything that happened on the night Tony died. About who else you saw there. About what was going on at the gate when you arrived. About all of it. I saw it too. And I want you to do the one thing you’ve never been able to do in your life. I want you to shut up. Because if you don’t, I’ll use these pictures.”
“There’s nothing in those pictures to use.”
“Not for the police to use, no,” Anne said. “But I can think of a few other venues where they might be useful. I could, for instance, file suit against you for endangering the safety of a minor. Patsy Lennon has spent quite a lot of time at Adelphos House, did you know that? She’s a very troubled and fragile girl. The court might not grant me standing, or it might, but it wouldn’t matter, because I’d have made the charge a matter of public record. Then all I’d have to do would be to make sure it’s reported.”
“You couldn’t get a charge like that reported. The papers would be afraid of lawsuits. And besides, they’d find it trivial.”
“They’d find it trivial that their new media star and prominent witness to the Tony Ross murder is being sued on charges that he enticed a child into sex?”
“She wasn’t a child,” Ryall said, and bit his lip.
“She was thirteen,” Anne said. “And don’t kid yourself that the newspapers wouldn’t be interested, or the television news shows, either. Even the ones I don’t own significant stock in would be interested. The ones I own significant stock in might see some reason to make the story a priority. Did you know that I still had all that stock?”
“People like you always do, don’t you?” Ryall said. “You make a grand show of being Mother Teresa, but you never let go of the money and you never let go of the power. I ought to do a nice little exposé on you. Just so that the city of Philadelphia can see that you’re not anything at all like a saint.”
“I’ve never pretended to be a saint. Please get me all the publicity you can. Adelphos House can always use donations.”
“For all you know, I’ve already told the police whatever it is you don’t want me to tell them,” Ryall said. “I’ve already been questioned. I spent four hours at the police department the day after your brother was murdered. It was disgusting. But I told them everything I know.”
“Fine. Then it’s possible that you don’t know what I think you do. No harm done. But if you get some bright idea in your head, keep it to yourself. Don’t tell the police. Don’t tell Larry King. Just calm down and shut up. Because if you don’t, I’m going to take these pictures and shred your life, from the bottom up.”
“You’re such a bitch,” Ryall said. “You always were, even when I first started the column. You were probably a bitch in grade school.”
“I make a point of it.” Anne Ross Wyler stood up and took the snapshots off the coffee table. “You can have these, you know. I have the negatives. And I have copies. It doesn’t matter.”
“I want them out of here as fast as you can make them go.”
“Fine. Here’s one more thing. Stay away from Patsy Lennon from now on. And stay away from that street and all the rest of the girls on it. I’m out there almost every night. I’ll be watching for you. If you have to fuck children, take a sex tour to Thailand.”
“What wonderful language. All of you have completely foul mouths, have you ever noticed that? Do they teach that kind of thing in dancing classes?”
Her tote bag was packed up and back over her shoulder. Her coat was in her hands. Ryall didn’t remember her getting either. She was not a tall woman, but she was very trim. He didn’t think she went on diets or worked out to keep herself that way. Why was he thinking about Anne Ross Wyler on a diet? He thought he was losing his mind.
“I don’t understand how you can live the way you do,” she said, looking around the living room. Then she turned her back to him and walked off, out of the living room, into the foyer so tiny it wasn’t much more than a breathing space shoved against the door. He didn’t think she’d been talking about the living room, but he couldn’t be sure.
What he could be sure of was that he was sick. If he didn’t get up and get to the bathroom immediately, he would soil himself. All his muscles felt completely out of control. Everything was twitching. And the worst thing was, he had no idea what she was talking about. He really could have told the police already. He couldn’t remember what he had told them. He’d talked and talked and talked. He’d said whatever had come into his head. The same was true with what he’d been doing on television. He’d just talked.
He thought of himself, just through the gates when all hell had broken loose, the shouts of the security guards, the running of men in dark clothes. It had been like watching a movie. If there had been some secret there that he was supposed to have witnessed, he couldn’t begin to imagine what it was.
