“You’re a little touchy, it seems.”
If I hadn’t been noticing the same thing all day, I would have denied it. But it was true.
“I thought you needed to get out for a while,” I said.
“It can wait.”
“It’s been one of those days. I’ve only had about four hours of sleep. I woke up feeling sad about O’Connor, and all day I’ve either felt basically at peace with it or completely out of sorts. I keep thinking about standing there on O’Connor’s front lawn. Then Kenny and I had a really awful conversation at the hospital. He basically dumped on O’Connor and said he wasn’t sorry his father was dead. It was a bit much for me. I’m sorry, Frank. I’m just sort of frazzled right now.”
“That’s understandable. Do you need company, or would you rather get together some other time?”
I had mixed feelings. I wanted to spend time with him, but right at that moment I really wanted to be alone.
“You won’t feel insulted?”
“Not at all. And that answers the question. I’ll walk you back to your car.”
He put his arm around me as we walked.
“Irene, you won’t try to solve O’Connor’s murder on your own, will you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, regretting my testiness as soon as I had spoken. But he acted as if I had been as pleasant as a spring morning.
“It means,” he said, “that you’re still not safe. I probably don’t have to tell you that, but I just don’t want your desire to find out who killed him to lead to your getting hurt — or worse.”
“I can’t just roll over and play dead, either, Frank.”
“Well,” he said, a little exasperation edging into his voice. “I guess you’re going to do whatever you want to do anyway.”
“Right.”
He was quiet the rest of walk. I kept thinking of things to get a conversation going, but the problem was that I knew I was being difficult. And I didn’t like to admit it. But as we reached the car, I turned to him.
“Don’t pay attention to me today. In fact, if you could erase the last ten minutes from your memory tapes, I’d appreciate it.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I drove back to Lydia’s. On the way, I remembered another one of those sayings O’Connor was always pulling out of his hat. “It never does any good to tell another person ‘Don’t worry,’” he said.
He was right. Frank’s parting words aside, I was worried about the effect my emotional state might have on — on what? Hell, I didn’t even know what — our friendship? Our relationship?
My mood did not improve.
41
LYDIA WAS SURPRISED to see me walk back into the house, but didn’t say anything about the brevity of my visit with Frank. She may have been scared off by the dark scowl I found myself wearing as I came in. I realized I needed to smooth things over with her.
“Look, Lydia, about the Hollingsworth-Longren thing. I’m sorry I was so short with you this afternoon.”
“You’re just having a bad day, Irene. Besides, I’ve been sitting here thinking about it. I wondered how Jennifer could be pregnant by one of them, when Richard Longren had already been here for years and Andrew Hollingsworth was in his final year at Harvard.”
I felt the rug being pulled out from under my feet. I had been so concerned with proving it was Hollingsworth that I hadn’t asked myself the obvious questions about why it might not be him after all. Such as the fact that he was probably miles away from Jennifer when she got pregnant. “Lydia, you know how most people get wiser with age? I think I’m getting dumber.”
“Oh, you hadn’t thought of that?”
“No. Obvious as it is, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well, wait a minute, Irene, maybe there is some way it could have happened. Let’s see. How far along was she?”
“Somewhere around two months.”
She counted back on her fingers. “June to May, one month, May to April, two months. April. Maybe she traveled to Boston or Las Piernas in the spring of 1955.”
“Not likely. She was poor. She didn’t even have enough money to buy her bus fare all the way to Las Piernas in June.”
“Hmm. Let’s consider it the other way around then. Maybe one of them went to Arizona.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, why not at least look into what was going on in April of 1955? Maybe something will ring a bell.”
“Maybe, but I can hardly go up to the two of them and ask, ‘Where were you in April of 1955?’ Besides, it could have been late March as well. They only estimated that she was two months along. And the father and the killer might be different people altogether.”
“What would make a young woman leave home like that unless she thought someone was going to take care of her when she arrived at her destination?”
