by Jane Haddam
“But you’ve noticed the anger with Belinda Hart Grantling.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kyle said. “And it isn’t only her. It’s Emma Kenyon Bligh, too, if you want to know the truth, and Chris and Nancy weren’t too calm about the whole thing, either. I don’t know about Peggy. I’ve never heard her talk about it.”
“What about everybody else in town?” Gregor asked. He had begun to move slowly along the garage’s perimeter, studying the walls. “Are they angry at Elizabeth Toliver, too?”
Kyle cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “a lot of them, it’s sort of the ‘who do you think you are?’ thing. They all knew her when she was growing up. They didn’t think she was anything special. And now she’s—We don’t feel very comfortable with people who are different. People who go away and become famous are different.”
Gregor finished with the first wall and began on the second, moving carefully, running his eyes up and down as well as back and forth. “But that’s not the way all small towns behave about all people who go away to become famous,” he said. “There’s that country singer, what’s her name, Shania Twain. Her hometown held a big celebration for her when she returned. And that movie star. Meg Ryan. Her hometown—”
“But that’s different,” Kyle protested. “They were big deals even before they left. Meg Ryan was a prom princess. So, you see—”
“Yes,” Gregor said. He finished with the third wall. The fourth wall was garage doors. He looked around one more time, to make sure. “Where else would somebody keep tools?”
“Tools?” Kyle looked blank. “You can’t be looking for tools here. Mrs. Toliver has Alzheimer’s disease. Even if the Tolivers ever had any tools, they wouldn’t have them around now. She could get hold of them and be dangerous.”
“Did they have any tools?” Gregor asked.
“Not a chance. Mr. Toliver was a hotshot lawyer. He never touched a tool in his life.”
“Elizabeth Toliver has a brother, doesn’t she? Did he have tools?”
“He kept them at Andy’s Garage,” Kyle said. “And it’s been years since he’s been back here, too. He moved out to California about two decades ago. What is it you’re getting at?”
“We ought to go check the basement, just in case,” Gregor said.
“I can’t do that without a search warrant,” Kyle said. “You don’t want to get me into a position where—”
“Don’t worry about it. I won’t get you into any kind of position. There will be no searching the house in the ordinary sense. We will not be conducting a criminal investigation. I’ve got the key. I’m going in to get some of my things, which I’m going to need. You coming with me?”
“Shit,” Kyle said.
“Turn off the lights,” Gregor told him.
Gregor waited until the lights were out and then went out into the driveway again through the bay. He waited until Kyle got out and then pulled the garage door down. The rain really had let up by now. It was still coming down, but it was of only ordinary force, and there was no thunder in the distance. Gregor led the way across the backyard toward the kitchen lawn.
“For a long time,” he said as he and Kyle let themselves into the mudroom, “I was very confused. I didn’t go to what you’d call a normal high school. I grew up in central Philadelphia, in what was at the time I suppose a slum. I went to high school with a lot of other people just like me. We had parents who’d come from Armenia. English was not our first language. We didn’t have proms and prom princesses and cheerleaders and any of that sort of thing—well, the school did, to an extent, but that had nothing to do with us. Our parents wouldn’t have let us near things like that. If we wanted to meet members of the opposite sex, we went to dances at the neighborhood church. So you see, it didn’t make any sense to me. The ‘popularity’ thing. Have you noticed how odd that is? The ‘popular’ people are ‘popular’ by virtue of being envied and hated by ninety-nine percent of the people they go to school with. Does anybody but me think that’s very strange?”
“No,” Kyle said. “It had occurred to me on occasion, too.”
“Here”—Gregor held open a door on the other side of the mudroom—“there’s a basement down here. ‘Finished.’ That way’s the main house. Down here there’s a recreation room and some kind of workroom.”
“I’ll bet there aren’t any tools in it,” Kyle said.
