Page 58

"About the same thing," Matt said.

"Through?" Amanda asked, and slidthe Bulletin away from Matt's side of the table.

He saw her eyes widen when she got to the place in the story about him. She glanced at him, then finished the story.

"You never told me about that," she said.

"Yes I did," Matt said. "You said if you had a car like mine and somebody dinged it, you'd kill him. And I said somebody did and I had."

The waitress appeared with a stainless-steel coffee pot. Amanda waited until she had poured the coffee and left.

"I thought you were just being a wiseass," she said.

"You should have seen what he did to my car," Matt said. "He was lucky I didn't get really mad."

"Matt,stop!."

"Sorry," he said after a moment.

And a moment after that Amanda reached out and caught his hand. They sat that way, holding hands and looking into each other's eyes, until the waitress delivered breakfast.

NINE

There was a fence around the Browne place in Merion, field-stone posts every twenty-five feet or so with wrought-iron bars between them. The bars were topped with spear points, and as a boy of six or seven Matt had spent all of one afternoon trying to hammer one loose so that he would have a spear to take home.

There was also a gate and a gate house, but the gate had never in Matt's memory been closed, and the gate house had always been locked and off-limits.

When he turned off the road, the gate was closed, and he had to jump on the brakes to avoid hitting it. And the door to the gate house was open. A burly man in a dark suit came out of it and walked to the gate.

A rent-a-cop, Matt decided. Had he been hired because the Princess of the Castle was getting married? Or did it have something to do with what had happened at the parking garage?

The rent-a-cop opened the left portion of the gate wide enough to get through and came out to the Porsche.

"May I help you, sir?"

"Would you open the gate, please? Miss Spencer is a guest here."

The rent-a-cop looked carefully at both of them, then smiled, said, "Certainly, sir," and went to the gate and swung both sides open.

Matt saw that a red-and-white-striped tent, large enough for a two-ring circus, had been set up on the lawn in front of the house. There were three large caterer's trucks parked in the driveway. A human chain had been formed to unload folding chairs from one of them and set them up in the tent, and he saw cardboard boxes being unloaded in the same way from a second.

Soames T. Browne, in his shirt sleeves, and the bride-to-be, in shorts and a tattered gray University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt that belonged, Matt decided, to Chad Nesbitt, were standing outside the castle portal when Matt drove up. The rent-a-cop had almost certainly telephoned the house. Matt saw another large man in a business suit standing just inside the open oak door.

"I'll see you later," Matt said, waving at the Brownes with his left hand and touching Amanda's wrist with his right.

Amanda kissed his cheek and opened her door.

Soames T. Browne came around to Matt's side. Matt rolled the window down.

"Morning."

"Daffy said Amanda was probably with you," Browne said. "You should have called, Matt."

"Matt had to work-" Amanda said.

"Surehe did," Daffy snorted.

"-and I waited for him."