by Jane Haddam
“Has anybody tried to talk to her?”
“Peggy went in and tried for a while. Peggy was lunch monitor today.”
“So?”
“Whatever it was started at lunch. She’s saying she’ll never go back to the cafeteria as long as she lives. Diane Asch is saying it.”
“Why?”
“She says they said something to her,” Harvey said. “You know. DeeDee Craft and Lynn Mackay and Sharon Peterson. They said something to her.”
“What?”
“How am I supposed to know? I couldn’t go into the girls’ bathroom. Not in this day and age. I’d get arrested. If you ask me, you don’t take this situation seriously. Think of Columbine. Think of that place in Kentucky. This is how school shootings get started.”
“You think Diane Asch is going to commit a school shooting?”
“Think of Carrie,” Harvey said darkly.
Nancy stood up. Something at the back of her mind told her that she should not do this. At the very least, she ought to talk herself down from her anger enough so that all her muscles weren’t jumping. She ran her right hand through her hair. Her nails were long and sharp enough to serve as a crude kind of comb.
“Did you say the east wing second-floor girls’ room?”
“We had a very interesting presentation about situations like this at the last in-service,” Harvey said. “It’s regrettable you were too busy to attend. There was an educational psychologist down from the University of Pennsylvania—”
Nancy was past him, out her office door, into the anteroom. “Take messages,” she told Lisa as she passed. “I’ll only be a minute.”
She went out into the foyer and down the hall. She got to the stairwell and almost ran up the stairs. Sometimes physical exercise calmed her down. This was not one of those times.
When she reached the east wing second-floor girls’ room, there were students in the hall. She pushed past them and went inside.
“Everybody out,” Peggy’s voice nearly screamed at her.
The only other sound in the room was of wracking, shuddering breathing.
“It’s me,” Nancy told Peggy.
Peggy was leaning against a locked lavatory stall. Nancy pushed her away.
“Diane?” Nancy said.
The breathing stopped, momentarily. Diane did not reply.
“Diane,” Nancy said, “listen to me. Come out of there now. Now. If you don’t come out of there now, I’ll break that door down and drag you out.”
“No,” Peggy said. “Nancy, what are you doing? You can’t—”
“Come out, or I’ll break the door down.”
There was no sound from inside the stall. Whatever Diane was doing, she was not unbolting the lavatory door. Nancy pushed Peggy away, stood back a little, and raised her foot. She was wearing high heels, but she knew it wouldn’t matter.
“One more chance,” Nancy said.
“You’re crazy,” Peggy said, but it was a whisper.
There was still no sound from the other side of the door. Nancy raised her foot even higher and shot it forward, as quickly and with as much force as she could. The tinny bolt that held the lavatory stall door shrieked. Nancy lifted her foot again and shot it forward again. This time the door gaped for a moment before it fell back into place. The third hit was all Nancy needed. The door strained against what was left of the bolt fastening. Then it popped open with a bang and shot forward, right into the side of Diane Asch’s face. Diane burst into tears.
Nancy reached into the stall, grabbed Diane by the arm, and yanked. Diane stumbled forward. Nancy yanked again and then began to push her toward the sinks.
“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“They said,” Diane started. Then she shook her head. “They said—”
“Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
“They can if you hear them every day,” Diane said.
“They can if you hear them every hour. I’m not eating lunch in the cafeteria anymore. Not ever. You can’t make me. You can’t.”
“Nancy listen,” Peggy said. “Calm down. You’re—”
Nancy ran her hand through her hair again. If felt as if she had been doing it without a break since she left her office. Her scalp felt raw. Diane Asch slid to the floor next to the sink and started to cry. They were not attractive tears.
“God,” Nancy said. “Look at yourself. Get up and look in the mirror and really see yourself for once in your life.”
“They called me a fat ugly pig,” Diane said hysterically. “They said it over and over again. They all did—”
“They chanted it,” Peggy said. “That’s what I was trying to tell Harvey, but he wouldn’t listen. DeeDee and Sharon started it, but then everybody in the cafeteria took it up. Or nearly everybody—”
“It was everybody,” Diane said.
“So Diane here bolted,” Peggy said. “Nancy, for God’s sake.”
“For God’s sake what?” Nancy said. “Look at her. What do you think, it’s an accident? She is a fat ugly pig and she won’t do anything for herself. You can’t blame the rest of them for not liking it. How many people around here have tried to help her get herself fixed up, to wear a little makeup, to stop whining all the time—”
“I don’t want to wear makeup,” Diane screamed. “Why do I have to wear makeup? I didn’t do anything. I’m not the one who calls people names.”
“Nobody would call you names if you’d straighten yourself out,” Nancy said. “You like to be called names. If you didn’t, you’d have done something about yourself years ago. Get your face washed and get back to class. You’re holding everybody up.”
“Fuck you,” Diane said.
“That’ll get you a week in detention,” Nancy said.
“I won’t come.” Diane Asch turned her back to them and began to run the water in the sink. She was no longer sobbing, not even silently.