David Alden was getting extremely tired of the game. It wasn’t that he wanted to stop playing it, exactly. No matter what Annie Ross said, he was not, at heart, an emotional dropout from hypercapitalism. He’d always liked his job when Tony was alive. He’d liked being the one who knew everything, all the projections, all the risks, all the secrets. He’d liked being the one who made the decisions. Tony was supposed to make them, but in nine cases out of ten Tony left it to him, and they were both satisfied. Being Tony Ross’s second in command was like being the chief clerk to a justice of the Supreme Court. You were the one who had the expertise, who did the work, who made the change happen. You weren’t the one who got the blame for it when things went wrong. Well, David thought, not quite. If things went wrong enough, you could end up with plenty of blame, but it would be private blame, meted out in secret, not the kind that appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, when things went right, you didn’t get quite as much of the credit as you deserved, but David was finding he minded that less than he thought he had. Nobody in the bank seemed to know what to make of him anymore. They couldn’t get along without him. He was the only one who knew what Tony had known and who could explain it to them. They didn’t want to have to get along with him at all. Two murders had made him seem more than a little jinxed, and he could tell that some of them were beginning to wonder if he had committed them, or if he had somehow brought them on. Maybe there was a jealous husband out there aiming for his back. Maybe the jealous husband had less-than-perfect aim. Maybe the nuts had found out who he was and were using him as a pilot fish. Maybe he was a pilot fish by choice.
Now he looked out at the early morning downtown New York traffic and felt almost infinitely tired. He hated staying overnight in Philadelphia in the middle of the work week. He hated the morning commute, even on the Amtrak express. He hated not being able to get to his own things in his own closet in the only place he’d ever called home without ambiguity, the apartment he kept on Riverside Drive that had exactly one bedroom, no room for guests, no room for family, no room for expansion. Mostly, he hated the feeling of disorientation it gave him, so that his timing was off for the rest of the day. Maybe that was his problem. Some part of him was back there with Charlotte dying in her own driveway and Marianne shrieking like a gored pig and the police sirens in the distance, all of it seeming so familiar that he thought he would never be able to think of Tony’s place again without those sirens. He was, he decided, going slowly crazy. He looked up and down the street, which still seemed tense and cramped to him in the wake of September 11. He went into the building and across the high-ceilinged prewar lobby and into the ornate elevator. There were too many people in the halls, rushing in late to work, rushing around trying to get set up for the day. He rode the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor and got out again. He went down the hall to his own office and put his attaché case on his desk. He seemed to be the first one here besides the secretaries. He usually was. The secretaries were all hushed and agitated, and he didn’t blame them.
He unbuttoned his coat, but didn’t take it off. He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out on the financial district. He’d always liked this view. He still liked it, in spite of the fact that it had been … altered … somewhat in the destruction last year. He heard the door open behind him but didn’t turn around to see who it was.
“I saw you come in,” Adele said. “You didn’t have to come in. God, David, we’d all have understood if you’d wanted to take a day off.”
“I’ve still got Price Heaven up the wazoo,” he said. The view was altered, but not altered enough, that was the problem. He couldn’t see enough. “Get a coat on and come for a walk with me. Just for ten minutes.”
“A walk? Where are we going? The office just opened—”
“There are other people to handle the phones. You don’t do much of that anyway. Come take a walk with me. I want to go see it.”
“See what?”
“Ground Zero.”
“Good God, David, why?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, did you know that? Everybody else has been over there to take a look, but I never have. On the day it happened, the first I knew that there was something going on was when the windows blew out. All these windows. They just popped, suddenly. I was sitting at my desk going over the risk cost figures for the loan to the government of Peru, and suddenly snap snap snap. It was the oddest thing.”
“I think you should have stayed home,” Adele said. “I don’t think you’ve got your head on straight this morning. I know you didn’t like her much, none of us did, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the way she died. You knew her a long time.”
“Do you know Tony’s sister, Annie Ross?”
“Mrs. Wyler? I’ve met her a few times, why?”
“She thinks I’m turning on, tuning in, and about to drop out. She thinks I’m emotionally detached from banking.”
“Are you?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. At least, it’s not the banking. I know how this looks to people, you know. I hear all the jokes on Leno. Here we are, the heartless bank, making Price Heaven fire six thousand people right before Christmas. And I’ll admit, the timing is not stellar. If it were up to me, the physical year would end on August thirty-first and then these layoffs wouldn’t always coincide with the holidays, but Adele, the thing is, they’d still happen. They’d have to happen. And getting that damned fool CEO of theirs to take a cut in salary and bonuses wouldn’t keep a single extra person on the job.”
“I thought the idea was to get that damned fool CEO of theirs to resign.”
