by Jane Haddam
Gregor took a single slice of pizza and put it on the plate that had been provided for just that purpose. Except for the size of their largest offerings, this could have been any of hundreds of pizza places from one end to the other of the country, although not in any of the big cities, where real Italians lived. The waitress looked like one more Hollman mayonnaise-and-American-cheese-on-white-bread type, and the woman behind the counter cooking pizza did not look any different.
“You’re drifting off again,” Kyle Borden said. “If you’re tired, we could probably make this appointment for another day. Daisy hasn’t got that much to do with her time. She won’t be unavailable.”
“No, that’s all right. I’m not tired. I’ m just thinking. Do you always eat this much pizza when you get pizza?”
“Of course not,” Kyle said. “I figured you’d have half.”
2
Gregor Demarkian wasn’t sure what he had expected Daisy Houseman’s life to be like, but he knew it wasn’t what he got: a neat little brick house on a leafy corner lot on a residential street near the center of town. At first glance, the house seemed to be a story and a half, but as Gregor and Kyle moved up the walk Gregor realized it was an illusion. The roof was steeply pitched, but the house itself was a ranch, probably of the same vintage as the Tolivers’, but much smaller. The lot was smaller still. It would be the work of less than a minute to walk out Daisy Houseman’s front door and into the front door of the house next door. It would take all of three minutes to make it to the front door of the house on the other side, around the corner. Still, there was nothing crowded about this neighborhood. The lawns were well kept and adequate at the back. The houses were just far enough apart to allow for privacy and fresh air. The trees and grass were lush, and some of the yards already had sprinklers working to keep them watered.
Kyle went up to the front door and started to ring the bell, but his hand was still in the air when the door opened and a neat, trim, well-kept elderly woman came out. Gregor thought she was about seventy or seventy-five, which would make sense, if she had married and had her children young. Kyle said something to her that Gregor couldn’t hear, and the woman turned to look him over as if he were a new representative from the gas company.
“I’ve been telling her all about you,” Kyle called, his voice echoing down the quiet, deserted street.
Gregor came up to the little stoop in front of the front door and took the hand Daisy Houseman was holding out to him. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said.
“I know.” Daisy Houseman nodded. “He has been telling me all about you, Mr. Demarkian. And I must admit that I’ve been looking for somebody to talk to. Although not on my front walk for the whole of the town to hear.”
“She thinks I talk too loud,” Kyle said.
“Come in,” Daisy Houseman said.
She retreated through her front door, and Gregor and Kyle followed her. The door opened directly into the living room, which was high-ceilinged but small and undergirded with wall-to-wall carpeting. The carpeting was relatively new, and it had been vacuumed recently. The furniture had been dusted. Gregor recognized it. It was the “country” set sold by a well-known national chain of discount furniture stores—sofa, love seat, chair and ottoman, all upholstered in the same “country” print, for $799 the set. The coffee table had come from the same source. The television was very old, but very well kept, and encased in a polished wood console that made it look like a piece of furniture itself. On top of it was a doily, and across the doily were a whole set of framed photographs of what looked like high school yearbook pictures, three of boys and one of a girl with her hair held back in a stiff blue headband.
“I have three children besides Michael,” Daisy Houseman said, seeing Gregor looking at the pictures. “Two other boys and a girl. They all went to UP-Johnstown and came back to live in town, or near it. My daughter is Caroline Houseman Bray. She teaches at the high school.”
“Mrs. Houseman here used to teach at the high school, too,” Kyle said. “I had her for sophomore English. She gave me a D.”
“You deserved an F,” Daisy Houseman said. “I quit the year after Michael died. I hadn’t intended to. My other children are all younger, and I’d meant to stay for them. And we needed the money, of course, because we’re not wealthy people. My husband was a foreman at the Caravesh plant. They make steel casings, or used to. I guess steel’s pretty much dead in this part of Pennsylvania, these days. Can I get you two some coffee? Tea? I know Kyle will take a Coke.”
“There’s no need to put yourself to any trouble,” Gregor said.
“It’s no trouble. It’s just a matter of putting the kettle on. My daughter bought me a coffee grinder and a percolator for Christmas the year before last, but I still haven’t the faintest idea how to work them. I’m a Philistine when it comes to coffee, I’m afraid. I can’t taste the difference between fresh ground Colombian and Taster’s Choice.”