“If you don’t come,” Nancy said pleasantly, “I’ll suspend you. And if you try to break the suspension, I’ll have you up before the board of education’s disciplinary committee. And if you think they’re going to take your side over mine, you’d damned well better think again. You’re a mess. Get your act together.”
Peggy started to say something. Nancy didn’t wait to listen to her. She went out the lavatory door and found the hall still full of students, standing just close enough to hear what was going on with Diane. DeeDee and Sharon and Lynn were standing together in a little knot to one side, looking faintly anxious.
“Go,” Nancy said.
A few of the girls hesitated—why was it, Nancy wondered, that boys never hung around in situations like this?—but in the end they drifted off, some of them looking guilty. Nancy went back the way she had come. The tension in her body was gone. She had never been this clearheaded in all her life. Maybe what she needed was to tell the truth more often.
When she got to the front foyer, she had a split second of worry. Maybe this would come back to haunt her when the hearings for the superintendent’s job came up. The worry didn’t last long. Most of the members of the school board were as exasperated with Diane as she was, and Diane’s own mother could barely stand the sight of her. Nobody was going to make an issue of the fact that somebody had finally told Diane what the score was, not even if that somebody was Nancy Quayde.
Nancy passed through the outer office. Lisa called out, “Harvey went back to his office. He had an appointment.”
Nancy went into the inner office and shut the door behind her. Her sandwich was on the desk. Her little bottle of Perrier water was still unopened. She pushed them aside and pulled the phone close to her.
After all these years, she still knew the number at Betsy Toliver’s house.
SEVEN
1
The last time Gregor Demarkian was in a small town, it was nearly winter, and in New England, so that both the weather and the landscap
e fit the occasion. Discussions of murder should take place on gray days or in the night. In Hollman, in the spring, Gregor felt as though he were playing a movie scene on the wrong set. It was as if John Sayles had decided to make a movie of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” in the bright greens and very early sixties Happy Days spotlessness of Matinee.
“What are you thinking about?” Kyle Borden asked as he pulled the town’s one police car into a parking place on Grandview Avenue.
They were parked right in front of a largish store whose purpose he couldn’t decipher—hardware, maybe, or home furnishings. Just across from them, there was a side street split around a small triangular island. On the far side of that from where they were, in a place where the sidewalk curved in a great sweep up the hill, was Hollman’s Pizza, where they were headed.
“I was thinking about ‘The Lottery,’” Gregor said.
“The Pennsylvania lottery?”
“No. There’s a short story, by—”
“Shirley Jackson,” Kyle finished. “Yeah, I know it. Small town where they draw lots every year to pick somebody to stone to death. I did two years at the junior college. We had to read it in English. You think Hollman reminds you of Shirley Jackson? That’s funny, you know, because she used to say that. Betsy. I mean, Liz. When we were all in high school.”
“I can imagine,” Gregor said. He got out of the car, looking up and down Grandview one more time. There was really nothing remarkable about it. He just hated it. The last place he had ever truly hated like this was Fort Benning, Georgia, and that didn’t count, because what he’d really hated about Fort Benning was the fact that they kept making him make forty-mile forced marches with a fifty-pound pack on his back in ninety-degree heat.
Kyle’s idea of crossing the street was to look both ways and run. There was no streetlight on this section of Grandview, and no crosswalk, either. Gregor looked both ways, crossed his fingers, and followed. If Kyle did this all the time, it was a miracle he wasn’t dead. Gregor got to the opposite sidewalk just ahead of a green Jeep Cherokee with a very loud horn. Kyle watched the Jeep go up the hill and shrugged.
“This is a famous place,” he said, pointing at Hollman’s Pizza. “In the story of Betsy Toliver in Hollman, I mean. When we were all freshmen, a bunch of them asked her to have pizza with them one day after school, and then they all snuck out on her one by one and stuck her with the tab. Eight pizzas, they’d ordered. She had to call her mother to pay the bill.”
Kyle held open the swinging glass door and ushered Gregor through it, apparently oblivious to the fact that the story he had just told was nasty as hell—that all the stories about “Betsy Toliver in Hollman” were nasty as hell, the kind of stories you’d expect to hear about psychopaths. Gregor looked around the small room with its dozen wooden tables and spotted the pay phone on the wall next to the door they’d come in by.
“I want to make a call,” he said. “I’ve got a cell phone with me, but I can’t seem to get it to work, and I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone all day.”
“Cell phones don’t work up here,” Kyle said. “It’s the mountains. You go ahead. I’ll order us a pizza. Sausage and pepperoni be okay?”
“Fine.” Gregor congratulated himself for bringing lots of antacids, and went over to the pay phone to see what he could do. He found his long-distance calling card at the back of his wallet and tried Tibor’s first. He got a busy signal. Tibor must be on the Internet. He tried his own number and felt instantly relieved when somebody picked up.
“Hello?” Bennis said in that deep voice of hers that could never quite lose the Main Line debutante, boarding-school accent.
