Free Conspiracy Theory by Jane Haddam

got off the marble planter and went out the bank’s front doors, into the cold that was even more frigid than he had been expecting it to be. If there had been any moisture in the air, it might have snowed. He couldn’t remember a time when it had snowed this early in November. He stuck his gloved hands in his pockets and stepped off the curb to hail a cab.
    The real sad thing about this thing tonight was that Annie wouldn’t be there. Charlotte wouldn’t invite her, and if Charlotte did—and hell froze over—Annie wouldn’t come. David wondered when it had gotten to the point that having money meant never being able to do anything you wanted to do.
8
    It was eight o’clock, and Charlotte Deacon Ross was in a state of high piss-off unmatched in all her fifty-two years on earth, except maybe by the time that Marietta Hand had shown up at her own debutante ball in a black dress. Charlotte’s mother had put that particular tantrum down to “Charlotte’s sensitivity to nuance,” by which she meant she thought Charlotte was afraid a black dress would bring bad luck. It wasn’t true. Charlotte did not believe in luck. She did believe in the divine right of kings—and, more to the point, queens—but she saw that as predestined, the way her solidly Presbyterian forebears had seen their election to heaven as predestined. God chose, before the start of time. Charlotte was one of the chosen.
    Charlotte had been angry at Marietta Hand because she hadn’t thought of that black dress first. Forever more, when people wrote those over-illustrated histories of Society in its prime, it would be Marietta, not Charlotte, singled out as the daring innovator that nobody could stop talking about. It gave Charlotte a great deal of satisfaction to remember that Marietta had eventually married an impecunious nobody she’d met at college, only to have him fail in one business after the other until Marietta’s money was gone, or nearly gone. Marietta hadn’t had to go to work, of course. She probably had ten million dollars left. Still, ten million dollars wasn’t enough to live like
this
, or even approximate it. Now, when Charlotte saw Marietta, it was only by accident, at parents’ day at one of the schools, where Marietta’s children were proving to be just as stupid as her husband had been. Really, the whole thing was ridiculous. Anybody with a brain would have known better. If you’re going to marry poor, you wait to see how he’ll turn out. You marry somebody like Steven Spielberg or Steve Jobs. You don’t pick some intense brooder in your Introduction to Philosophy class and decide that he’s a genius.
    Marietta’s husband had committed suicide, in the end. It was the kind of thing people like that did. Charlotte had no idea what Marietta did with herself. Now she looked around the longest of the buffet tables, counting china crocks of beluga caviar, and feeling so worked up she almost thought steam might be coming out of her ears. There was the danger of television, and of all entertainment like it. Once the vulgar images got stuck in your head, you could never get them out again. She counted the crocks again. She took a deep breath. She considered blasting the caterer and decided she couldn’t risk it. If he walked out this late, there would be a disaster. She was, she thought, willfully misunderstood, by everybody around her. She wanted only what was best for everybody. She wanted only perfection.
    She counted the crocks again. She counted the plates of sliced salmon. She counted the canapés set out in slanting rows on a long silver serving tray. She was nearly six feet tall and, even at this age, and in spite of the Main Line prejudice against plastic surgery, a magnificent-looking woman. Her neck was long and thin. Her eyes were huge and blue. Her hair was as thick as the evergreen bushes that comprised the topiary garden at the