"Doesn't sound as if Jill was an extrovert," I remarked.
"She was described as charismatic, witty, but self-contained."
"And Elizabeth?" I asked.
"More outgoing, I think," she said. "Which I suppose she had to have been to be good in sales."
The glow of gaslight lamps pushed the darkness back from cobblestone sidewalks as we walked to the Merchant's Square parking lot. A heavy layer of clouds obscured the moon, the damp, cold air penetrating.
"I wonder what these couples would be doing now, if they'd still be with each other, what difference they, might have made," Abby said, chin tucked into her collar, hands in her pockets.
"What do you think Henna would be doing?"
I gently asked about her sister.
"She'd probably still be in Richmond. I guess both of us would be."
"Are you sorry you moved?"
"Some days I'm sorry about everything. Ever since Henna died, it's as if I've had no options, no free will. It's as if I've been propelled along by things out of my control."
"I don't see it that way. You chose to take the job at the Post, move to D.C. And now you've chosen to write a book."
"Just as Pat Harvey chose to hold that press conference and do all the other things she's done that have burned her so badly," she said.
"Yes, she has made choices, too."
"When you're going through something like this, you don't know what you're doing, even if you think you do," she went on. "And no one can really understand what it's like unless they've suffered the same thing. You feel isolated. You go places and people avoid you, are afraid to meet your eyes and make conversation because they don't know what to say. So they whisper to each other. 'See her over there? Her sister was the one murdered by the strangler.' Or 'That's Pat Harvey. Her daughter was the one.' You feel as if you're living inside a cave. You're afraid to be alone, afraid to be with others, afraid to be awake, and afraid to go to sleep because of how awful it feels when morning comes. You run like hell and wear yourself out. As I look back, I can see that everything I've done since Henna died was half crazy."
"I think you've done remarkably well," I said sincerely.
"You don't know the things I've done. The mistakes I've made."
"Come on. I'll drive you to your car," I said, for we had reached Merchant's Square.
I heard a car engine start in the dark lot as I got out my keys. We were inside my Mercedes, doors locked and seat belts on when a new Lincoln pulled up beside us and the driver's window hummed down.
I opened my window just enough to hear what the man wanted. He was young, clean cut, folding a map and struggling with it.
"Excuse me."
He smiled helplessly. "Can you tell me how to get back on Sixty-four East from here?"
I could feel Abby's tension as I gave him quick directions.
"Get his plate number," she said urgently as he drove away. She dug in her pocketbook for a pen and notepad.
"E-N-T-eight-nine-nine," I read quickly.
She wrote it down.
"What's going on?"
I asked, unnerved.
Abby looked left and right for any sign of his car as I pulled out of the lot.
"Did you notice his car when we got to the parking lot?"
she asked.
I had to think. The parking lot was nearly empty when we had gotten there. I had been vaguely aware of a car that might have been the Lincoln parked in a poorly lit corner.
I told Abby this, adding, "But I assumed no one was in it."
"Right. Because the car's interior light wasn't on."
"I guess not."
"Reading a map in the dark, Kay?"
"Good point," I said, startled.
"And if he's from out of town, then how do you explain the parking sticker on his rear bumper?"
"Parking sticker?"
I repeated.
"It had the Colonial Williamsburg seal on it. The same sticker I was given years ago when the skeletal remains were discovered at that archaeology dig, Martin's Hundred. I did a series, was out here a lot, and the sticker permitted me to park inside the Historic District and at Carter's Grove."
"The guy works here and needed directions to Sixty-four?" I muttered.
"You got a good look at him?" she asked.
"Pretty good. Do you think it was the man who followed you that night in Washington?"
"I don't know. But maybe,… Damn it, Kay! This is making me crazy!"
"Well, enough is enough," I said firmly. "Give me that license number. I intend to do something about it."
The next morning Marino called with the cryptic message, "If you haven't read the Post, better go out and get a copy."
"Since when do you read the Post?"
"Since never, if I can help it. Benton alerted me about an hour ago. Call me later. I'm downtown."
Putting on a warm-up suit and ski jacket, I drove through a downpour to a nearby drugstore. For the better part of half an hour I sat inside my car, heater blasting, windshield wipers a monotonous metronome in the hard, cold rain. I was appalled by what I read. Several times it entered my mind that if the Harveys didn't sue Clifford Ring, I should.
The front page carried the first in a three-part series about Deborah Harvey, Fred Cheney, and the other couples who had died. Nothing sacred was spared, Ring's reporting so comprehensive it included details even I did not know.
Not long before Deborah Harvey was murdered, she had confided to a friend her suspicions that her father was an alcoholic and having an affair with an airline flight attendant half his age. Apparently, Deborah had eavesdropped on a number of telephone conversations between her father and his alleged mistress. The flight attendant lived in Charlotte, and according to the story, Harvey was with her the night his daughter and Fred Cheney disappeared, which was why the police and Mrs. Harvey were unable to reach him. Ironically, Deborah's suspicions did not make her bitter toward her father but her mother, who, consumed with her career, was never home, and therefore, in Deborah's eyes, to blame for her father's infidelity and alcohol abuse.
Column after column of vitriolic print added up to paint a pathetic portrait of a powerful woman bent on saving the world while her own family disintegrated from neglect. Pat Harvey had married into money, her home in Richmond was palatial, her quarters at the Watergate filled with antiques and valuable art, including a Picasso and a Remington. She wore the right clothes, went to the right parties, her decorum impeccable, her policies and knowledge of world affairs brilliant.
Yet lurking behind this plutocratic, flawless facade, Ring concluded, was "a driven woman born in a blue collar section of Baltimore, someone described by her colleagues as tormented by insecurity that perpetually propelled her into proving herself."
Pat Harvey, he said, was a megalomaniac. She was irrational - if not rabid when threatened or put to the test.
His treatment of the homicides that had occurred in Virginia over the past three years was just as relentless. He disclosed the fears of the CIA and FBI that the killer might be someone at Camp Peary, and served up this revelation with such a wild spin that it made everyone involved look bad.
The CIA and the Justice Department were involved in a cover-up, their paranoia so extreme they had encouraged investigators in Virginia to withhold information from each other. False evidence had been planted at a scene. Disinformation had been "leaked" to reporters, and it was even suspected that some reporters were under surveillance. Pat Harvey, meanwhile, was supposedly privy to all this, and her indignation was not exactly depicted as righteous, as evidenced by her demeanor during her infamous press conference. Engaged in a turf battle with the Justice Department, Mrs. Harvey had exploited sensitive information to incriminate and harass those federal agencies with which she had become increasingly at odds due to her, campaign against fraudulent charities such as ACTMAD.