He couldn’t flip through the hymnal because he’d only get stuck in lyrics which would play in his head the rest of the day. He tried to think of Vanessa and Julian Watts lying in their coffins, but he began to imagine their state of necropsy, how their bodies had been drained of blood—what was left of it after the police had found them—and replaced with embalming fluids, and how in a few days they would begin to turn dark, and shrivel, and the fluids would begin to leak from their orifices.
He then ran through the capitals of the world, as stupefyingly boring as that was, then moved to the most populous cities including their populations according to the latest World Book of Facts.
What snapped him back was Nicole.
She had entered the rear of the church with her parents. Before they could move to a pew, he put his backpack on his seat and got up. “I have to see you,” he said, pulling her aside.
She gave him her blue-ice look. “Leave me alone.”
“Look, it’s v-v-very important.”
She started after her parents without response.
“Please.”
When her mother looked back, Nicole flashed her face to him. “Later,” she said through her teeth. Then she moved down the aisle.
Brendan returned to his pew and watched her move to the front of the church to join her parents. She was dressed in a simple dark blue sundress with white trim and dark blue pumps—an ensemble that projected a nautical motif, as if she were some kind of naval recruit. As he watched her settle, his mind slipped to that tattoo she wore.
While he worked on that for the hundredth time, he spotted Rachel Whitman walking in with her husband. Nicole had said that they had been on a parent tour of Bloomfield, which didn’t make sense.
A few minutes later Sheila MacPhearson came down the aisle with her daughter, Lucinda, who was carrying a Palm Pilot. They took seats beside the Whitmans. The women were friends—Rachel Whitman of 224 Morningside Drive and Sheila MacPhearson of 22 Willow Lane.
Mrs. MacPhearson’s husband, Harry, had lost all his money in a dot-com venture, then died of heart failure a year ago. According to rumors circulating at the club, he had left his wife with considerable debt, which might explain why she was always hustling off to show a property.
Lucinda fascinated him. She was clever, cunning, and very authoritarian with other children. He once caught her sticking a pin into the head of the rabbit in play school. She also knew how to turn on the charm, winning over Miss Jean and other Dellsies. Her mother, she wore like an engagement ring.
The two caskets lay side by side at the altar.
Rachel sat between Martin and Sheila MacPhearson. They had left Dylan with a sitter for the morning. However, Sheila had brought Lucinda, who was pressed beside her and working on a small computer—probably calculating the flaws in the unified field theory, she thought sickly. Rachel felt the urge to grab the damn thing out of her hands. She also was irritated that Sheila let her click and poke away at the keys while people filed in solemnly.
Rachel was sick at the sight of the two caskets with the twin wreaths of white roses. Such a tragic waste. Last week the world appeared to be Vanessa’s oyster. Then, in a matter of hours it was all over. Apparently the public humiliation had driven her to the brink. But why take Julian with her? How could she kill her own son? And a son she had been so proud of. Something clearly had snapped—and now there was a dead mother and son. Nothing was as it seemed.
Nobody could explain where the incriminating videotape came from or how it had gotten switched for the original. Apparently no fingerprints were found on the cassette. A Hawthorne policeman had come by to ask if Rachel knew of any enemies of Professor Watts since it was clear that somebody had been out to get the woman. Rachel knew of none. In fact, she barely knew Vanessa. He also asked if she knew any possible motives for her killing of her son. Rachel had no idea.
The newspapers had carried an interview with Joshua Blake who said he had been alerted to the plagiarism anonymously while on sabbatical in Western Samoa. He said that he had been encouraged to make the videotape to discourage Professor Watts from going ahead with the publication. He explained that he had just set up his own video camera, taped the interview, then overnighted the cassette to an anonymous post office box in Boston. He had also sent a copy to Vanessa’s publisher by airmail, which explained why her editor at the party was unaware of the plagiarism. He added that he had no idea who was behind the expose.
Sheila was sniffling into her handkerchief and checking her watch as the service began. When Rachel could see that she was not going to stop Lucinda from playing with her Palm Pilot, she leaned across to her and in a dead flat voice said, “You can put that away now.”
Lucinda looked up at her with chilling menace. Before another word was exchanged, Sheila snapped the thing out of her daughter’s hand and stuffed it in her purse.
While her parents were huddled by the gravesite, Brendan nodded to Nicole to come over. When she disregarded him, he started toward her—and that got the expected reaction. She came over not out of interest but because she did not want her parents and all their friends to think that golden-girl Nicole DaFoe was pals with the local weirdo—which is how everybody saw him: a creep to shield their children from, a schizoid basket case who talked to himself and suffered poetry seizures; the idiot savant who could recite the script of any movie he had seen. The kid nobody wanted their kids hanging with. Brendan LaMotte, goblin of Cape Ann.
“Make it fast. I’m going back to camp.” She followed him to a spot behind a large gaudy obelisk that blocked the view of the others.
From his backpack he pulled out a folder, saying how he had found it buried in his cellar. “I-it’s a WISC standard intelligence test taken when I was five.” He pointed to some numbers. “My IQ was seventy-seven.” Then he showed her another test taken two years later. “Same test, but intelligence quotient one hundred thirty-nine. That’s practically double. My verbal went from forty-three percentile to ninety-nine.”
Something slithered across her face. “I have to go.”
“N-no, there’s more.”
He then pulled out a photocopy of two canceled bank checks for three hundred thousand dollars each, made out to cash and signed by Brendan’s father, Eugene LaMotte. The dates were two weeks apart and about six months before the date of the second WISC test.
Nicole put her dark glasses on and started away.
“Wait. I also found MRI scans of my b-b-brain,” he said. “They operated on me. They did s-something to make me smarter.”
In the distance, her mother was waving her over. “Be right there,” she called.
She walked away, but Brendan caught up to her. “Nicole, listen to me. They did the same thing to you.”
She looked at him, her face appearing as rigid and white as the nearby headstone.
“Here, look.” In his hand he was holding a slip of paper—a piece of personalized stationery with the address and name of her father, Kingman DaFoe. Written in pen on it was a telephone number with an old exchange.