by Jane Haddam
“Oh, Christ,” Nancy said. “You’re incredible. Has this situation even penetrated your head yet? Chris is dead.”
“I know.”
“Chris’s husband was out of town. Way out of town. Which means that unless you think he hired a hit man, he’s not a suspect. Which means that everybody else in town is. Including all of us.”
“I don’t see why,” Emma said. “It’s more likely that he did it. The son. He was there. He must have seen Chris come in.”
“Betsy’s son Mark killed Chris Inglerod Barr.”
“Why not?”
“What for?”
Emma fluttered her hands in the air. “He’s odd, I told you. Just like she was. And you know what they do when they’re odd these days. Columbine. And that place in California. They kill people. So, you know, maybe he saw Chris come in and there he was with a, well, whatever you need to cut somebody’s guts out, and—”
“Jesus,” Nancy said.
“You don’t have to go all superior on me,” Emma said. “He really could have killed her. Or Betsy could have. It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us.”
“It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us because they read Kafka? You’re delusional.”
Emma drained the last of her coffee. It was stone-cold by now, and almost entirely milk. “It’s more likely to be one of them than one of us,” she repeated stubbornly. “There’s nothing wrong with any of us. We’re all normal as the day is long. They’re the ones who are odd.”
She got her wallet out of her pocketbook and three quarters out of her change purse. She put the money down under the bill and got off her stool. Her ass hurt.
“You ought to make more sense than you do,” she told Nancy. “You’re the one who’s supposed to be the principal.”
She went back down the length of JayMar’s to the front door and out again onto Grandview Avenue. This was all she ever did: went in and out of buildings, went up and down Grandview. For a split second, the vision was appalling. In the end, it was comforting. It was normal. Nothing could be more normal than Grandview at breakfast time with the lights glowing in the deep long recesses of Mullaney’s, and the little red signal light blinking at the end of the platform at the train station, and the dresses on mannequins in the window at Elsa-Edna’s. This was what people did with their lives. They graduated from high school and got jobs and had families and lived in towns where they knew most everybody and everybody knew them. They gained weight as they got older and took snapshots of their grandchildren to show their women friends when they met them once a month or so for lunch. That was normalnormalnormal, and normal people did not take knives to their childhood friends and spew their intestines all over somebody else’s backyard.
2
For at least an hour after the news had come on television the night before, things had been all right. They hadn’t been great—things were never great when Stu was drinking—but they had been all right, and Peggy had sat by herself on one of the small red chairs at the kitchen table and wondered if he just hadn’t heard the news at all. It was one of those nights when everything was very clear to her, not only her marriage, but her house, too, and her face, and her life, as if she were looking at all of them through a magnifying mirror. The west wall in the kitchen was cracked. It had been cracked for at least a year or two. The vinyl on the floor in the entryway was peeling. When she came in after teaching, she tried to come in the back way so that she wouldn’t have to see it. In the early days of their marriage, Stu had been good at fixing things. He had a whole wall full of tools in the garage to prove it. Of course, in those days he had also held a job for more than a couple of weeks at a time. He’d come home on Friday nights with two big steaks he’d bought at the Grill Center and a bottle of champagne, and she’d think he was wonderful, so optimistic, so exuberant, so happy with life. Sometimes now she thought about those steaks and wondered what they had cost. The Grill Center was the place where the people who lived out by the golf course went. Peggy had been in there once and seen swordfish selling for fourteen dollars a pound. It was probably a sign of manic depression that Stu bought the steaks there, or a sign of alcoholism, and she knew now that she should have worried once it became clear that he would hit the Grill Center every single Friday night. The problem was that she had wanted steaks from the Grill Center, too, and good china bought in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, and a house with three bedrooms and a family room with a fireplace where children could hang stockings. That was the kind of thing you aspired to when you grew up in Hollman. Peggy remembered sitting for hours with Emma and Belinda and Maris and Chris, pouring over her mother’s old House Beautiful magazines and talking about what they would do, what they would have, how they would live once they were married. It was frightening to think of Chris there with them, her legs folded up underneath her, her hair pulled back from her face with clips. Was there some connection between the fact that Chris was the only one of them who had managed to achieve a House Beautiful life, and the fact that she was dead? Peggy kept feeling that there had to be some connections somewhere. There had to be reasons for why things happened. She just couldn’t think of what they were. It was nearly midnight. The news about Chris had been on at eleven o’clock. Peggy wanted to fall asleep right where she was, sitting up.
It was the crying that started the trouble. Back in the kitchen now, with her dress torn and her eye so painful she knew it had to be black, she had to admit it to herself. It was the crying that started the trouble, and she was to blame for the crying, because it really made no sense for her to cry. Stu was always so rational about everything. Even when he was drunk and crazy, he was rational. He saw situations plain. She was the one who got things confused and made everything wrong and then did the worst possible thing. She was the one who somehow made it impossible for him to function. She was a ball-busting bitch—she was—she was—what? One of those feminists, Stu said when he really got going. Maybe she was. Maybe she was one of those feminists, like Betsy, and she was dangerous to people, she was dangerous to Stu, if she ever had had a child she would have ruined it. Christine Inglerod Barr was found dead at the home of … Nobody ever called Chris Inglerod “Christine.”
