by Jane Haddam
“No. You tell them. I don’t want them asking to come with me. They’re probably as stir-crazy as I am. And relax. She may turn me down.”
“Lately, I don’t have that kind of luck.”
He came over to her and kissed her, seriously, the way he did when he couldn’t wait for them to get into bed. Then he leaned back and smiled at her, as if it had been a joke.
“No harm in trying,” he suggested.
She pecked him on the cheek and went out of the room. She saw Mark and Geoff sitting on the floor of one of the rooms in front of a television set, blasting away on another video game. She went to the end of the corridor and out onto the landing and down the stairs.
As soon as she was moving in the stairwell, she knew she had made the right decision. She already felt a million times less tense than she had. Her muscles were already beginning to unkink. She went through the fire doors at the second floor and out onto Bennis’s corridor.
She watched the door numbers pass by and stopped at 223. She knocked on the door and waited, patiently, while somebody came up close and probably looked through the spy hole. Then the door locks turned over and the door opened on Bennis Hannaford, looking disheveled and just out of the shower in a clean green robe.
“You want to borrow the car,” she said, holding up a set of keys on a plastic key ring. It was one of those fish with feet with the word “evolve” printed inside it.
“Do you always give the keys to your car to strangers?” Liz said. “And how did you know I wanted to borrow the car?”
“I knew because you asked me thirty questions about it when you were down here before. Besides, I’ve been claustrophobic in my life. I know the signs. And no. I don’t loan the car to strangers. I don’t loan it to anybody. I figure, at the moment, that I’m loaning it to Jimmy, and I owe him a little.”
“Well, I’d like to hear about that.”
“Maybe we’ll skip it. Do you want these?” Bennis jangled the keys in the air.
Liz took them, and looked at them, and then looked up. “Listen,” she said, “come with me. I mean it. I don’t want to talk to Jimmy, and I don’t want to talk to the boys, and God only knows I don’t want to talk to the police or the reporters or even to Mr. Demarkian. But I could use someone to talk to.”
“Someone you don’t know?”
“Maybe. But not any somebody.”
“Are you all right?” Bennis said.
“No,” Liz said furiously. “No, I’m not. Deep down, in the pit of my stomach, I have this awful sick feeling that I’ve been a complete idiot nearly all my life. I’ve based everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt—I’ve based it all on a delusion and it’s all my fault. It’s been my delusion. Nobody lied to me. Nobody tried to confuse me. The truth was right there in front of my face all along and I just chose not to see it. Oh, Christ. Am I making any sense at all?”
“No,” Bennis said, “but you’ve convinced me. I’ll drive. Why don’t you come in and sit down for a minute while I put something on. Do you know where it is you want to go?”
“Sort of.”
Bennis made a little grunting noise and disappeared into the room’s bathroom. Liz came in and shut the door behind her and went over to the window. There was more parking lot out this side, too. At least, with Bennis Hannaford, she wouldn’t have to listen to a lecture about how she shouldn’t be spending her time—right this minute, under the circumstances—looking for Maris Coleman.
2
It had seemed to Maris Coleman that the best possible course of action would be silence, and that the best possible way to maintain silence would be to disappear for a few hours. When she’d gotten back to town from the Toliver house, she’d gone up to Belinda’s apartment dreading the kind of conversation she was going to have to have to keep Belinda happy, but she’d only been happy herself for a moment or two. After that, she’d started flipping back and forth through the channels on Belinda’s cable system, getting nowhere. It was like that old joke: fifty-two channels and nothing on. There was something on CNN and the twenty-four-hour news shows, but not nearly as much as Maris would have liked. For the moment, the legitimate press were being very careful about what they said about Betsy Wetsy’s involvement in Chris Inglerod’s murder, and what coverage there was of the case seemed to focus on the return of Chris’s husband Dan from his convention in Hawaii. What was really disturbing was the fact that CNBC seemed to be treating Chris’s death as if it were an attempted attack on Betsy, gone wrong, making Betsy look like a martyr or a victim, not like somebody who could have been responsible for a woman being eviscerated on her lawn. Local news was nonexistent. It wasn’t the hour for it. They were showing syndicated episodes of Maury Povitch and Sally Jesse Raphael and Ricki Lake. The Cartoon Channel had cartoons. Comedy Central had reruns of Saturday Night Live shows. Court TV was broadcasting a drunk driving trial in North Carolina. Maris paused a little on that one to listen, but she couldn’t understand much of what was going on.
When the commotion started up Grandview Avenue, she went out and tried to blend into the crowd around the door to Country Crafts. It took her a while to figure out what was going on inside, and to hear the story of Peggy Smith Kennedy and her “near coma” as one woman put it, while another corrected that to “near catatonia, poor dear, it must have been such an awful thing to find.” The crowd was full of reporters, some of whom knew her, and that was the last thing she wanted at the moment. She wasn’t ready to talk to the Enquirer, or the Star, and she had a feeling that they would not be ready to talk to her. The big prize now would be Emma, who had survived being cut in the belly with something that sounded like a Saracen’s sword. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t made some kind of terrible mistake. That was why she hung around in the rain only long enough to find out what had happened, but not so long that the crowd started to thin out and leave her stranded.
