by Jane Haddam
“Are they supposed to be friends?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Obviously,” Peggy said judiciously, “you know more than I do. You must have been on the phone all night with one or the other of them. Except not with me. Never with me anymore, right? We use Stu as an excuse to avoid talking about why it is none of you are my friends anymore, even though we’ve all known each other since kindergarten.”
“You know what it’s like with Stu. If he’s in the wrong mood, he goes berserk. None of us wanted to—”
“Talk to me,” Peggy said.
“We don’t really know why he’s here. We just think he’s here because of Michael. And the stories in the supermarket newspapers. What else could it be, right? What other reason would he have to be down here? We don’t think it’s a very good situation, under the circumstances.”
“Why don’t you ask her about it?” Peggy said. “We’re all supposed to be grown-ups these days, right? We’re all practically fifty. None of that high school stuff should matter anymore. Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call her house and ask her—”
“Listen,” Nancy said. “There was an incident. Last night. Somebody got into the garage out there and left a dead dog in it.”
“In Betsy Toliver’s garage?”
“Right. Exactly. I don’t know the details. It was Kyle Borden who took the call, and you know what he’s like. Chris couldn’t get a thing out of him, even though she tried, except that it was deliberate. I mean, the dog was killed, it didn’t just die of something. If you could think of anybody doing anything stupider—”
“It doesn’t have to be connected to us,” Peggy said. “It could be somebody else, doing it for some other reason.”
“What?”
“Kids. Bugging the famous person.”
“Don’t be asinine,” Nancy said. “Why would kids put a dead dog in Betsy Toliver’s garage? Even your standard sociopathic adolescent has to have some reason for what he does. No, I’m with Chris. I think somebody meant it as a warning.”
“A warning of what?”
“A warning for her to get out of town,” Nancy said. “For Betsy to get out of town. Chris thinks it came from one of us, and I’m with her—”
Peggy snorted. “Could you just see Belinda dragging a dead dog out there where the Tolivers live? You must be joking.”
“I’m not joking, and you shouldn’t be joking, either. The situation would have been mucky enough if she were just down here on her own, but with Demarkian here with her it could get very nasty. So Chris and I decided. We’re going to invite her to things.”
“What?”
“We’re going to invite her to things,” Nancy said. “Chris is going to have her to dinner. I’m going to invite her to lunch. We’re going to invite her to things. Just like we do when Maris comes down from New York.”
“Are you crazy? Whatever makes you think she would come?”
“Oh, she’ll come,” Nancy said confidently. “People like that always do. I’ve had enough ed psych to know that, and so have you. It doesn’t matter if she lives to be a hundred and five, she’ll still be trying to make up for what happened to her when she was fourteen. Why do you think she puts up with Maris?”
“I thought she and Maris had become friends in college.”
Nancy smirked. “If Maris is Betsy’s friend, I’m Hillary Clinton’s hairdresser. Maris can’t stand Betsy Toliver now any more than she ever could, and you know how Maris was about Betsy. Worse than Belinda. She’ll come, Peggy, trust me.”
They were driving through the gates onto the long drive that led to the new high school. Peggy cleared her throat. “Remember that night when we invited her to the White Horse?”
“Yes. It won’t matter. She won’t believe we’d do something like that again, not at our ages. And we have to make it clear to that Demarkian person that none of us has anything against Betsy Toliver anymore. You got that?”
They were at the end of the drive and into the faculty parking lot. Peggy picked her purse up from the floor and watched a thin line of students climbing their way up from the lower level lot. They carried book bags instead of just books. Peggy couldn’t remember when that had started, but she did remember that none of them would have been caught dead with a book bag when she was in high school. Of course, none of them would have been caught dead in jeans, either, at least not on a school day, and now nobody seemed to wear anything else.
“So,” Nancy said. “What do you think? You going to help us out?”
“How?”
“Chris is going to have a lunch on Saturday, with Betsy as the guest of honor. Do you think you could manage to be there?”
Saturday was the day after payday. Stu would be unconscious by ten in the morning. “Yes,” Peggy said.
