28 Hearts of Sand (35 page)

Authors: Jane Haddam

BOOK: 28 Hearts of Sand

9.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

“I’m right on time,” Caroline said. She went up the walk and then through the front door, past Charlotte and into the foyer. Cordelia was in the foyer, looking grim.

“We’ve been lucky so far,” Cordelia said, “but how long can you expect that to last?”

“I’d give it another five minutes at the outside,” Caroline said. “Somebody will talk if they haven’t yet. Where did they put the urn that they brought in the enormous hearse for no reason?”

“It’s in the living room,” Charlotte said. “I put it on the fireplace mantel. The mirror is still broken, but it seemed to be the right kind of place.”

“Why are the people from the funeral home still here?” Caroline asked.

Charlotte and Cordelia looked at each other.

“Well,” Cordelia said. “The man said he’d just stay around to help, you know, if we needed anything.”

Caroline counted to ten. “Get rid of him,” she said. “Get rid of anybody from the funeral parlor and anybody who isn’t us. If they followed my instructions about the urn, I can carry it myself when this farce is over.”

Cordelia and Charlotte looked at each other, and Charlotte hurried at the door.

That was something she would never have, Caroline thought. She would never have that mental telepathy her older sisters had shared with each other, that ability to have entire conversations without words.

She went into the living room. The space above the fireplace where the mirror had been was still ugly and still raw. The blue white marble urn on the mantel right in front of it was just as small as she had asked it to be. Caroline put her hand out to touch it, but she felt nothing. What did she think she was going to feel? Chapin was dead, and Caroline had to use everything in her body and mind to keep herself from adding, automatically, “finally.”

Charlotte came into the living room, looking strained. “He’s gone,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s going to look a little odd? Aren’t people from the funeral home usually there when there’s a service going on?”

“I don’t care,” Caroline said. “I just want to wait out the suitable interval, and then I want to get out of here. Where’s Cordelia?”

“I’m here,” Cordelia said, coming through from the same direction Charlotte had come. “He’s left the driveway. I watched. There are other people in the driveway, though. Some of them have cameras.”

“I don’t care,” Caroline said again. “Let them sit in the driveway and stew. God only knows they ought to mind their own business.”

Cordelia sat down on one of the couches and smoothed the knees of her black dress pants.

“So here we are,” she said. “And it’s over. Can you believe it’s over?”

“I can’t believe we got away with it,” Charlotte said. “Thirty years is a long time. It’s practically forever.”

“We were very careful,” Caroline said. “We never saw her. We never talked to her. We never even really wrote. I was so surprised when I found out she was in New York. It hardly seemed possible. None of those places I sent the envelopes to was ever New York. None of them were even in New York State.”

“She probably had that man running around, picking things up for her,” Cordelia said. “Did you see him on television? Could you believe Chapin would ever know anybody like that? Well, it was Chapin. It is odd, though.”

“My oldest sister robbed five banks and killed two people,” Caroline said. “That’s odd enough for me. I want to make sure we all get what’s going on here. We’re going to sell the house. We don’t need it anymore, and Chapin doesn’t need it anymore, so we’re going to get rid of it. And I truly hope to never set eyes on it again.”

“She let that man come into the house and take our family pictures,” Cordelia said. “Isn’t anybody bothered by that but me?”

“There is no free lunch,” Caroline said. “She had to pay him with something. She needed his help. Let it go. Sell the house.”

Charlotte straightened up a little. “Yes, of course. We’ll sell the house. We’ll have to get it cleaned up and repaired. I wonder what she was thinking, shooting it up this way. And the report on the news said that Hope was in the house when she did it. When Chapin did it. Hope Matlock.”

Cordelia sniffed. “Well,” she said. “The Matlocks. I don’t see that that’s all that surprising.”

“That’s true,” Charlotte said. “Most families who’ve been here since the
Mayflower
are very well off by now, it’s the natural progression of things. If the Matlocks weren’t, you do have to assume that something was wrong.”

“You could tell there was something wrong about Hope in elementary school,” Cordelia said. “She didn’t even look like a human being half the time.”

Caroline looked from one of her sisters to the other.
Our older sister planned and carried out five bank robberies and killed two people. And she didn’t need the money. She did it for kicks.

Caroline got up and walked out into the foyer, away from the talk.

This was not her home in the way it had been home for Charlotte and Cordelia and Chapin. This was a place that she had always feared and been, just a little, ashamed of. She was not ashamed of her sister Chapin. Sisters were sisters. You could hate them, but you couldn’t ever let them go. That was the difference between people like the Matlocks and the Veers, and people like the Warings. That was the difference between people like the Warings and everybody else in the world.

The foyer was cool and dim and wide. There were sounds coming from just beyond the front door that let Caroline know that reporters had arrived. She imagined the fuss she would cause if she went out and told them, “Once every year or two, I got a letter with an address in it, and I sent a key and the security codes to that address, so that Chapin could come here. I didn’t know why she wanted to come here, and I never asked. I never saw her myself, but I wish I had. If she were still alive, I would go on doing it for her.”

Yes, it was amazing, really, that they had gotten away with it. But people did get away with these things. Sometimes they never stopped getting away with them.

Caroline passed through the foyer into the dining room, and sat down on a chair, and started to cry.

THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS
BY JANE HADDAM

Not a Creature Was Stirring

Precious Blood

Act of Darkness

Quoth the Raven

A Great Day for the Deadly

Feast of Murder

A Stillness in Bethlehem

Murder Superior

Dear Old Dead

Festival of Deaths

Bleeding Hearts

Fountain of Death

And One to Die On

Baptism in Blood

Deadly Beloved

Skeleton Key

True Believers

Somebody Else’s Music

Conspiracy Theory

The Headmaster’s Wife

Hardscrabble Road

Glass Houses

Cheating at Solitaire

Living Witness

Wanting Sheila Dead

Flowering Judas

Blood in the Water

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
ANE
H
ADDAM
is the author of more than thirty novels and is best known for her mysteries featuring Gregor Demarkian. A finalist for both the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award, she lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

This is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover art by Doron Ben-Ami

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Haddam, Jane, 1951-

Hearts of sand: a Gregor Demarkian novel / Jane Haddam.—First Edition.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-1-250-01234-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-02601-9 (e-book)

1. Demarkian, Gregor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.A613H43 2013

813’.54—dc23

2013013928