“It is. We’re going in on that today. But do you know what you get when you don’t have people like me, people like Tony, people like the bank—when you don’t have us coming in and forcing these things? Everything just jogs along getting worse until the business collapses completely. Or they get themselves a government bailout and then it jogs along even after it’s dead, and the money that could have been used to put life into a new and viable enterprise isn’t available, because we’re putting it into keeping a gigantic dinosaur alive and for what? For sentiment? It’s not even good sentiment. The collapse is going to come, no matter what. Staving it off just makes the mess bigger when it’s over.”
Adele cleared her throat. “David? You’re preaching to the choir here.”
“Yes,” David said, “I know. I know. Come take that walk with me. I want to move around a little before I start the day. And I want to see it. Just this once. Have you been?”
“We went—the whole bunch of us, all the exec assistants and most of the typists—we went the day after the observation platform was opened.”
“Why?”
“To see it,” Adele said.
“See?”
“Yes to see,” Adele said. “But we haven’t been back. None of us, that I know of. I think we wanted to see it because we’re all afraid of it. We’re still afraid of it.”
“You’re afraid the terrorists will come back?”
“No,” Adele said. “Not of that. I don’t know how to put it. The terrorists don’t bother me at all. They just seem like jerks.”
David turned his back to the window and sat on the sill. “You’re right. They seem like that to me too. Any loser can destroy things. They do it all the time. They get knives and guns and mug old ladies on Broadway. They set fire to buildings.”
“It’s—” Adele looked uneasy. “It’s just, you know, you hear all these things, about how we should appreciate other cultures for what they are, that every culture is great in its own way. And after that I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t true. Their culture isn’t great. If it was, they wouldn’t have done that, and their people wouldn’t have cheered it. And I shouldn’t say that in the bank. We have a lot of clients from Islamic countries. Stewart Markham down in development will call me an imperialist.”
“At least,” David said wryly. “Annie wants to blame it on religion—all religion, everywhere, leads to violence. Christianity had its religious wars and it burned its heretics and hanged its witches. The Hindus kill the Muslims in India and Pakistan. The Muslims make war on the World Trade Center. We should go to work to abolish religion.”
“How can you abolish religion?”
“I think it’s all an excuse,” David said. “All of it. Religion. Politics. Love. Hate. Rage. It’s all an excuse for the fact that some people love blood. They love destruction. They hate everything about themselves so much. They hate what they are. They hate their humanness. And mostly they hate other people’s humanness. They hate the fact that other people are human just the way they are, but they do so much more, they accomplish so much more. That’s what they have to get rid of. The fact that there’s no difference between themselves and those people, the people who do things, who make things instead of tearing them down. I think every murder ever committed on the face of this planet has been committed out of guilt.”
“I’d like to say I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t,” Adele said. “Maybe you should take your coat off and sit down. I’ll bring you some coffee.”
“Maybe you should get your coat on and come with me. I’m going to go look at it. When we come back, we can take a break from Price Heaven and look over the setup for the foundation Annie wants to endow for Adelphos House. We can write up the specs and send it down to Carver to hammer out the details. I want to go, Adele. I’d like you to come with me.”
“All right,” Adele said. “My coat’s right out in the hall. Let me get it. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home in bed with a tranquilizer?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re behaving the way some of us did right after it happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they call it. Some of the younger men walked around for days looking like they’d just been shot, and not being able to remember where they put anything. Tranquilizers do help, you know. And nobody would think worse of you for taking a day off when two of your closest friends have been murdered within sight of you in less than a week.”
“I don’t need a day off. Get your coat. Let’s go.”
Adele hesitated. Then she shrugged slightly, turned on her heel, and went. She left the door open. David stared through it for a moment. The outer offices looked busy. They always were at this time of day. In an hour or two, the men on the Asia desk would pack up and go home. They worked reverse hours to be in touch with the Tokyo market. He didn’t think he had been exaggerating. He really didn’t. Every murder was committed out of guilt, the guilt of knowing that you were less than you ought to be. That was what had happened on September 11 and that was what had happened to Tony and Charlotte. It was counterproductive to attempt to make something huge and special and enormous out of a terrorist attack, as if to be a terrorist was to be something more than human, or less. To be a terrorist was to be exactly human. To be a murderer was to be exactly human. No matter what the excuses were, at the bottom, the motives were always the same.