“Good,” Nancy said. “Chris is going to call her this morning to firm things up. After that, we should know something about times. I think Chris is going to have it catered. All you’ve got to do is show up and behave yourself. No commenting on how she still has really awful taste in clothes.”
“Well,” Peggy said, “they’re no longer cheap.”
Nancy pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “No, they’re not, and nothing else about her is either. I just hope you take the point. Chris is right. It’s been bad enough with those stupid newspaper stories, but it’s going to get a lot worse if we don’t do something about it. Show up. Make polite conversation. Pretend that you’re really impressed with what she’s done with her life. That’s all I ask.”
But I am really impressed with what she’s done with her life, Peggy thought, struggling with the door handle and her pocketbook and the brown paper bag all at once. Then she stepped out of the car and looked around, bewildered. There were times when she woke up in the middle of the night and thought she was still fourteen years old. She still lived in the same place and knew the same people. She still went to the same school she’d gone to then, even if it was in a different building.
She turned to say something to Nancy, but Nancy was gone, striding out across the parking lot with her briefcase swinging on the tips of the fingers of her right hand.
If I were Betsy, I wouldn’t come, Peggy thought, and then she changed her mind, quickly, because she had to. She was going to come herself. That was just as bad. If she’d had any self-respect left, she would have refused outright.
2
For Belinda Hart Grantling, it was better this morning than it had been for a long time, in spite of all that nonsense about the dog in Betsy Toliver’s garage. Part of that was that she had someplace to go, and therefore some reason to stay away from Maris. Always before, when Maris had come home, she’d gone to stay with her own parents in their house out in Stony Hill. Now Maris’s parents were both dead, and there was nowhere for her to stay except in one of those motels out on the highway, which weren’t feasible, since Maris wouldn’t drive. It made Belinda insane. She’d rented that bright yellow Volkswagen at the airport, and driven it out here, and now it was sitting abandoned in the English Drugs parking lot while Maris cadged rides from whoever would give them to her. Belinda wondered, vaguely, if Maris had inherited whatever money her parents had. She had a brother with a wife and a child somewhere in Ohio, but surely that wouldn’t mean she’d been cut out of the will entirely. Maybe there was nothing to inherit. Maris never seemed to have any money, and although Belinda knew that was Betsy’s fault—didn’t it figure that Betsy was not only stuck-up, but a miser?—it was still odd that Maris could have the things she had and live the way she lived and not have enough pocket money to buy magazines when she went to English Drugs. Maris had been in residence less than forty-eight hours, and Belinda was ready to kill her. If it wasn’t for that meeting the night before, Belinda would have kicked her out, first thing, as soon as she woke up.
She stopped in the living room right before she left the apartment, and stared at the television screen Maris had left glowing
the night before. Maris never turned anything off. Lights, television, faucets—Belinda found herself wandering from one room to the next, shutting things. Belinda found the remote half under the couch and punched the channel changer. She passed Cartoon Network and Lifetime and the Sci Fi Channel and hunkered down with the news shows: CNN, MSNBC, C-Span. Betsy didn’t seem to be on any of them at the moment. Maybe it was the wrong time of day. Maybe they were done live, and Betsy wouldn’t be on television at all the whole month she was in Hollman. The idea gave Belinda a little rush of satisfaction. It wasn’t, Belinda thought, as if Betsy were somebody really famous. She wasn’t a movie star or a rock singer or a model or anybody else important. She was just an intellectual, the way she’d always been. The only difference now was that there were a lot of intellectuals on television for other intellectuals to watch. Belinda couldn’t imagine who else would watch them. She hated those screaming matches over fiscal policy she sometimes stumbled into looking for a movie or a rerun of Designing Women. The shows where they didn’t scream were even worse. Four people in four modern chairs on a gray platform on a black set, talking so reasonably you could barely hear them—and about what? The Bush tax cut. The Clinton legacy. The Laffer curve. Belinda truly hated Hillary Clinton, more than she hated anybody on the planet except for Betsy Toliver herself. You could see what Hillary was all about just by looking at her, another stuck-up smart girl who thought people should elect her God just because she listened to classical music. It was disgusting. It was unfeminine, too. Belinda didn’t understand why all these women didn’t come right out and say they were lesbians. What was the point of the pretense, the husband they didn’t like sleeping with, the children they kept as pets to drag out in front of the cameras when the holidays rolled around and they needed to take a family portrait? Belinda snapped the television off and put the remote where it belonged, on the coffee table. Then she went to the back of the apartment and looked in on Maris, asleep across the daybed in the back room with her clothes from last night still on, including shoes. Belinda went out again and picked up her purse from the counter next to the sink. She took out her wallet and counted the money in it—$17 in bills, $1.26 in change—and put the wallet back and zipped up the bag. There was just something wrong about the whole thing, something so fundamentally unfair. It was as if all those women—Betsy, and Hillary Clinton, and all the rest of them on the news talk shows—it was as if they were all cheating, breaking the rules, going behind the backs of everybody else and stealing things that rightfully belonged to others. The worst thing was, men never seemed to catch on. Men married them for it.
