Conspiracy Theory by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

that?”
    â€œIf they wanted to kill each other, they’d hire hitmen. And not the kind who get caught.”
    â€œNobody cares about those people anymore. They’re not relevant to real people’s lives. And don’t give me that thing about running the world, because it doesn’t matter if they do. They don’t run
my
world.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t think that if they took it into their heads to shut down the newspaper and you were out on your ear looking for a job.”
    â€œI don’t think anybody would just take it into his head to shut down the newspaper. That’s not the way it works, Ryall. Come into the real world for a time—pretty funny, considering your name. Do people make that joke on your name all the time?”
    â€œNo,” Ryall said. “And we’ve had this conversation before. Never mind. As long as you have the material. I’ll come in tomorrow and look it over. Although God only knows, I hate to come in to the office after one of these things. I always have a hangover.”
    â€œIt’s like that Enron thing,” Marilyn said. “It was a big scandal, and a big deal in all the newspapers, and it was on CNN and TV for months, but nobody really paid attention. Why should they? It’s just a business thing. It’s not as if they’re—”
    â€œâ€”Steven Spielberg—”
    â€œâ€”Madonna.”
    â€œThat’s the car,” Ryall said. “As long as you have them. Put them somewhere safe. I don’t want them getting lost.”
    â€œI never lose anything,” Marilyn said, which was true. She never forgot appointments, either. Ryall was sure that, if she had been alive at the time, she would have been the one person in her class who would have remembered all her homework on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He knew for a fact that the events of September 11 hadn’t fazed her for a moment.
    â€œThey’ll be in your private drawer,” she said. “I’ve even taken the care to lock it, since you’ve been so paranoid. But if you ask me, you’re behaving like a lunatic.”
    â€œThe car,” Ryall said. Then he switched the cell phone off and put it down. The car wasn’t really here, not yet, and wouldn’t be for a while. He still had to find all his paraphernalia: his money clip; his wallet; his card case; his key ring; his Swiss army knife. The Swiss army knife was made of sterling silver and accented with gold. It was the kind of thing that impressed people like Marilyn.
    â€œCrap, crap, crap,” Ryall said to the air. He didn’t want to spend the night at this party. He didn’t want to file a story about it with the paper and then with
Town and Country
. He didn’t want to
feel
like Porky Pig anymore, so that right in the middle of any moment when he was able to think of himself as winning, the image would pop up on the back of his eyelids like a computer virus and there he would be, squat and round, with a little curly tail sticking out of the back of his best tuxedo pants.
    â€œCrap, crap, crap,” he said again. Then he swept all his things off the top of his bureau and headed out his bedroom door and down the stairs.
6
    Lucinda Watkins had been born and raised a Baptist in a world where the most exotic “other” religion belonged to the Catholics at St. Mary of the Fields, and there weren’t many of them. “The preachers say they worship the devil,” Lucinda’s grandmother had said, “but I don’t believe it.” And because Grandma Watkins hadn’t believed it, Lucinda hadn’t believed it, either. In the end, everything that had ever happened to Lucinda had come down to Grandma Watkins, who had taken their residence in Mount Hope, Mississippi, as a kind of purgatory come early, except that she hadn’t believed in purgatory. God was getting them ready for something special. She