Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

“You’re the one who told me that stuff about Lizzie Borden,” Bennis said. “I don’t know. I admit, in a small town like that, you’d think this would be an enormous deal, even after all this time. Are the police who did the investigation still around?”

  “One of them is, retired and living in town and more than happy to talk to me, or at least he says he is.” Gregor shrugged. “The chief of police at the time is dead. He was sixty-six in 1969 and had a heart condition even then. He died about ten years later. There was one other officer on the force that summer and he moved to California a couple of years after it happened. Nobody knows how to find him.”

  “I can see it right now. He’s the real murderer, and his friends on the police force have covered up his crime and given him a chance to escape and make a new life, because the dead boy was really a vampire—”

  “Bennis.”

  “Well, it was a thought. You didn’t really want coffee, did you?”

  “I thought I did. But all kidding aside, there’s something very nasty about the way they treat that murder. I don’t care if the kid was on crack and in a gang—”

  “In 1969?”

  “—he still would deserve to be taken seriously. I find myself wondering if this was the attitude they had at the time, or if it’s just what’s developed because Elizabeth Toliver got ‘famous,’ so to speak. It’s something worse than annoying. It nags at me. So, I thought I’d go help your friend out and see what the problem was at the same time, and I may be kidding myself. Maybe I’ll get there and it will turn out that there’s a perfectly good reason why nobody pays any attention to Michael Houseman and how he died.”

  “I think you’re bored,” Bennis said.

  “I think you’re going to Los Angeles,” Gregor said.

  “I think you’ve got an hour before you leave, and we ought to go somewhere and neck.”

  2

  It was early evening by the time Gregor Demarkian reached Hollman, Pennsylvania, and when he did he was as rattled as he had been the one time he took a train in the Alps. He had not, this time, taken a train. There might once have been trains that stopped in Hollman or somewhere nearby, but these days the nearest station was fifty miles away and on the other side of what he could only call mountains. He spent a moment thinking how odd it was that the mountains should be covered with vegetation all the way to their tops—sometimes he caught sight of pine trees sticking up like cowlicks, far above him—and then the landscape closer to the ground started to capture him, and he began to feel uneasy. Gregor Demarkian was not a small-town boy. He had never had any part in the great American story, the one that Elizabeth Toliver now seemed to be the public expression of: you start in an obscure small town somewhere, born to unimportant people; you work very hard and get to go away to a good college on the East or West Coast; you leave college for a wretched apartment in a shabby but Bohemian section of New York or San Francisco; you Make Good. This was the part that was left out of Thomas Wolfe’s story, Gregor thought. It wasn’t that you couldn’t ever go home again, it was that you didn’t want to. Gregor had grown up in Philadelphia, on the very street on which he now lived, and he had spent all his life in cities except for his obligatory stint in the armed services. That wasn’t the kind of memory that would make anybody fond of small towns, if he wasn’t used to them—godforsaken backwaters in Mississippi and Alabama, bad weather, bad insects, bad feelings all around, the local cops just itching to get to you the first time you did anything out of line or even before, if you happened to be one of the few black soldiers in that newly integrated army. Still, it hadn’t been the hostility to all things military that had bothered him, even at the time. It had been the claustrophobia. It was incredible how airless these small places could get, when they were effectively cut off from the outside world—and they were, that was the odd thing, in spite of MTV and CNN and the Internet. It was almost as if they didn’t believe the things they saw and read, as if they thought all that was fiction and that in reality everybody on the planet lived exactly the way they did. Or ought to. Gregor was coming in by car, with a driver. It wasn’t a limousine—“you don’t want to be too conspicuous,” Jimmy Card had said, and Gregor had agreed with him. He really hated limousines—but it still had a chauffeur, and although that solved the problem of the fact that Gregor never drove except in an emergency, like maybe the end of the world, it still made him a little uncomfortable. Jimmy Card was not the most formidable man Gregor had ever met. During his years with the FBI, he had met both presidents of the United States and presidents of multinational corporations, the kind of men who got done what they needed to get done, no matter what it was. Still, Jimmy Card had the makings of men like that, even if success in entertainment would never give him the same kind of authority. If it had been up to Gregor, he would have come to town in some neutral way and then hired a car and a driver here, or hooked up with a local private detective—did they have private detectives in places like Hollman?—but Jimmy Card had insisted, and Gregor had been unable to resist. Now here he was, in a black sedan with New York plates, driven by a man who was both obviously Hispanic and entirely uncommunicative. He could have gotten more conversation out of a robot. He was also tired. It was a long way up from Philadelphia, and on the Penn Turnpike, too, which Gregor personally regarded as a state-sanctioned instrument of torture. He was also hungry. The Penn Turnpike didn’t have rest stops with fast-food places in them every thirty miles or so. It didn’t even have rest areas that he could tell. His back creaked. His stomach rumbled. The sight of Hollman beginning to spin out around him made him tense.