She was out on the street before she knew it. The day was very bright. She blinked a few times in the sun. She stayed on her own side of the street, because that’s where the library was. She went around to the side of the library’s new addition and let herself in the back door. It was ten minutes to nine. She had just enough time to put away her things and get her hair brushed before the doors opened. If business was slow, as it always was on Tuesday mornings, she would be able to run across the street to JayMar’s to take out a cup of coffee, or over to Mullaney’s, near the railroad tracks, for a package of crackers and peanut butter to eat.
She put her handbag behind the take out desk. The lights were all on, meaning that Laurel was already here. She took out her brush and ran it vigorously through what hair she had left. She was balding badly, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She thought about trying Rogaine, but that seemed to be for men. She looked at her reflection in the security mirror above the main desk, put her brush back in her bag, and started walking toward the front.
“Laurel?”
“I’m up here.” The sound came from the front foyer of the addition. Nobody went into the front foyer of the main building anymore. Once the addition had been fully up and running, the main building had been turned into a museum of things nobody wanted to see. Who cared how people had lived in Hollman in 1865?
“What are you doing?” Belinda asked. She was coming up between the stacks. Laurel was there, at the very front, pinning something on the cork bulletin board.
“I’m putting up a notice. Did I tell you? I couldn’t have. You haven’t been here. Anyway, she came in late yesterday afternoon, to return some overdue books she found on a shelf somewhere and ask me if her mother had anything else out that I might be looking for. God, she looked great. Do you know if she’s had plastic surgery or not? I mean, no crow’s-feet at all. Of course, her mother doesn’t have them, either, so maybe it’s genetics. Wouldn’t that be lucky genetics to get? I already look like a road map in the top half of my face.”
“So, what did she say? Just that about the overdue books?”
“Oh, no,” Laurel said. “We talked about her coming here and doing a program, and she said yes right away. On Saturday, at our regular meeting of the Friends. I’ve been frantic ever since. I had to call the Home News and put in a notice, and I had to make this sign.” Laurel gestured at the paper she was tacking to the corkboard. “It’s not a very good one, but the letters are big. And I ran off a whole bunch of them to pass out. I mean, of course the Friends will all be there, but I’ll be embarrassed beyond belief if we can’t get a bigger crowd than that. She’s going to talk about covering a political campaign. Did you know she covered the campaign in Connecticut the last time Rosa DeLauro ran for Congress?”
Belinda had never heard of Rosa DeLauro, but she had an instinct not to say so. Obviously, she was somebody Laurel recognized, and that other people would, too. The sign was just an ordinary piece of legal-sized paper printed in red capital letters, boldface and in italics: ELIZABETH TOLIVER IS HERE. Underneath, there was smaller lettering, giving the day and time and location and a brief sentence about the subject of the talk.
“Do you think a lot of people are going to be interested in an election in Connecticut?” she asked, because she couldn’t help herself.
Laurel waved this away. “It’s not an election in Connecticut. It’s campaign finance reform and celebrity perks and the way the media treats women running for Congress. Especially somebody like Rosa DeLauro, who’s so feminist. Oh, and you’ve got to remember. She likes to be called Liz, not Betsy. She’s really adamant about it. It upsets her to be called Betsy.”
“Betsy Wetsy,” Belinda said.
