by Jane Haddam
“She’d keel over from the kickback from a water pistol.”
“—but you must see what I’m getting at. I wish you’d sit down and try to come up with some approach to this problem that didn’t make all of us look bad. We really can’t go to the press or the school board or the Home News saying that Diane Asch is some kind of paranoid psychotic, not unless you can prove she is a paranoid psychotic, which I don’t think you can—”
“No,” Nancy said. “She’s not a paranoid psychotic. She’s a fat, unattractive, whining, sniveling mass of insecurity complexes and it’s no damned surprise to anybody who’s paying attention that she has virtually no friends. We can’t just cave in to this kind of thing. What are we supposed to do next? Cancel the prom? Abolish the cheerleaders? Chuck the whole student council? What Diane Asch needs is a good swift kick in the pants. What her father needs is some reality therapy.”
“Yes,” Carol said. “Well. I just thought I’d better warn you. He may be calling you later. The man from the New York Times. You might want to decide what you’re going to say.”
“Yes. All right. I will. Maybe I just won’t take the call.”
“I don’t think that would be advisable. He’d put it in his story, that you refused to talk to him. That wouldn’t look good.”
“Fine, then. I’ll talk to him.”
“It’s really too bad things like this have to get blown so out of proportion,” Carol said. “Still, it’s better to be safe. You must admit that. It’s better to be safe.”
“It’s better to be safe,” Nancy repeated—and then she hung up. She didn’t say good-bye. She didn’t wish Carol a good day. She didn’t make any of the soothing noises that had come to be standard practice on ending a telephone call. She just hung up.
A second later, she realized she was frozen in her chair. Her muscles would not move. Her head felt screwed into her neck. All she could think about was the afternoon Emma and Belinda had held Betsy Toliver down on the floor of the girls’ room in the junior high wing of the old building and put lipstick all over her face, on her cheeks, on her eyelids, on her ears. They’d done it because they couldn’t stand the fact that Betsy never wore any of the stuff, but now that Nancy thought of it she could see how right it had been, how just it had been. None of the teachers then would have dreamed of interfering with what they were doing.
Crap, Nancy thought.
Then she got up and started throwing the things she needed for home into her attache’ case.
3
Peggy Smith Kennedy had no idea why they had brought her to the hospital. It would have made more sense if they had sent her home to Stu. She was having a lot of difficulty holding on to time. She’d been sitting against the wall with that thing in her hand, and Emma had been spurting. Emma had been like a fountain of blood, spritzing thick red goo everywhere. The stain had spread along the front of her dress like the stain that spread across the front of the screen in that old Vincent Price movie.
The light changed in the room, and she shifted a little on her chair to get back into the center of it. She had been thinking that it would be nice to own a chair like this for her own living room. Stu always wrecked new furniture. She would like a new chair, and she would like flower boxes outside the windows at the front of the house, where she could plant pansies in the spring. When she was growing up and writing Stu’s name all over her notebooks at school, she had had distinct fantasies about window boxes and pansies and big evergreen wreaths for the door at Christmas. It was odd. You never really thought about the important things. You never imagined paying the bills, or buying a car, or cleaning vomit up off the carpet in the bedroom hallway because Stu hadn’t made it all the way to the bathroom before he’d started to throw up. You never thought about lying on your face on the linoleum in the kitchen with your right arm broken and your teeth aching where he had kicked them. You never thought about what it really meant to say you were in love.
The light in the room changed again, and Peggy shifted again, and then she realized that there was someone standing in the doorway.
The woman in the door seemed to lean forward. She was standing in shadow, and Peggy could not make out her features.
“Do you want something?” she called out to the form in the doorway. “Are you looking for somebody?”
“I’m sorry,” Betsy Toliver said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I was just wondering how you were.”
It was not, Peggy thought, Betsy Toliver’s voice as she remembered it. It was Betsy’s voice from television, with its tinge of Britishness that probably came from living all those years in London. Peggy stabbed at her hair.
“You came all the way out here to see how I was doing?” she said.
Betsy came farther into the room. “Not all the way out to the hospital, no. I came out to the hospital to check on my mother. She’s right down the hall.”
“I’m on the geriatric ward?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s more of a general ward, really. Are you all right? They told me you’d been found in the same room as Emma, all banged up. I haven’t been able to see Emma. She’s still unconscious.”
“Is she on this floor, too?”
“No,” Betsy said. “She’s in some special care unit. I asked the nurse.”
By now, Betsy was all the way into the room. Peggy could see her up close. Betsy was Betsy, but she wasn’t Betsy at the same time. She still wore almost no makeup, and funny clothes, but even Peggy could see that these funny clothes were expensive, at least for Hollman. Maybe they were cheap for wherever it was Betsy lived now. Maybe Betsy hadn’t really changed. Maybe.
“You look different,” Peggy said.
“Well, I suppose I should. It’s been over thirty years.”
“I don’t mean you look older. I mean you look different. I look older.”
“I look older, too. Believe me. If I don’t, it must be the light.”
