by Jane Haddam
“Now, pay attention,” Kyle said. “Did you see Chris when you were out there?”
“Of course we didn’t.”
“Could she have been parked in the driveway behind the house?”
“No,” Belinda said positively. “If her car was parked in that driveway, I’d have seen it.”
“Are you sure?” Kyle asked. “Because I asked Emma, and she said she couldn’t see anything.”
“That’s because Emma was driving,” Belinda said. “She was on the other side of the car. She wasn’t right up next to the curb. I was right up next to the curb, and I was practically in front of the driveway entrance, and I could see right down it. The only car there was that Ford Taurus the nurse drives Betsy Wetsy’s mother around in.”
“Could there have been cars in the garage?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” Belinda said. Then she put on a show of thinking really hard. “I suppose there could have been. I don’t remember the garage doors being open, but I don’t remember them being closed either. Was Chris’s car in Betsy Wetsy’s garage?”
“No,” Kyle said.
Gregor got up. He was finding it almost impossible to sit still in this room.
“You’ve got a good view here,” he said. “And that’s where you work? Right across there?”
“It means I don’t have to drive when the weather gets bad,” Belinda said. “But it’s not like it was when I was growing up. My parents had a really nice house in those days, and we had big trees. Even when I was married, I had a better house. It’s a good thing Hayley was grown when her father decided he wanted a divorce. She’d have been ashamed to bring her friends here.”
Gregor wished he could open a window. The room was virtually airless. Unfortunately, although the window had screens, they wouldn’t keep out the rain, and the rain was still coming down in sheets.
“It’s so weird,” Belinda said pleasantly. “Do you know what I was thinking? It was raining just like this, the night Betsy Wetsy got stuck in the outhouse. Not in the beginning, you know, but at the end, when we were all at the river and then—then—” She looked from one to the other of them and blushed.
“And then Michael died,” Kyle Borden said. “What is it with you people that you can never say that right out loud?”
Belinda got out of her chair and bustled off in the direction of the kitchen. She was one of the few people, Gregor thought, who could actually be said to bustle.
“I don’t know why everybody makes such a big deal about it,” she said. “It’s as if it were some kind of catastrophe or something. Chris is the catastrophe. She was somebody who really mattered.”
SIX
1
The really odd thing, Liz Toliver thought, was that, when it was happening, she’d behaved as if she’d been through it all a dozen times in the last six weeks. The reporters were storming the house. The phone lines were cut. Her own picture was on the news segment of the Today show, as if she were O. J. Simpson—in fact, exactly as if—and yet through it all she had been perfectly calm, and perfectly clearheaded, and perfectly focused.
Now she turned over on her side and looked out the window. They had commandeered an entire floor of the Radisson, almost as much space as they had on the first floor of the house in Connecticut, and maybe more. She was lying on this bed because it had been handy when she wandered out of the shower, and she had taken a shower because she’d needed something to do that wouldn’t require her to talk to anybody for a while. There was so much thunder and lightning it amazed her that they still had power.
She got up and went to the door of the room and looked down the hall. Several of the other doors were standing wide open. Through one of them, she could hear the sounds of Mark and Geoff playing a video game. She went back into the room she’d come from and got the robe she’d left lying across the little desk near the window. She got the robe wrapped around her and went out into the hall again. She bypassed the room where the boys were playing—if Jimmy had been in there playing with them, which he sometimes did, she would have been able to hear him cursing at the joystick—and went down to the other end of the hall where she could see a door standing wide open and hear the sounds of classical music spilling out. The music was Paganini, whom Jimmy claimed was his favorite composer after Paul McCartney.
When she came to the door, he was still on the phone. When she knocked, he was just hanging up. He looked at her and smiled. “Hey,” he said. “I wish I’d known it was you. I was talking to Debra.”
“My Debra?”
“Your Debra, yeah. I thought I’d check in and see how things were going. There’s been a certain amount of fuss over there this morning. You might want to call her back when you get the chance. She was a little frantic.”
“My Debra? Frantic? The world must be coming to an end.”
Jimmy picked up a cup of coffee from a large round table beside the bed, and Liz realized he’d ordered room service while she’d been showering. She went over to the table and found enough hot water and Constant Comment tea bags to last the afternoon.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”
“I’ve been thinking, too,” Jimmy said. “Debra said you were supposed to fire Maris when you were up here. Have you?”
“I was only going to stop her from going back to the office,” Liz said. “Debra’s right about that. She’s a distraction. I was going to keep her on as a research assistant, or something like that. Keep Maris on, I mean.”
“I know who you mean,” Jimmy said. “Why?”
“Because she probably couldn’t get another job. Because I don’t really want to see somebody I’ve known since kindergarten sleeping in the street. Why do we have to go through this again?”
“Because,” Jimmy said, “I’m the most loyal person on the planet, and you know that, but even I wouldn’t go on taking care of somebody who spent all her time trying to screw me up. Is that why you won’t marry me? Because you’re afraid I’ll make you fire Maris?”
