Deadly Beloved

by Jane Haddam

  Tiffany had put the photograph down on the desk. Julianne picked it up herself and looked it over. There were six of them in this picture, but only four of them counted: Patsy MacLaren and Karla Parrish and Liza Verity and Julianne herself. Julianne couldn’t even remember the names of the other two. She put the picture back down on the desk and rubbed her forehead.

  “Well,” she said. “A photo op. That’s fine, if Karla wants to go along with it.”

  “I’ll contact her people. It’ll probably be a good career move for her too.”

  “Maybe it will be.”

  “I’ll get you the things you need for the health care people,” Tiffany said. “There isn’t much you need to know. There’s nothing you’re going to be able to do for them this year anyway.”

  “Mmm,” Julianne said.

  Tiffany hurried out of the office and shut the door behind her. Julianne picked up the photograph again. She could remember buying this frame, the urgency she had felt at the time to keep this remembrance pristine, to make sure it didn’t tear or fade. She had just come back from India and just started law school. She was living in a fifth-floor walk-up only two blocks from the university and eating Chef Boyardee macaroni cold out of cans at least three times a week because she couldn’t afford to use her electricity for cooking. She rubbed the side of her face with her fingertips and thought that she ought to grow her nails long and paint them scarlet. If you were going to transform yourself from nothing into something, you ought to take care to make the transformation complete.

  “If you could go back and do your life over again,” Tiffany had asked her once, “what would you do that was different?”

  “I’ve got the sheets you need if you want to look at them,” Tiffany said now, coming in with a stack of papers. “Do you want to see these people as soon as they come in, or do you want me to make them wait?”

  “I’ll see them as soon as they come in,” Julianne said.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Tiffany asked her. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Julianne said.

  Then she looked down and made herself concentrate on the lists of figures on health insurance premiums, which didn’t matter because, like most things in life, they could only get worse.

  8.

  AS SOON AS LIZA Verity came in from work she saw the red light blinking on her answering machine. There was something about the way it was blinking that made her not want to hear the message—although, God only knew, even Liza knew, answering machines didn’t have moods. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t in a very good mood herself. Sometimes Liza didn’t really mind the way things had turned out. Life seemed to be a matter of choices, and these were the choices she had made. Other times—now—Liza knew it was all wrong. She had graduated from Vassar, for God’s sake, and back in the days when it was an all-women’s college and just as hard to get into for girls as Harvard and Yale were for boys. Liza Verity, class of ’69. Women like her did not end up wearing a nurse’s uniform nine hours a day, not even as the heads of ICU wards. They didn’t end up saying “yes, doctor” and “no, doctor” to overgrown boys who had barely had the grades to make it into Penn State. They became doctors, or lawyers, or congresswomen, like Julianne. At the very least, they married rich men and lived splendidly somewhere in the Northeast Power Corridor and hired Martha Stewart herself to cater their daughters’ graduation parties. Liza threw herself down on her small couch and stretched out her legs. Her white uniform shoes were heavy and awkward. Her white uniform stockings reminded her of the silly things they used to wear when she was first in college, back when miniskirts and being mod were still in vogue. Liza remembered thinking, at the time, that there was no end to possibility. She would just go on and on and on, experiencing everything. She would never have to stop. She would never want to stop. She would never grow up or grow old or find herself in a two-bedroom ranch house on a quarter-acre plot in the worst residential section of Gladwyne, just plain stuck.

  I should have done something serious to get myself stuck, Liza thought. I should have had an illegitimate baby or blown up a bank or been in a terrible accident or run through dozens of men.

  The red light on the answering machine was still blinking and blinking. Liza stabbed at the play button and threw her head back against the couch, closing her eyes. Her uniform was made of some sort of synthetic material that was always too stiff and too sharp. When she had first been in nursing school, she had gone out of her way to get uniforms in real cotton and not minded the extra expense of having them starched and pressed at a laundry. Then the other women in her class had found out what she was doing and it had been impossible. They had all started out half sure that she was just some stinking rich bitch, coming in from Vassar and thinking she was better than everybody else. After they knew about the uniforms, they wouldn’t talk to her at all.

  “Liza,” a voice said from the answering machine. “This is Courtney Hazelwood. Would you be available to do special duty work next week?”

  Courtney Hazelwood was the head of the pediatrics nursing unit on the fourth floor. She was ten years younger than Liza, but she had gotten further faster, probably because she had no attitude problem. When Courtney Hazelwood said that nurses were serious professionals who deserved more money, more responsibility, and more status, she meant it.

  “Liza.” It was a male voice this time. Pompous. Young. Insufferable. “This is Dr. Martinson. Could you call me as soon as possible about the Brevoric case? You forgot to make some notes on the file.”

  Liza made a face at the machine. Dr. Martinson was barely thirty. He thought he was the next best thing to God, but he was always screwing up, and that was what this would turn out to be. Liza never forgot to make notes on the file. She was meticulous. Dr. Martinson, though, always forgot to make half the documentation he was supposed to. He was always in trouble with the administration about it, because they all had to be so careful with the legal ramifications of everything these days.

  “Liza?”

