by Jane Haddam
Liz slid in behind the wheel. She wanted to cry, but that was not news. She had wanted to cry ever since she first pulled into this parking lot. She couldn’t cry in front of Geoff. He associated her crying with his father dying. Still, she thought. It was all wrong. Everything was. She was all hollowed out inside, as if all that was left of her was a great draining pulse of pain and guilt, and she couldn’t figure out which one was true. It was the guilt that held her attention. She felt guilty every day, as if she’d stolen her own life and owed it back to somebody. It seemed to her that she was somehow to blame for what had happened to Maris, or had not happened to her. It didn’t make any sense, but it wouldn’t go away, and as long as it was right here in the front of her mind, she didn’t know if she would be able to move. She tried fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. She got Geoff, staring at her, instead.
“Well,” she said.
“We should start the car,” Geoff said.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “We should start the car.”
She started it, and backed out of her parking space, and headed for Grandview Avenue, but she couldn’t help looking back at the Sycamore. Then she was winding up the hill on Grandview, headed for the center of town, and for a moment it seemed as if Maris was headed right back at her, driving that bright yellow Volkswagen she had said she’d rented, but that she wouldn’t drive. Then the car passed and Liz realized that she recognized the woman driving it, but that that woman was not Maris.
She was halfway out to the Interstate when she pegged the face as Peggy Smith’s.
2
Emma Kenyon Bligh had been restless all day. In fact, she’d been restless since some time the night before, when she’d sat in Chris Inglerod Barr’s living room and listened to Chris and Nancy go on at length about image laundering and strategic campaigns. Image laundering. That was the first time she had ever heard that one, and she had been almost as annoyed with it as she had been with Chris’s tray of perfectly matched china and monogrammed silverware. Real silverware, of course. Chris’s whole life seemed to come out of an issue of Better Homes and Gardens. Years ago, she’d even badgered her mother into getting her real engraved wedding invitations—not just thermoplated ones—from Tiffany’s in New York, and Emma knew for a fact that the Inglerods couldn’t afford it. They’d probably had to put the expense on a credit card and borrow the rest of the money for the wedding, too. Emma had had her own wedding at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church right here in town, with a reception at the Holiday Inn out on the Interstate.
This morning, her restlessness had had some use. The store needed a good cleaning. She cleaned it. She took all the objects off each of the shelves, one by one, and dusted them, with a damp cloth if appropriate. Then she dusted and polished the shelf itself. Then she put the objects back. It had taken her two hours to get it all done, and when she was finished she had started in on the rest of the woodwork, the counter, even the windowsills. When that was done, she’d had a customer, and for half an hour she had been able to lose herself in an elaborate discussion of the differences between crocheting and knitting and the relative merits of needlework and brocade. It was only after that that she felt herself begin to fall apart. She didn’t keep a television in the shop, because she thought it looked tacky. She had the radio on to the easy listening station out of Johnstown, but that wasn’t enough to keep the brain of a fruit fly occupied. She had one of Betsy’s books that she’d taken out of the library—Making It Out: A Look Into the Real American Dream—but she’d already tried three times to read it and never managed to make it through more than a page and a half. Betsy still used words so big no normal person could possibly know what they meant. Sometimes, when Emma felt like this, she went through the scrapbooks and picture albums she brought with her every day when she came in to work—pictures of herself as a cheerleader and in Tri-Y; pictures of herself in her formal dresses from every junior and senior prom and junior-senior semiformal from the day she started high school (it paid to go out with older boys); dance bids; prom cards; the certificates she’d received for being voted Cutest Girl and Best Dressed four solid years in a row—but since she’d first heard that Betsy was coming home, she hadn’t been able to get into the spirit of them. Even eating didn’t help. She sat still next to the cash register in the empty store and felt weighed down and bloated, as if she’d eaten lead.
It was almost one o’clock when Emma went out to the porch to get some air. She looked up one end of Grandview Avenue and down the other. She saw Maris Coleman walking slowly across the railroad tracks near Mullaney’s. Maris trudged up past the Opera House. At English Drugs, she stopped, looked at the newspapers in the rack outside, picked one up, and went into the store. She came out barely two minutes later, carrying the newspaper under her arm.
Under most circumstances, Emma would not have volunteered to spend time one on one with Maris Coleman. Maris Coleman had changed, at Vassar and in New York, and these days she didn’t do much for Emma but make her uncomfortable. This afternoon, though, Emma thought she was going to go crazy, and so she raised her arm and tried to signal at Maris coming up the street.
Maris didn’t see her. Emma watched her turn off the sidewalk into the small door that led to the little clutch of apartments where Belinda lived.
There wasn’t a single customer in the store. There had only been a single customer since she’d opened up this morning. Emma turned back and went inside again. She switched the OPEN sign to CLOSED and stepped back onto the porch. She locked the front door of the shop and then tried the knob to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. She was sweating. She sweat when she did any sustained movement. Once, worried about her weight, she’d tried a Richard Simmons program, but she’d stopped after only three sessions with the workout tape. Each time, she’d sweat so much there had been big circles of black dampness in the armpits of her T-shirt, and more sweat down its back and on the inside of the thighs of her workout pants. She had been ashamed to look at her clothes in the mirror when she went into the bathroom to take them off. Anything at all, even weighing five hundred pounds, would be better than seeing her clothes all wet like that.