“Be sensible,” Liz said. She got a cup of tea rigged up—why was it that places always gave you little tiny cups to drink tea in, as if they thought that only coffee drinkers were in it for the caffeine?—and took a seat on the edge of the bed. “Think about Maris for a minute,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“How should I know where she is?” Jimmy said. “Not here. That’s enough for me.”
“Why isn’t she here?”
“Is this a trick question? Maybe if we, you know, did a little rock and roll, it would clear my head and I could answer better.”
“Behave yourself,” Liz said. “Think about this for a minute. Last night, when Chris’s body was found, Maris was at my mother’s house. Right?”
“Right.”
“And then she fell asleep on the couch,” Liz said. “Passed out, really. You remember that? You went off to take a shower, and Mr. Demarkian came in to talk, and then Mr. Demarkian left and I went to bed and Maris was still asleep on the couch. I think I mentioned something to you about it at the time.”
“I think I said something about Maris going down one more step of the alcoholism ladder. I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Well,” Liz said, “if she was asleep on the couch when we all went to bed, where was she when we all woke up?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe she woke up in the middle of the night and went home. Or to wherever she’s staying.”
“At Belinda Hart’s place. How?”
“How what?”
“How did she get home?” Liz insisted.
Jimmy looked thoroughly confused. “She got home the same way she got to the house in the first place,” he said. “She must have driven out, right? So she got back in the car and went home, and it’s probably a miracle she didn’t kill herself or somebody else.”
Liz shook her head. “She didn’t drive out. Or at least, she didn’t drive herself out. She’s got a car she rented, yes, but it’s a bright yel
low Volkswagen, one of those new bugs. She told me. There was no bright yellow Volkswagen in the driveway at my mother’s house when Chris’s body was found, and there wasn’t one in the garage, either, because my mother’s car is in there. Maris hates to drive. She even walked all the way back from the Sycamore yesterday after we had lunch.”
“Maris is scared shitless that she’ll kill somebody,” Jimmy said. “It’s one of the few signs of common human decency I’ve ever been able to attribute to her.”
“The thing is,” Liz said, “if she didn’t have a car, then where did she go? Where was she this morning? And what bothers me, what I keep thinking about, is maybe that nothing happened to her this morning. Maybe she’s still out there. Back at the house.”
“Doing what?”
“Waking up to find the house deserted,” Liz said. “Waking up to find the phone lines cut. Or, if you really want to write a worst-case scenario, waking up maybe an hour and a half ago and finding some reporters still outside the house and nobody in it and needing a ride into town and having only one place to get it from. If you see what I mean.”
“Shit,” Jimmy said.
“Exactly,” Liz said. “She could have been half a dozen places in that house and we’d never have seen her if we weren’t looking for her. All she had to do was get up in the middle of the night, still mostly drunk, and go wandering around looking for a bathroom in the dark. Is there a way we could send somebody out there to check?”
“There’s supposed to be a policeman posted,” Jimmy said. “Maybe he can check. Maybe he can find another cop to get her a ride back into town. Assuming she’s still there. Shit, shit, shit. I forgot all about her.”
“I forgot all about her, too,” Liz said. “Oh, damn. This is going to be messy, too. Maris, stranded while we flee, giving no thought to her comfort or well-being. Or however the papers will put it. And People. I’m beginning to be very glad that George folded when it did.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry if she didn’t spend half her time talking to the papers.”
“Do you ever wonder what you’d be like if you hadn’t ended up being a famous person named Jimmy Card?” Liz asked him. “Do you ever wonder what kind of jerk you would be if you’d tried all the things you tried but they hadn’t worked out and you were still playing bars in Long Island City? You don’t give any consideration to context.”
“I give my consideration to you,” Jimmy said.
He stretched out his hand and ran the tips of his fingers across her cheek, very slowly, the way he sometimes did when they first met at the apartment for an afternoon of making love. Liz knew that nothing like that was going to happen right here, right now. Her rule about sex in any place the boys were was absolutely unbreakable. It was just that she wished they really were married, as married as she had once been to Jay, so that she could stretch out on the bed with Jimmy beside her and not have to care at all what Mark thought might be going on on the other side of the door. It wasn’t that she was horny, as Mark liked to put it. It wasn’t as if she wanted sex the way she sometimes did when she was working in the city and knew she would be meeting Jimmy later, for lunch, or at the end of the day. She was not craving orgasm, but the comfort of a catharsis, something to prove that she was not Chris, she was not dead in somebody else’s backyard, she was not dead at all, and she was not likely to be indicted for a murder she didn’t commit. She wanted to twist around and wrestle Jimmy down to the bed and go at him the way she’d never dared to do when she had wanted sex.
“Are you all right?” Jimmy asked her.
“I’m fine,” she said, but she wanted to say something else, and it scared her. So she got up and went to the room-service table and made herself another cup of tea.
2
Emma was working on the checkbook when Peggy Smith came in, and for a moment she was even more disoriented than she had been. Was it after three o’clock already, that Peggy should be here? Had it really been raining all day? Peggy was as wet as Emma had ever seen anybody. Droplets as thick as the ones on chandeliers were falling from her hair.
