Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Page B

been established, and nothing had been reported missing from the house. Further questioning of Mrs. Von Stein had proven fruitless, as she remained unable to describe the assailants or to tell police how many people had beaten and stabbed her. Questioning of neighbors had proved equally unproductive.
    * * *
    On Friday, four days after the murder and one day after the memorial service for Lieth, Bonnie’s ex-husband, Steve Pritchard, paid a visit. He was balding now and had a beard and, as always, was very well-spoken. He could use the phrase
symbiotic relationship
and seem to know what it meant. Also, despite much talk of financial difficulty, he drove a BMW.
    For many years, he’d lived out west: South Dakota, Wyoming, someplace like that. He’d been a truck driver. Now he was back in North Carolina, in the western part of the state, working in some other aspect of the trucking business. She didn’t know, didn’t care.
    He’d come to see the kids a couple of times since they’d moved to Washington. Angela treated him as if he were a total stranger, which, to her, he was. Right to his face, she’d tell him she did not consider him her real father. Lieth Von Stein, she would say, was her father.
    Chris was more hospitable. Chris apparently still yearned for some sort of relationship with Steve. For Chris’s sake, Bonnie had tolerated the visits. As had Lieth. Lieth, in fact, got along surprisingly well with Steve; said he liked the man, said he seemed like a nice guy, the kind of fellow you could sit down and talk to about all sorts of different subjects. Lieth had even insisted that when he visited, Steve sleep right there in the house, in Chris’s room. Bonnie herself would just as soon have let him sleep in his car, but she worked hard at not being vindictive.
    Now, however, she was not about to act glad to see her ex-husband. In the sphere of existence she presently occupied, there was no room for pretense.
    Steve sat on the edge of her bed and told her he was so sorry about the way things had turned out. He said that if he’d never left her, then none of this would have happened.
    â€œDon’t apologize,” Bonnie said. “You did me the biggest favor of my life.”
    He looked at her, not comprehending.
    â€œIf you hadn’t walked out, I never would have had the opportunity to know and love Lieth. I
thank
you for what you did to me.”
    â€œWell,” Steve Pritchard said, “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
    Then she asked him please not to sit on her bed. “They don’t allow people to sit on hospital beds,” she said. And that was the end of his visit.
    * * *
    Bonnie’s other visitor that day was Lewis Young. He did not tell her about the fire. He did not tell her about the map. He did not tell her about the suspicions her brother had expressed. He did not tell her about the blood-spattered pages from
A Rose in Winter
.
    He was still talking to her for “background,” he said later, but he was aware that, despite his own impression of the severity of her injuries—an impression supported by the physicians who were treating her—nine out of ten people in Little Washington already seemed certain that Bonnie had planned the murder of her husband and that her children had helped carry it out.
    He’d been hearing a lot about life among the Pritchard children and the Von Steins, very little of it consistent with the picture that Bonnie had painted for him in their first conversation, three days earlier.
    He’d been told by high school classmates that Chris was “a tad bit weird,” always trying out a strange new hairstyle, and driving a noisy car, in an attempt to draw attention to himself. He’d also had “very little luck with the ladies.”
    Angela had “hung out with a wilder crowd,” including, Young was told, boyfriends who had served time in