Page 24

“Please don’t go,” Louise said. “Right now, I need a friend.”

FOUR

Brewster C. (for Cortland) Payne II, a senior partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, had raised his family, now nearly all grown and gone, in a large house on four acres on Providence Road in Wallingford.

Wallingford is a small Philadelphia suburb, between Media (through which U.S. 1, known locally as the “Baltimore Pike,” runs) and Chester, which is on the Delaware River. It is not large enough to be placed on most road maps, although it has its own post office and railroad station. It is a residential community, housing families whom sociologists would categorize as upper-middle income, upper-income, and wealthy, in separate dwellings, some very old and some designed to look that way.

What was now the kitchen and the sewing room had been the whole house, when it had been built of fieldstone before the Revolution. Additions and modifications over two centuries had turned it into a large rambling structure which fit no specific architectural category, although a real estate saleswoman had once remarked in the hearing of Patricia (Mrs. Brewster C.) Payne that “the Payne place just looked like old, old money.”

The house was comfortable, even luxurious, but not ostentatious. There was neither a swimming pool nor a tennis court, but there was, in what a century before had been a stable, a four-car garage. The Payne family swam, as well as rode, at the Rose Tree Hunt Club. They had a summer house in Cape May, New Jersey, which did have a tennis court, as well as a berth for their boat, a 38-foot Hatteras, called Final Tort IV.

When Mrs. Payne, at the wheel of a Mercury station wagon, came down Pennsylvania Route 252 and approached her driveway, she looked carefully in the rear-view mirror before applying the brake. Two-Fifty-Two was lined with large, old pine trees on that stretch, and the drives leading off it were not readily visible. She did not want to be rear-ended; there had been many close calls.

She made it safely into the drive, and saw, as she approached the house, that the yard men were there, early for once. The back of the station wagon was piled high with large plastic-wrapped packages of peat moss.

She smiled at the yard man and his two sons, pointed out the peatmoss to them, and said she would be with them in a minute.

Patricia Payne was older than she looked at first glance. She was trim, for one thing, despite four children (the youngest just turned eighteen and a senior at Dartmouth); and she had a luxuriant head of dark brown, almost reddish hair. There were chicken tracks on her face, and she thought her skin looked old; but she was aware that she looked much better, if younger meant better, than her peers the same age.

The housekeeper—the new one, a tall, dignified Jamaican—was on the telephone as Patricia Payne entered her kitchen and hea

ded directly and quickly for the small toilet off the passageway to the dining room.

“There is no one at this number by that name, madam,” the new housekeeper said. “I am sorry.”

Ordinarily Pat Payne would have stopped and asked, but incredibly there had been no peat moss in Media, and she’d had to drive into Swarthmore to get some and her back teeth were floating.

But she asked when she came out.

“What was that call, Mrs. Newman?”

“It was the wrong number, madam. The party was looking for a Mrs. Moffitt.”

“Oh, hell,” Patricia Payne said. “Did she leave her name?”

“No, she did not,” Mrs. Newman said.

“Mrs. Newman, I should have told you,” Patricia Payne said, “before I married Mr. Payne, I was a widow. I was once Mrs. Moffitt—”

The phone rang again. Patricia Payne answered it.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. John Moffitt, please,” a familiar voice asked.

“This is Patricia, Mother Moffitt,” Pat Payne said. “How are you?”

“My son Richard was shot and killed an hour ago,” the woman said.

“Oh, my God!” Patricia said. “I’m so sorry. How did it happen?”

“In the line of duty,” Gertrude Moffitt said. “Like his brother, God rest his soul, before him. He came up on a robbery in progress.”

“I’m so terribly sorry,” Pat Payne said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“I can’t think of a thing, thank you,” Gertrude Moffitt said. “I simply thought you should know, and that Matthew should hear it from you, rather than the newspapers or the TV.”

“I’ll tell him right away, of course,” Patricia said. “Poor Jeannie. Oh, my God, that’s just awful.”