Locust Lane(92)
“Come right home,” she said, worried that he might be planning to slip back to Emerson to see Hannah.
To her surprise, he hugged her.
“You got to stop worrying about me.”
“Fat chance of that.”
Once he was gone, Celia restlessly paced the big house. She didn’t like staying here. The place wasn’t exactly teeming with fond memories. Having nothing to do didn’t make it easier. For now, Oliver was taking care of everything, dealing with the police and the press and Rapid Response Cleaners. She was supposed to be resting. The plan was for her to return to action when they got home on Sunday. If six days seemed too soon to anyone, that only proved they’d never shared a house with Katharine de Vissier. Granted, her mother had been profoundly sympathetic when they first arrived the morning after. About the attack, of course, but also the vicious slander her beloved grandson had endured running up to it. Celia’s mother did not use social media—she didn’t even own a computer, and on the rare occasions she operated the iPhone Celia bought her, she touched the screen like someone picking swallowed diamonds from stool. She did, however, listen to the gossip of friends, and they were kind enough to provide her with chapter and verse descriptions about the terrible things being said about Jack.
Her compassion, however, had soon devolved into something less supportive. Katharine, who’d been charmed by Christopher on the night he’d stayed over, started speaking of him as if he was a beturbaned, bazooka-wielding member of the Islamic State, even though she knew that he was a baptized Catholic with an early acceptance at BC and a handshake offer to attend Le Cordon Bleu. None of this mattered to Katharine. His arrest had reinforced a long-held opinion she’d somehow never managed to express. For Celia to let Jack become entangled with this ticking time bomb of murder and mayhem was parental malpractice of the first order.
“It’s just odd nobody saw this coming,” Katharine said, her tongue loosened by her third Dubonnet. “I’m glad I lock my bedroom door.”
“For heaven’s sake…”
“And I cannot for the life of me understand why you’d confide in that woman.” Evidently they’d moved on from Mohamed Atta to Hester Prynne. “Didn’t you have any idea that she was a con artist?”
“I knew she had an eventful past. But no, I didn’t think she was a con woman. Nobody could have.”
Katharine leveled a dark maternal glare at her.
“Don’t go too easy on yourself, sweetheart.”
“Not a concern, Mother.”
They settled into a difficult silence, neither really wanting to enter into a full-on argument with Jack within earshot and Oliver due home.
“Well, just be glad the police arrived before that lunatic did something.”
She shuddered, then retreated to her room to start her evening round of cocktail calls. Celia wouldn’t go so far as to say she was glad that Detective Procopio had arrived when he did. Not when she remembered the look on Patrick Noone’s face. At least her mind had blocked the shooting itself, as well as the moments leading up to it. She’d have thought it would have been the immediate aftermath that was scrubbed. But that was all starkly present. The ringing in her ears and the smell of a thousand struck matches. Jack sitting with his back against a cabinet door, eyes shut, his fists balled, like a newborn. The squawk of a radio. And Patrick lying on his back, his eyes fixed on a point a million miles above the ceiling, his expression one she could only call wonder.
But of the moments before that, nothing. The last thing she remembered was hearing voices in the kitchen. And then she was looking after her son. Her initial temptation had been to take him to her mother’s immediately, but he was needed to make a statement to the police. Drew and Scotty arrived just before dawn. Both were ashen. Nobody could understand it. Michel Mahoun would have made a certain kind of grisly sense. But Gabi’s father? He’d always seemed so gentle. Even when his poor daughter had been in such dire trouble at the house, he’d handled it calmly and with grace.
Their business at the scene concluded, they went to her mother’s. Together for the first time since Christmas, the Parrishes sat in Katharine’s drawing room as Oliver explained what he’d learned. Patrick’s behavior leading up to his attack on Jack had been bizarre. Clearly, it had been him at the house on Saturday night. He’d gone to the police yesterday morning, spewing conspiracy theories. This came just an hour after he’d been fired from his job for drinking. There had also been some sort of confused shoplifting incident at Whole Foods.
“But I still don’t get why he came for Jack,” Drew said.
“He’d been claiming he saw him outside the Bondurant house on the night Eden was murdered,” Oliver said.
“What was he doing on Locust at that time of night?” Celia asked.
“Wandering around aimlessly. If he was even there.”
“And he seriously thought he saw Jack?” Scotty asked.
“Only after he read everything being posted online,” Oliver said. “Supposedly that jogged his memory. Hence the visit to the police.”
“Jesus, couldn’t he just drag him online like any other red-blooded American?” Drew asked, his scowl deepening.
“It gets stranger,” Oliver said. “He seems to have convinced the girl’s mother that there was something to all of this.”