  Liza sat up a little straighter on the couch. The voice belonged to Julianne Corbett. Julianne never called anymore, not since the election. She had gotten to be too damned important to bother with Liza Verity. Of course, before the election, while she was campaigning, Julianne had been behaving like the best friend Liza would ever have in the world. Liza had organized a party so that Julianne could meet all the really important people in the nurses’ union.

  “Liza, listen,” Julianne’s voice said. “I just found out something wonderful. Karla Parrish is coming to Philadelphia.”

  Liza’s eyes went automatically to the small oak liquor cabinet on the other side of the room, where she kept all her important photographs in frames. Then she looked away, embarrassed, because of course the picture wasn’t there. She had taken it down nearly five years before. It makes us all look silly, she thought now. Like the heroines of one of those women’s novels who all thought they were the best and the brightest but who had turned out to have failed lives and second-rate lovers instead.

  “Anyway,” Julianne was saying, “you should call me, because I’ve had the best idea. I think we ought to have a party for Karla when she comes, don’t you? A kind of Vassar College mini-reunion. She’s spent the last ten years or something in Africa and I’m sure she’s just dying to catch up, so why don’t you give me a call as soon as you have the chance and we can work it all out. My number is—”

  Liza reached out and turned off the machine. She knew what Julianne’s number was—or at least what her office number was. She didn’t have Julianne’s home number, which was supposed to be all right because Julianne used call forwarding. It was probably just a way for Julianne to keep her at a distance. So was this business about getting Liza to call Julianne back. Julianne knew perfectly well what Liza’s work schedule was. Liza had had the same one for two and a half years.

  I wonder what Karla was doing in Africa, Liza thought. Maybe she’s been like Julianne and Patsy
were that time, all in love with primitive peoples and trying to go back to the land. That hadn’t worked out all that well with Julianne and Patsy, had it?

  Liza picked up the receiver on her phone. You had to do odd things to the answering machine to make sure it didn’t start working right in the middle of your making a phone call, but Liza avoided those by just unplugging the thing. Then she dialed Julianne’s office number and waited.

  “The office of the Honorable Julianne Corbett,” a female voice said.

  Liza made a face. “This is Liza Verity,” she said. “I would like to talk to Julianne.”

  “I’m not sure the congresswoman is available at the moment. Is there something I could help you with?”

  “I’m a friend of hers from college. She left a message on my machine.”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  Music began playing in Liza’s ear: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Liza made a face at her feet. Then Julianne’s voice came on the line, sounding bright and strained.

  “Liza,” she said. “How good of you to call. I must have just missed you. It was only minutes ago.”

  I’m sure it was, Liza thought. “What was Karla doing in Africa?” she asked. “Was she living in tree houses and learning how to make native jewelry?”

  “No, no.” Julianne sounded impatient. “She’s a photographer. Did you see The New York Times last Sunday, the magazine? The cover story on the war in Rwanda?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.” The hospital had several subscriptions to the Times, for doctors and patients. The hospital administration seemed to assume that nurses couldn’t read.

  “Well,” Julianne was saying, “that cover picture, that black-and-white thing of all the boys, that was Karla’s. And the rest of the pictures in the article were Karla’s too. She’s practically famous, I mean it. Like Annie Liebowitz or Mary Ellen Mark.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “So am I.” Julianne sounded impressed. Liza heard her take a deep breath. “Anyway. I thought I’d give a party, and we could have all the people from our Vassar class that I could find—there have to be dozens of us. The Main Line has a very active alumnae club. We ought to get a very good crowd. What do you think?”

  “I think it sounds wonderful.” Actually, Liza thought it sounded terrible. She could just picture it: herself in her nurse’s uniform and all the rest of them in their Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein; herself with nothing to talk about but bedpans and union troubles and the rest of them going on at length about the prospects for a rise in IBM stock in the new year. It would be like starting out at Vassar all over again.

  “Good,” Julianne said. “Then it’s all settled. I’m going to have to go through her agent—can you believe that? It’s been so long since any of us has seen Karla, I’ll have to go through her agent. Unless you’ve been in contact with her? Have you?”

  “Julianne, I didn’t even know what she was doing for a living.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well. Anyway, I’ll have to go through her agent, but I’m sure it can all be arranged. And I was thinking that maybe I’d invite a few members of the press too, you know, because—”

  “Ah,” Liza said.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.” Julianne was stiff. “Ah.”

  “Ah, now I understand what all this fuss is about. Why you want to give this party.”

  “I want to give this party because Karla is a good friend of mine and I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “I never thought Karla was that good a friend of yours.”

  “She was one of my closest. And so were you. We were almost a family, the four of us—”

  “Six,” Liza said automatically.

  “Whatever. We were almost a family, and now you’re saying God knows what. Honestly, Liza, that attitude of yours is going to get you in trouble.”

  “It already has. On several occasions.”

  “Well, then. You see what I mean.”

  Liza kicked her right shoe off and listened to it land with a thud on the floor. She began to work her left shoe off with the toes of her right foot, digging at the shoe’s heel the way some people used toothpicks to dig at their teeth.