She went down her front porch steps and onto the sidewalk. She went up the sidewalk past the half-dozen little stores. She stopped just past Elsa-Edna’s, without bothering to look at the clothes in the display window. It had been a long time since she’d been able to fit into them, and when she had been able to fit into them she hadn’t been able to afford them. She suspected that she wouldn’t be able to afford them now. She went up the steep flight of steps at the side of the building, moving carefully, stopping every once in a while to take a breath. She didn’t want to give herself a heart attack just because she’d run over to Belinda’s on a whim.
When she got to the landing, the first thing she noticed was that Belinda’s apartment door was standing slightly opened. The next thing she noticed was that Maris was talking, not only out loud, but loudly. Someone thinner than Emma, who had not had to concentrate so hard on getting up the stairs, would have heard Maris from the first-floor entry.
Emma pushed inside and closed the door behind her. Maris was in the living room, her back to the kitchen and the apartment’s front door, holding the phone to her ear. It was Belinda’s phone, not a cell phone.
“ … that’s what I said,” Maris was saying. “Her mother’s dog. Right. In the garage. Eviscerated. Jimmy’s coming down this evening to make sure she’s all right. I don’t know what to make of it. I just tell you what’s going on. She’s going to be here until the end of June, unless this drives her out. I expect the usual, of course. If this gets any better, I may need a little more. Yes. Well. Yes. I’ll talk to you when I have something.”
Maris put down the phone. Emma knocked on one of the kitchen counters. Maris turned around.
“How did you get in here? I thought that door was on automatic lock.”
“You left it open,” Emma said. “What were you doing?”
<
br /> Maris cocked her head and smiled. “I was talking,” she said, “to a friend of mine at the National Enquirer. We have a little arrangement.”
“You tell the National Enquirer about stuff that happens to Betsy.”
“Where do you think they get it?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said. “I thought they had, you know, reporters. That went and reported things. Dug things up.”
“It’s much easier to dig things up if you know where to look,” Maris said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a secret. Everybody on earth knows all about it.”
“Betsy knows all about it?” Emma shook her head. “I don’t believe that. I don’t think she’d go on giving you a job if she knew you were calling up the National Enquirer and saying she murdered Michael Houseman.”
“Well, let’s just say everybody knows, but nobody can prove it.” Maris brushed by Emma and went to the cabinet where the tumblers were kept. She got one down and opened the refrigerator. She got out a big carton of orange juice and poured the tumbler half full. “I think the deal is that Betsy Wetsy’s been told, but she just refuses to believe it. In New York I make the calls from pay phones, never anything too close to my apartment or too close to her offices. Do you know she owns a town house on the Upper East Side? She’s got an apartment on the top floor of it, but she never uses it anymore. Jimmy’s got an apartment of his own and they go there. In the afternoons. To screw.”
“What does that have to do with you telling things to the National Enquirer?”
“Nothing.” Maris went back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. “I tell things to the National Enquirer because they pay me for them. And because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. She gets very upset at those stories. You have no idea. Don’t you just love it when you see things like that at the supermarket?”
“Not really.” Emma watched as Maris got a huge Chanel No. 5 bottle out of her pocketbook and emptied half its contents into the tumbler. “You’re drinking perfume?”
“It’s gin,” Maris said. “I’ve got a couple of real bottles around here somewhere, but it’s inconvenient to take them out for the afternoon. Places without a liquor license protest when they know you’re trying to fortify their soft drinks. I just love it when I see things like that in the supermarkets. And on the newsstands. In New York, we’ve got these newsstands, these kiosk things, and they hang magazines and papers and things from a clothesline sort of arrangement over their open windows. You can see the headlines for miles.”
“Why didn’t you use a pay phone here?”
“The only one I know of is in English Drugs. It’s the first place Jimmy would check.”
“Why wouldn’t he check here?”
“How would he ever get Belinda’s phone records?” Maris had already finished a third of her tumbler of “fortified” orange juice. She looked much more sober than she had before. “It’s not so easy to get hold of private information. The government can get it, but the rest of us have a very hard time, and if Jimmy did manage it Belinda could probably sue him. Not that she’d think of it. Christ. Was Belinda this stupid when we were all in school?”
“You were her best friend. You should know.”
“She was this stupid,” Maris said. “Never mind. Just don’t bother to look shocked, will you? It’s depressingly hick of you. I come back here and I just can’t believe how god-awful provincial this place really is.”