She went back to Belinda’s apartment and locked herself in. She threw all three of the bolts—whatever did anyone want bolts for in a place like Hollman? Maris didn’t have bolts on her apartment door in New York—and went into the bathroom. As soon as she saw the sampler on the wall next to the medicine cabinet, she felt her stomach start to heave. She arched up over the toilet bowl and let it out, all at once, a thick hot stream of it that came from so deep inside her she thought she was pulling up her own organs. She had no idea what it was. She hadn’t eaten anything in hours. She hadn’t even had much in the way of dinner the night before, just a half a tuna-fish sandwich that Mark DeAvecca had made her. She seemed to be finished heaving. It was gone as capriciously as it had started. She stood back, flushed the toilet—she’d clean up later, when she had a chance to relax for a while—and washed her face.
Out in Belinda’s kitchen, Maris suddenly realized that she really only had one option. She couldn’t just sit in Belinda’s apartment for another two weeks. She couldn’t just act as if nothing had happened, and she had some repair work to do. She got a thick white coffee mug out of the cabinet and put a spoonful of Taster’s Choice coffee in it. She put the little kettle on to boil and waited until it began to whistle through its spout. She filled the mug half full of water.
Then she got the Chanel No. 5 bottle out of her bag and filled the mug half full of gin. She stirred the whole thing with a spoon and took a long drink off the top of it. Her throat felt scalded. Her nerves felt calmed. She took the mug into the living room and sat down next to the phone.
Belinda was always talking about how expensive the phone calls were, but this was an emergency. Maris had to make a long-distance call, and she didn’t have a calling card anymore since AT&T had taken hers away. They’d taken her Universal Card away, too, in one of those periods when Maris was having a hard time remembering anything, and didn’t remember to pay her bills. Right now, though, she did remember the number of the office and, more importantly, the number for Debra’s private line. She didn’t want to be stuck on the phone waiting while the others put her on
hold and discussed whether Debra was willing to talk to her at all. Without Betsy in the office to rein them in, they were as likely to hang up on her as to help her out—and Betsy had not been as enthusiastic about disciplining them lately as she had been in the past. Still, Maris thought, they had to talk to her. Until Betsy told them not to, they had to.
The phone was picked up on the other end and Debra’s voice said, “Elizabeth Toliver’s office.”
“It’s Maris,” Maris said. “And don’t you dare try to lecture me. I’m a wreck. We’re all a wreck. I need to know where she is.”
“You need to know where who is?” Debra said.
“Oh, cut the crap. I need to know where Betsy is, and you know it. She left me stranded out at her mother’s house this morning, without a phone, without any means of transport, surrounded by hostile press—”
“Liz Toliver never left anybody stranded in her life,” Debra said. “Not deliberately. And especially not you. And you know it.”
Maris took a long drink of coffee. “I take it you talked to her. She knows she left me stranded. They all took off out of there and just left me asleep in the basement. Doesn’t she want to know where I am?”
The pause on Debra’s end was even longer than the one Maris had taken to fortify herself with gin. “She did mention that she didn’t know where you were. And that she was worried about you. I don’t know why. God takes care of drunks and little children.”
“I need to know where she is and I need a number where I can reach her,” Maris said. “You probably don’t realize it, but there’s been another one. Right down the street from where I am. I want to get out of here.”
“Another what?”
“Another murder.”
“Well, she couldn’t have committed that one, can she?” Debra said. “No matter what you try to make it look like. She’s been in full view of half a dozen people all day.”
“How the hell am I supposed to know who committed it?” Maris said. “I just don’t want to be in the middle of it, which is what I am right now, because it happened just half a block up the street from me. I want to know where she is and I want a number where I can get in touch with her.”
Debra paused again. “No,” she said finally.
“What?”
“No,” Debra said again. “There’s no use screaming at me. I’m not authorized to give out that information. What I can do is to call her and tell her where you are and to give her the number you’re calling from so that she can call you back. Then she can decide what to do about you herself. But the information you want is privileged. I’m not going to give it out unless she’s given me direct instructions to give it out.”
It was obvious that Debra expected her to argue, but Maris was better than that. She knew that Debra was telling the complete truth—it was Debra’s job, as Betsy’s personal assistant, to guard information, even from close friends and relatives.
“All right,” Maris said. “Tell her I’m at Belinda’s. That’s 555–2627. She ought to know that number by now, but she probably doesn’t.”
“I’ll call her right away.”
“You do that.”
“I will call her right away, Maris. It isn’t everybody who thinks her responsibilities are a joke. Sit tight where you are for a few minutes.”
Debra hung up in her ear. Maris put the phone back in its cradle and finished off her coffee. Then she got up and made herself another cup. The rain had now eased to nothing but gray and drizzle. The gin had begun to taste bitter. She went back to the couch and put her hand on the phone.
It took much longer than she had expected it to, and the longer it took the more uneasy she got. She was sure, really, that Betsy would call her back. In spite of the craziness of the last few days, Betsy was nowhere near ready to cut her off just yet. Maris was fairly sure Betsy would never be able to cut her off. Even with Debra, even with Jimmy Card, even with Mark all hating the sight of her, Maris could always count on Betsy being Betsy, the same girl who had walked all the way out to the White Horse and back again, the same girl who had come when she was called to the outhouse.
