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And he admitted that he also liked how it sounded.
The exhaust made as nice a deep powerful note during downshifts as when he ran up through the gears, pushing the tachometer toward redline, which he was doing now as he headed down U.S. 1, which forever had been called the Baltimore Pike, toward Media.
A mile later, he downshifted and braked again to make a left onto Pennsylvania Route 252. And, finally, after a couple miles on that narrow two-lane, also known as Providence Road, he entered the small Philadelphia suburb of Wallingford.
While somewhat close to the Main Line, Wallingford technically was not part of the well-known upper-crust area, which derived its name in the nineteenth century from the Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line. That rail line, now long gone, had connected the towns incorporating the sprawling country estates that belonged to Philly’s wealthiest families.
The present-day median income of Main Line residents was the same as that of residents of Beverly Hills, California. Similarly, sociologists would categorize those who lived in Wallingford as upper middle income, upper income, and wealthy, living in separate dwellings, some of which were very old, with many of the newer ones designed to look that way. Wallingford also had its own post office and railroad station and Free Library.
The residences were set well back from Providence Road. The two-lane macadam was lined closely with tall, overgrown pine trees that, while beautiful, made for blind driveways. And with the entrance to the Payne property coming up on the right, Matt, out of long-established habit, first hit his turn signal and checked mirrors for traffic—he couldn’t count the many times he almost had been rear-ended by someone flying up on his bumper—and only then downshifted and applied the brakes.
He made the turn without incident. And after following the winding, crushed-stone drive through the four-acre property, the house came into view.
The property had been in the Payne family for more than two centuries. Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esquire, had raised his family, now grown and gone, in the large, rambling structure. What had been the original house, built of fieldstone before the Revolution, was now the kitchen and the sewing room. Additions and modifications had been made over the many years. While the result could fit no specific architectural category, it was comfortable, even luxurious.
A real estate saleswoman had once remarked that “the Payne place just looked like old, old money.”
Yet it was not ostentatious—there was no tennis court and no swimming pool, as the Payne family used those facilities at the Rose Tree Hunt Club, where they also rode.
They did have a tennis court at the Cape May summerhouse on the southern tip of the Jersey Shore, as well as a dock that eventually would hold Brewster Payne’s Final Tort VI, a Viking sportfisherman yacht that Matt was planning on eventually ferrying up from the Florida Keys.
Approaching the house, Payne saw two late-model GMC Yukon XLs, parked short of what a century before had been a stable and now was a four-car garage.
Both enormous SUVs originally had been purchased new by their father. The newest one, looking as if it had just come off the showroom floor, was still his. The two-year-old model, which also had been in pristine condition when Brewster had given it to his daughter, now was somewhat battered. It had been parked at an odd angle, its right tires up on the grass alongside the cobblestoned parking area.
Dr. Amelia A. Payne’s inability to conduct a motor vehicle over the roads of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania without at least grazing, on average once a week, other motor vehicles, street signs, and, on one memorable occasion, a fire hydrant, was legendary. Brewster had hoped that the big truck would keep Amy alive.
Matt shook his head—and parked his Porsche at the farthest possible spot away from her vehicle.
[ THREE ]
After crossing the big patio of old red brick and entering the house through a back door, he could hear his sister and mother talking in the kitchen. He found them both holding large coffee mugs and standing at opposite ends of a four-foot-square butcher-block island loaded with the makings for hoagie sandwiches.
r /> “Matt, honey! How nice,” Mrs. Patricia Payne said, smiling.
She was trim and youthful, with the fair skin of the Irish, and looked to be in her early forties when, in fact, she was a decade older. In recent years, she had changed her luxuriant head of reddish brown hair to blonde.
Matt quickly walked to the island and, after she raised her cheek, gave her a kiss. At the same time, he reached down and took a slice of salami from the butcher block. He folded it, then stuffed it in his mouth, while waving in an exaggerated fashion at his sister.
“I wasn’t sure you’d find time in your busy schedule for us,” Amy said. “Clearly, you couldn’t find the time to shave.”
“Don’t start, you two,” Patricia Payne protested. “You’re starting to sound like Mother Moffitt.”
Amy Payne, petite and intense and approaching thirty, while not a pretty girl, was rather naturally attractive. She kept her brown hair snipped short, not for purposes of beauty but because it was easier to care for that way.
She was unusually intelligent, having shortly after turning age twenty-two had a psychiatric residency under the mentorship of Dr. Aaron Stein, head of the school of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and former president of the American Psychiatric Association. Many strongly suspected that Dr. Stein, who was short and plump and in his fifties—Brewster Payne described him as looking like a beardless Santa Claus—was responsible for Dr. Payne’s current professorship at UPenn.
“So, Sigmund,” Matt replied, after swallowing the cold cut, “did you actually park your truck out there or give up and desert it?”
Dr. Payne gave him the finger.
Their mother pretended not to notice that, instead asking, “How’s your wound healing, honey? Does it still hurt?”
“Only when I breathe.”
“That’s not funny,” Amy said. “You could be dead.”
“I just learned,” Matt said, “that having dodged the Grim Reaper, I pissed off more than a few guys waiting on the promotion list. They thought that with the demise of the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, there suddenly was about to be a sergeant’s slot opening.”
