by Jane Haddam
She set herself up at the kitchen table with a large glass of orange juice and a cup to put coffee in, and spiked the juice from her Chanel bottle. She really did have to get back to Belinda’s. She was getting low, and her reinforcements were packed away in her big traveling case. She put the kettle on to boil. There was percolator coffee and a percolator, but it hadn’t been used this morning. She sat down and took a big long drink of orange juice. She put her head in her hands and willed it to stop throbbing.
Eddie came back from the bedrooms, looking happy. “That was great,” he said. “She uses cheap makeup, did you know that? Max Factor. Revlon. The stuff you buy in drugstores. None of that designer salon stuff at all. Maybe that’s what our angle should be. Liz Toliver, El Cheapo Supremo. Too cheap to get a professional out here to help with her mother. And now, what, her mother’s had a heart attack because of all the commotion and somebody is dead and she’s probably got something to do with it—”
“You don’t know that her mother’s had a heart attack,” Maris said.
“No, I don’t, and I won’t write anything until I do know, but it’s fun to speculate. Christ, I hate women like that. They think they’re so damned superior.”
The kettle went off. Maris got up and poured water over her coffee bag, but only halfway up the cup. The Gordon’s was clearing her head a little, and it had occurred to her that they ought to be in something of a hurry. She wished Jimmy Card would go back to New York. Betsy was a lot easier to handle when Jimmy wasn’t around.
Maris sat down in front of her coffee and said, “I’m going to chug this down, and then we ought to get out of here. There’s supposed to be a cop guarding the crime scene out back. There probably will be one any minute now.”
“It’s not much of a crime scene,” Eddie said. “I’ve looked at it. It’s just a lot of flattened grass. It would have been better if there’d been a concrete walkway or something like that. Concrete soaks up mud.”
“Right,” Maris said.
“There wasn’t any dirty underwear, either,” Eddie said. “I checked the hampers. We can always use dirty underwear. We got a shot of Nicole Kidman’s that we ran when we broke the story about the miscarriage. Liz Toliver must change hers three or four times a day. The stuff that’s there looks like it’s there by mistake. Clean as a whistle. Not a single stain.”
“Right,” Maris said again. She drained the coffee. She drained the orange juice. She was beginning to feel awake again. The rain was still coming down outside. She could remember a flood here once, although floods were rare in the mountains. She’d been four or five years old at the time, and the waters had washed out all the bridges between Hollman and the main roads.
“You want to get paid?” Eddie Cassiter said. “I brought it with me.”
“I want to get paid,” Maris said. “But I also want a ride back into town. I need to get a shower and some clean clothes. Let’s get out of here.”
Eddie reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. He took out twelve one-hundred-dollar bills and left them faceup on the table. “There you go. Not bad for one phone call and twenty minutes’ worth of work.”
Maris picked the money up and put it in her purse. “Why do you always have so much cash?” she asked him. “Do you guys keep it in a safe in the office so you can hand it out when it’s needed?”
“Maybe we get it out of the side of the bank,” Eddie said.
Outside, thunder rolled across the sky that sounded like bombing. It came close enough so that the house began to shake.
2
If Belinda had had to go into work today, she would have called in sick. She had a hard time putting up with the library on the best of days. The smell of books made her feel as if she were strangling. The loud-voiced older men who spent the day in the reading room made her lose her patience. The unattractive teenagers who came in after school made her positively crazy, as if teenagers didn’t have better things to do with their time than read. At least, she’d had better things to do with her time when she was a teenager. Sometimes she suspected that the teenagers who came to the library were all potential school shooters. Their minds were so addled with books and their souls were so starved for fun and light and air that one day they would just snap. She knew there were people who said they liked books, but she did not believe it. She thought they were putting on airs, the way people put on airs about liking the opera or watching only art shows on PBS instead of real television. Whatever it was, it was not something she liked to be involved in, and she would forever resent the fact that no other place had offered to give her a job, not even as a waitress. She could do what receptionists did. She could do what customer service representatives did, too. She would have preferred to have been in a place where people could talk out loud and laugh and have fun, and where nobody at all wanted to know if she’d read some book or the other that had come out only last week.
This morning, she would have preferred to be anywhere but in her apartment. She had spent most of the last hour going over her options. She could go down to JayMar’s. She could go over to Mullaney’s. She could get into the car and drive out to the Mountain View Shopping Center. She could drive a really long way and go to the mall. It made Belinda queasy in the pit of her stomach to think that she would never see Chris in the mall again. It made her even queasier to think of Chris with her insides spread out across Betsy Toliver’s lawn, white and oozing, tangled in the grass. This was another reason why Belinda didn’t like to read and didn’t like to listen to the news, either. It made images in your brain, and no matter how hard you tried to get rid of them, you couldn’t get them out.
The apartment was too quiet. The radio was on, which usually helped, but this morning the oldies station was not playing its regular round of songs that she recognized and could sing along to. There were only songs from the sixties, Bob Dylan and Janis Ian and folk music, which Belinda had always thought of as grungy.