She had put her head in her hands and started crying without realizing it. She had been thinking about Chris being dead and the fact that none of the others had called her. Then she’d thought about the phone ringing and realized she didn’t want that either. Stu hated to hear the phone ringing. She didn’t know what she wanted. It seemed to her that everything she had ever wanted had been wrong.
The punch, when it came, had been a surprise. She hadn’t heard Stu come into the kitchen. It hit her in her left eye and knocked her backward in her chair. The chair jumped on the floor and then tilted over backward. Peggy had found herself suspended in midair. The thought that ran through her mind was: Don’t break anything I can’t break anything I can’t go to the hospital tonight. It came and went without her conscious mind registering most of the words, and then she hit the floor, hard, with her back against the turned wooden spindles of the chair and the back of her head on the hard linoleum. She was breathless. It reminded her of falling off the side of the slide in Baldren Park when she was a child. You landed on your back and for a moment or two you couldn’t breathe, and up above you the sky was bluer than it would ever be again. All that was up above her now was the light fixture. It had started out to be a modest chandelier, but three of the bulbs were out and one of the chandelier cups was broken. She could buy bulbs at the grocery store, if she remembered to bring one with her so that she could check the size. She could take the chandelier cups to the glass place in Johnstown and find out what it would cost to replace them. She might be able to get away with buying them someday when Stu was out of the house, and installing them someday when he was passed out drunk.
She felt the kick in her side as if she’d been hit by a car. Stu was wearing his shit-kicker boots, the heavy ones with cleats that he u
sed in the winter when the driveway got bad. Peggy grabbed at her side and twisted away. The trick was not to cry and not to cry out. He kicked her again, higher, in her rib cage near her breast. She wrapped her arms around her chest and tried to roll away from him. She was stopped by the chair. She was still sitting in the chair, with her legs hanging off the seat, only she was on her back. Over her head, the chandelier swung and shuddered. The whole house was shaking. She had been crying before he ever walked in, and now she couldn’t stop. He shot a kick to her pelvis and she cried out. Her voice in the room was oddly animal, too low, too anguished, too everything.
“Fucking shit,” he said.
And then the boot hit her pelvis again and she did roll. She got off the chair somehow and rolled and rolled until she hit the wall, the cabinets near the sink, somewhere. He was picking his boots up and grinding his feet right down on top of her. The cleats were tearing at her dress and the skin underneath it. She was wet with sweat and blood. She knew that all she had to do was to stay calm, stay calm, not cry out, not get hysterical. It was all her fault when he got crazy because she made him that way. She brought it on with her hysterics and her attempts to manipulate him. She brought it on when she cried.
She had somehow managed to roll in the wrong direction. When his boot came down this time it hit her straight in the gut. It knocked the wind out of her. When she got it back she screamed, and as she did she felt her sphincter releasing, and her bladder, too, everything, she was making a mess of herself and the floor and everything, everything, she was crying and she couldn’t stop and he was kicking her so hard she thought she was going to die. She rolled herself up in a ball and turned the right way this time, pressed up against the place where the cabinets met the floor, and from then until she passed out she only cried silently, so that she couldn’t even hear herself.
Now it was half past eight in the morning, and except for the black eye—she knew she had a black eye, even though she hadn’t looked in the mirror. She never looked in the mirror anymore if she could help it—the house was cleaned up. The kitchen looked normal. The only thing that might have seemed odd was the smell of soap and disinfectant, but kitchens always smelled like that when you cleaned them, and it was better to smell soap and disinfectant than to smell what had been in here before. She was, really, very calm, but she thought she had at least one broken rib, and there was the black eye. If she didn’t go in to teach, she would be here in the house with Stu all day. There was always the chance that it would happen again. If she did go in, there would be the black eye, and the fact that she’d had to take a taxi because she hadn’t been waiting at the door when Nancy drove into the driveway, and the fact that she was having trouble walking and having trouble breathing, and all the other things. Nancy would be furious. Worse than that, she would tell the rest of them.
Christine Inglerod Barr was found dead at the home of a friend in the Mars Road section of Hollman this evening …
She picked up the phone and called the school. She asked for Nancy, and waited. She was not going to stay in this house all day, no matter how much it hurt to walk. She wasn’t going to wait in the kitchen with her hands folded until Stu woke up and figured out she had never gone in to work, because that would start him off again. It always did. He was scared to death that she’d lose her job.
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“It’s Peggy. I’m sorry to call so late. I’m—not feeling very well today. It might be a good idea if you got a substitute.”
“It’s eight-thirty.”
“Yes, I know. I seem to have slept through the alarm. If you’d knocked on the door, I might have heard you, but you must have realized when I wasn’t outside and waiting—”
“Realized what? That Prince Charming had been beating you into a pulp again?”
“I’m just sick, Nancy. That’s all. I’m just sick. I’m nauseated and I’ve got a headache. And I’m a little … confused … about this thing with Chris.”
“What’s there to be confused about? Somebody took a knife or a razor or something and eviscerated her. Her guts were all over Betsy Toliver’s lawn.”