“You look different,” Peggy said again. She didn’t bother to explain. She shouldn’t have to explain. It should be clear. And explaining was too much work. “If you’d looked like that in school, we’d probably have loved you. You’d have been the queen of everything. Except maybe Belinda. Belinda always hated you.”
“Yes. Well. I rather thought that emotion was general.”
Peggy flicked this away. “I have no idea what that means. I’m very tired.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll let you be. I only wanted—”
“They say Emma is going to be fine. You say she’s in the intensive care unit—”
“No, I didn’t say that. I said she’s in a special care unit. Those were the words the nurse used when I talked to her.”
“Whatever. They said downtown that she was going to be fine. Her fat saved her. That Mr. Demarkian said that. I heard him. Her fat saved her. It was so thick, the razor thing couldn’t go all the way through her in one stroke, the way that it did with Chris. Do they all think you killed Chris?”
“No,” Betsy said. “Not as far as I can tell.”
“You’d think they would,” Peggy said, “with the body in your yard and everything. But then, you were never somebody who got in trouble. I remember that. You weren’t popular but you didn’t get in trouble. Not like some people. Do you think it isn’t fair, the way schools are? That some people get in trouble all the time and others don’t for doing the same things and it’s all a lot of personalities and luck?”
“I think it’s more a matter of reputation,” Betsy said. “People get reputations, and it’s like those tags the characters had in Greek epics. Heraclitus the Wise. Andromachus the Malevolent. Once you have the tag, it never changes and it never disappears, and people think that’s all you are.”
“Some people deserve it, though, the treatment they get. Some people really do do things that are wrong and harmful and bad.”
“Absolutely.”
“Nancy always thought you deserved it,” Peggy said. “She still does. Not that you dese
rve it now but that you deserved it then. She’s a terrible person, really. She hates weakness of any kind, except half the things she calls weak aren’t, they’re just human. She hates Stu. She thinks she knows what it’s like in my marriage. Do you hate Stu?”
“I don’t know him. I never did know him, not even when we were all growing up. Maris told me you’d married him.”
Peggy looked away. It was hard to look at Betsy. The clothes were nerve-wracking. Leather. Coach. Something expensive.
“Nobody knows what it’s like in somebody else’s marriage. Nobody can know. Everybody thinks Emma and George are all lovey-dovey and well suited to each other, but nobody knows. All kinds of things could be going on between them when they get themselves alone. He could be drinking up all the money they make. She could be having affairs on the side. I know you think it isn’t possible because of her weight, but things like that have happened. The woman who ran the key booth at the mall had an affair with one of the janitors and she was married and he was black. Black. Do you remember when we used to call them Negroes? And nobody went to Kennanburg because there were too many of them there, and now there are twice as many and Hispanics, too, and everybody goes there anyway because you can’t help it if you want to go to the hospital or get a copy of your birth certificate. I was always going to marry Stu. Everybody knew that. I knew that by the time I was five years old.”
“Yes,” Betsy said. “Well. I think they’ve pickled you in sedatives. You ought to get some rest.”
“If you really love somebody,” Peggy said, “if you really, really love them, you don’t walk out on them because they’ve got a few imperfections. You love the imperfections. You cherish them. You protect them.”
“Sometimes you can’t protect them.”
“You shouldn’t have come back here,” Peggy said. “Belinda’s right about one thing. It isn’t fair. What happened to you and what happened to us. It isn’t fair. The world is supposed to make sense. It has an obligation to. You should have stayed in New York or Connecticut or wherever it is you live and left the rest of us alone.”
“I’ll leave you alone now. You should rest, and I need to get back to where I’m staying.”
“You should have left us alone,” Peggy said, but she was talking to air. Betsy was gone. Maybe Betsy had never been there. She felt very drowsy.
It was true, Peggy thought. You didn’t just walk out on somebody you loved because they weren’t as perfect as you wanted them to be. If you did, it wasn’t love. It was convenience, or sex, or prestige, or position, or even habit. Love is stronger than that. Love accepts the bad with the good. Love learns to—
She was very tired. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. Betsy had been right. They’d given her a lot of pills, a lot of sedatives. They’d been trying so hard to calm her down, and she hadn’t been able to understand why. She hadn’t been agitated. She hadn’t even been restless. She was sitting so still, she could have been frozen into a stone. Besides, she didn’t have anything to worry about.
Emma was all right. Emma would wake up, sooner or later, and tell everybody on earth who it was who had really attacked her.
FIVE
1
Gregor Demarkian decided to find out where the Radisson was because he couldn’t find Bennis Hannaford, who was supposed to be there, but who wasn’t answering the phone. If she was off on the floor where Jimmy Card and Elizabeth Toliver were hiding out, he was going to kill her. She hadn’t given him that number—probably because she hadn’t been authorized to—and she hadn’t given him any other way to reach her. Gregor was beginning to realize just how much he had come to rely on cell phones.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the notebook he’d been using since before he’d first come out to Hollman. Kyle was driving as if everything would get out of his way when he needed it to, even trees. It was better not to watch the road while that kind of thing was going on.