Emma looked away. This apartment was so tiny it would have made her breathless even if she hadn’t climbed a steep flight of stairs to get to it, or been so shocked that she could barely defrost her mind enough to think of what she had to do next. Good people, decent people, did not do things like this. If there was one thing she had never questioned, it was that she and all her friends were good and decent people. Of course, there was all that other stuff, about Betsy, not only the outhouse but stuff that had come before, but that was different, somehow. That hadn’t been real cruelty, but only kids and the way kids behaved. This was—
Maris had her legs stretched out on top of the coffee table now.
“You are going to get all provincial on me,” she said. “What the hell. I’m not sorry I did it. I’m really not.”
“I’ve got to get back to the store,” Emma said. “We’re supposed to be open straight through the day. I’ve probably missed half a dozen customers.”
“Why did you come? Were you looking for Belinda? Belinda works today. Were you looking for me? How did you know I’d be home?”
“I just thought I’d drop by and see how things were going,” Emma said. She looked around her, helpless. “I’d better get going,” she said. “I really shouldn’t be away for long. George has a fit if he finds out.”
“Make sure you lock the door when you leave,” Maris said.
Emma turned around and shuffled out, past the little dining table, through the kitchen, into the hall. The stairwell was dark. Emma went down half the stairs and then stopped, breathless again.
What struck her, suddenly, was that she did know a way for that dog to have ended up in Betsy Toliver’s garage—but that was because she knew the way Michael Houseman had ended up dead.
3
At first, Nancy Quayde thought she would take it easy. It was a nothing much of a day. There wasn’t a school board meeting for at least a couple of weeks, and that one would be the end-of-year report, where she spent most of her time listing all the supplies they’d used over the last ten months. Then she would spend even longer explaining, or trying to explain, why they needed at least that much or more for next year: so many cartons of chalk; so many sophomore biology textbooks. Some of the school board members resented the idea that there was any school going on in school at all. Their philosophy of education amounted to the belief, fervently held, that schools should be places where “kids were allowed to be kids.” Anything that got in the way of that—say, for instance, the new mandatory state mastery examinations that would retain any student at grade level if she didn’t pass—was an obvious evil. Anything that helped that along—like proms, and football games, and the annual class vote for who would be named Most Popular and Cutest Couple for the yearbook—was just as obviously good. Nancy had a fight every year with the mothers who wanted to double the semiformal dance schedule. Aside from the junior and senior proms, they already had a junior-senior semiformal and a Valentine’s Day formal and a harvest dance at homecoming in the fall. It wasn’t enough for people like Emma, who didn’t remember much of anything about high school except the dances, and maybe some of the football games, assuming she ever watched any of the ones she cheered at. Nancy thought it was doubtful. She hated parents, if she were honest about it. They existed only to make her life difficult, and the more involved they got in the school, the worse they were. The rich parents were the worst of all, because it wasn’t enough for them if their child was popular. He had to have good grades, too, to make sure he could get into some college whose name their friends would recognize. It was impossible to enforce an honor code. If a student was caught cheating, she couldn’t expel him, because if she tried the parents would sue. It was impossible to discipline anybody for anything, except maybe bringing a weapon to school. There had been enough violence that the parents couldn’t get away with suing for that. There were days when Nancy Quayde knew exactly why some people got hold of shotguns and strafed their workplaces from one end to the other. There were days when she wanted to do it herself.
Today, it had started out to be all right, except that she was jumpy about the meeting they’d had the night before at Chris’s, and still angry with Peggy Smith. She had spent the morning in her office doing the kind of paperwork that she could not avoid, but that required no mental effort whatsoever. A badly made android could have done just as well. Once or twice, she’d tried to call Chris at home, without luck. Chris was probably on the golf course, taking her aggressions out on little white balls. Once, she’d walked down to Peggy Smith’s classroom and l
ooked through the big window at the top of the door. Every once in a while, she hatched plans to get Peggy off the faculty, permanently, but they always ran aground on the fact that Peggy ran an excellent classroom. Nancy went back to her office and got her lunch out of the little refrigerator she had had installed her first week as principal. She was working herself into a positively bad mood, complete with tantrum. By the time Lisa buzzed her to tell her the assistant principal wanted to have a word, Nancy nearly had smoke coming out of her ears, and she had begun to tear paper into confetti.
The vice principal was a man named Harvey Grey, who hated her. It was Harvey’s opinion that he was the one who should have been made principal of Hollman High the last two times the job had become open, and it was further his opinion that the only reason he hadn’t been was that the board had decided they had to give the job to a woman. That he had a master’s degree instead of a doctorate in education, and that he’d gotten it at UP-Johnstown instead of Penn State, did not seem relevant to him, any more than it seemed relevant to him that he was a little worm of a man with a high-pitched squeal instead of a voice and the personality of a sex-obsessed, hypochondriacal old maid. He collected resentments the way other people collected stamps.
He came into the office and sat down in the chair in front of her desk, without being asked. Harvey never asked. “It’s Diane Asch again,” he said. “There was an incident at lunch.”
“An incident?’
Harvey looked at the floor, and the ceiling, and his hands. “She’s having hysterics in the east wing second-floor girls’ room. I’m not sure what started it.”