Gregor led the way down the stairs. “I got very tangled up in it at first,” he went on. “The emotions were so strong, it seemed to me that they could lead to the murder of just about anyone. But the longer I thought of it, the more I realized that if somebody was going to get killed over this kind of thing, it would be Liz Toliver herself who ended up dead. Because the key here is the disjunction. What people really hate is that things haven’t turned out the way they expected them to.”
They were at the bottom of the basement stairs. Gregor knew where the light switch was. He flipped the flat of his hand against it and turned on half a dozen lights at once. “It would be different if Liz Toliver was still what she had been. That’s how you get school shooters. You think that kind of anger and hurt would dissipate in time, but I don’t think it does. I remember a woman who wrote to the Philadelphia Inquirer after the Columbine incident who said that whenever she heard about a school shooting, she cheered, because it was a triumph for the losers. She was forty-three. I thought she was psychotic when I read the letter. Now I’m not so sure. If she’s psychotic, practically everybody else in the country must be, too.”
“Is this going anyplace?” Kyle asked.
Gregor led the way through the recreation room—which was large, and carpeted, and contained a television set the size of Oklahoma. He tried the first door he came to on the back wall of the room. It opened onto a closet. He tried the next one and met blackness. He snaked his hand inside against the wall and found the light switch. The lights went on, big fluorescents behind patterned plastic panels. There was a table in the center of the room. There was a sewing machine. There were a lot of things in boxes.
“Here we are,” Gregor said.
“You do spend a lot of time talking about nothing,” Kyle said. “And then you don’t finish your thought.”
“My thought? Well, my thought is that reality is not very much like the movies. You know those movies, where the small-town loser goes off to the big wide world and comes back a success and everybody finally loves him?”
“It’s the American dream.”
“Exactly. And it’s full of it. When the small-town loser comes back a success, everybody hates him, or is indifferent. But mostly there’s the hate. And if you’re not prepared for that, you’re likely to get thrown very badly. I don’t think Liz Toliver was prepared for that. I don’t think she was expecting a hero’s welcome, mind you. She’s not that naive. But I don’t think she was expecting the animus.”
“Why not?” Kyle said. “It’s the way they always did treat her, before. The woman is completely phobic about snakes, and they knew that. And they nailed her up in that damned outhouse with nearly two dozen of them. I’d say that’s enough animus for anybody to notice.”
“True. I just don’t think she was expecting it to have lasted. To tell you the truth, if I’d been in her position, I wouldn’t have expected it either. It’s not really very sane, is it?”
“Do you have what you came for?” Kyle asked. “It gives me the creeps, being in here like this. We could get nailed.”
“We could not get nailed. I have a key. I have the right of access. And, yes, I have what I came for. No tools. Not only that, no sign that there ever were tools. No drills. No saws. No linoleum cutters. No pegs in the wall. No toolboxes.”
“I told you so.”
“I know. I had to see for myself.” Gregor looked around. “It looks like it was used as a sewing room once. Now it’s a storeroom. That’s sensible enough. Here’s another question. Is there some reason why the fever about Liz Toliver is so much higher in Maris Coleman and Beli
nda Hart Grantling than in the rest of them I’ve met so far?”
“Well,” Kyle said, “they were the ones who pulled the most crap on Betsy in high school. And before high school. Betsy’s problems didn’t start in high school.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I know. It’s odd the way people are, don’t you think? There’s so much emotion expended over things that don’t matter. Most people who are murdered are murdered over trivialities. Over emotions. Over slights and disrespect and arguments and dozens of other things that make no sense. Harris and Klebold murdered fifteen people over things that shouldn’t matter to anybody, except that we make them matter. You’d think we’d learn.”
“You’re not making sense again,” Kyle said.
Gregor sighed. He supposed he wasn’t making sense, although he was making perfect sense to himself. He headed for the door again. “We’d better get out of here,” he said. “I’d better pick up some clothes upstairs. I should go out to the Radisson to see Bennis. Do you think you could call me there and let me know about Emma Kenyon Bligh’s medical condition? Or I could call you.”