Daisy Houseman left the living room. Gregor walked over to the television set and looked at the pictures on it.
“Is one of these Michael Houseman?” Gregor asked Kyle.
Kyle tapped the one at the very back. “That one. She used to keep it in the front, but maybe the other kids complained. Michael, Steve, Bobby, and Caroline.”
Gregor picked up Michael’s picture. The boy who stared back at him was nice enough looking, but not particularly handsome. He had regular features and hair that was still more short than not. Gregor put the portrait down.
“Like I said,” Kyle told him. “Nice kid. Played decent sports.”
“And didn’t stand out in any way,” Daisy Houseman said, coming back into the living room with a round wooden tray. The tray had a tall glass of Coke and two coffee cups, plus a sugar bowl, a small cream pitcher, two spoons, and the kettle, which was as small as everything else in this house and still steaming. She put the tray down on the coffee table. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It won’t offend me. He was special to me, of course, but he wasn’t the kind of boy who really stood out among his peers. There are always a few of those, even in small towns like this, the ones you know will go on to good colleges and the kinds of careers most of us can only dream of. And then there are the other ones, the ones who have their fifteen minutes of fame at their senior proms. Michael wasn’t one of those, either.”
“He looks like a very nice boy,” Gregor said.
“He was. Nice and steady and reliable. Oh, I know there were things. He drank beer sometimes, not often, but he couldn’t really fool me when he did. And that last year before they all went off to college—or didn’t—there was a fair amount of marijuana in town. Michael was very disapproving. It upset him. Our principal then was an old fool named Deckart Crabbe. He came close to having a nervous breakdown over that marijuana. These days, they’d probably bring in the state police and send a lot of silly teenagers to prison for five years just for carrying a joint. Excuse me, Mr. Demarkian. I don’t much approve of the drug war. You haven’t sat down.”
“I’m sorry.” Gregor sat down.
Kyle reached across the coffee table and took the Coke. “So,” he said. “Like I told you, Mr. Demarkian has been asked to come in and look over what happened to Michael, because—”
“Because the supermarket tabloids are making Elizabeth Toliver sound like a murderer, and her famous boyfriend doesn’t like it. Yes, Kyle, I know what’s going on. Not that I mind, really. If I were in her position, I’d probably do the same thing. Maybe some good will come of it. I’ve never been in the kind of financial position that would allow me to hire a famous detective to look into Michael’s death.”
“What about at the time?” Gregor asked her. “Were you satisfied with the extent of the investigation? I keep getting the impression that not very much was done, and yet that makes very little sense. The murder of a teenager in a small town is usually major news.”
“And it was major news, for about two months,” Daisy told him. “I can’t say I was dissa
tisfied with the investigation. They searched that park backward and forward. It stayed closed for the rest of the summer. They questioned all of those girls, the ones who found the body.” Daisy Houseman fluttered her hands in the air. “Maybe I shouldn’t start on that. Gene—my husband—Gene was very angry about that. He said they were the ones with blood on them. They were the ones the police ought to keep under observation. He was very bitter when the summer was over and they started going to college and nobody stopped them. But I could see the police point of view. There was no weapon. And unless you thought they were all in it together, they all had alibis. They were all together, you see, not killing Michael in the dark.”
“Did anybody ever consider the possibility that they were all in it together?” Gregor asked.
Daisy flashed him a smile. “I considered it. Gene did, too. Oh, I did not like that group of girls. Not a bit. I didn’t like it when Michael stayed so close to Chris Inglerod, and I didn’t like it when he was dating that other one, Emma. Although that came and went the summer between his sophomore and junior years. She dumped him as soon as they got back to school. She didn’t think her reputation would survive if anybody knew she was dating a boy in her own class. If it was up to me, the system would be very different. I’d cancel all the proms and all the dances and all the cheerleading squads. I’d make school school. But nobody would listen to that.”
“Michael was close to Chris Inglerod all his life, wasn’t he?” Gregor said.