  “Listen,” he said, leaning forward to make sure the driver could hear him. “Maybe we could stop along the way here for a minute. I’d like to get some breath mints.”

  “There’s a parking place at the curb ahead,” the driver said, looking straight through the windshield, as if he were talking to a voice on the radio. “There’s a place called English Drugs.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. “A drugstore. That will be perfect.”

  The driver didn’t say anything. Gregor sat back and looked out the side window at the narrow streets edged with stores and churches. The stores were made of clapboard and had false fronts, so that they seemed to go up a story higher than they really did. The churches were very old, and looked it. The Methodist one had a square bell tower that looked to be the tallest structure in town. Gregor felt his sense of claustrophobia increasing. He had never been able to understand how people managed to stay in places like this.

  The driver pulled the car up next to the curb and cut the engine. He looked up into the rearview mirror—victory, Gregor thought, he knows I’m here—and said, “What kind of breath mints would you like, sir?”

  “Oh,” Gregor said. “I don’t know. You don’t have to go get them for me. I’d like to get out and walk around.” He almost added “if you don’t mind,” but didn’t, because it was absurd. You didn’t apologize to a man being paid to drive you because you wanted to get out and walk around.

  The driver was no longer looking into the rearview mirror. He was looking straight out the windshield, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other people on the street or the other cars parked at the curb. Gregor didn’t think he had brought a book. What would he do while Gregor was walking around, stretching his legs, looking at the scenery? He didn’t even have the job of opening Gregor’s door and closing it for him. They’d discussed all that at the outset, and agreed that it—like a limousine—would only be conspicuous. Actually, Gregor thought, they hadn’t agreed on anything. Gregor had just given directions, and the driver had acted as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

  “Right,” Gregor said now. He popped his door open. “I won’t be long. I just want to walk around a little.”

  The driver said nothing. Gregor tried to remember his name and couldn’t. Then he got out onto the sidewalk and stretched his legs a little.

  If he’d been expecting a revelation of some sort, he didn�
�t get it. It was quite possible—in fact it was likely—that Hollman had exhibited a few tense oddnesses in the days after Michael Houseman had died, but that was more than thirty years ago. Now it looked exactly like a hundred other places of the same type, from Maine to Nebraska and maybe even beyond. The men who passed him were wearing either stiff-collared polo shirts with little animals embroidered over their breast pockets (but not Izod alligators) or the kind of suits you bought in Sears when you weren’t used to wearing them. The women were not so much fat as lumpy in the way women got when they were neither particularly athletic nor committed to working out. Everybody looked tired. Gregor looked up and down this side of the street. Elsa-Edna’s was a dress shop with pretensions to sophistication. JayMar’s was a restaurant that would have been called a diner anywhere else. English Drugs was a drugstore and the biggest enterprise on the block, except that it wasn’t really a block. It went on for far too long in both directions, broken only by driveways.