Kyle said something about how Gregor should call him, and they both went far too quickly up the stairs. The house felt deserted, even though they were in it.
TWO
1
There came a point when Liz Toliver couldn’t sit still any longer. She had never been very good at sitting still—that, and not talent or drive or an unhappy childhood, was what she thought really explained her success—and she found sitting still under pressure virtually impossible. She had been pacing up and down the long corridor of the hotel floor they had rented all morning. She’d put down a half-dozen half-empty cups of tea and forgotten where they’d gone. She was scared to death that she was about to commit one of the great sins in her ethical lexicon and leave a mess for the maids. It didn’t matter. The world felt like a claustrophobic place, all the more because she now knew that events were going on without her. She kept getting an image of Emma Kenyon with a knife stuck out of her belly, a knife that didn’t go all the way through because, in Liz’s fantasy, Emma was as enormous as a circus freak. She turned on a television in one of the rooms and sat down to watch CNN. There was nothing on it of any interest. She surfed through the channels until she found some local news, and there was nothing on that, either. She had forgotten what it was like to live in a place where people did not expect fresh, up-to-the-minute, breaking news about their area twenty-four seven. Her muscles ached. She wished she were herself only five years ago, when nobody would have cared if she walked stark naked down Fifth Avenue at high noon. Most of all, she wished she understood herself. She ought to feel vindicated. She ought to feel that she’d scored some big triumph. That was how Maris expected her to feel. Instead, whenever she could get her mind off herself, the whole thing made her tired. How could anyone—anyone—spend their entire lives in a town like Hollman?
She went to the end of the corridor and looked out. Her car was at Andy’s Garage. Jimmy’s car was in the parking lot, and his driver was in one of the rooms on this very floor, but that wouldn’t work. Everybody in creation knew what Jimmy’s car was like. There was Mr. Demarkian’s car, but Mr. Demarkian had it. There was Maris’s unused little rental, but Maris had that, or it was parked behind English Drugs, which came to the same thing. Liz could remember one day when she was fourteen years old, walking alone down Grandview Avenue, on her way up the hill to go to the Booklet. Belinda and Maris and Emma had been coming at her from the other direction, and when they got less than a foot and a half away, they burst into giggles and jaywalked at a run to the other side of the street. 1965, she thought. That had been in 1965.
She went back down the corridor to the room where Jimmy had set up shop and stood in the empty doorway. He had his back to her, talking on the phone, the good black light summer wool of his city jacket making him seem just a little taller and a little thinner than he was.
Jimmy was pacing around, just as she had been. In the middle of one tour of the room, he saw her standing in the doorway and stopped.
“Just a minute,” he said into the phone. He put the receiver against his chest. “Are you okay? Do you need me?”
“I always need you. It’s not important. I’m feeling a little crazy.”
“Just a minute,” he said again, but this time to her. He put the receiver back up to his ear. “Listen, I’ll call you back in an hour, how’s that? I know. I know. Something’s come up. It can wait, Creighton. It can certainly wait an hour. Yes. Yes. I’ll talk to you later.”
Creighton Allmark was Jimmy’s agent. Liz waited while Jimmy hung up the phone and came across the room to her.
“You look awful,” he said. “You really look awful. Is there something I can do?”
Liz shrugged. “The problem is, there isn’t anything I can do. I’ve had a shower. I’ve played backgammon with Mark. I’ve played Go Fish with Geoff. I’ve drunk enough tea that my kidneys are floating. I’ve eaten half a pound of that pastry thing Ms. Hannaford brought up for me. I’ve talked to you. I’ve talked to the doctors. I’ve talked to the hospital. I’ve even talked to Mr. Demarkian. I’m going insane.”
“States of siege are sort of like that.”
“But we aren’t in a state of siege, are we?” Liz asked. “There isn’t anybody outside. Nobody knows we’re here.”