“Oh, yes.” Daisy nodded. “We bought this house in 1953, and the Inglerods had the one next door around the back on Carter Street. We were the only families in the area who had children. Everybody else in the neighborhood was older. Their children were grown-up and gone. Most new young families in those days bought houses in the subdivisions that had just started going up. They had nobody to play with but each other, when they were very small children, and then later they walked to and from school together. That was why Gene and I bought this house, not so that Michael could walk to school but so that I could, when the children were bigger and I wanted to go back to teaching.”
“Excuse me if I’m wrong,” Gregor said, “but I keep getting the impression that that was unusual. That in this high school, the groups are pretty much closed off from each other.”
Daisy took a long sip of coffee. Gregor hadn’t even noticed her making it, but now that he looked down at the tray he saw that she’d made him a cup, too, but hadn’t put any milk in it, and probably hadn’t added any sugar. She put her cup down again and said, “You’ve got to understand. Hollman is a small town now, but in those days it was teeny. They all knew each other, all these kids, for most of their lives. In a large school, you can break up into groups and refuse to interact with anybody else, but in a small one you end up having to spend at least some time with almost everybody. There’s no practical way to avoid it. And, if you want to know the truth, they probably don’t want to avoid it. There’s a psychological dynamic there that somebody ought to study. Somebody who isn’t a complete fool, that is. I’ve read some of the literature on ‘adolescent status hierarchies,’ as they call them. It’s completely idiotic.”
“Was Michael going out with anybody in particular, that summer?” Gregor asked.
Daisy shook her head. “Nobody. He took the little Haggerty girl to the senior prom, but that was a matter of convenience. They both wanted to go, and neither of them had dates, and they were lab partners in biology. When summer came around, he was just working, just marking time. I’m sure he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. It seemed to Gene and me that he’d have plenty of time to find out.”
The silence in the room lasted for what felt like forever. Gregor tried his coffee and decided it was better, black, than the stuff he made for himself. Kyle, who had never taken a seat, shifted from one leg to the other.
“Well,” he said.
Gregor took another sip of coffee. “Do you mind if I ask you about the day in question, the day he died?”
“Of course not.”
“He left for work that day, when?”
“Well, he wasn’t due at work until ten or eleven o’clock, but he left a long time before that. At eight, I think, or maybe quarter of. Chris picked him up and they went down to the Sycamore for breakfast.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Oh, no. They did that maybe twice a week. I think it made them feel adult to sit in a restaurant and order from a menu, even if it was only the Sycamore.”
“Do you know if they went by themselves, or if they met people?”
Daisy Houseman shook her head. “I have no idea. The impression I got is that they went by themselves, but the Sycamore is the main teenage hangout in this town. It still is. They might have met a dozen people. They never said so.”
“Not even on the day in question?”
“No.”
“I don’t remember there being anything about them meeting other people that morning,” Kyle said. “You know, in the gossip in town after it all happened. Just that they’d gone to breakfast there in the morning.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “So. Chris Inglerod took Michael to the park and Michael went to work as a lifeguard. He spent the day sitting on the lifeguard’s chair. There’s no indication that he was missing from that chair for any significant amount of time, is there?”
“He didn’t even take a break for lunch,” Daisy Houseman said. “He ate sitting in the chair. I sent a bottle of orange juice and a bologna sandwich with mustard with him, in a brown paper bag. That’s what he liked to take to school, too, but at school he had an apple with him, too. You can’t send apples with them when they’re lifeguarding. They cramp.”
“Michael started work in the lifeguard’s chair,” Gregor said, “and Chris Inglerod did what?”
“Came back to town and met up with Nancy Quayde and went to her house,” Kyle said promptly.
“Nonsense,” Daisy Houseman said.
“What?” Kyle said.
“I said nonsense. That’s not what she did unless she changed her plans that very morning. I heard her talking in this very house before she and Michael left for the Sycamore. She was going to stay in the park and meet with that pack of—well. Those girls. Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart and Maris Coleman and Peggy Smith. Oh, and Nancy Quayde, too, of course. Always Nancy. I’m glad I left teaching long before she ever got into it.”
