Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  “Sorry to have taken up so much of your time,” Liz said to Belinda.

  Then she swept out of the apartment with Bennis Hannaford trailing behind her. Belinda slammed the door after them as they went.

  “I can’t believe that,” Belinda said. “Betsy Wetsy. What a stuck-up little bitch. What a stupid little loser creep. Don’t listen to a word she says. You can get her. You just go right ahead and do it.”

  Maris Coleman burst out laughing.

  2

  Emma Kenyon Bligh was awake when Kyle Borden came into her room with that man he’d been going around town with all day, but she didn’t feel up to talking, and they didn’t seem interested in asking questions, and finally they’d gone away. George was there, too, of course. As soon as he’d heard, he’d come running down from whatever real estate showing he’d had to see how she was. He was there watching her when she woke up, and he was there watching her still, except for going out for cigarettes every few minutes. George should quit smoking, he really should, but it was a lot like her resolves to quit eating. Somehow, there never seemed to be anything else to do with her time. When she tried to diet, she got hungry, but that wasn’t what drove her back to food. Not eating caused a terrible void in the day. Not eating meant looking down at her hands every half hour or so and thinking: Is this it? Is this all? What exactly happened here? The worst thing was that Emma thought she knew the answer. What had happened here was exactly what was supposed to have happened here. It was exactly what she had been trying to make happen for as long as she could remember. This was what it was like, the life she had wanted when she was seventeen. Some of it was good, like watching the children grow. Some of it was bad, like the times when the store hadn’t been doing well and they’d been afraid of losing the building or having to declare bankruptcy. Mostly it was just dull, and repetitious, and strangely hopeless, as if in this life she had lived the future had ceased to exist. Except that it hadn’t ceased to exist. She got fatter. She got older. The face in her mirror got paler, as if she’d been painted out of watercolors and somebody had left her out in the rain. She hadn’t minded any of it until recently. Every part of her was floating. She remembered the sensation vaguely from when she and George used to smoke marijuana in his car up at Mountain Lookout the year after she graduated from high school. That was the year that it had begun to occur to her that she had made a mistake. Maris was coming back from Vassar on vacations. A few of the boys nobody had noticed were coming back, too, and really, suddenly, there was nothing to do in town, nobody to talk to, nothing to see. She’d thought she’d hated school, but she missed it, then. She wanted some kind of structure in her life. That was why she had decided to marry George as soon as she had. She already knew she loved him. They’d been going out forever. She already knew she liked sex with him. They’d started doing that on the night of her senior prom, which was what she had expected them to do. All the girls she knew lost their virginities at their senior prom parties, except for one or two, like Peggy, who couldn’t wait, and did it the year before after the junior-senior semiformal. Peggy. Emma was finding it very hard to think about Peggy. Peggy had ruined everything. If it hadn’t been for Peggy, Emma thought, she would never have started to feel as if there was no point in going on with life.

  The Venetian blinds on the windows were pulled all the way up. There was light coming through the glass, but not much. Emma thought it might still be raining. She could see herself drifting out to sea with the waves bobbing her gently among the dolphins and nothing to think about, never again. She’d always been of the opinion that thinking was highly overrated. Now she didn’t seem to be able to do anything but think, and it made her want to cry.

  She fell asleep and came awake again and fell asleep again. She was aware of coming and going, and of George and the nurses and other people hovering right over her head. The nurses said soothing things. George promised that the girls would be coming in tonight to see her. The doctors wrote on the clipboard attached to the end of her bed. She wondered where Peggy was, if they had arrested her, if they even knew she was the one with that thing who was going around attacking people. How could that have happened? It wasn’t normal people who did things like that. It was oddballs, misfits, outcasts. It was people like Betsy. That was why you had to be so careful about them. They were dangerous. People like Peggy, who had been a cheerleader and student council president, were people you could count on.

  She fell asleep again, and woke up again, and fell asleep again. This time, when she opened her eyes, she saw a nurse sitting in the chair where George had been, looking through a magazine. Emma tried to turn on her side and found that it was almost impossible. Her whole front was taped up and she was far too weak to move her bulk, which for the first time seemed to her to be embarrassingly large.

  She turned her head in the nurse’s direction and said, “Are you there?”

  The nurse looked up from what she was reading and frowned. She got out of her chair and walked over to the bed and looked down. “My God,” she said, “you’re up. I’ll get the doctor.”

  “No,” Emma said. “Not yet. The doctor was just in here a little while ago.”

  “Not in the last half hour.”

