SARAH LOCKWOOD KNEW SHE had to be careful. At this stage in things—the almost-but-not-quite, the just-next-to-done—anything could happen to screw it all up, and the last thing she wanted was for something she did or said to bring the whole thing crashing down on her head. Because of that, she was even grateful to Patsy Willis for killing her husband and bringing a pack of detectives down on their heads. The detectives made Kevin nervous, but Sarah saw them as a distraction. Joey Bracken was so fascinated by the things that were going on in the Tudor across the street, he was barely looking at the papers Kevin had spread out in front of him on the breakfast room table. The papers were the most impressive Sarah had ever seen. God only knew where Kevin had gotten them. They went on for pages and pages of utter incomprehensibility. There were maps too, but Sarah knew where Kevin had gotten those. They had been copied out of an ancient edition of the World Book Encyclopedia they had in the basement and then run through the computer so that they would look official. Now one of them had a “lot” outlined in red highlighter and marked with an X. Joey’s cashier’s check was paper-clipped to the page just above the X’s top left tip. Joey was leaning sideways in his chair, trying to see if something was happening at the Tudor, although nothing was. It was too late in the day for policemen and too late in the week for anybody to be much interested in Patsy Willis. The explosion in Philadelphia at Julianne Corbett’s party had taken everybody’s mind off spousal murder.
“Do you think she did it?” Joey Bracken was saying, his pen poised above the paper he was supposed to sign like a safe poised to fall on Daffy Duck’s head in an old cartoon. “Tried to blow up Julianne Corbett, I mean. They all say she probably did it.”
“I don’t see why Patsy would want to blow up Julianne Corbett,” Sarah said. “From everything I’ve heard, she worshiped the woman.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that too,” Joey said. He sounded eager. Sarah thought he looked awful being eager. His eyes bugged out. The fat line across his stomach seemed to pulse. It made Sarah crazy to think that Joey and Molly had more money than she and Kevin did. Joey looked like he ought to try out for the starring role in a movie about a guy who spends his whole life in a diner and Molly—
—but Molly wasn’t there. Sarah got up from her chair at the table and went into the kitchen, looking for Perrier water, looking for a way to calm down. She also took some nuts out of a cabinet near the stove, because unlike most of the people she knew, Joey Bracken ate most of the time. He had been in her kitchen for half an hour now and he had already gone through an entire bowl of potato chips and half a cheese roll.
“The way I see it,” Joey was saying, “is that she’s not quite right in the head. Patsy, I mean.”
“That’s the way we all see it,” Kevin said. “Jesus Christ. We wouldn’t want to think she was right in the head. We wouldn’t be able to go to sleep next to our wives.”
“What?” Joey Bracken said. “Oh. Oh, yeah. I never thought about it like that.”
Joey Bracken’s cashier’s check was for thirty thousand dollars. It was made out to himself, as if he had asked a lawyer for advice about it—but Sarah didn’t think he had. She thought he had just asked somebody he worked with at his bank. She wondered what Joey really did there. She couldn’t believe he had a serious job. He was just too stupid. She wondered what Molly’s father did too. Maybe it was Molly’s father who had the money, and he was with the mob, which was the kind of organization Sarah could imagine Joey succeeding in.
“The thing is,” Joey said, “if you look at it this way, then she’s likely going to try to strike again, right? The question is, where?”
“You mean Patsy Willis is going to try to blow somebody else up?” Kevin looked shocked.
“It stands to reason,” Joey Bracken said.
“I don’t think it stands to reason at all,” Kevin said. “You don’t even know she blew that party up. That’s just speculation.”
“It was the same kind of bomb,” Joey said.
“It’s a really simple kind of bomb,” Kevin told him. “I could show you how to make one myself. I have made one myself. Back when I thought I was going to be a revolutionary.”
“I never knew you thought you were going to be a revolutionary.” Sarah brought the nuts to the table. Joey Bracken grunted when he saw them and reached out for a handful of cashews and Brazils. The peanuts were oiled and salted. Joey got a wash of grease across his palm.
“Are you just going to buy Molly the lot for a birthday surprise,” Sarah asked him, “or are you going to get a builder and put the house up and present the whole thing to her as a kind of big package?”
Joey looked down at the paper he was supposed to sign. “Oh, I couldn’t build the whole house without telling her. She’d know there was money missing. This is about as big a surprise as I’m going to be able to get. And I’m not going to be able to keep it a surprise at all.”
