with a crisis of her own. Her cousin Stella’s neighbor’s daughter is getting married, and Stella has not received an invitation. Edna has clearly been called upon to advise Stella on how to handle this potential slight, and within five minutes I hear Edna advise her to talk to the neighbor about it, ask other neighbors about it, and forget it and ignore it completely. The fact that her advice is self-contradictory does not seem to give her pause.
I bring Kevin up to date on what Richard told me, and he agrees that we should wait to get the discovery documents, which will be delivered in the morning, before confronting Steven with any of it.
Since there is little to do before the documents arrive, I decide to go home and start preparing for Laurie’s arrival tonight. Those preparations will be basic. They start with changing the sheets on the bed, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I can’t actually remember the last time I did it, but it must have been a long time ago, because I think the sheets were white at the time. Now they’re a dull gray.
After that I’ll shower a couple of times, brush my teeth until my gums bleed, and try to find underwear and socks without any holes in them. Thus finished with the personal-hygiene portion of the preparation, I’ll plug one of those electric air fresheners into a socket in the kitchen. It hasn’t been smelling so great in there lately; I think I may have dropped a frozen pizza behind the stove a few weeks ago.
These tasks will have to be delayed for a while, because as I’m ready to leave the office, Martha Wyndham shows up unannounced. I’m not a big fan of unannounced show-ups, but since I had planned to meet with her anyway, I decide to make an exception in this case.
I bring her back to my private office, which in the area of cleanliness makes my house look like a sterile operating room. I can see her eyes scanning the room, trying to find a relatively clean place to sit down. Unable to do so, she picks the least dirty place and sits in the chair opposite my desk.
“What can I do for you?” I ask.
She hesitates a moment. “I feel as if we have something of a bond, seeing as how we both could have been in that house.”
I can’t believe she’s here because of this imagined bond, so I just nod and wait for her to continue.
“I understand you’re representing Steven,” she says.
“How did you know that? I haven’t even officially registered with the court.”
“He called me and told me so,” she says. “From the prison.”
“You and Steven are friends?”
“I guess so, though I never really thought of it that way. We talked a lot; we have the same view about a lot of things.” She thinks for a moment. “I consider him a friend… yes.”
At this pace, Laurie will have landed at the airport, met someone new, and gotten engaged by the time I get home. “So what can I do for you?” I repeat.
“I want to help Steven in any way I can.”
“Good,” I say. “He can use all the help he can get.”
“So tell me what I can do,” she says.
“How long did you work for Mrs. Timmerman?”
“One week.”
She sees my surprise, so she continues. “I was Mr. Timmerman’s personal assistant, and when he… died… Mrs. Timmerman asked me to work for her.”
“So you know a lot about them?” I ask.
She nods. “To a degree. They were difficult people to get to know. But I can certainly be a source of information, if that’s what you need.”
“That’s helpful,” I say. “I’ll need a road map to help me navigate their lives. Steven may not have killed them, but someone did. Someone with a reason to do so.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who that might be,” she says.
“Not yet. Tell me about Steven’s relationship with his father.”
“It was complicated; I don’t even think Steven understood it. Steven idolized him, and loved him, and was intimidated by him, and probably hated him. And every one of those emotions made sense. Walter Timmerman was an amazing man, in ways both positive and negative. Not an easy man to have as a father.”
“But you don’t think Steven could have killed him?”
“No.”
“What about his stepmother?”
“That’s another story.”
LAURIE’S PLANE IS DUE at Newark airport at eight o’clock.
I’m there just before seven, which is about normal for me.