As Fran looked around the room, she did not see Tim Mason’s compassionate glance, nor did she realize that the expression in her eyes brought back to him vividly the image of the teenage girl mourning her father.

34

Annamarie Scalli had agreed to meet Molly at eight o’clock at a diner in Rowayton, a town ten miles northeast of Greenwich.

The location and the hour had been Annamarie’s suggestion. “It’s not fancy, and it’s quiet on Sunday, especially that late,” she had said. “And I’m sure neither one of us wants to bump into anyone we know.”

At six o’clock-much too early, she knew-Molly was ready to leave. She had changed clothes twice, feeling too dressed up in the black suit she first put on, then too casual in denims. She finally settled on dark blue wool slacks and a white turtleneck sweater. She twisted her hair into a chignon and pinned it up, remembering how Gary had liked her to wear it that way, especially liked the tendrils that escaped and fell loosely on her neck and ears. He said it made her look real.

“You always look so perfect, Molly,” he would tell her. “Perfect and elegant and well bred. You manage to make a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt look like formal dress.”

At the time she thought he’d been teasing her. Now she wasn’t sure. It was what she needed to find out. Husbands talk to their girlfriends about their wives, she thought. I need to know what Gary told Annamarie Scalli about me. And while I’m asking questions, there’s something else I want to talk to her about: what she was doing the night Gary died. After all, she had a good reason to be very, very angry with him too. I heard the way she spoke to him on the phone.

At seven o’clock, Molly decided it finally was reasonable to leave for Rowayton. She took her Burberry from the downstairs closet and was headed toward the door when, as a last-minute thought, she went back up to her bedroom, took a plain blue scarf from the drawer, and searched until she found a pair of oversized Cartier sunglasses, a style that had been fashionable six years ago but probably was dated now. Well, at least they will give me a sense of being disguised, she decided.

At one time the three-car garage had held her BMW convertible, Gary ’s Mercedes sedan, and the black van he had bought two years before he died. Molly remembered how surprised she’d been when Gary showed up with it one day. “You don’t fish, you don’t hunt, you wouldn’t be caught dead on a campground. You’ve got a big trunk in the Mercedes, easily big enough for your golf clubs. So what’s with the van?”

It had not occurred to her at the time that, for his own purposes, Gary might have wanted a vehicle that looked exactly like dozens of other vans in the area.

After Gary ’s death, his cousin had arranged for his cars to be picked up. When Molly went to prison, she had asked her parents to sell hers. As soon as her parole was granted they had celebrated by buying her a new car, a dark blue sedan she’d selected from the sales brochures they sent.

She had looked at the car the day she came home, but now she got in it for the first time, enjoying the smell of the new leather. It had been nearly six years since she had driven, and suddenly she found the feel of the ignition key in her hand to be very liberating.

The last time she had been behind the steering wheel of a car was that Sunday she had returned from Cape Cod. With her hands on the wheel now, Molly could visualize that drive. I was gripping the wheel so tightly that my hands hurt, she remembered as she backed out of the garage, then used the remote to close the door. She drove slowly down the long driveway and onto the street. Normally I’d have put the car in the garage, but I remember that night I stopped right in front of the house and just left it there. Why did I do that? she wondered, straining to remember. Was it because I had the suitcase and, that way, wouldn’t have to carry it as far?

No, it was because I was frantic to talk to Gary face to face. I was going to ask him then the same questions I’m going to ask Annamarie Scalli now. I needed to know how he felt about me, why he was away so much, why, if he wasn’t happy in our marriage, he hadn’t been honest and told me instead of letting me waste so much time and so much effort in trying to be a good wife to him.

Molly felt her lips tighten, felt the old anger and resentment surge through her body. Stop it! she told herself. Stop it right now, or turn around and go home!

Annamarie Scalli arrived at the Sea Lamp Diner at twenty after seven. She knew she was ridiculously early for her meeting with Molly Lasch, but she wanted very much to be the first to arrive. The shock of actually speaking to Molly, of having her actually track her down, had not set in until after she had agreed to the meeting.

Her sister Lucy had argued strenuously against keeping the date. “Annamarie, that woman was so upset about you that she bludgeoned her husband to death,” she had said. “What makes you think she won’t attack you? The very fact that she may be telling the truth when she says she doesn’t remember killing him tells you she’s a mental case. And you’ve always been afraid because you know too much about what was going on at the hospital. Don’t meet her!”

The sisters had argued all evening, but Annamarie had been determined to go through with it. She had reasoned that since Molly Lasch had tracked her down, it would be better to go ahead and meet with her face to face at the diner rather than to risk having her show up at her home in Yonkers, maybe even stalking her as she tried to take care of her clients.

Once inside the diner, Annamarie had headed for a corner booth at the far end of the long, narrow room. A few people were sitting at the counter, their expressions glum. Equally malcontent was the waitress, who had become annoyed when Annamarie had refused the front table at which she’d tried to place her.

The gloom of the diner only added to the feeling of foreboding and despondency that had come over Annamarie on the long drive back from Buffalo. She could feel fatigue settling into her bones. I’m sure that’s why I feel so low and depressed, she told herself without conviction, sipping the tepid coffee the waitress had slapped down in front of her.

She knew much of the problem stemmed from the argument that had raged between her and her sister. While she did love her sister dearly, Lucy was not shy about hitting her where it hurt most, and her litany of “if onlys” finally had gotten to her.

“Annamarie, if only you’d married Jack Morrow. As Mama used to say, he was one of the nicest men who ever walked in shoe leather. He was crazy about you. And he was a doctor, and a good one at that! Remember, Mrs. Monahan came in to say hello that weekend you brought him up here? Jack said he didn’t like her color. If he hadn’t persuaded her to go for those tests and that tumor hadn’t been found, she wouldn’t be alive today.”

Annamarie had continued to give the same answer she’d been giving Lucille the past six years. “Look, Lucy, give it a rest. Jack knew that I wasn’t in love with him. Maybe under other circumstances, I could’ve loved him. Maybe it would’ve worked out if things had been different, but they weren’t. The fact was, I was only in my early twenties and on my first job. I was just starting to live. I wasn’t ready for marriage. Jack understood that.”

Annamarie remembered that the week before Jack was killed, he had quarreled with Gary. She’d been on her way to Gary ’s office but was stopped in the reception room by the sound of angry voices. The secretary had whispered, “Dr. Morrow is in there with Dr. Lasch. He’s terribly upset. I haven’t been able to make out what it’s about, but I suppose it’s the usual-a procedure he wanted done for a patient has been canceled.”