  “I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” the nurse said. “You should have fallen asleep. You’re supposed to be getting some rest. Let me get the doctor.”

  “No,” Emma said. “Not yet. Please. I want to—ask you things.”

  “What things?”

  “About—about Peggy. First Peggy Smith. Do they know—”

  “The woman who tried to kill you? They arrested her maybe an hour ago. They found her with you in the store, sitting off on the side with something or other in her hand. A razor, I think. They brought her here because she seemed to be in shock. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I’m going to call the doctor.”

  “I don’t want the doctor,” Emma said.

  The nurse picked up the call buzzer and depressed the button three long times. “Dr. Bardrieau will kill me if I upset you.”

  “Mark Bardrieau was in my class in high school.”

  “Was he?”

  “He was a geek, though, I remember that. He was small and short and looked a lot younger than the other kids and he wore big black glasses that were really thick and George and his friends used to steal them the year George was a senior and Mark must have been a freshman. Do you think it’s God? About the geeks, I mean. Do you think it’s God who makes it so the geeks all get rich and successful after high school and the rest of us don’t? Except some of us do, don’t we? Meg Ryan was a prom princess. I read about it.”

  “You’re making yourself out of breath.”

  A doctor came in, but only the resident, a young woman who looked raw. Emma lay still while she did what she was going to do—take her pulse, take her temperature, make a note on the chart. The resident was not anybody she knew. There was a time when Emma would have known almost everybody who worked at this hospital, but these days a lot of new people moved in all the time. They came from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Wilmington and even Rochester, New York. Everybody moved around restless. Nobody ever just stayed still. The resident came back to the head of the bed and said, “Do you want to sit up?”

  “No,” Emma told her.

  “Do you want some juice?”

  “No,” Emma said again. Then she thought that she ought to have said “no, thank you.”

  “I’ll have the nurse here get you some juice, just in case you want it later,” the resident said. “She’ll water it down a little. You ought to try to take fluids as soon as you can.”

  She bustled out the way she had bustled in, and Emma shook her head. “Did I nearly die? Is that why everybody is acting so strangely?”

  “No,” the nurse said. “You didn’t come close to nearly dying. The razor or whatever it was didn’t penetrate to anything really serious. You’ve got a fair a
mount of damage to your abdominal muscles, and you’ve lost a lot of blood, but that’s about it. The doctor said it was the luckiest thing in your life that you were this heavy. If you hadn’t been, she’d have sliced your intestines in half. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. I know what she was trying to do. She told me what she was trying to do. I guess I’m going to have to tell Kyle about it, one of these days.”

  “It would probably be a good idea.”

  “Maybe we should have told everybody what happened at the time. Did you know about that? That we all knew?

  “We were just trying to protect Peggy. That wasn’t wrong. We couldn’t know she’d turn into a homicidal maniac. Or whatever she is. Do you know who Betsy Toliver is? Have you seen her since she came back to town?”

  “A couple of times, yes,” the nurse said. “She’s brought her mother here once or twice.”

  “She calls herself Liz now. Maris told me. Belinda said she wouldn’t change what she called her, no matter what. We called her Betsy Wetsy. I remember this day at Center School when we were all out on that playground, it was completely asphalted over except for the sand area and the sand area had that concrete ridge around it and in the middle there were swings and a slide. And this one day, she—Betsy—she was sitting in a swing by herself and Maris wanted to ride on it. And Maris took a stick, a big long tree branch that had fallen down in the wind or somehow, and started poking at her with it and calling her Betsy Wetsy, and then the rest of us got sticks, too, not big ones, there weren’t a lot of big ones around. But we got them. And we all started … advancing on her … I guess that’s what you’d call it. And Maris pushed her off the swing and then—and then I don’t know what. I don’t remember. I don’t know if she cried or told the teachers or if we got away with it or got in trouble or what. I can only remember pushing at her and sort of chanting that name. Betsy Wetsy. Betsy Wetsy.”

  “I think you really are going to run out of air. Listen to yourself. You’re gasping.”

  “I know.” Emma closed her eyes. She did a lot of gasping. She gasped when she walked more than half a block without stopping. She gasped when she climbed stairs. It had been years since she had been able to take a full, deep breath without feeling as if she were being suffocated. All she had to do was wait, and the air came back to her. “The thing is,” she said when she could talk again, “I was wondering. About her. About Betsy or Liz or whatever you want to call it. About what she was like. Did you know I met her son?”

  “No,” the nurse said.

