The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (20 page)

The dinner hour was over, and since quiz shows were playing on the television in the common room, Rose had invited “the girls,” as she called her hallmates, to come to her room for an impromptu party of bring-your-own soft drinks and crackers from the vending machines. Emma O., despite her earlier profession of loathing parties, was persuaded to come anyhow, as a therapeutic exercise in socializing. She sat on the floor with her back to one of the twin beds and watched the others laugh and talk as if they were a play and she was the audience. She had brought her legal pad and a stack of envelopes, so that she could work on her correspondence while she listened.

“Still writing letters of apology to society’s victims?” Elizabeth asked her. “Who is it this time?”

“Tonya Harding,” said Emma O., still scribbling. “The ice skater? Because …?”

“Well,” said Emma O. “Tonya Harding may or may not have conspired with her husband to break that other ice skater’s leg before the Olympic tryouts, but a year or so after that incident the other ice skater definitely did break up some other
woman’s marriage. In fact, after the divorce became final, she married the guy. So if it’s a question of which of the two skaters inflicted the more lasting injury to someone, I’d say that the answer is: Not Tonya.”

“Okay …”

“Also, I think Tonya was hooted out of skating because she wasn’t the willowy well-bred ice princess that people expect to see in the sport. She was a scrappy working-class kid from a trailer, and skating was her one chance to make it out, but nobody cared. They threw her out of amateur skating permanently for something she was never convicted of doing.”

“Yes, Emma, but athletes are role models. They are held to a higher standard.”

“Oh, please!” said Emma O., waving her pen. “Mike Tyson went to prison for rape and got back in the boxing ring, where he promptly bit part of his opponent’s ear off. Darryl Strawberry continued to play professional baseball after his drug convictions—and Tonya can’t skate. Why?”

“Well, if you put it that way …”

“Damn right I do. Tonya Harding got a raw deal. On behalf of the planet, I’m begging her pardon. Anybody want to sign this one?”

Three hands went up.

“Being crazy is so damned liberating,” said Emma O., passing the letter around the group. “I wish I’d cracked up sooner.”

“I wish I could get all the way to delusional,” Elizabeth said. “Then maybe I could forget Cameron.” She thought for a moment. “Am I the only person who ever talks about why I came here?”

Seraphin, whose weight on the bedspread caused scarcely
a wrinkle, looked up. “Sometimes people talk about it,” she said softly. “I don’t mind telling you. I came because my parents insisted. I just hope my marriage can survive it.”

“Oh, but surely your husband understands that you’re ill.…”

Rose Hanelon, who had overheard the conversation, laughed. “That creep! He refuses to believe that there’s anything wrong with her!”

Elizabeth looked at Sarah Findlay’s hollow eyes and the childlike body with its pipe stem arms and legs. “But surely …”

Seraphin smiled. “Philip loves the way I look. Like a greyhound, he says.”

“Can’t he afford to buy food?”

Rose laughed again. “Interesting that you should say that, Elizabeth. Sarah’s husband has more money than God. He comes from one of those old blue-blood families who haven’t had to buy any silver in a hundred years. It’s quite a Cinderella story—which should make you think twice about fairy tales.”

“I wasn’t poor,” said Seraphin. “Just middle class. My father was a bank president and my mother’s a nurse. We even belonged to the local country club—but I wasn’t in Philip’s league. We met in college, when it’s hard to tell what class anybody is. He was majoring in philosophy, but that didn’t tell me much. I thought he might become a minister.”

“What did he become?” asked Elizabeth.

“Philip didn’t exactly become anything,” said Seraphin. With one bony finger, she traced a pattern on the untouched can of diet soda on her lap. “He just went on being himself. I mean, we moved to one of the family homes near Savannah, and Philip serves on the board of a few of the family’s companies,
but that still leaves him most of the week to play golf, and lunch at the club, and sometimes we go sailing. But mostly we go to parties. I didn’t fit in terribly well. I kept making mistakes that I didn’t even know were mistakes, like saying ‘couch’ instead of ‘sofa,’ or ‘drapes’ for ‘curtains.’ And all the women were so terribly thin. They used to make catty remarks, in their well-bred tones, about my ‘healthy appetite,’ and my ‘buxom’ figure. Then Philip started to make ‘helpful’ suggestions, like, ‘Do you really need a whole baked potato, darling?’ So one day I just decided that if I wanted the marriage to last, I’d better slim down. A lot.”