Still, it was hard to wait, and she had to wait a long time. The minute hand on Belinda’s clock moved five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Maris began to be afraid that Belinda would come back before Betsy rang. The last thing she wanted was to have to have this conversation with Belinda listening in. She finished her cup of coffee. She got up and made another one. She sat down next to the phone again. She thought if this went on much longer, she would be sick again.
When the phone rang, it startled her, and she jumped. Liquid jumped out of her mug and splashed against the front of her dress. She put the mug down next to the phone and picked up the receiver with that hand. She brushed at the wet spot on her breast with the other.
“Hello,” she said.
“It’s Jimmy,” Jimmy Card said. “Liz isn’t here.”
“What do you mean, she’s not there? She has to be there. Where else could she be?”
“I have no idea. You can ask her when she gets back. I’ll give her the number. Just stay where you are.”
“Why don’t you give me her number, instead, and tell me where she’s at so that I can get there. It was bad enough that you left me stranded at the house when you took off this morning—”
“We didn’t do anything of the kind. You were nowhere in sight. We thought you’d gone home while the rest of us were sleeping.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t think anything at all. If you had, you’d have remembered I didn’t have a car with me out there yesterday. Or Betsy would have remembered it. Right now, there’s been another murder—”
“There hasn’t been any murder, Maris. We already talked to the police. Mrs. Bligh is very much alive. She was attacked, but she wasn’t murdered.”
“Wonderful. She’ll be able to tell the police who attacked her. In the meantime, this town is full of reporters with appetites like vampires and I’m right in the middle of them. And you’re telling me that Betsy isn’t even where she’s supposed to be, for all you know she could have been right here in the middle of town cutting up the front of Emma’s disgustingly obese stomach—”
“Don’t,” Jimmy Card said.
“Don’t what? Do you think I’m doing anything different from what those reporters are going to do when they get hold of this?”
“Don’t,” Jimmy Card said again. “I’m not Liz, Maris. I’m not even Mark. If you try to pull this kind of crap on me, I’ll take you apart at the joints.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m the man who knows how to put a stop to you. In the meantime, I’ll tell Liz you called. She can call you back if she feels like it.”
He hung up. Maris sat listening to the receiver buzz a dial tone in her ear. She put the receiver back in its cradle and picked up her mug of coffee again. Coffee and gin. It was a mug of coffee and gin. Her head was starting to hurt the way it did when she was having a particularly bad hangover. Big drops of rain were dropping down from the roof gutters outside the living-room window. The apartment was absolutely silent.
Maris Coleman thought that everything would be all right if only she was able to think.
3
It was not that Belinda Hart Grantling did not know what happened to Emma Kenyon Bligh. She not only knew, she had known for minutes before anybody else, because she had been in the store minutes before anybody else, before even George. She told herself, a little self-righteously, that she would have called the police if it had been necessary, but it hadn’t been necessary. Almost as soon as she had darted out of the building and down the sidewalk, George had pulled into the best parking space out front and gone bounding up the porch steps to the front door. It made more sense to let George do what needed to be done than to get involved herself. The truth was, she had panicked. She had been really shocked at how much blood there had been, blood everywhere, blood spurting out of Emma’s middle as if Emma wer
e that fountain people jumped into in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York.
It was at that point that Belinda had run, really fast, out the door and across the porch and down Greenview Avenue in the rain—and it had still been raining then, hard, so that she was sure that if anybody had seen her running, they would only have thought it natural in the weather. She had started walking more slowly when she got to JayMar’s, which was about the time she had seen George pull in. Then she had gone down the block a little more to find her car. She didn’t really want to drive anymore today. She had been driving since early this morning. She had driven all the way out to Betsy’s house, only to find not much of anybody home and the whole front lawn a mess. She had driven all the way out to the hospital to see if she could catch Betsy there, but when she’d arrived at the hospital, there had been no sign of Betsy anywhere, and when she’d asked the receptionist, the receptionist had clammed right up. In the end, she had been about ready to scream. Then she had driven all the way back to town and parked on Grandview and gone walking up the street to Country Crafts, and all she had really wanted to do was—
All she had really wanted to do was to talk to Emma, Belinda thought now. She was sitting in a little turnoff on Jefferson Road in Grassy Plains, right above the Sycamore. That was where she had gone when she had run out after seeing Emma bleed, although she couldn’t remember why she’d come there in particular, instead of just driving all the way out onto the highway and going to the mall. She put her head on the wheel and closed her eyes. Her hands were jerking around against the steering wheel. Her body was twitching almost uncontrollably. She hurt.
Belinda took a deep breath. It was too bad she didn’t have a full-time job. A full-time job would at least give her someplace to be. She got the car started and backed out onto Jefferson Road again. She headed down the hill. She went slowly, because she was still trembling, and because she didn’t know what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go. Then, when she got to the very bottom of the hill, she did. She pulled into the parking lot of the Sycamore and cut the engine.