“It’s me,” Gregor said. “How are you? I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. I was just listening to the news. There’s a story about a dog found eviscerated in Elizabeth Toliver’s garage. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. But don’t even begin to think that’s the strangest thing about this place. It’s insane. It’s like living in Lord of the Flies.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. It’s a long story. I wish you were here. I’ve got no way to judge what people tell me about this place. And they all tell me things. A minute ago it was about a bunch of kids who asked Liz to have pizza with them and then they sneaked out of the restaurant after they’d ordered and stuck her with the bill. Eight pizzas.”
“Well, that was sucky of them.”
“One story would be sucky. I’ve heard maybe half a dozen since I got here, and the thing is, when they tell you about them, they act as if it’s all perfectly normal. Liz Toliver doesn’t, but she was the victim. The rest of them behave as if there’s nothing unusual about the stories at all. And what do I know about it? My high school was in an inner city and all I ever did in it was study like a maniac so the University of Pennsylvania would give me a scholarship. If we had a Homecoming Queen, nobody ever told me about it.”
“My high school was a rich girls’ boarding school where the girls brought their horses and boarded them, too. I’m not really much more of an expert on this sort of thing than you are.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I keep feeling that you could tell me what’s real and what isn’t in this place. You’ve got to know more about it than I do. Sometimes, I stop in the middle of everything and it all just feels absurd. These are grown people. Most of the ones we’re dealing with are fifty or close to it. Can they really still be so—obsessed—with what happened when they were in high school? And I do mean obsessed. It’s like they don’t have any other frame of reference.”
“Well, the murder—”
“Forget the murder. It might as well not have happened. You mention it and people say, ‘Oh, I forgot about that.’”
“Well,” Bennis said in her “soothing” voice, “they’re all stuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Maybe high school was the only interesting thing that ever happened to them.”
“I wish you’d come,” Gregor told her. “Just get in the car and drive up. If the news about the dog has been on television, it’s only a matter of time before we’re inundated with reporters. Maybe not the full-court press, but at least a few of them making nuisances of themselves. I could use your point of view, even if you do think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re having a bad case of cultural dissonance. Besides, I can’t come up. There’s no place for me to stay. We looked it up in the triple-A handbook, don’t you remember?”
“The room I’m staying in has a double bed.”
“Oh, marvelous. I can just camp on Elizabeth Toliver’s doorstep and announce I’m staying. She won’t mind. What’s the harm of having one of Jimmy Card’s old lovers installed in her guest room?”
“Bennis—”
“Be reasonable,” Bennis said. “Besides, I’m supposed to go over to Donna’s and help her with the flags. Tibor was supposed to help her, but he’s having an argument with his friend Vicki about gun control, and it’s really heated up, so he spends all his time on the computer posting messages to RAM, and Donna says that if she wants to make the Kashinian’s building look like the Armenian flag she’s got to order the materials now, and she can’t do that until she gets a good picture of what the Armenian flag looks like, and she’s hopeless with search engines.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Donna wants to make Howard Kashinian’s house look like the Armenian flag?”
“Right. The Kashinians are the Armenian flag, Lida is the American flag, and we’re the U.N. I forget what she’s doing to her own place, but it’s another flag.”
“Why?”
“Because June fourteenth is Flag Day,” Bennis said reasonably.
On the other side of the room, a middle-aged waitress was putting an enormous pizza down on the table in front of Kyle Borden. Kyle looked up, saw Gregor staring, and waved.
“I’m supposed to eat a sausage and pepperoni pizza the size o
f a cow,” Gregor said. “You know that’s bad for me. You could come and make sure I ate right.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Bennis said. “If you don’t have this whole thing cleared up by the end of next week, I’ll find a hotel someplace within screaming distance and come out and take you to lunch. If we keep this up, Tibor is going to start in again with all that talk about us getting married, probably coupled with how I ought to enter the church. Of course, why he’s worrying about me joining the church, I don’t know. You’re the one who never goes. Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. We’ve got an appointment to see Michael Houseman’s mother in about an hour and a half. That ought to be some help.”
“At least you’ll be talking about a murder,” Bennis said.
“Right.” Gregor thought of saying other things—“I love you,” for instance—but he had one of those temporary interior clutches that made him incapable of saying anything, and the next thing he knew the receiver was buzzing in his ear. He hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. They were together so often these days, it no longer seemed natural to him when she was gone.
Kyle Borden waved at him again. Gregor left the phone and went to the table with the pizza spread out across it. It looked even bigger than the large pizzas they sometimes ordered on Cavanaugh Street when they were all playing Monopoly at Tibor’s and nobody wanted to deal with the state of Tibor’s kitchen.
“Spectacular, isn’t it?” Kyle Borden said happily. “Largest pizzas you can buy in the county. They’re famous for them.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He looked Kyle up and down. The man was thin almost to the point of emaciation. So much for the stereotype of the potbellied small-town cop.
The waitress came back to the table with a tray of drinks, both very large on the same scale as the pizza, both dark.
“I ordered you a Coke,” Kyle said. “I figured that was safe. Everybody loves Coke. They even love it in China.”