“They will.”
“I know they will. And then we will be in a state of siege. I want to get out of here before that happens.”
“Get out how?” Jimmy looked alarmed. “You mean get out of Hollman? Mr. Demarkian explained how that wouldn’t be the best idea, and—”
“No,” Liz said. “I want to get out of the hotel. I want to take a drive. I want to do something, even if it’s nothing in particular.”
“Somebody will see you. And recognize you.”
“Maybe.”
“They’ll follow the car when you try to come back here,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe,” Liz said again.
“Besides”—Jimmy took a deep breath—“what would you take a drive in? Your car isn’t here. Mine is too recognizable. Taking that would really be psychotic. And you couldn’t rent one, not from here, not now. If you tried it, we’d be inundated in no time flat.”
“She’s got a car,” Liz said.
“Who’s she?”
“Bennis Hannaford. She’s got a tangerine-orange Mercedes two-seater. Parked in this parking lot. I know. We talked about it.”
“Well,” Jimmy said. “That’s not exactly being inconspicuous either, is it?”
“Maybe not. But it would at least get me out of here. And I do have to get out of here. I know what you’re saying. I’ve seen it happen to other people, the Clintons during the impeachment, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg right after John Kennedy disappeared in his plane. I know what you’re trying to say. But even Caroline Kennedy went out for a bike ride. She didn’t stay indoors for the whole week until the reporters went away.”
“When she did go out for a bike ride, she was followed by camera crews in vans,” Jimmy said. “I know you’re feeling shut in. I’m just trying to counsel something like prudence. You said yourself that Demarkian was asking you about where you were when this latest murder happened—”
“It wasn’t a murder. It was an attack. She’s still alive.”
“Attack, whatever. You said yourself he was asking about where you were. And you know you were here, in full view of everybody, for the whole time. And you know that means that you’re going to be off the hook, probably sooner rather than later. So if you’ll just—”
“If they don’t arrest somebody for this crime,” Liz said carefully, “the tabloids will pin it on me, forever, and it won’t matter at all that I couldn’t have committed the attack on Emma Kenyon. The legitimate press will pin it on me, too, they’ll just be more polite about it. You know all that as well as I do.”
“The police usually do catch murderers,” Jimmy said.
“I know. On the other hand, I also know that the police in this town consist of exactly two men, one of whom I have known since birth. And he was nobody’s Einstein even then.”
“They have the state police in on this as well. And Demarkian.”
“I know. I know.” Liz walked over to Jimmy’s window and looked out. There was more parking lot on this side of the building. The hotel seemed to have been set down in a vast sea of parking lots. “Take me seriously, for a moment. I have to get out of here for a little while. I’m really beginning to lose control. And that won’t be any good for any of us.”
“You won’t lose control, Liz. You never do.”
“You know,” Liz said, “that’s not true. I did when Jay died. I didn’t lie down on the floor and roll around and kick and scream. I looked all right. But I didn’t work at all for nearly two years, and that in spite of the fact that my financial world was collapsing and we lost the house and had to live in that god-awful cabin and one Christmas there wasn’t a Christmas. And none of that picked me up and got me moving again.”
“Something did.”
“Yes. Something did. But it was mostly time. I do lose control of myself. I do. And I do make an idiot of myself. I do handle things badly. I do. I just want to get out and ride around in the air for a little while. Is that really too much to ask?”
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Ask the guys who are trailing you. What is it exactly that you want to do?”
“I thought I’d run downstairs and see if Bennis Hannaford would give me a ride into town. Either that, or let me borrow her car, but I wouldn’t let anybody borrow a car like that from me. Tangerine-orange. She must have had it custom-painted.”
“I think it’s really odd that you and Bennis Hannaford get along so well.”
“Why? You fell in love with both of us.”
“I fell in love with Julie and you can’t be in the same room with her without spitting nails. You going to tell the boys you’re going?”