If she didn’t go down to the mall and didn’t want to go to the shopping center—it bothered her to shop when she knew she couldn’t buy anything—she could go to Hollman Pizza and have lunch there. She thought about turning on the television and rejected the idea. Television shows at this time of day were all talky-talky and full of people with problems. The local stations had bulletins and news updates all through the day. The last thing she needed was some announcer coming on to tell her that Chris had been secretly pregnant or that her intestines had been carried off in the night by dogs.
She looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost eleven.
“It isn’t fair,” she said, out loud, to the air, and then she clamped her mouth shut. Surely it was a sign of mental illness to be talking to yourself in an empty apartment.
The radio was playing a song by somebody named Dave van Ronk. Belinda had never heard of him, and he had a terrible gravelly voice that sounded like it belonged to a bummy old drunk. She thought of Emma and herself—sitting in the car in front of the walk that led to Betsy’s front door and talking to Betsy’s tall teenaged son about what he liked to do in his spare time. That had been an event she wouldn’t want to repeat. It was like talking to an alien from a science fiction movie. How could anybody that cute want to spend his time going to art exhibits about Abstract Expressionism?
She heard the sound of footsteps. That had to be Maris coming home. She sat down at the table and began to play with the flowers, although there was nothing that needed to be done to them. It wasn’t as if they needed to be watered, or there were so many of them that they could be infinitely rearranged.
There was a fumbling at the apartment’s door. Belinda had given Maris a key. The key turned in the lock. The front door swung open. Belinda turned around on her chair and smiled.
“Where were you all last night?” she asked brightly. “I thought you’d been mugged and murdered and left on Betsy Wetsy’s doorstep with everybody else we know.”
Maris threw her own large shoulder bag down
on the table and pulled out a chair. “This is the biggest frigging mess we’ve ever been in,” she said. “Don’t make jokes.”
3
The trouble, Nancy thought, was that this was such a small town. In even a medium-sized town, there would have been a good chance that most of her students would never even have heard of Chris Inglerod Barr. Now, of course, she had dozens of girls who had worked with Chris at the food bank as part of the country club’s “Good Samaritan Christmas Project,” or who’d been to her house with their parents for a holiday party, or who had waited on her in Elsa-Edna’s or Mullaney’s. It didn’t help that the gory details had been all over town in a split second, either. Just walking through the halls after third period, Nancy had heard at least six different versions of the murder scene, each more outrageous than the last. At first, Chris had just been stabbed, albeit eighty-five times. At last, Chris had been cut up into chunks and placed in a pile at Betsy Toliver’s back door—except they didn’t call her “Betsy,” they called her “Elizabeth,” and they seemed to assume that she was being persecuted. It was a privilege of celebrity. Nobody wanted to believe you’d really done anything wrong. If it appeared you had, they made excuses for you. That was how Nancy explained O. J.
It was now quarter after eleven, and Nancy needed at least two ibuprofen, which she wasn’t eligible to get for another half hour. She had found a substitute to take Peggy’s classes, but she’d had to teach the first one herself. There just hadn’t been time to jury-rig anything else. Nancy truly hated teaching. She had hated it from the first, and the five long years between the time she got her master’s degree and the time she had been able to find a job in administration had been the longest of her life. She would rather have gone back to that summer after her senior year in high school than do those five years over again.
What she really needed to do, she thought, was to take half an hour and drive out into the country with the radio off. If she could just spend a little time without having to see or talk to people, she knew she would be able to calm down. She was not, really, upset about Chris. She was only upset about the things that were going on around Chris, about the stories, about the hysteria of people like Emma. She had half expected to have a call from the superintendent this morning, suggesting they bring in “grief counselors” for the students who “might need them,” but no call had come from that source, even to offer condolences. She had been reduced to pacing up and down the halls, from one floor to another, from one wing to another, looking into classrooms, listening to the talk in the halls when the bell rang and classes changed.
Nancy looked around the foyer and made a note to herself to get the clubs to change the display cases. She was tired of everything she saw. She went into her office and nodded to Lisa as she passed through the outer room. She passed into her own office and went to the window at the back. The view wasn’t good at the best of times, and today the rain was so hard and the sky was so black that there wasn’t anything to see but water, coming down. She pulled out the chair behind her desk and sat down. There was work she had to do. She ought to do it. She didn’t want to. Lisa Bentkoop came in, and Nancy looked up, relieved.
“I’m having the worst day today,” she said. “It’s not that anything in particular is going wrong, it’s just—” Nancy fluttered her hands in the air.
“I think that’s understandable,” Lisa said. “You’re probably more upset than you realize. She was a friend of yours forever.”
“Well, yes,” Nancy said. “That’s true, I guess, but since we became adults we haven’t been particularly close. Oh, we saw each other. It’s hard not to go on seeing the people you grew up with in a town like this. But there was a divergence, if you know what I mean. Chris was so involved with being a wife, and a wife is the last thing I ever wanted to be.”
“I know what you mean. And I hate to make your day any worse than it already is, but there are a couple of things.”
“Like what?”
