possessed, a smarty-pants, but not the kind of girl you would have thought would end up so attractive. In high school, she was one of many young women the boys, with typical cruelty, referred to as ‘a Greek tragedy,’ meaning her nose is far too large for her face. But she always had that air. And a killer body. Now she knows she’s something special.
Laughing, he sits up to examine himself. There is a grass stain on the sleeve of his tan Brooks Brothers suit, but no pain anywhere. He accepts her hand to return to his feet, while several people who came close to help now turn away.
In answer to his question, Sofia tells Paul that for the last seven years, she has been in a combined college and med school program in Boston. She got her MD in June and began a residency here at U Hospital.
“In?” Paul asks.
“Surgery,” she answers.
“Jesus,” he says. He never would have imagined. “Does that mean I could have gotten free stitches, if I needed them?”
“My mother keeps telling me I should have let her teach me to sew.”
Sofia asks about him. He will be sworn in to the bar in two months and become a deputy prosecuting attorney in Kindle County in Raymond Horgan’s office.
“And what about the rest of it?” Sofia asks. “Still going with Georgia?”
“Still going with Georgia,” he answers. Her two small front teeth appear over her skinny lower lip and that fine set of honkers seems to perk up somehow. He recognizes what she’s thinking: When are you going to figure it out? “She’s here somewhere,” he says and gestures widely, as if he did not know that Georgia is bound to have stayed close, almost as if he otherwise might get away.
“I’ll have to find her,” Sofia says. “And say hello.”
“You should,” he says, feeling that Georgia has somehow thwarted the momentum of their conversation. Sofia parts with a quick wave and he resists the temptation to let his eye follow her. But the impact of her presence lingers. Sofia, he senses, has become one of those people he has longed to be, able to make herself felt in the world. It is a jarring sight when he finally glances back a second later to see Sofia with Georgia, who holds no similar ambitions. At Father Nik’s urging, Georgia skipped college, and is already a senior teller at a local bank. Paul loves Georgia. He will always love Georgia. But he is not sure he wants to marry her, which is what she and her family have long expected. That is his problem. Life with Georgia would be good, but not necessarily interesting.
Caught up with these thoughts, Paul realizes that he has lost track of their mother, and when he finally spots her, he is alarmed to see her engaged with the host. But Lidia is considering Zeus with an unyielding expression. Dark and still improbably handsome at the age of sixty-six, Zeus with his rushing silver hair is turned out in a white suit, doing his best to appear jolly in the face of Lidia’s coolness. Paul would have thought that Zeus is too obviously stuck on himself to succeed in politics, but he became the Republican candidate for governor, and is neck and neck in the general election race with barely two months to go. If Zeus wins, he will presumably leave his vast business, which owns shopping centers across the nation, in the hands of Hal, who is virtually certain to run it into the ground.
In the meantime, Paul notices Zeus’s beautiful daughter headed toward him. Dita glides up and plants full on Paul’s mouth a humid kiss, in which the ether of alcohol lingers. Whenever he sees Dita, she seems to be smashed. It takes Paul an instant to understand that she is pretending she can’t tell the twins apart-most people still cannot-and he eases her away.
“Is that you, Paul? Lucky for me you didn’t play along. Would Cass be jealous or do you two share everything?” Raven-haired and statuesque, with full, well-shaped features and striking dark eyes, Dita laughs and draws her breasts against his arm, forcing him to take another step back.
Because of antics like this, Paul tries hard to avoid Dita, even though he knows intuitively that is exactly what she wants, to separate him from Cass.
“Dita, I know you think you’re funny, but I wouldn’t be hanging by the phone waiting for your guest shot on Carson.”
“Oh, Paul,” she says, “you’re totally uptight. If somebody shoved a lump of coal up your ass, it would turn into a diamond.” Having plainly triumphed in this impromptu round of the Dozens, Dita pauses for a measuring look. “Why is everybody in your house against me?”
“We’re not against you, Dita. We’re for Cass.”
“That’s right. Cass needs a girl like Georgia. Bor-ring.”
The pain of hearing someone speak so callously about Georgia is surprisingly sharp, and he has to suppress the impulse Dita frequently inspires to slap his hand over her mouth. Dita is smart. That is another thing that makes her so dangerous. He turns away, but Dita cannot resist a final shot.
“Really,” she says, “I think I would have dumped Cass a long time ago, if I didn’t know it would give the rest of you such a thrill.”
Over the years, when Paul revisits this day that will change his family’s life forever, Dita’s thrashing unhappiness with herself will grow plain to him across the distance of time. But in the moment, he can feel only the peril to his twin that Dita poses, and his painful inability to save Cass from it. Paul walks off, while the thought comes to him with the force and clarity of a trumpet blast: He despises that woman.
2
Evon Miller, fifty, senior vice-president for security at ZP Real Estate Investment Trust, ran with the uncommon speed of a former athlete through the basement of the State Building Annex, not knowing where she was going or why she was here. Short and strongly built, Evon unexpectedly made out the number of the conference room she was seeking, and jerked to a halt. Within a plastic holder beside the door, a misprinted placard read PARDN AND PAROLE BOARD HEARING. Inside the conference room, she found her boss, Hal Kronon, CEO of ZP, whose urgent e-mail had summoned her. He was speaking with his personal lawyer, Mel Tooley, and another man in a suit she didn’t know.
Evon had spent twenty years as an FBI special agent before taking this job, and she had learned that the power of the state, frequently spoken about as if it were a dread disease, was often most notable for the utter lack of majesty with which it was exercised. The Pardon and Parole Commission’s monthly deliberations about the liberty of several dozen humans were going to be conducted in this low-ceilinged windowless room from metal folding chairs placed at two card tables. Behind the seats, the great seal of the state, thirty inches across and all plastic, hung slightly askew on the streaked wall. A lectern with a microphone was centered between the commissioners and two more card tables reserved for the participants, the state and whoever would speak for the prisoner. The hearing, which the card at the door said would commence at 2:00, had apparently been delayed.
Evon’s boss, dark and burly, with his shirt gathered over the waist of his bespoke suit and his necktie askew, finally saw her and drew her toward a corner of the room. On the way, she asked why he was here. His message had offered no explanation.
“I’m trying to keep Cass Gianis in prison,” he said. Evon knew next to nothing about the murder of Hal’s sister, Dita, in September 1982. The case was long past being news by the time she’d moved to Kindle County fifteen years ago, and Hal preferred not to discuss it. Her knowledge was limited to what had been in the papers recently, that Cass Gianis, the identical twin of Paul Gianis, a state senator now running for mayor, had pled guilty to killing Dita, his girlfriend at the time. “That’s not what I need first.”
“What is?”
“It’s YourHouse,” he whispered. Hal had been in negotiations for months to buy YourHouse, one of the nation’s largest builders of planned communities, for several hundred million dollars. With the downtick in prices for single-family homes, he believed he could bargain hard and diversify ZP, as he’d been advised to do for years. “We missed something in our due diligence. In Indianapolis. Sounds like there may be a brownfield on part of the