“I wish you could teach me how to do that,” Emma O. remarked.

“There’s no trick to it that I know,” said Seraphin. “As a teenager I was always rather thin, and of course we all dieted, because it was a social thing to do, whether one needed to or not. So I may have had a tendency to skip meals a bit too much. Anyhow, after the day I resolved to become as thin as I could get, I just wasn’t hungry any more. And I felt very powerful, because my body was the one thing in my life that I could control. Everyone there thinks I look marvelous in clothes now. Philip is pleased.”

“But your parents weren’t?”

“No. I went home for a visit, and I had a silly fainting spell, and my mother, who’s a nurse, put me in the hospital. The doctors insisted I come here, but Philip is furious. He says that a corn-fed hick may be my parents’ idea of normal, but it isn’t his.”

Everyone was silent, because there didn’t seem to be anything
to say that wouldn’t make things worse. Seraphin was going to die or she was going to lose her husband, or possibly both.

“Too bad therapy can’t fix what’s really wrong with the world,” said Emma O. “But it can’t, which is why it’s so tempting to try to kill yourself.”

“It was tempting,” said Rose. “I know just what you mean. I got up one morning, and I was just sick of trying. Sick of being ugly. It’s wearisome for a woman, being ugly. You always have to watch your man, because you know that no matter how good you are, or how successful you are—” She nodded toward Emma when she said “successful.”

“Are you successful, Emma?” Elizabeth was surprised. Somehow she had imagined Emma O. living in her parents’ basement and spending her days watching
Star Trek
videos.

Lisa Lynn, Emma’s roommate, laughed. “Are you kidding? Emma O. is a whiz with computers. Companies were fighting to get her, and throwing stock options at her left and right. She made her first million at twenty-eight.”

Emma O. shrugged. “Money didn’t help. The software industry is practically a sheltered workshop for Asperger’s people, but they’re mostly guys, so it’s all right. Allowances are made for them. Women are expected to be the grease between the wheels for all these loners—and I was just as bad as they were. Nobody wants to work with me.”

“Maybe money would help for a while,” said Rose. “I’d sure love to find out. But I think that in the long run, nothing would change. Like I said, no matter how good you are, or how successful—”

“What?”

“You know what. The relationship.” She drawled the word with a mocking smile. “He’ll leave you for anybody. Anybody. And every year the pool of anybodies gets a few thousand girls larger, and you get older and wrinklier.”

Elizabeth realized that they had come round to the subject of loss. “So you lost a loved one, too?” she said.

“Of course, I did. Loved one may be putting it a bit too strongly, but he was pretty important to me. He was a photographer at the paper. He wasn’t much, but I did think we got along pretty well together. He was forty-seven and unmarried, not particularly good-looking, practically no social skills, and he barely made minimum wage, and so I thought, ‘Well, this is a nice, safe little relationship. Who else could possibly want him?’ Ha! Some twenty-something blonde in Classifieds got her hooks into him, though God only knows what she saw in him. I guess that’s when my drinking really got out of hand. Being ugly is like an automatic twenty points off in the quiz of life.”

“You know, they shouldn’t send women to crazy houses,” said Emma O., waving a candy bar for emphasis. “They should send them to spas and plastic surgeons. Because there’s almost nothing ever wrong with a woman that being thin and pretty wouldn’t cure.”

“You’re not going to start that again are you?” Elizabeth sighed. “There are lots of people worse off than you are, Emma. Look at poor Mr. Randolph with his scarred face.”

“Hillman Randolph is a man. I’ll bet there are people who say that his scars give him character. Catch them saying that about a woman!”

“I think he’s just as unhappy as the rest of us, though. Does anybody ever visit him?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” said Rose. “He doesn’t hang out with anybody much. Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “He seems lonely,” she said. She patted the pocket of her sweater, where her cousin Geoffrey’s fax lay carefully hidden. It seemed that to make any progress, she would have to befriend Hillman Randolph.

