Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  If Gregor had expected a quick denial, he didn’t get it. Instead, Kyle Borden looked at him long and hard, and then turned away to shuffle through the mess of papers on his desk again.

  “Look,” he said finally. “This may be a little hard to explain. How long have you lived in Philadelphia?”

  “This time?”

  “In your life. How long have you lived in cities? Philadelphia. Wherever.”

  “I’ve always lived in cities, except for when I was in the army. I grew up in Philadelphia.”

  “Okay.” Kyle sighed. “This is going to be very hard to explain. This is not a city. It’s not even close. Maybe about half of all the people who grow up here stay here. It was more than that for my high school graduating class—did I tell you I graduated in the same class as Betsy Toliver?”

  “Liz,” Gregor said automatically. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Liz, right. I’ll try to be careful. I had a nickname I didn’t like much myself. I didn’t get rid of it until I had a gun to threaten people with. Guns. Shit. I was thinking last night after I left the Toliver place that these days she wouldn’t have gone to Vassar and gotten to thumb her nose at all of them. She’d have just gotten a handgun out of her daddy’s bedside table and laid ’em all to rest. A couple of them deserved it.”

  “She doesn’t seem like the violent type. I think she’s on some committee that works to ban handguns.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “The thing is, what you’ve got to understand, is that for people in a place like this, high school is a big deal. Most of them think it was the best time of their lives. Most of them never did anything afterward but work, except go to the junior college down the road or maybe, if they were really bright, to UP-Johnstown. There were one hundred and twelve people in my graduating class and only six of them went away to any college more impressive than that, and two of them went to Penn State. High school is the be all and end all of everything in a place like this. High school football games attract hundreds of people. Homecoming saturates the whole town. All the businesses on Grandview Avenue decorate. There’s a big parade. The Homecoming Queen and her court get their pictures on the front page of the town paper. And forever afterward, if they stay in town, they keep nurturing it. Does that make any sense to you? Go into Emma and George Bligh’s place sometime and look on the walls. Emma was captain of the varsity cheerleaders our senior year. She’s got a picture of herself in her uniform, blown up to eight and a half by eleven, right behind the cash register. Sheila Sedding over at JayMar’s can tell you who was Homecoming Queen every year back to 1948.”

  “Liz Toliver’s son Mark said that what bothered him about Maris Coleman here was that it was like the years between then and now had never happened.”

  “Yeah, well. Mark DeAvecca spent the first seven years of his life in London and he’s got a mother who’s on TV all the time. He’s probably going to have Jimmy Card as a stepfather. He can afford to think high school is stupid.”

  “What are you saying, exactly?” Gregor stretched out his legs. “That somebody might have—done that—to Mrs. Toliver’s dog in her own garage just because they were mad at Liz Toliver for getting to be successful when she wasn’t particularly successful in high school?”

  “No, not exactly. I’m just saying that you maybe don’t want to make assumptions about what’s an overreaction to all that stuff about high school. I think the dog is too much myself, but I could see something close to it. I keep expecting to get a phone call that somebody’s taken the sharp end of a can opener to that car.”

  Gregor shook his head. “I don’t get it. She seems like a perfectly nice woman. Does she turn into a vampire when the moon gets full? Why all this—emotion?”

  “It’s werewolves who come out when the moon is full,” Kyle said. “And I don’t know why all this emotion. I didn’t understand even back then, although I know why they thought she was so odd. Everybody thought she was odd. She used to walk around with all these really strange books. Jean-Paul Sartre. I remember that one. That’s how I found out who Sartre was. I asked her.”

  “Seems a little thin to cause the kind of reaction she got. Gets.”

  “I agree. I don’t pretend to be able to explain it. She did get a reaction, though. Some of them—well, anyway. That was it. I wanted to warn you. You wanted to know something about the death of Michael Houseman.”

  Gregor nodded. “Doesn’t it ever bother you that nobody talks about that? We wander around here talking about how people hated Liz Toliver in high school, and somebody is dead. I’ve been thinking of it all the way up from Philadelphia.”

  “Now you can do something about it.” Kyle stood up, took a thick manila folder off the top of the debris, and handed it over. “That’s a copy of the complete file on the death of Michael Robert Houseman. You can look through the originals in the office if you want. Everything is in there, the stuff from the time, but other stuff that’s come up over the years. His mother’s still in town. She’s seventy-two. Not in too bad shape. She wants to talk to you one of these days. Most of the other people involved that night are still here, too, except that a couple of them have died. Some of them may not want to talk to you, and some of them may know they don’t have to. He was sort of a friend of mine. I wouldn’t mind if you did find out who killed him.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”

  “Not a clue. The official but unstated premise around here is that he was killed by a tramp or a drifter who was out of the area before anybody started looking for a murderer. But the story is weirder than you know. It’s even weirder than the tabloids know. Whoever is giving them their information isn’t giving all the information there is to give. You want to go out to the park and look over the area?”

  “You mean the area where he was killed?”

  “Right,” Kyle said. “Also the area where Ms. Toliver got nailed into that outhouse. It’s all in the same general place. It’s hard to describe unless you see it. Let’s drive out there and I’ll walk you around.”