  Midway up from where he stood now, back the way they had come, the flat faces of the false-fronted windows were broken by the existence of a small Victorian house, painted red. Gregor stepped back a little so that he could get a better look at it. It had a sign hanging over the four small steps of its entryway, the way a bed and breakfast would. The sign said: COUNTRY CRAFTS. Gregor moved up the street a little to get a better look. It was not an unusual or particularly interesting place, on its own. Like the town, it was surely one of thousands of identical places all across the country. The porch made it impossible to see anything that might have been sitting in its windows. Gregor had the idea that that must be a very bad thing for a store. He walked up the slight incline of Grandview Avenue until he was right in front of the place and stopped. There was another sign besides the one over the front porch entry. This sign was bolted into the porch rail next to the steps, and it said more than just COUNTRY CRAFTS. It said: PROPRIETORS GEORGE AND EMMA BLIGH.

  Gregor reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket—Bennis had been absolutely right, as usual. He shouldn’t have come here with nothing but suits—and took out the notebook he’d been using to organize his notes on the Hollman trip. Bennis had given him a Palm Pilot last Christmas, but he’d left it in the top drawer of his dresser, the way he always did. He could not get the hang of using it. What he kept in his breast pocket was a simple stenographer’s pad. He flipped through it and found want he wanted: Emma Kenyon. Now Emma Kenyon Bligh. Runs Country Crafts.

  Sometimes, Tibor always said, God is trying to tell you something. Gregor figured this must be one of those times. He put his notebook back in his pocket and climbed the short flight of steps to Country Crafts’ front porch. Once he was up on it, he realized that there was one of those ubiquitous driveways running along the side of the building. That meant there had to be a parking lot out back. He stopped on the porch and looked at what was in the windows, which wasn’t much: a doll made out of “pulled” yarn in an old-fashioned dress; a little set of bright blue clay pots; a swath of hard red velvet that seemed to have drifts of dust across its surface. He pushed through the front door and heard a bell tinkle above his head. It sounded like a brass cowbell.

  The big front room of the house was empty except for a woman standing behind a counter, chewing on a Mars bar and looking through a copy of Us magazine. She was, Gregor thought, the single fattest human being he had ever seen outside a hospital. If she went on eating Mars bars, she was going to end up in a hospital. He wondered if she made her dresses herself. He couldn’t imagine a store that would sell a size like that. He wondered if she did her hair herself, too. It wasn’t just blond. It was a bright egg-yolk yellow.

  The woman looked up from her magazine and said, “Hello, there. Can I help you?”

  “I don’t know.” Gregor walked up to the counter. “I’m supposed to be spending the week with a friend. I thought it might be a good idea to take some kind of house gift.”

  “And you just thought of that this minute?”

  “What?”

  The woman put her copy of Us down on the counter. “I said I can’t believe you thought of that just this minute,” she said patiently. “I mean, I’ll help you out if I can, but let’s face it, you’d probably have had a larger selection of house gifts wherever it was you came from.”

  “Philadelphia,” Gregor said politely.

  She looked him up and down. “Yeah. I figured it had to be at least Philadelphia. You staying here in Hollman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anybody who lives in Hollman will have seen everything I’ve got a hundred times and hated all of it. Unless they’re into crafts, of course, and then they come in to buy the material they need. Yarn. Material. Pipe cleaners. Do you smoke a pipe?”

  “No. Are you Mrs. Bligh?”

  “What?” The woman looked startled. “Oh,” she said finally. “The sign. Yes, I’m Mrs. Bligh. Emma Bligh. Emma Kenyon Bligh, as they put it in the newspaper when they write me up for being on some committee at the high school. Kenyon was my maiden name. Who are you?”

  “Somebody who needs a knickknack to present to a friend of mine before I’m unconscionably late arriving.”

  The cowbell rang again, and they both looked up at the front door at the woman coming in. To Gregor, she seemed less alarming than Emma Kenyon Bligh—not fat, and with ordinary brownish hair instead of yellow—but there was also something out of key about her, as if, if you scratched the surface, you would get something you didn’t expect to see. The surface was ordinary enough, though. She had on a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of the kind once favored by the women called in Gregor’s youth “old-maid schoolteachers,” and if it hadn’t been for the thin gold wedding band on the fourth finger of her left hand, that was what Gregor would have thought she was.