P
.J. Purdue liked to drive. Under ordinary circumstances she was inclined to go well above the speed limit, but just now she was driving a stolen car, and even though they had taken the precaution of swapping license plates with an unsuspecting fellow hotel guest the night before, she knew that it would be dangerous to call attention to herself on the highway. She drove the speed limit and stayed in the right-hand lane as much as she could. Carla, who was already worried because they were not making a beeline for Canada, had made Purdue promise to stop using any credit cards, her own or stolen ones, because charged purchases left a paper trail, thus increasing their chances of being caught.

She glanced over at Carla, asleep in the passenger seat, with only her nose visible through a tangle of corn-colored hair. Carla wasn’t really a daredevil. Her crimes had been committed out of poverty and desperation, not for the thrill of exacting revenge on an unjust system. Purdue’s unholy glee at finding more victims for their rampage had left her confused and frightened. She kept saying, “But the point is to get away, isn’t it?”

Purdue would always solemnly agree that the point was to
escape and to live happily ever after—ultimately—but she had business to take care of first, and now that the roads were beginning to look familiar again, she felt her pulse quickening with excitement.

They were on I-81 now, headed east, and a large blue-and-gold sign had just welcomed them to Virginia. Now she was six hours from her alma mater in Williamsburg, three from A. P. Hill’s law practice in Danville, and somewhere in between lay the ancestral home of the Purdues, where her grandfather lived, but she had no plans to visit him unless she had nowhere else to go. She wondered if A. P. Hill had got in trouble when her name turned up in Banker Jenkins’s complaint to the Arkansas police. She had probably been questioned, which meant that she would be annoyed, but A. P. Hill needed to be shaken out of that good-little-girl complacency that enveloped her like a cocoon.

She pulled into the
VIRGINIA WELCOME CENTER AND REST AREA.
“Bathroom break,” she told Carla, turning off the engine. “Are you coming?”

“No,” came a sleepy voice from within the tangle of hair. “You go ahead.”

Purdue grabbed her purse and headed for an empty pay phone. The cops were probably monitoring her telephone calling card number, but perhaps they had overlooked that detail in tracing her. Besides, this was a public area far from their destination. It didn’t seem like much of a risk. She pulled a piece of paper out of her billfold to refresh her memory, and then punched in 0, the 804 area code for southeast Virginia, and then the number. When the mechanical voice asked for her calling card number, she punched that in, too. Live dangerously, she thought.

After three rings, a brisk voice said, “MacPherson and Hill, attorneys-at-law. Edith speaking.”

“Hello, Edith!” said Purdue in her best imitation of a social voice. With any luck she’d be mistaken for someone else. “Is Powell there? I really need to chat with her for a minute.”

There was a moment’s pause, during which Purdue could picture the secretary trying to place her voice. Finally she said, “A. P. Hill is out of the office this week. Would you like to leave a message?”

Purdue laughed and did her best imitation of a socialite. “Goodness, no! It isn’t business. It’s girl stuff. Can you give me her cell phone number? My address book went to the cleaners in my raincoat, and all the numbers got smudged.”

The idea of the driven and humorless A. P. Hill having any girl stuff to talk about was entirely beyond Edith’s powers of comprehension, but hers was not to reason why, she thought. The voice on the phone obviously wasn’t a salesman, an old boyfriend, or a bill collector, so there didn’t seem to be any reason not to give out the cell phone number. She recited it slowly so that the caller could write it down. “Now what did you say your name was?” asked Edith, in a belated attempt to document the call.

She heard a gurgle of laughter on the other end of the line. “Tell her it’s about Milo. She’ll know. Thanks, Edith!” said the young woman’s voice. Then a click.

Purdue hung up the phone and glanced at her watch. She had been on the line less than a minute and a half—not that anybody would be trying to trace her from A. P. Hill’s number, but still it was reassuring to know that they couldn’t. Besides, in another couple of minutes they’d be miles away down I-81. She
headed into the mock-colonial building that served as the state’s welcome center. She might as well pick up a free road map while she was here. Later on they might need to take a few detours if the cops did pick up their trail. She grinned at the thought of careening down Virginia back roads with sirens wailing behind them. It was an exciting thought, but it didn’t fit into her plans, and she knew for a fact that Carla would be too scared to enjoy the experience. She’d better keep driving sixty-three miles per hour and not take any chances. Well, maybe a couple more chances. They were going to need more cash pretty soon. She’d have to talk Carla into doing one more job—one more, that is, before the one that counted.