Less than you ought to be, David thought, turning to look out the windows again, through the narrow streets around Wall, toward the towers that weren’t there anymore. He thought about Charlotte on the walk in front of the house, the back of her head gone, the grey-pink spatter of brains on the windows next to the front door. He thought about Tony with his face blown away. He should have known at the very beginning. All the signs were there. It simply hadn’t occurred to him.
Now that it had occurred to him, he had no idea what to do about it.
Lucinda Watkins finished doing the dishes at eleven. The house was still almost as quiet as it had been in the early morning, except for the thumps and giggles coming from the second-floor drawing room where there was an encounter therapy session in progress. The day outside was grey and getting greyer. The kitchen was cold. One of the things Lucinda wanted to do, as soon as they had the money to do it, was to completely overhaul the heating system. It didn’t make any sense to her to keep the house freezing cold when so many of the girls came here to get in out of the weather. If it was always warm and glowing and comfortable here, maybe more of them would come.
She went down the narrow hall to the front of the house where the living room was and looked out the front windows at the street. That was deserted. Even hookers didn’t walk here, no matter what the time of day or night. She wondered if it was ever possible to find a hooker in the morning, on a business basis. She’d never thought about it before. They were so concentrated on the night in this place. Annie went out at night. Those pictures she was always bringing back were always taken in the dark. The windows of the cars that cruised the strip were sometimes tinted black too, although that was only for the men who could afford that sort of thing, or had the foresight to rent it. She wondered how many men rented cars to go trawling for tail. Then she winced at the phrase, even though she hadn’t spoken it out loud. It was Annie’s phrase. It sounded all right when Annie said it, just as it sounded all right when Annie said fuck or cunt as if she meant them. Annie could get away with anything. Lucinda didn’t think even Grandma Watkins would have disapproved.
She was restless, and agitated, and tired. She knew she had to go out, but she hesitated to do it. She didn’t want to leave and not get back by the time Annie did. She didn’t want to wait until Annie got home, either. She wondered how many people out there, how many ordinary, everyday people, really knew what people like Annie were like. Before she’d come to Adelphos House, Lucinda had been like everybody else. She’d only been able to guess, and her guesses had been made up of too many viewings of The Philadelphia Story and a few desultory forays into the fiction of Dominick Dunne. She’d been convinced that people like Annie—that people like Tony and Charlotte—were “all prim and proper,” as the saying went in her childhood, and that they only listened to classical music and went to Shakespeare plays. The truth was, she’d never heard anybody swear the way Annie did on a regular basis. Even the greaser boys of her adolescence, who’d made a fetish of their motorcycles and their violence, had had mouths less foul than Mrs. Wyler’s over breakfast and the morning paper. She thought of Charlotte, dead on the walk in front of her house, but it was hard to get a clear picture of the woman. Lucinda hadn’t known her very well. The few times they’d met, they’d said very little to each other, although it had been easy for Lucinda to see what Charlotte was thinking: trailer trash, cheap flash, vulgar. It was all well and good for Annie to fret over how paranoid and ridiculous The Harridan Report was, but it had a point, all the same. Those people really were different from you and me, if not different in the way the movies portrayed them as being. They didn’t watch television. They didn’t go to malls. They didn’t play the lottery. Of course, Lucinda didn’t do any of those things either, but that was different. She didn’t do them because she was here, working, and it was too expensive to keep more than two televisions on the premises, with cable, so there always seemed to be somebody using the one she wanted to use to watch Friends or listen to the news. And she didn’t play the lottery because she had sense. Every time she went home, or anywhere near it, she found her family and all their friends knee-deep in lottery tickets, hundreds of dollars of lottery tickets, and all of them losers. Learn to count, she wanted to scream at them— and then another happy-happy television commercial would come on for the Pennsylvania lottery, and it was like watching an ad for angel dust. The girls all played the lottery too, of course. They bought their tickets at the convenience stores they passed on their way downtown to work. They hid them where they hoped their pimps wouldn’t find them. Well, Lucinda knew, if one of them won, her pimp would find her soon enough. There was something The Harridan Report got exactly right. If the lottery wasn’t a plot of the rich to drain the blood of the poor, Lucinda didn’t know what it was.