  “Peggy,” Emma said. “What are you doing downtown so late?”

  Peggy looked at her feet. She seemed not only unwilling, but incapable of looking anyone in the eye. “I had to work late. We had chess club. I—” She looked confused.

  “Shit,” Emma said, under her breath.

  Peggy looked up at the ceiling. There was a fan there, turning slowly, not doing much good. “I had to talk to you,” she said.

  “Shit,” Emma said again.

  Peggy seemed not to have noticed.

  Gregor grabbed the first thing at hand—a little wooden plaque with a ceramic inset with the words “The Kitchen Is the Heart of the Home” printed across the top of it and a poem underneath, probably a bad one. Emma had come out from behind the counter and was moving through the shelves full of inanities toward the front door, where Peggy was still standing almost still, as if she had just come in. Gregor hadn’t realized how many shelves and knickknacks there were. He hadn’t been paying attention. Now the place seemed to be stuffed full of them.

  “I’ll just leave you twenty dollars for this,” he said, taking out his wallet.

  Emma had reached Peggy and grabbed her by the arm. They were, Gregor realized, the same age. Emma only looked younger at first glance because the heavy folds of fat left her without the kind of wrinkles Peggy had. He had, he was sure, a Peggy in his notebook, but he didn’t want to check it here.

  Emma had started to drag Peggy through the aisles between the shelves. She had to drag, because Peggy didn’t seem to be moving her legs or her feet. She was moving her head, but that was more disconcerting than if she had been holding herself absolutely still. Her head bobbed back and forth on the top of her neck, as if they weren’t securely connected.

  “Jesus Christ,” Emma said. “I can’t believe you came in here at this time of day. Does he know where you are?”

  “I’ll just leave this twenty-dollar bill,” Gregor said again.

  The plaque cost $14.95. He didn’t really care. Emma continued to drag Peggy toward the back of the store, and in no time at all, they were out of sight. They were not, however, out of earshot. Peggy had the kind of clear-bell voice that carries for yards, even though it
isn’t loud, and Emma was hissing.

  “He knows I had to work late,” she was saying. “You know what he’s like. He understands when I have to stay at school to do the chess club.”

  It was, Gregor thought, like listening to someone talking during an episode of sleepwalking. The voice had no affect.

  He anchored the twenty-dollar bill firmly under a small vase of silk flowers. The vase was made of bubble glass. At the last minute, he left the plaque there, too. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do with it. Then he headed out the door and across the porch and down the steps back to the sidewalk, having no idea at all why he should feel so much in a hurry.

  When he got back to the car and slid into the backseat and gave the robot-driver directions to go straight to Betsey Toliver’s house, he reached into his jacket again and looked up the entry on “Peggy.”

  3

  Fifteen minutes later, after some confusion about the difference between Meadow Farm Road and Meadow Farm Lane, the car pulled into the long driveway leading to a low ranch house that stretched out across its property like a ruler made of Silly Putty. It was a fifties ranch, not a modern one, but it had been kept up. The flagstone walk that led from the front door to the street—the one that nobody would ever walk on, because nobody would ever park on the street, out here—was well set and swept clean. The flagstone walk that led from the driveway to the side door was positively new. There were no cracks in the driveway’s asphalt paving. The front door had been freshly painted a glossy metallic red. Gregor could easily see how this might have been the biggest and most expensive house in town thirty years ago, especially since Hollman was hardly a bastion of the rich and famous, or even of the rich and bored. He popped open his door, swung his feet out of the car, and vaulted out into the air. At the end of May, it was warm out here, although not as warm as Philadelphia would have been. There was a slight breeze brushing through his hair. The grass smelled as if it had just been mowed. The house looked so quiet, and so deserted, he thought he might have come at the wrong time. Maybe Elizabeth Toliver had taken her mother to a restaurant. Maybe nobody was home.