He could picture her perfectly. He could almost feel her body next to him. The balloon within him began to expand.

“Well, there’s this policewoman. She’s a problem.”

“Tell me about her.”

Pell kissed Jennie and slipped his hand down her bony spine, past the strap of her bra, and kept going into the waistband of her slacks, felt the lace. “Not here. Inside. I’ll tell you about her inside.”

Chapter 37

“I’ve had enough of that,” Linda Whitfield said, nodding toward the TV, where news stories about Pell kept looping over and over.

Samantha agreed.

Linda walked into the kitchen and made decaf coffee and tea, then brought out the cups and milk and sugar, along with some cookies. Rebecca took the coffee but set it down and continued to sip her wine.

Sam said, “That was nice, what you said at dinner.”

Linda had said grace, apparently improvised, but articulate. Samantha herself wasn’t religious but she was touched by Linda’s words, intended for the souls of the people Daniel Pell had killed and their families, as well as gratitude for the chance to reunite with her sisters and a plea for a peaceful resolution of this sad situation. Even Rebecca—the steel magnolia among them—had seemed moved.

When she was young, Sam often wished her parents would take her to church. Many of her friends went with their families, and it seemed like something parents and a daughter could do together. But then, she’d have been happy if they’d taken her to grocery shop or for a drive to the airport to watch the planes take off and land while they ate hot dogs from a catering truck parked near the fence, like Ellie and Tim Schwimmer from next door did with their folks.

Samantha, I’d love to go with you but you know how important the meeting is. The issue isn’t just about Walnut Creek. It could affect all of Contra Costa. You can make a sacrifice too. The world’s not all about you, dear….

But enough of that, Sam commanded herself.

During dinner the conversation had been superficial: politics, the weather, what they thought of Kathryn Dance. Now Rebecca, who’d had plenty of wine, tried to draw Linda out some, find out what had happened in prison to make her so religious, but the woman might have sensed, as did Sam, that there was something challenging about the questions and deflected them. Rebecca had been the most independent of the three and was still the most blunt.

Linda did, though, explain about her day-to-day life. She ran the church’s neighborhood center, which Sam deduced was a soup kitchen, and helped with her brother and sister-in-law’s foster children. It was clear from the conversation—not to mention her shabby clothing—that Linda was struggling financially. Still, she claimed she had a “rich life” in the spiritual sense of the word, a phrase she’d repeated several times.

“You don’t talk to your parents at all?” Sam asked.