She paced around the living room, aimless. She stopped at the window again and looked out again and saw nothing again. She thought about getting out the prospectus for the foundation Annie was setting up to fund Adelphos House. It was only a draft prospectus. The banks and the lawyers were still haggling over the details. Once the provisions were in place, Adelphos House would have a constant stream of income that would pay the bills and pay the taxes and pay the salaries of herself and two other full-time people, complete with benefits. Lucinda didn’t understand why it was taking so long to put it all together. Couldn’t you just take your money out of the bank and do what you wanted with it? There was something else The Harridan Report got exactly right. The money the rich had was different from the money ordinary people had, and not only because there was more of it. She wondered how banks stored their money. Were there vaults with gold under the rubble of the World Trade Center? Were there secret passages in Switzerland full of silver and precious stones? Surely, at some point, money would have to stop being paper for somebody. It couldn’t all just be a matter of blips on a ticker tape or pulses on a computer screen or those green oblong things everybody carried in their wallets and nobody thought about. Lucinda had seen French paper money once. It was odd how obvious it was that “money” was just paper when you looked at foreign currency, which you weren’t used to considering real.
Marvelous, she thought. I’m not only losing my mind, I’m working overtime at it. She didn’t want to look at the draft prospectus. She didn’t understand it, except for that bit about Adelphos House finally being set up to run independently of Annie’s writing checks. Of course, it would still be a matter of Annie’s having written a check, but a big one, so that they wouldn’t have to go back to her for more checks two and three times a week. She didn’t want to think about The Harridan Report, either. It gave her a headache, and then it made her feel a little resentful for being what it was. On one level, she couldn’t help thinking it was a work of genius. Only somebody truly plugged in to the way people think could have produced it, and that meant plugged in to the way they all think, the Annies as well as the regular people. She didn’t want to think about Adelphos House, either, which this morning felt like an oppressive weight. Sometimes it was like that. The whole history of human misery was wrapped up inside it and given a new name every hour: Patsy Lennon; Amy Margerbrad; Susie Kell.
She went back out into the hallway and back down to the other end of the house and got her coat out of the closet there. It was a big, heavy, thick wool thing that she’d bought at Price Heaven after a long summer of saving up. Annie would have given her the money to buy a better one. She’d have called it an “advance on salary” and then forgotten all about it. Lucinda had had no intention of asking. It was the kind of thing Annie did where she meant well, but it only made people angry.
Lucinda went back down to the front of the house. She could hear the encounter group rollicking away upstairs. Sometimes they screamed and cried for the whole two hours, but today they were laughing. She let herself out onto the street and looked around. Before she’d come to this place, she’d never believed that a city street could be utterly and irrevocably deserted, as if no human beings existed anywhere anymore, anywhere on the planet. She tried the door to make sure it locked. She turned left and began to move up the block as quickly as she could manage it with her weight. The wind was coming down between the abandoned buildings like swiftly flowing water through a shunt. It whistled and rattled and moaned. What glass was left in the windows around her shimmered in the very faint sunlight that emerged once in a while from the blanket of clouds. Annie said that she could feel the vampires who were buried here. Annie may have thought she was exaggerating for effect, but Lucinda knew she was exactly right. This neighborhood was full of vampires, and werewolves, and the shape-shifters that lived where no living thing could—and it had been a mistake for them to put Adelphos House here. They should have bought a building on a better street, closer to the action. They could have been right around the corner from the strip. Being where they were meant they were miles away from everything, even their own work—miles away emotionally, if not physically. Most of the time when they wanted to go anywhere, they had to use a car. That meant they had to keep two, just to make sure there was always one available at the house when Annie wanted to do her photographing. The wind sounded like children crying. The cold felt like glass. Lucinda knew there was no danger of it getting dark. It was still only late in the morning. She picked up speed anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to be caught on this street on foot after nightfall, when the vampires came out to feed and the werewolves began to wait in the shelter of the empty buildings that were just one small step from being shape-shifters themselves.
She made a right, past two vacant lots and a big building that might once have been a factory or a warehouse. She made another right, into the first faint stirrings of what could be called a neighborhood. She felt the muscles of her back ease a little, but only a little, because she knew she couldn’t stop here. She was too close to home.
In another three blocks, there was a street with some life on it. People sat on stoops. People went in and out of stores. People minded their own business. There was a big pharmacy there with pay phones in the back near the candy counter, old-fashioned ones with wooden booths. She would feel much better once she had made her call. History was an engine. It ground everything in its way to dust. If she wasn’t careful, they would all be dust too, and blood and skin and bone, lying out on the pavement, like those two people in Bryn Mawr.