“Matt, I’m scared.”
“Well, you should be. What about the Ollwood woman? Did she meet Chenowith at the University of Pittsburgh? Or were they already planning armed revolution and rebellion at Bennington?”
“I don’t know where she met him,” Susan said. “But you have to understand about Jennie, Matt.”
“What do I have to understand?”
“She is no more capable of blowing up a building than I am.”
“The fact is that she did. There’s no question about that, honey.”
“You have to understand her.”
“Understand what, Susan?”
“Her family is a disaster,” Susan said. “Her mother’s a drunk, on her fourth husband. Her father doesn’t give a damn about her. She’s all alone, Matt, and always has been. Until, of course, Bryan came along. Whatever she did was because of Bryan.”
“That’s bullshit, honey,” Matt said gently. “She might have been strongly attracted to this character, that’s understandable. But once she found out that he was seriously considering doing something like blowing up a building—there’s a hell of a difference between hitting a campus cop with your ‘Fair Play For Animals!’ sign and robbing a National Guard armory to get explosives and weapons—”
“You know about that?” Susan interrupted.
“We even know the serial numbers of the carbines they stole. And that your friend Chenowith—”
“He’s not my friend, Matt!”
“—has chopped down one of them into a movie-style terrorist’s machine pistol to use when he robs banks.”
“Well, that answered another question I had. You know about the banks.”
“Yeah, we know about the banks. And it’s only a question of time before Robin Hood decides he has to use that machine pistol, and other innocent people get killed.”
She met his eyes and then looked away.
“You want to hear about Jennie?” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” Matt said. “I do. I left off saying that she had a choice to make when she understood that he was about to do some very terrible things, and she made the wrong one. I can’t work up much sympathy for your friend, honey, drunken mother on her fourth husband or not.”
“You said, in the car, that you were . . . ‘sucked into’ your relationship with Penny Detweiler. That she was really fucked up, and really needed you.”
“I wondered why you picked up on that,” Matt said. “That’s how it is with you and the Ollwood woman?”
Susan nodded.
“After—what happened at the Univer—”
“Let’s knock off the euphemisms,” Matt said. “What happened was that your friend actively assisted Chenowith in the placement and detonation of an explosive device in a building on a college campus, and caused the deaths of eleven innocent people.”
“All right,” Susan said, her voice choked. Tears formed in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
“Say it, honey,” Matt said gently but insistently.
She sighed.
“After Bryan . . . blew up the building, and the police started looking for him, Jennie called me. She was hysterical. Desperate. I felt so sorry for her. And she said she absolutely had to h
ave some money . . .”
“And you gave it to her,” Matt finished. “And as you were aware she was involved in blowing up the science building, that made you an accessory after the fact.”