“Mrs. Houseman,” Kyle said patiently, “I’ve read the reports. And I was here at the time, don’t you remember? Chris went to Nancy’s house, and the other girls—”
“Nonsense,” Daisy Houseman said again. “They’d been planning that operation all summer. Chris told Michael about it, right in my dining room, weeks before it happened. Michael had a fit. He didn’t want it happening on his watch. He’d have to go investigate it. They’d put him in a terrible position. I think that’s why they waited until after five. So that Michael would be off duty and the park would be closed and he couldn’t turn them right in for what they’d done.” She wheeled around to look at Gregor Demarkian. “I know you must think we’re all a bunch of savages in this town, Mr. Demarkian, but believe me. If Michael hadn’t died the same night, those girls would have been in major league trouble for what they did. At the very least, they’d have been hauled in front of juvenile court. Betsy Toliver’s father was the most important attorney in this part of the state. He’d have seen to it. And the rest of the town would not have stood behind them. We are not jerks. Did they really tell the police they hadn’t thought up that stunt until the day it happened?”
“They told everybody that,” Kyle said.
“Well, what can I say?” Daisy’s hands fluttered again. “I wasn’t paying much attention at the time. I had other things to think about. I didn’t realize. But if I had, I would have told somebody. Belinda Hart discovered the snakes’ nest two weeks before graduation, in June. There were eggs and the eggs would hatch. That’s how they were sure of getting enough snakes. C
hris sat down at my dining-room table and drew a whole diagram for Michael to show him what it was about. They wanted him to help, but he wouldn’t do it. He told me he didn’t believe they’d do it. And you know what he was like. He would have turned them in, just the way he always said he’d turn in whoever it was who was selling the marijuana at the high school, if he ever found out. But don’t you dare let that pack of bitches tell you that what they did to Betsy Toliver that night was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
3
It was only later, when he was in the car with the robot-driver on his way back to Elizabeth Toliver’s house, that Gregor Demarkian thought how odd it was that Daisy Houseman had called that incident at the outhouse an “operation.” Of course, television had changed the world, and so had paperback fiction. Lots of people talked like private eyes these days. Even cultivated people—the kind of people who contributed every year to their local affiliate of PBS—thought of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie as “classics,” as if they were Jane Austen and Henry James. There was also the fact that Mrs. Houseman had ended up calling the girls “bitches,” but Gregor put that down to simple honesty. Daisy Houseman had said it, but lots of other people should have. Most of the people Gregor had gone to school with had either been sinking into juvenile delinquency or working their asses off to get the hell out, as Gregor himself had, in the end, with a four-year all-tuition-paid scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. The Armenian kids tended to stick together. It was safer that way, and they had their own events, on Cavanaugh Street, to compensate for the lack of events at school. Gregor could remember going to dozens of “youth” dances in the basement of Holy Trinity Church, carefully watched over by the Very Old Ladies who had been Very Old even then. Once, he’d kissed Lida—Lida Kazanjian as she was then—right on the mouth in the little niche behind the boiler in the basement’s back room. She’d been shocked, and before either of them had had a chance to say a word, Mrs. Varmesian had leaped out of the dark and whacked Gregor in the leg with an umbrella, screeching all the time in Armenian, which by then Gregor no longer understood. Mrs. Varmesian had died the next year, of some “female complaint” Gregor’s mother would never specify. Like everybody else on the street, he had gone to her funeral and then followed her casket out of the church and down a long three blocks to the waiting hearse. In Armenia, they would have followed the casket all the way to the cemetery, but Mrs. Varmesian was being taken to an Armenian-American cemetery in Sewickley. That was the same year he had graduated from high school, and his parents had come to the ceremony in their best clothes that even he knew, by then, made them look as if they were just off the boat. That didn’t matter too much, because most of the other parents looked as if they were just off the boat, too. Gregor had graduated second in his class—the boy who had graduated first had picked up a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1987—and his mother had carried his diploma around for weeks, showing its gold summa cum laude star to strangers on the street, and discussing Gregor’s plans and scholarships with everyone from the men who came around on the garbage truck to the driver of the bus she rode to get to her doctor’s appointment. Bennis said she didn’t know any more about places like Hollman than Gregor did himself, but it wasn’t true. She at least didn’t find discussions of things like proms and homecoming queens completely alien. She’d seen all the movies and read all the books, even if she had spent her adolescence at subdebutante dances and champagne teas. Now that he’d spent a day in Hollman, he felt as if he’d landed on another planet.