  “All right.” Gregor stood up. Kyle Borden’s office window faced the parking lot. Gregor could see Luis the robot-driver standing idly by the car he was supposed to drive Gregor in. He wasn’t even reading the newspaper. “Maybe I’ll just give my driver the morning off,” he said as they both headed out the door.

  3

  When Jimmy Card, and Liz Toliver, and Kyle Borden had said “park,” Gregor had imagined something very large and open-ended, like Yellowstone, except not so large as that. It was the outhouses in the woods that had engendered that image. Gregor didn’t think he had ever been in a park with outhouses except the one time he was in Yellowstone, on kidnapping detail in his early years with the Bureau, and that might have been the only time he’d seen “woods,” too. In the one other case he’d consulted on since his retirement that had had a park in it, the park had been like Central Park, large but cultivated, with paved walkways through every part of it. When Kyle Borden pulled into the parking lot at Meldane Park, Gregor was disoriented. The parking lot was minuscule. It wasn’t even paved. The one other car pulling into it at the same time contained a young mother and two children with plastic buckets and shovels. Up ahead, there was what looked like an arched entryway to nothing. It had gates that could be shut, but it was not connected to anything on either side. “Meldane Park” was cut into the curve of the arch, all the way through, as if somebody had been trying to make a stencil. At the arch’s side was a sign with dates and times on it, announcing when the park was officially open.

  “That can’t help much,” Gregor said as Kyle Borden switched his engine off. “All anybody would have to do was go around to one side of the arch, and they’d be in.”

  “It’s to tell people when the lifeguard will be on duty,” Kyle said.

  Kyle got out of the car, and Gregor got out after him. The day was getting hot. Kyle headed toward the archway and Gregor followed, looking from one side to the other. He truly hate
d the country. He would far and away prefer to deal with a serial killer in a gang-infested ghetto than with anything at all that lived in harmony with insects and trees. The ground around the archway was sandy and dry. The plants that grew on it were anemic and scraggly. The trees in the immediate vicinity were pines. Gregor didn’t know what kind of pines.

  “Michael Houseman,” Kyle said as Gregor went on following him. “Michael had just graduated from high school about a month before. We all had. Like most of us, he wasn’t doing much of anything. He was going on to college—”

  “Where?”

  “UP-Johnstown. We send a fair number of kids up there. It’s close, and it’s relatively cheap if you’re a state resident. And if you’re one of those people who don’t really know what you want to do, and don’t really care much about education. If you know what I mean. Betsy wrote this column once I read in the newspaper about education—”

  “Liz,” Gregor said automatically. “I know. Education as an intrinsic good. In Paris Review. When I was trying to find out something about her, a friend of mine showed it to me.”

  “I didn’t read it in a review. I read it in a newspaper. Never mind. Michael was one of those guys. He did okay in school without doing really well. He got, maybe, Bs and Cs. He played a little football without being a star on the team. He played a little baseball in the spring, same deal. He wasn’t particularly popular, but he wasn’t particularly not. Are you getting the picture?”

  “It’s like a hole in the atmosphere,” Gregor said dryly.

  Kyle Borden laughed. They had come to the end of a short path that meandered through the trees. A few feet away, Gregor saw a narrow beach that ended in a smallish lake. There was a tall lifeguard’s seat near the edge of the beach. There was a raft out in the middle of the water. The little beach was full of sunbathing mothers on terry-cloth towels and children throwing sand at each other.

  “It’s like a public swimming pool,” Gregor said. “Not what I expected.”

  “It is a public swimming pool,” Kyle agreed, “except instead of building a pool we built a lake. This is man-made. The town put it together back in 1964 because the people on the board didn’t like the idea of our kids going over to Kennanburg to swim there. There was getting to be an ‘element,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “Not exactly.”

  Kyle’s eyes slid sideways, cynical. “An African-American element. Welcome to Hollman in the sixties. Welcome to Hollman now, for that matter. Anyway, that’s why we built it. I was thirteen years old when it opened and I remember the first day. Dozens of people showed up, with folding lawn chairs and inflatable water toys. I even remember the first lifeguard. Bobby Resnick. It was the summer before his senior year in high school, and he went on to be the biggest damned deal in the history of Hollman. Captain of the football team. Homecoming King. He’s got a garage out on Route 15 these days.”

  “Does everybody in this place know what everybody else has been doing for the last forty years?”

  “Well, hell, Mr. Demarkian. There are some women in this town who could tell you whose great-grandmother slept with which traveling moonshiner in 1892 and how that ended up with three kindergarteners having red-haired eyebrows in 1957.”

  Actually, Gregor thought, that sounded familiar. It sounded just like the Very Old Ladies on Cavanaugh Street. Kyle had steered them onto a path that skirted the sandy beach and went around in a half circle. “What does this have to do with Michael Houseman?” he asked.

  “Well,” Kyle said, “that summer, Michael Houseman was the regular lifeguard here. There was a relief lifeguard for weekends, but Michael had the job Bobby Resnick baptized. So, unlike everybody else in this story, when that evening started, he was already here.”