  “Don’t you wish you could find out what Patsy MacLaren thought about all this?” Liza asked Julianne. “Wouldn’t you just love to hear it?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Sure you do. Patsy MacLaren, relegated forever to obscurity. Karla Parrish, getting famous as a photographer. Karla Parrish getting famous as anything. Do you remember the things Patsy used to say about Karla?”

  “Patsy and Karla were very good friends,” Julianne said.

  The second shoe was off. The two shoes lay like dead white jellyfish on the carpet.

  “Patsy MacLaren was never a friend to anyone,” Liza said, “and certainly not to awkward, drab girls who didn’t know how to dress.”

  “Really,” Julianne said. “The things you think about to say. And I don’t see what good it does obsessing about poor Patsy now. She’s not even around for you to take it out on.”

  “I think it’s a very good idea that she’s not around.”

  “Well, I miss her,” Julianne said, “and you probably do too, if you’re honest about it. And besides, it’s hardly her fault that she’s—relegated to obscurity, as you put it.”

  “I’ve got some work to get done around here,” Liza said. “Call me back when you’ve got some details on this thing.”

  “Oh, I will. I will.”

  “Say hello to Karla for me if you get the chance.”

  “You can say hello to Karla yourself. At the party.”

  “I’ve got to go, Julianne.”

  Julianne said something else that Liza didn’t hear. Liza hung up and spent a moment staring at the phone, as if it would tell her things she needed to know, like how she could be almost fifty and still not satisfied with her life. Her parents’ generation had made such a point of trying to grow up. Maybe she should have made a point of it too, so that she didn’t feel adolescent and geriatric at the same time, staring at white shoes on a blue carpet.

  Crap, Liza thought, standing up and heading for the small kitchen at the back.

  It really was too bad there was no way of knowing what Patsy MacLaren would have thought about Karla Parrish making a success of herself. It really was too bad that Patsy had sunk out of sight and left not so much as a ripple in the water.

  Still, Liza thought, sometimes you had to admit it. Sometimes life really did work out just the way you wanted it to.

  9.

  FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, AT precisely eighteen minutes after four o’clock, a black Volvo station wagon parked on the second level of a Philadelphia garage began to rock. The noise it made was so distinctive, the man in the glass ticket booth at the garage’s entrance began to get disturbed. He was worried that there were vandals in the garage, or teenagers looking to steal something they could sell for serious money. The neighborhood around there had been going to hell for years. The man put out his cigarette on the cement floor of his booth and stepped out into the air. He lit another cigarette and rocked back and forth on his heels. Maybe he ought to go back into the booth and call the cops. Maybe he ought to just walk away from there, take what money he could and leave. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking this cigarette. Nobody was supposed to smoke on duty in the garage. He took a deep drag and started up the incline.

  The Volvo was parked in one of the spaces that faced that ramp. He saw it as soon as he came up over the rise, bucking and shuddering, as if somebody were having trouble with a standard transmission. For a moment he thought that must be what it was. Somebody was having trouble getting their car started. Then he saw the driver’s seat behind the wheel and realized that no one was there. The car was absolutely empty and the locks on the doors closest to him were pushed all the way down.

  The woman who wanted the all-day parking ticket, the man thought to himself as he continued climbing up the ramp.
Then he heard something like a pained grinding of gears and stepped instinctively back. The stepping-back probably saved his life. A second later there was a scream and a blast. The garage was suddenly so hot, it was like being in a blast furnace. Smoke and fire shot up out of the Volvo and side to side too, hitting the cars on either side of it, starting a chain reaction in a small Toyota that had come in only half an hour before. Smoke and fire was rising up into the concrete. Metal was everywhere, and glass, and what felt like melted rubber still hot enough to burn flesh.

  The man began to back down the ramp. Then he turned and started to run. He ran right out of the garage and onto the street. The sidewalks were full of people at a dead stop. Black smoke was billowing out of the garage’s third level. Windows were broken on cars half a block away.

  “Fire department, fire department,” the man started shouting, but no one was listening to him.

  They were all standing stock-still in the street, so that when the second large blast came—the biggest one, ripping through cars on either side of the Volvo like a buzz saw through balsa wood and shooting bits of debris into the air like lethal snow—three people had their eardrums shattered and four got bits of powdered glass in their eyes.

  PART ONE

  A Marriage Made in Heaven or Someplace

  ONE

  1.

  FROM THE MOMENT THAT Gregor Demarkian had first heard about Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, he had wanted to be happy about it. After all, he kept asking himself, what could there possibly be not to be happy about? In all the years Gregor had known her, the one thing she had really needed was a good husband. She was only twenty-two years old and on her own with a small child. The small child’s father had disappeared into the mists of studied irresponsibility as soon as he had heard of the impending arrival of the small child. The man she was marrying was a blessing too: Russell Donahue, once a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department, somebody they all knew. Donna was even going to go on living on Cavanaugh Street. Howard Kashinian was fixing up another dilapidated stone house on the northern edge of the neighborhood. Donna’s parents were giving her the down payment for a wedding present. Russ was just as happy to live there as anywhere else—happier, in fact, since the neighborhood was safe and he liked most of the people in it.