“I keep a private checking account for things like that,” Kevin said. “You ought to think about it. Otherwise, you can’t buy them anything serious, and they like to have things bought for them. Wives, I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. But Molly says she doesn’t trust me with money. I work in a bank, she ought to trust me with money.”
“I know just what she means,” Sarah said. “I have the same problem with Kevin all the time. Men just don’t have the same priorities women do.”
“Molly wants to have a baby,” Joey said. “It just doesn’t seem to happen for us. I was thinking that maybe this would cheer her up.”
“Well, it certainly is a cheerful place,” Kevin said. “Sarah and I can attest to that. We get cheered up every time we think about it.”
“And it’s still so reasonable,” Sarah said. “Oh, I know it doesn’t sound like it when you’re used to land prices in Pennsylvania, but in Florida these prices are ridiculously low. Especially for waterfront. Friends of ours just bought a waterfront lot in Boca Raton and it cost them three quarters of a million dollars. For the lot.”
“Oh, I know. I know,” Joey said. “And Molly wants a vacation place. She’s said so over and over again. Did the Willises have a vacation place?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “We didn’t know the Willises all that well. They were—well, you know. Older people. Set in their ways.”
“Stuffy,” Kevin contributed solemnly.
“I was just thinking that if the Willises had a vacation house, Patsy could have gone there.” Joey reached into the little bowl and took the rest of the nuts out of it. His whole hand looked salted. “She has to be somewhere. She can’t just have disappeared. And yet she has disappeared. Just listen to the newspapers.”
“Listen to the newspapers?” Sarah said.
Joey waved his greasy hand in the air. “To the television news. You know what I mean.”
“The television news doesn’t know everything,” Sarah said. “I’ll bet the police know where Patsy is right this minute. They’re just biding their time.”
“Biding their time for what?” Kevin asked.
“To have all the evidence they need before they go to trial,” Sarah said. “To make sure they can lock her up. All those things. They don’t like to make arrests and then later have the person go free at the trial. You know how it is.”
“You watch too much television,” Kevin said.
“I’d better sign this thing,” Joey told them. He leaned over the paper and signed, which Sarah and Kevin didn’t pay any attention to. Then he took the cashier’s check out from under its paper clip and signed the back of that over to Kevin Lockwood. Sarah and Kevin did pay attention to that. That was what really mattered here. That was what was going to get the bills paid for the next couple of weeks.
“Well,” Kevin said as Joey handed the check over.
“I got to thank you for doing this,” Joey said. “I couldn’t ever have done it on my own. I don’t know enough about this kind of thing.”
“There’s nothing much to know,” Kevin said. “And it’s going to be old-home week down there next year. Evelyn and Henry are doing this too. It’s going to be Fox Run Hill all over again.”
“Molly doesn’t like Evelyn and Henry,” Joey said. “She thinks Evelyn is too fat. And she thinks Henry is a prick.”
“Does she?” Sarah said.
Kevin put the check in the chest pocket of his shirt, folded up, out of sight. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad you’re doing it. It will be good to see you and Molly down there next year. Or this year. Whenever you decide to build.”
“I still think somebody ought to check into whether or not the Willises had a vacation house,” Joey said. “You don’t want a person like that wandering around in the open, do you know what I mean? Even if it is a woman. It isn’t safe.”
“I’m really sure she isn’t after you,” Sarah said.
“The next thing you know, she’s going to try to blow up the president of the United States, and then there are going to be days and days and days of Dan Rather moaning about how we never do things right and get them settled beforehand. You just wait. And don’t forget: If she was gunning for Julianne Corbett, she didn’t get her.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.
“She didn’t get her,” Joey insisted. “Corbett is still alive. Which means maybe they ought to have a guard on Corbett.”
“Maybe she was gunning for that photographer who took the awful pictures of starving people,” Sarah said, “or maybe she was gunning for that woman from the animal rights movement who got blown up. Or maybe it wasn’t Patsy Willis at all. Really, the way people go on about this, you’d think space aliens had landed on the ninth fairway at the Fox Run Hill Country Club.”
Joey Bracken got out of his chair and went to stand at the sliding glass doors that led out to the patio, and that also looked around the back toward the Willises’ mock-Tudor.
“Maybe that’s what happened,” he said solemnly. “Maybe aliens landed at the country club. It sure as hell feels odd enough around here since Patsy offed Steve.”