Rapture

But there was nothing to it, she tried to reason. Nothing of any real substance. Suppose Jeff did have some kind of obsessive fixation about her. Wasn't it much more likely that he would have made some grand romantic play for her months before, even when Sean was alive? Married people fall in love, get divorced, and remarry all the time. He wouldn't have had to go to the deranged extreme of wiping out her whole family. And even if he had been happy to see Sean removed from the picture, there was no reason, no need whatsoever, for Bonnie to die too. It was crazy, that line of thought. Impossible.

The rest was the flimsiest of stuff. Coincidence and circumstance. During the week, Georgianne stopped at a pharmacy in Santa Barbara to buy something, and while browsing at the magazine rack she came across a full-page ad for a malt Scotch, She almost laughed and cried at the same time. You couldn't indict someone for drinking one thing or another, any more than you could for making an illconsidered remark.

The notion was so unspeakably awful that it had to be wrong. But it also had a horrible fascination, and it wouldn't go away. It was bad enough dealing with her thoughts; Georgianne couldn't bring herself to articulate them to Jan.

Jeff had a brilliant idea.

He decided to throw a party. It would be small but lavish. A caterer and a bartender. A stock of good wines, champagne, and the best liquors. He thought his condominium was just large enough for such an event.

He hadn't held a party since the minor fiasco he and Audrey had staged about ten years ago, when they were living in a boxy tract house in the Valley. All the top people at Lisker-Benedictus would come, of course. It would be a fine occasion for him to show off Georgianne. His woman.

What if?

That's what it came down to every time Georgianne thought about it. What if Jeff was the person respon sible? It didn't matter if there was only one chance in two hundred million, she had to face the possibility.

And what if, somehow, she became convinced of it? She still wouldn't have any evidence to take to the police, and she knew she herself would be incapable of personally exacting revenge.

What if she might be at risk? If things somehow reached that appalling, impossible point, would she be able to defend herself or would she give in, perhaps even gratefully, and follow Sean and Bonnie?

I must be losing my mind, just to think like this, she decided. If I told anyone what's going on in my head, they'd recommend me for treatment.

But there she was, Friday morning, sitting at the foot of her bed in Ian's house, holding a gun in her hand. It was an ugly little weapon, so small and light it was hard to believe it could hurt anyone. The bullets were like tiny pieces from a child's board game.

The day she had arrived at Jan's, Georgianne was unpacking her suitcase and hanging up clothes in the spare bedroom when she found the gun and bullets in a shoe box on the closet shelf. Jan explained that she had bought it a few years ago, after there had been a number of attacks on nurses and women visitors in the area of the hospital. A suspect was caught, better lighting was installed, the attacks dropped off, and Jan eventually got tired of carrying the gun, so she put it away in the closet and forgot about it.

A cheap, trashy little pistol, so dusty it probably wouldn't even work. Idly, Georgianne began to clean it with a piece of tissue paper.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Friday evening they went out to dinner at Ma Maison and resumed a desultory conversation, begun the week before, about Georgianne's plans for the future. Jeff was cool. He didn't try hard to persuade her to stay on in Southern California, but he carefully reinforced the idea by the way he acknowledged its advantages and appeared to discount the alternatives. He assumed, correctly, that Jan also wanted Georgians to stay and would be more direct and outspoken about it. So he took the softer approach.

Once again, it struck Georgianne as odd that Jeff had virtually nothing to say about Bonnie. No questions, no comments, no hint that he wanted to sympathize or share in her sorrow. It was as if Bonnie had been ruled ineligible as a topic for discussion. But because she wasn't really looking for sympathy and was herself reluctant to mention her daughter's death, she was still faced with the possibility that Jeff was simply being considerate.

After dinner, neither of them felt much like doing anything special, so they returned to Santa Susana and drank several nightcaps while watching Hanover Street and Vertigo on cable.