“Well.” Lisa took a deep breath. “We got a heads-up from Kyle at the police station, for starters. Apparently, Hollman has been invaded. There were so many reporters out at the Toliver place this morning, the inhabitants had to flee. Those aren’t my words, they’re Kyle’s. ‘The inhabitants had to flee.’ Hundreds of them, from his description—”
“He went out there?”
“No,” Lisa said. “That detective person was out there. Gregor Demarkian.”
“I can’t believe there was that much fuss over Betsy Toliver,” Nancy said. “Yes, she’s sort of famous, but it’s only sort of. Most people don’t even watch those talking heads shows.”
“I don’t think it was about Elizabeth Toliver. Kyle said Jimmy Card was here, he was here last night when they found the body. So I think it’s him they’re after.”
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“And Kyle said they got inundated awhile at the police station, too, with the reporters crowding into the vestibule and the waiting room, but they got that under control. He wanted us to be ready, though, because he thinks—or maybe it’s Mr. Demarkian who thinks—anyway, he thinks that they might come here.”
“Who? Kyle and Mr. Demarkian?”
“No,” Lisa said. “The reporters. Or some of them, at any rate. Remember how that one came down here a couple of months ago, from the Enquirer? Except he didn’t tell us he was from the Enquirer. He wanted to photograph the school.”
Nancy did remember. That was when the stories had first started appearing in the tabloids about the night Michael Houseman was murdered. She drummed her fingers on her desk. “Has anybody actually been here today?”
“If you mean reporters, not that I know about. But you know what they are. They could be waiting in the parking lot for the students to come out. They could just waltz through one of the doors. We talk about making this school secure, but we never do anything about it. And we can’t lock too many doors. The fire regulations—”
“No,” Nancy said. “No, that’s all right. I don’t see that they’d have much to get if they did come here. I can’t see that it would hurt the school anyway. It isn’t even the right building. This wasn’t where we all were when all that stuff happened with Betsy.”
“Yes,” Lisa said. “Well, the thing is, there may be another complication.”
“What complication?”
“David Asch is here to see you.”
“Who’s David Asch?”
“Diane Asch’s father.”
Nancy’s head snapped up. “He’s here? Waiting outside someplace? He didn’t call for an appointment?”
“No, he didn’t call for an appointment, and I don’t think that’s a good sign. He looks like the kind of man who does call for appointments. He’s—well, you’d have to see him.”
“I don’t intend to see him. Go right back out there and tell him I don’t have any time today. Make him make an appointment.”
Lisa hesitated. “I’ve tried that,” she said. “I tried it several different ways. He said he’d wait. ‘Nobody schedules every breathing minute of the day,’ is what he said.”
“Was he belligerent?”
“Oh, no. He was quite pleasant.”
Nancy drummed her fingers on the desk again. “What about Diane? Is she in school today?”
“Same as always. I saw her on her way to biology.”
“Has there been any trouble?”
“Nothing unusual.” Lisa shrugged. “I mean, I heard a couple of people call her ‘fart face’ in the hall, but that’s—”
“Par for the course,” Nancy finished. She stood up. If she had been one of the students this year, she would have called Diane Asch “fart face,” too. She wondered what Mr. Asch was like. Maybe he was Rick Moranis. “Send him in,” she said. “Tell him I’ve got exactly five minutes. It’s a busy day. When I buzz, I want you back in here faster than you can think about it. And I’m going to want him out.”
“Right,” Lisa said.
She hurried out of
the room, and Nancy remained standing. A moment later, Lisa returned ahead of a tall, elegant-looking man in a good tan suit. He was far too elegant, and the suit was far too good, for Hollman. Nancy held out her hand.
“Mr. Asch,” she said.
“Ms. Quayde.”
Lisa retreated out the door and closed it behind her. When she was gone, it seemed too silent. The rain outside was too loud. David Asch had an attache’ case. He was smiling.
“Well,” Nancy said. “I suppose you’re here to talk about the trouble Diane has been having, getting along with her classmates.”
“No,” David Asch said. “I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
“There wouldn’t be any point, would there? I’ve heard enough conversations of that kind—not about Diane, mind you, but about me—to know how they go. I complain. You tell me it’s really mostly Diane’s fault, we need to get her a therapist, she has a problem, and besides, there’s nothing you can do to make people like her. That is the way the conversation would go, isn’t it?”
Lisa was right, Nancy thought. This man was pleasant, but it was not a nice pleasantness. “If you don’t want to talk about Diane,” she said, “what do you want to talk about?”
“You.”
“Excuse me?”
David Asch’s smile became wider. He sat down himself, in the visitor’s chair, and put his attache’ case on the desk. “You,” he repeated. “Because there are things you can do about the situation with Diane, although you won’t do any of them. It’s true you can’t make people like her, but you can stop collaborating in their bullying. Because we both know, don’t we, that this kind of ostracizing behavior does not occur in isolation. It does not occur where there is not adult support.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
Nancy watched in fascination as David Asch snapped open the brass fixtures on the attache’ case. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she said. “If you were, I’d know you. You look like you come from someplace far more cosmopolitan and—”