“So,” Kyle said. “What’s that you’ve got there? The answer to all my problems?”
“It’s a list.” Gregor turned the notebook sideways so that Kyle could get a look at it. He didn’t leave it up long, though, because he wanted Kyle concentrating on the roads. “In a way, it’s a suspect list. It just wasn’t supposed to be a suspect list for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr.”
“What is it a suspect list for, then?”
“Oh, it’s a suspect list for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr,” Gregor said. “It’s very efficient that way. It’s just that, when I wrote it, Mrs. Barr was still alive and well and I only knew her as Chris Inglerod. I should say knew of her. We hadn’t met. This is the list of names Jimmy Card gave me the afternoon he hired me. I’ve added a couple of names to it.”
“Okay,” Kyle said.
“I should have insisted on talking to Liz Toliver before I came up here.” Gregor sighed. “As it is, I only met her after we both got to Hollman, and that was in the midst of the crisis about her mother’s dog. And everything I knew about that night Michael Houseman died, I knew either from dry research or from Jimmy Card, and Jimmy Card doesn’t give a flying damn about who killed Michael Houseman as long as it wasn’t Elizabeth Toliver.”
“It wasn’t,” Kyle said quickly.
“I know. But the thing is, since the beginning, my focus on this case has been what Jimmy Card set it up to be. But what struck him most forcefully, and what naturally strikes Elizabeth Toliver, isn’t the murder but the outhouse. It makes much more sense for Elizabeth Toliver to be fixated on the outhouse and what happened to her in it than it does for her to worry about who killed Michael Houseman. She never even saw the body. And she never knew the boy very well.”
“She’d have recognized him in the corridors in school. But they never hung out or were friends or anything of that kind.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “So Elizabeth Toliver thinks about the outhouse, not about the murder, when she thinks about that night. The only thing she ever says about the murder is that she heard somebody screaming—”
“‘Slit his throat,’” Kyle said quickly. “She told the police that at the time. She said she couldn’t recognize the voice.”
“She told Jimmy Card she couldn’t recognize it as well,” Gregor said. “But what that leaves me with, what it has left me with all along, is an investigative structure that hinges on the outhouse incident. And since the two incidents are connected in a very tenuous way—since they overlap, I should say—the suspect list is still useful. But it’s not actually a suspect list for the murder of Michael Houseman, or for the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr, either.”
“So who’s on it?” Kyle said.
Gregor held the notebook up. “Maris Coleman. Belinda Hart. Emma Kenyon. Chris Inglerod. Nancy Quayde. Peggy Smith.”
“Well, you can get rid of Chris Inglerod,” Kyle said. “At least, as a suspect in her own murder. Do you think she killed Michael Houseman?”
“No.”
“Well, you can’t think she killed herself, can you?” Kyle said.
“I can’t see Mrs. Barr doing it and managing to hide the weapon so well we couldn’t find it,” Gregor said. “No. I don’t think she killed herself. And Emma Kenyon Bligh is eliminated because she was attacked this afternoon. Of course, there is a possibility that Mrs. Bligh inflicted that wound on herself. This time, we do have the weapon. And there’s also the possibility that Mrs. Bligh was working with somebody else, possibly Peggy Smith Kennedy, and they had a falling out. But all in all, I’m inclined to think not. It’s not a crime of that character. It has too much passion in it.”
“Are you talking about what happened to Chris now, or what happened to Emma?”
“Both. Sorry. I’ve been thinking of them as one crime. The two women and the dog. And that sequence has a lot of passion in it, which is interesting, because from everything you’ve told me and everything everyone else has told me and everything I’ve read in the material you’ve given me, the murder of Michael H
ouseman was cold as hell.”
“And you’ve got more suspects for that one,” Kyle said. “There’s me. And Stu Kennedy. You don’t suspect either of us of murdering Chris Inglerod?”
“No. In fact, I know that neither of you did. Mr. Kennedy is not capable of pulling off something of this complexity, not unless he’s also capable of getting himself sober and straight when he has to, which, from what you’ve told me, he isn’t.”
“Not from anything I’ve ever seen, no.”
“I’d be willing to bet not, period,” Gregor said. “And as for you, you couldn’t have killed Chris Inglerod Barr because you didn’t have time. You were with me most of the afternoon. Then I left to go out to the Toliver place. You would have had to make it out there before me, kill Mrs. Barr, and get away again, all before Luis pulled into the driveway with me in the backseat. And that ignores the obvious, which is that you’d have had to know that Mrs. Barr was going to be there in the first place. So no. I don’t think you’re a serious suspect in the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr, and you’re no suspect at all in the attack on Emma Kenyon Bligh, because we were together the whole morning and I know where you were and what you did. Feeling relieved?”
“More than you know.”
“It’s not a bad suspect list for the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr,” Gregor said, “if I remember to use it for that, instead of letting the list focus my mind on the outhouse. Because the thing about the outhouse is that it was almost beside the point. Almost. Not entirely. That’s another mistake I made. First I took it too seriously, and then later for a while I didn’t take it seriously enough. There’s a big sign over there saying ‘Radisson.’ Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
