Conspiracy Theory by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online

poor everywhere in the world. The people of the Third World want only to rise up and throw off their capitalist oppressors and take on the mantle of vanguard communism for the new millennium. The real problem with this country is the Consumer Mentality. Oh, yes. Groton and St. Paul’s, Exeter and Choate. All those places positively despised the Consumer Mentality. It was just so damned tacky, and bad for you. McDonald’s hardened your arteries and ruined the landscape in pristine wildernesses from Maine to California. Television was a drug, meant to take your mind off Really Serious Things and keep you stupid and happy. Wal-Mart was the worst, because it not only did everything morally wrong, from refusing to carry emergency contraception to resisting the formation of workers’ unions, but it killed the very heart of America, the American small town. America had been a much better place when people had been forced to pay very high prices for bedsheets and electronics on their very own local Main Streets. Ryall was sure these people had seen a Main Street or two, once or twice in their lives. There was one in Stowe where they went to ski. There was another in Bar Harbor.
    Tacky, tacky, tacky,
Ryall thought. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead against the mirror’s glass. He was very revved up, and he hadn’t even taken anything yet. He hated to medicate himself before he absolutely needed to. It was getting harder and harder for him to keep his mind on the subject when he went to one of these affairs, and yet everything—his whole life—depended on his remembering what he had seen and
not
writing it down until he was safely in the car and on the way home. Of course, he could cheat a little. He could find his way into the bathroom a couple of times every night and take out his notebook then, getting the details down before they disappeared forever from his head. It wasn’t as good as having the nearly total recall he’d had when he’d started, but it helped. The problem was that it had its natural limits. If he started hitting the bathroom every hour, rumors would be in full swing by the end of the night. They’d have him half-dead of AIDS or addicted to crack before he’d had a chance to file his column in the morning. That would be the end of everything. Reliability was the key. The women really weren’t as addled as their men. They kept their heads, and they kept their eyes on the main chance, and they weren’t about to jeopardize the only thing that mattered to them to hold on to a pudgy little dork whose only amusement value lay in his ability to get their names in the papers. There was a contradiction for you. The men really did things. They ran banks. They determined the economies of nations. The women did nothing but go to parties, and they were the ones with their names in the papers.
    Ryall stepped back, reached around on his bureau top for his tape recorder, and switched it on. He really was pudgy, in the way unatheletic teenagers are pudgy. He was round and white and soft, like something that had lain for a long time in the water and bloated. He rubbed the side of his face. His fingers were stubby too. It didn’t make much of a difference that he was always careful to keep them very well-manicured.
    â€œThis is Ryall Wyndham reporting from the Around the World Harvest Ball, Philadelphia’s most talked-about event of the preChristmas social season.”
    He switched the recorder off.
Christ,
he thought. He sounded like a Walter Winchell imitation in a forties movie. What was
wrong
with him these days? If he’d had more money, he could have been married ages ago. The problem was, he could never understand how to get money, and that in spite of the fact that he was very good at keeping it. He tried to imagine himself going in to work every day as a banker, and all he got was an image of Porky Pig in a bow tie. He had actually tried law