Peggy seemed a little dazed. There was a slight swelling in her left eye socket that was going to turn into a shiner. At the moment, it only looked raw and painful. Peggy did not seem to notice it. Emma moved the checkbook around on the counter and bit the end of her pen. She didn’t like having Peggy in the store at the best of times—there was always the danger that Stu might show up—and she really hated it when Peggy was banged up.
Peggy stopped at the counter and put her handbag down. Her handbag was as wet as the rest of her.
“I didn’t realize it was raining so hard,” she said. “If I’d realized, I’d have worn my raincoat. Or brought my umbrella.”
“Right,” Emma said. She shut the checkbook, which was one of those big folderlike things for business checks. She had a regular-sized checkbook for her and George’s personal account upstairs in the apartment. “So,” she said, “it’s later than I realized. You’re already out of school.”
“What? Oh, I didn’t go in to school today. I wasn’t feeling well. But then, I thought, you know, staying cooped up in the house. It didn’t make me feel any better. So I thought I’d go for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“It’s like I said. I didn’t realize it was raining so hard. I don’t think it was, when I first started out. At least it wasn’t enough so that I noticed it.”
Emma did not say that it had been raining in sheets since early this morning. She took a clean rag from the shelf under the counter and began to polish fitfully. “So,” she said. “How’s Stu this morning? I haven’t seen him around.”
Peggy gave her a sharp look. “Stu’s fine. He was sleeping when I left the house. I didn’t see any reason to wake him up.”
“Did you call in to the school to tell them you’d be absent?”
“Early this morning. God, Emma, what do you take me for?”
“You look sick,” Emma defended herself. “You look absentminded. People get that way when they’re sick.”
“I even turned the ringer off on the phone before I left,” Peggy said. “I’m really not a complete fool, Emma. I know Stu gets upset when his routine is interrupted. Did you and Belinda really go out to Betsy Toliver’s house yesterday afternoon?”
Stu got upset as a matter of principle, Emma thought. That was why you couldn’t trust him. She put the clean rag back on the shelf. The counter did not need to be polished. “We drove her son back there from the library,” she said carefully. “Where did you hear about that?”
“I heard about it from Laurel. I was in the library for a while. It was quiet there, you know, but after a while I began to think that there might be other people. Somebody from the board of education. You know how it is in a town this size. Have you ever been sorry you didn’t get out and go do something? Like Betsy?”
“No,” Emma said.
Peggy looked around the shop. “I was looking through our yearbook the night before last. Do you ever do that? It was surprising me how many people we know are already dead. And that was before Chris was killed. People who died in Vietnam. People who died in car accidents. Nobody turned out the way you would expect them to, except maybe Chris. Nancy Quayde didn’t even manage to get married.”
“Is there some point to this conversation?” Emma asked. “Did you just drop in to muse? Because if you did, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Peggy smiled slightly. “You and I,” she said. “We didn’t turn out the way we were supposed to, either. We just sort of—approximated it. You’ve got a happy marriage, but you’re still living over the store. And I’ve got a house, but—” She shrugged.
“Don’t tell me you’re finally going to admit that your marriage isn’t happy,” Emma said. “I’ll sing glory hallelujah, I promise. Nancy will find you a good attorney. We’ll all go to court and testify against him, and maybe he’ll rot in jail for forty years.”
“You don’t understa
nd him,” Peggy said.
Emma wanted to say that she understood Stu perfectly, and so did everybody else, but Peggy was getting that look on her face that she always did when she talked about Stu, the one Emma associated with religious fanatics. It was not true that Peggy hadn’t ended up where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up exactly where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up married to Stu.
“Well,” Emma said.
“Did you go out to Betsy’s yesterday afternoon? When Chris was killed?”
“We weren’t there when Chris was killed,” Emma said. “We just drove Mark out there from the library and sat parked at the curb for a minute or two. We didn’t see Chris. We didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t see Betsy?”
“She wasn’t home.” Emma shook her head. “You’re reminding me of Belinda. She wanted to see Betsy, too. I don’t know why. If you really want to see her, she’s on Grandview Avenue enough these last few days. She’s been in Mullaney’s. She’s been in English Drugs. I’ve seen her half a dozen times, getting in and out of that Mercedes.”
“Haven’t you wanted to talk to her?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. To see what she’s like. She used to hate Stu when we were all in high school, did you know that? She told Maris about it when they were in college. Maris says it was really just a cover story about her coming back here to take care of her mother. Jimmy Card was going to send people down here to do that for her. Maris says what she’s really here for is to write an article about us for one of those magazines. You know, the ones nobody reads.”
“Where did you see Maris?”
“She was in the library.” Peggy looked around, vague and vaguely startled at once, as if she had had no idea, until now, just where she was. “We’ve made it a kind of meeting place, Maris and I. She’s the only one of you I can talk to anymore. She’s the only one of you who doesn’t treat me like some kind of leper. Or mental defective. God knows I can’t talk to Nancy.”
