“Have you talked with him lately?”
“No.I’ve had a couple of messages on the machine from him, but I didn’t see much point in returning the calls.”In fact, John hadn’t asked her to return them, whichwas typical.He called the shots.If he phoned her and she was out, he figured that was her loss.
“What’s happening with the engagement?”Arlan asked.“Have they set a date?”
Heading for the door, she tossed back a nonchalant, “No date yet, but the engagement’s still on as far as anyone knows.”
“Think you’ll be invited to the wedding?”
“God, I hope not.”Just thinking of it was painful.She would have to arrange a conflicting engagement.Perhaps she’d be out of town on business.She would be out looking for evidence that John had tampered with his father’s will.She liked the idea of that.
“Stick it to him, Hillie!”Arlan called as she passed into the hall.
She didn’t acknowledge the comment, but a small smile played on her lips during the elevator ride to the lobby.Once outside, though, her smile faded.She could do it, she realized.If she found evidence of a bequest to Cutter, she could really stick it to John.After all he’d done to her, that would be satisfying.
Chapter 10
Boston, 1969
When John first told Pam that her father was dead, she refused to believe him.She had been waiting, frightened, for hours and now stood in the front hall regarding him mutinously.“You’re lying; He can’t be dead.”
“The medical examiner certified it.”
“He wouldn’t die.”
“He didn’t have any say in it.None of us do when it comes to that.”
“But he wouldn’t have driven through a light.He was a good driver.”
“We don’t know whether he drove through or lost control, but he was at that intersection at the wrong time.”
Pam struggled to make sense of what John was doing.“You’re saying that because you hate him.”
“I’m saying it because that’s what the witnesses said.The truck had the green.”
“It couldn’t have!”she cried, but the most convincing argument was right before her.John was acting strangely, more subdued than usual.He was looking strange, too, tired and pale.And he was putting up with her protests without yelling at her, without telling her what a spoiled little pest she was.That was the strangest thing of all.For once in her life, she wished he were behaving like a rat.
Now he pushed his hand through hair that looked like it had been ruffled a lot.“Pam, he’s dead.He’s gone.There was nothing they could do to save him.”
She shook her head and began to back away.“Where’s my mother?She was with him.I know she was.”
“She’s at the hospital.She’s been badly hurt, but she’ll live.”
“I want to see her.”
“Tomorrow.They just brought her out of surgery.She won’t be back in her room till morning.”
Pam didn’t ask what was wrong with her.She didn’t want to think anything was, didn’t want to know.“Can I see her then?”
He nodded, and he was true to his word.Not that it did much good.At the hospital the next morning, Patricia couldn’t talk with her.She couldn’t say that everything was going to be all right.She couldn’t tell her that John was wrong, that Eugene was up in Maine and would be back in a few days.She was too doped up with painkillers and sedatives.So Pam returned home with little reassurance to cling to.
Then the phone calls started coming, and the visitors,and the evidence seemed to mount in John’s favor.Various people from the office dropped by, as did some of those in Patricia’s circle.There were calls from Timiny Cove, even calls from the mothers of Pam’s friends.John handled the calls and the visits with a somberness that Pam found hateful.But he wasn’t the only somber one in the house.Late that afternoon, when she went into the kitchen and found Marcy in tears, she knew that Eugene truly was gone.
The funeral was held on a Monday, an affair that John kept deliberately small, as he explained to Pam, because of Patricia’s precarious condition.Pam suspected that he was only using that as an excuse.She suspected that he didn’t want a crowd because it would be too much of a tribute to the man he hated.
He couldn’t control the crowds at the burial in Timiny Cove, though.The entire town plus carloads of people from surrounding areas and as far as the state capital came to pay tribute to Eugene.These were the people who might have been a comfort to Pam, but John hustled her off in a black limousine immediately after the graveside service and had her back in Boston that night.
She was too unsettled to cry or to protest.Her mind told her that Eugene was dead, but her heart kept waiting for him to call or walk in the door or laugh his wonderfully robust laugh.Second to that, she waited for Patricia to call her from the hospital and say that she was feeling better and would be home soon.