“What?” Laurel blinked.
“Betsy Wetsy,” Belinda said. “That’s why she hates to be called Betsy. It was a doll when we were all children, a baby doll that you fed with a bottle and then the water came out the other side and you had to change its diaper. So we called her Betsy Wetsy.”
“In high school?”
“In kindergarten and all the time after. It was just one of those things.”
“What an awful thing to do to somebody.”
“I don’t see why. It was just a nickname. Lots of people have nicknames when they’re children. I had a nickname.”
“What?”
“Lindy.”
“Not quite the same, is it?” Laurel made a face. “I’ve read things about how awful she was treated here as a child. I never really thought about the particulars. I think it’s a miracle she’s willing to be here at all. She must be incredibly close to her mother. And now doing a program for the library, too. You’re making me think she’s some kind of saint.”
“It would have been different if it really fit,” Belinda said. “But she didn’t really wet herself. It was just a nickname.”
“Right,” Laurel said. She had finished putting up the folder. With its red lettering, it would be hard to miss. She stepped back and rubbed the palms of her hands against her sky-blue linen Talbots pants. “Pay attention to me. You will not call her Betsy while she’s here. In the library, I mean. I don’t care how natural it feels. If people had called me a name like that when I was growing up, I’d have gotten away as soon as I could and never gone back. It’s unbelievable how children treat each other, it really is. No wonder there are school shootings ever
y spring. I’ve got to clean up the files on late returns this morning. Do you think you can handle things yourself?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Good.” Laurel looked her poster up and down. “Good,” she said again. “You’d think people would learn, but they never do. And it always comes out the same. Incredible. You can open up now. It’s five after nine.”
Laurel strode off through the big main room. Belinda watched her for a while and then did what she’d been asked to do. Laurel, obviously, hadn’t heard about the dog. Either she didn’t watch the local news in the morning, or the story hadn’t appeared there. It wouldn’t have appeared in the paper, because that only came out once a week. Belinda looked at JayMar’s, and English Drugs, and the railroad tracks, and Mullaney’s. She couldn’t imagine putting her hands in a dog’s intestines. She didn’t even like to handle raw chicken. Besides, this was the kind of thing that would appear in the news somewhere, and when it did it would make all of them look like—
—losers.
There were people on the street now, although not many of them. Belinda checked them out to see if she knew them—she didn’t—and went back inside and closed the door after her. For the first time, she considered the possibility that Betsy might take the dog seriously. Maybe, to Betsy, the dog would be a warning she needed to heed. Then she’d give this up as a bad job, and pack her children into her fancy expensive car, and go back to Connecticut.
For the first time, Belinda truly hoped that Betsy Toliver was scared to death.
FIVE
1
The first thing Gregor Demarkian did when he woke up that morning, before he’d taken a shower, was to get his notebook from the pocket of the jacket he was wearing the night before and make sure he had written down the name and address of the police officer he had talked to about the dog. He’d been dreaming all night that he’d lost both. Either he’d forgotten to write them down, or the ink had paled so much it was illegible, or the page was ripped from the notebook when he went to find it. Even during the first dream, he had been aware that he was dreaming. During the second dream and all the ones afterward, some part of his brain stood outside the action, analyzing. This was a kind of panic attack. He’d been prone to them when he was first in training at Quantico, which was odd, because he hadn’t been the least prone to them in the army, and he’d always been half afraid that the army would get him killed. He had no idea why he should suddenly be prone to them again, now, when—at least as far as he could tell—he had nothing at stake at all. It wasn’t the dog, although the dog still bothered the hell out of him. Mark had not been exaggerating. Somebody had cut that dog straight up the middle, with some kind of a sharp knife or a razor, while it was still alive. The intestines had been spilling out all over the garage’s cement floor, slippery and wet. Gregor could have understood it if he’d had dreams about that, the way he used to have dreams about the bodies they got pictures of when he was with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. The dog, though, had been worse. He couldn’t put his finger on why. Maybe there was some part of him that felt that it made sense for people to kill other people, even if the other people were children. There was something natural about human beings wanting to slaughter each other. Slaughtering a dog was not natural. He was making no sense at all.