Peggy blanched. “Oh,” she said.
“Half the town has been on the phone to me, telling me they just know it was one of us,” Nancy said.
“Yes,” Peggy said, feeling a little desperate now. The students in her homeroom had to be already in their places with nobody to watch over them, and she knew what that meant. “There’s homeroom,” she said carefully. “Somebody should go down to my homeroom and make sure—”
“Oh, Christ,” Nancy said. “All right. I’ll send Lisa. She can read announcements as well as the next person. You don’t need a teaching certificate for that. I can’t believe you did this to me. I really can’t. If you have to call in, for Christ’s sake, do it at seven, will you please?”
“Yes,” Peggy said, yet again. It seemed to be the only word she knew. “Yes, Nancy, I understand that. I slept through the alarm. I didn’t do it intentionally.”
“You stay with Prince Charming intentionally.”
“I’m going to hang up now and lie down,” Peggy said.
Nancy hung up instead, and Peggy found herself listening to a dial tone buzzing in her ear. She got up and put the receiver back in its cradle on the wall. Then she sat down again and put her face down on the palms of her hands. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. She counted to ten. She thought that when she began to feel a little less as if every bone in her torso was broken, she would take a walk to Grandview Avenue and have a coffee and English muffin in JayMar’s and just sit there for a while, just sit, without thinking about anything, not even about the six of them, that night, gathered around Michael Houseman’s body in the rain.
THREE
1
Gregor Demarkian fell asleep in his clothes, and when he woke up—too late, with the sun too high in the sky and the air too warm around him—he saw that he’d mashed his suit jacket into a ball of wrinkles. He checked his watch. It was only eight-thirty, which meant Kyle Borden wouldn’t be in the office yet. Gregor was supposed to meet him there at ten. He shook his legs out and eased his shoes off his feet. He took off his suit jacket and dropped it on the floor. He took off his tie. He picked up the phone and heard dead air. Either the service was out, or somebody had cut the phone lines—but that wasn’t a very good thought, under the circumstances. It was one thing to watch a butcher work when he was a serial killer who cared not at all about the people he slaughtered. Serial killers were about butchery. They were always looking to take one more step into the surreality of gore. It was another thing to see something like that at least ostensibly committed by a sane person—although, Gregor admitted, he’d always thought that the vast majority of murderers were peculiarly sane. It didn’t take madness to kill, although people who were mad sometimes did. It took determination, and a commitment to logic so pure that nothing else was ever allowed to get in its way. What kind of logic would have been required, to rip the guts out of a woman on a bright spring day in the unimpressive setting of a small-town backyard? He tried the phone one last time, because the thing he needed most of all in the world was to talk to Bennis, but the phone was still dead.
I need to take a shower, Gregor told himself. His clothes hung on him the way clothes do when they have been wet with sweat and dried without being washed. The fabric of his shirt was scratchy against his skin. He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled them back. He unbuttoned his top shirt button and set his neck free. Bennis was right. He was captive to an aesthetic that most people had abandoned decades ago.
He pulled off his socks. He got his second-best robe off the back of the chair near the little window and threw it over his shoulder. He could find the clean clothes he needed when he got back from the shower. It was easier to proceed in a murder case where the murderer was intent on doing odd or outlandish things. It was the ordinary cases, the ones where somebody just shot a gun into somebody else in the middle of a r
oom, that were the hard ones. In another way, though, oddnesses were a headache, because they meant providing the prosecutor with a plausible explanation. Juries were remarkably consistent in finding the odd and outlandish cause for “reasonable doubt” in any case against a white, middle-class defendant. A lot of juries also found it hard to find any doubt at all against a poor black defendant even when he had provably been in another state at the time of the crime. Gregor was eternally grateful that he did not have to worry about that kind of thing on a daily basis anymore. Twenty years in the FBI was enough professional law enforcement for anybody.
Gregor thought about looking out his window and decided against it. He opened the door to his room and went into the little hall. He was halfway to the bathroom—not very far, only a few steps—when he realized there was something going on.
“I heard the door open,” he heard Mark say. “I’m not going to wake him up. He already is up.”
“Mark?” Gregor said.
Mark appeared in the hall, looking huge, and worried, and even more adult than usual. “Hi. Good morning. I’ve got to nail your window shut.”
“What?”
“He’s got to nail your window shut.” Liz Toliver appeared in the hall. “It would be even better if we could nail a plank over it, but we don’t have any planks in the house, and we can’t go out in the driveway. I apologize, Mr. Demarkian. When you said that thing about securing the house, I thought you were crazy.”
“I kept telling her,” Mark said.
“One of them tried to climb through the bathroom window at the other side of the house. Scared my mother on the toilet. She’s had to be sedated.”
“I’ll be done before you finish with your shower,” Mark said, looking at the robe over Gregor’s shoulder.
Gregor walked down to the end of the hall instead. Jimmy Card was standing alone in the living room, looking at the flat darkness where the draperies covered the picture window that looked out onto the front lawn and the road. His cell phone lay open on the coffee table in front of the long leather couch. His T-shirt looked as if he had been balling it up in his hands, over and over again, for hours.