  “He was working?” Gregor asked.

  “No. He had been working. He’d worked all day since ten o’clock. By the time the nonsense started, the park was officially closed. That doesn’t mean nobody was here, or that nobody was supposed to be here. All that the park being closed ever means is that there’s supposed to be no swimming allowed, and some of the teenagers don’t pay attention to that. But it’s not like the park was deserted. There are always people here in the early evening in the summer.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “So, what time are we talking about?”

  “Good question. Michael would have gotten off at five. With the rest of them, though, it’s hard to tell. I included all the paper on the incident with Betsy Toliver with what I gave you. Liz. It’s part of the story of Michael dying, or at least it was for the police at the time. From what I remember, she had been in the park before it closed, too, sitting on the beach or reading a book or something. But she wasn’t going to leave just because the park was officially closed.”

  “How did she get here?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d suspect she drove. Her father gave her a nice little car for graduation, I forget what kind. Two-door. Like that.”

  “Do you remember if it was parked in the parking lot? And is that the same parking lot?”

  “It’s the same parking lot. As to whether Bet—Liz’s car was parked there, like I said, I’d have to check. But as long as you’re going on about cars, Michael didn’t have a car parked there. His car was in for repairs. Chris Inglerod had dropped him off in the morning. Chris Inglerod was supposed to pick him up.”

  “Chris Inglerod.” Gregor stopped on the path and took out his notebook. “She’s one of these people, isn’t she, one of the ones—”

  “Who spent most of their childhoods torturing Betsy Toliver? Absolutely. She went up to Penn State and found herself a medical student. Now he practices here in town and Chris has a big house out by the golf course. Good luck getting to talk to her. She’ll know she doesn’t have to let you in the front door.”

  “Was she Michael Houseman’s girlfriend?”

  “No. The girls in that group didn’t go out with boys their own age, except for Peggy Smith, and that didn’t count, because she’d been after Stu when they were both in diapers. When the rest of them got to senior year, they dated guys at UP-Johnstown. The guys in our class dated the girls in the classes behind us.”

  “You’ve said that Michael Houseman wasn’t important,” Gregor prompted.

  “Not very important.” They had stopped walking to talk. Kyle started heading up the path to an opening in the pine trees. “He dated a sophomore our senior year. By summer it was over. He and Chris Inglerod had known each other for years. They lived next door to each other in these two little ranch houses that were built side by side in this neighborhood full of old people, so maybe for the first five years or so they had nobody else to talk to. And they were still living in the same places, so Chris took him places when his car messed up. According to her, she got to the park at five-fifteen. She was with Nancy Quayde at Nancy’s house and they forgot the time. And when she got here, the other girls were collecting the snakes.”

  “How do you collect snakes?” Gregor asked. “That’s one of the things I haven’t been able to figure out about this.”

  “It’s not hard to collect snakes,” Kyle said. “Especially not those little black snakes the girls had that evening. I think a couple of them—Belinda and Emma, maybe Maris—had been at it most of the day. They had a lot of snakes. Belinda said later that it was twenty-two. I figure she should know.”

  “This took all day?”

  “A good part of it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well,” Kyle said. “That’s a good question. Because you’re now talking about maybe five-thirty, right?” He stopped walking and looked around. Gregor looked around with him. They were in the middle of a very small clearing, to one side of which was a low wooden shed with two outhouse stalls in it.

  “These are the famous outhouses?” Gregor said.

  “That’s right. Betsy was on the beach. The girls—Belinda, Emma, Maris, Chris, Nancy Quayde, Peggy Smith—had the snakes, and Maris went down to the cl
earing to call Betsy up from the beach. Betsy came up from the beach, and Maris started having this panic about how Emma was sick to her stomach in the latrine and Maris was on her own and couldn’t help Emma by herself, so would Betsy come, and as soon as they got near the outhouses a bunch of the girls jumped out of the trees, rushed Betsy into the one on the right, dumped the snakes right on her legs, and slammed the door shut. Then they nailed it shut. So how long do you figure that took?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Maybe another half hour?”

  “Fine. Now we’re up to six. Where do you think Michael Houseman was?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “Good.” Kyle nodded. “Nobody else does, either. Chris said at the time that when she got to the beach, he was nowhere in sight. She thought he’d gone to the latrine—there are other latrines, for men, up that way a little—but then she met the girls and forgot about him temporarily. According to the rest of the girls, all they did after they nailed Betsy in was to go back into those trees”—Kyle gestured behind them—“and sit still and listen. Then it started to rain, thunder, lightning, and they thought they’d better get out of there and go home. So they got up and got moving, and a few of them went this way. Come with me.”

  Gregor came. Kyle made his way up the hill next to the outhouses, through the pines and across a thick carpet of needles. They came out on another small clearing, this one next to a small river. Gregor didn’t know if “river” was the right word. It didn’t have much water in it.

  “Here,” Kyle said. “Right here. Maybe another ten or fifteen feet up that way. What Belinda said was that when they found Michael Houseman’s body, they just stood around it for a while, and they were all covered with blood.”