“Mr. Rooney,” I said.
He was eating a piece of buttered toast, and made no attempt to get up.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How are you today?”
“Oh, I’m just peachy,” he said. “Got the whole house to myself as it turns out.”
“I heard. Your landlady, Ms. Townsend, was one of the casualties.”
He took a bite of toast. “Found her yesterday morning in the backyard. Dead as a doornail.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must have been quite a shock.”
Victor nodded. “Not the sort of thing you see every day.”
“You didn’t see her getting sick?”
“I’d slept in. By the time I came downstairs, she was already toast.” He glanced at what was in his hand. “Maybe that’s not the best choice of words.”
“So she’d had water from the tap, but not you.”
His head went from side to side. “Yeah, I mean, no. I mean, she’d had coffee, and I hadn’t had anything. I mean, other than some juice from the fridge. But it was okay.”
“Lucky,” I said.
“I guess. Mr. Fisher was lucky, too. I mean, he got pretty sick, but at least he didn’t die.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There might be long-term effects. They don’t know yet.”
“Huh,” he said. “So, Walden, he might end up brain-damaged or something.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“I don’t know exactly what happens now,” he said, glancing back at the house. “I mean, she owned the place, but who gets it now? She’s probably got next of kin or whatever you call it, but that’s not my responsibility, is it?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t, technically. “You might want to look through her address book, something like that. If she had out-of-town family, they may hear about what happened here and make inquiries. That’ll get the ball rolling. Failing that, the police will get to it eventually. They’re a little backed up right now.”
He nodded, took another bite of toast.
“I think I might just move, anyway,” he said. “I think I’m done here.”
“Why’s that?”
He looked at me as though I was slow-witted, and there were times when I thought I was. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“I can understand why you might want to put this town behind you,” I said, “but I’d have thought you’d have done it three years ago.”
“Sometimes it takes a while to get your act together.” He finished the toast, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, balled it up, and tossed it onto the porch. He leaned back, arms outstretched, palms on the porch boards. “You just come by to shoot the shit?”
“I heard from Joyce Pilgrim,” I said.
His face screwed up. “Who?”
“The security chief at Thackeray.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” He nodded. “I talked to her last night. Why’d she call you?”
“Why?” I’d have thought it was obvious.
“Yeah. I mean, what’s the big deal if some guy parked illegally or something?”
“So she didn’t say why she was asking.”
He shook his head.
“Can you tell me again what you told her? About the car and the man you saw?”
He repeated what Joyce had said to me on the phone. The man he’d seen was white, over six feet tall, maybe two hundred pounds, tops. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap, a dark blue jacket or Windbreaker, and running shoes.
“Was the car parked under a streetlight?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And the car itself?”
“I think it might have been a Taurus. An older one, with the big bulbous fenders.”
“Color?”
He shrugged. “Black, blue? Don’t know.”
“Ms. Pilgrim said you thought the plate was green.”
“I’m not as sure about that, but maybe,” he said. “That’d make it Vermont, right?”
“Could,” I said.
“Why the big deal about this?”
I pressed on. “You have pretty good observational skills.”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“I mean, late at night, that car not being under a streetlight, and you managed to get a pretty good look at that guy, right down to the ball cap.”
“You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“Not at all. What you saw could be really helpful.”
“Helpful for what?”
The murder of Lorraine Plummer had probably made the news, but it had been overshadowed by the deaths from poisoned water. It was possible Victor didn’t know about her death. Or was pretending to be uninformed.
“Around the time you were jogging through the campus grounds,” I said evenly, “a young woman was murdered. A summer student.”
I watched his reaction closely.
“Jesus,” he said. “That woman-Pilgrim?-she never said anything about that. So then, this guy she was asking about, he could have been the guy who killed her?”
I waited a second. “Possibly.”
“Wow. I didn’t know that. Wish I’d taken an even closer look.” “Don’t feel bad about that. You saw and remembered more than most people would. Quite a bit more.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed. “There it is again.”
“What?”
“That sounds more like an accusation than praise. I’m trying to help out and you’re making me feel like I did something wrong.”
“Sorry if that’s how I came across,” I said. “Do you jog around there every night?”
“I kind of went back to running just recently, in the last week or so. I thought it’d be a way to get myself back together.”
“You mean back in shape?”
“Partly, but mentally, too, you know.”
“I guess,” I said. “I’m not much of a health nut.”
“No kidding,” he said.
“So tell me about the mentally part.”
“I’ve kind of-I don’t know-let myself go. Been hitting the drinking too hard. Haven’t been able to find a job. It’s taken me a long time to get over things.”
“Olivia.”
“Yeah. But you can only go on like that so long. You have to move on, you know?”
“And taking up running was part of that?”
“Yeah. I thought, if I felt better physically, maybe I’d start feeling better mentally.”
“How’s it going?”
He grinned. “It may be too early to tell.”
“Part of that plan includes moving away?”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe this is just when the town needs you,” I said. “After what happened yesterday.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Maybe the town had it coming,” I said.
Victor Rooney studied me. “Say again?”
“I said maybe the town had it coming. For how it failed Olivia.”
“I’m not following.”
“Have you ever felt that way? That those twenty-two people who heard Olivia’s screams and did nothing, that they were representative of the entire town? That they were a kind of a cross section? That if they’d do nothing, nobody here would?”
“Twenty-two?” he asked. “Was that how many people it was?”
“I think you already know that. Don’t you think sometimes there’re actually twenty-three people to blame?”
He stood. “I got stuff to do.”
“Don’t you blame yourself, too? For not meeting Olivia when you were supposed to?”
Victor stepped up onto the porch, grabbed a T-shirt that had been tossed onto a wicker chair. He slipped it on, and as his head popped out the top, he said, “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”
“If you blame yourself and the whole town, you didn’t end up paying quite as high a price for your failure as more than a hundred others did.”
There was a pair of low-rise sneakers under the chair. He slipped his feet into them, not bothering to do the laces.
“You know any place in this town where I can get an actual cup of coffee?” he asked. “If I have to, I’ll drive to fucking Albany.”
“Why do you think someone would do it?” I asked. “Why would someone poison the water?”