  “It’s like they’re all from a different planet. All those people. They don’t think like normal people. They don’t … I don’t know. I don’t get it. Why would anybody want to be that way? Why would anybody want to read books all the time and get into arguments and be … different … be … I don’t know. It’s like they like it. Being different. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What would make sense is for you to get some more sleep,” the nurse said. “I’m going to ask the doctor if he can’t give you a little more of that painkiller.”

  “I was just thinking how odd it was,” Emma said. She said it slowly. If she spoke slowly, it was easier to control her breathing. “There’s this person who went to school with me, and now she’s famous, and all I can remember about all the time we grew up together is us doing stuff to her. Me and Belinda and Maris and Chris and Peggy and Nancy and we all did things to her. Poked at her with sticks. Told her we wanted to meet her at the White Horse and then went somewhere else. Locked her in the supply cabinet in the gym. Nailed her into the outhouse. And I keep thinking that can’t be right. That can’t be all that happened. But I can’t remember anything else. And Peggy said—Peggy said that she hated us. Do you think that’s true?”

  “No,” the nurse said. “People don’t keep grudges like that, for thirty years. You need to go to sleep now. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s all that matters,” Emma said, but the words barely came out. She was beyond gasping. She was beyond thinking. She snapped her head from side to side, sucking in air, sucking in air. There wasn’t air enough in the universe to fill her lungs. It was, she thought, really and truly all that mattered. It was all that had ever mattered. Her life was bound up in that small capsule of time, in brick buildings that had by now begun to crumble into dust, on playgrounds where nobody ever played anymore. For all the rest of eternity, she would be just fifteen years old and dressed in the frilled pastel blue chiffon ballerina-length dress she’d had for her first formal date with George. Her sleeves would be a pastel blue net and come halfway down her upper arm. Her shoes would have only one-and-a-half-inch heels, but the heels would be made in the same shape as the ones for three-inch-tall “classic pumps.” Her purse would be dyed to match her dress. Her wrist-length gloves would be whiter than white. Her neckline would have an eyelet trim.

  Maybe it was true that in some places the world had gone on, but it had never gone on for Emma Kenyon Bligh, and she had never wanted it to. Even at fifteen, she had known it was all going to be downhill from there. She could see the future looming up at her like a tidal wave. The trick was not to have a future at all—and she had managed that, but she hadn’t realized, until now, that the strategy only worked if everybody around you was not having a future, too. Just let one of them step outside the circle and the game was up. The tidal wave had won. There was nothing left to look forward to. Except that that wasn’t right, either. There had never been anything to look forward to. That was the point.

  She turned her head back to look at the nurse, who was talking on the phone. It seemed there was a phone in the room that could actually be used, if she’d had the strength to use it, or any interest in calling anybody. She waited until the nurse put the receiver down and then said, “Please?”

  “What is it?” the nurse asked her, coming close. “I’ve already told you. You’ve got to relax. You’ve got to sleep.”

  “Listen,” Emma said, smiling a little, and closing her eyes. “I want to be dead.”

  3

  In Bennis Hannaford’s car, Liz Toliver’s head seemed to be pounding out several beats at once, all from songs with titles that had the words “my life” in them somewhere. Bon Jovi. Billy Joel. Strong bass sessions. Lots of drums. It was true what she’d thought of back there during the day somewhere. This was the first generation in history in which every single person had a sound track for his life. They were all playing out their own particular screenplays to somebody else’s music. For some reason, when she’d first said that, it had bothered her. Now it seemed entirely natural. It even seemed profound. She felt just a little drunk, and definitely giddy. She had never felt so free of Hollman in all her life.

  She pulled the car around the last of the banking curves that led out to the manufactured flatland where the entrance to the Interstate was and the hotels were, too, all four of them. As soon as she did, she saw the cluster of cars standing in front of the reception door at the Radisson. There were so many of them—and they were so out of place—that if they’d had flashing lights she would have assumed there was a fire. Or a murder, she thought, although she didn’t expect there to be another murder.

  “Rats,” she said. Then, when Bennis turned her head, she nodded toward the Radisson ahead. “They’ve found out where we are. Really, they’ve found out where Jimmy is. They don’t care about me, unless I’ve just been charged in the murder of Chris Inglerod. Do you think that’s likely to have happened?”

  “No,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t either. Let’s just bull it out.”

  If cell phones worked out here, Liz would have used hers to call up to Jimmy and warn him she was coming. Since they didn’t, she pulled the tangerine-orange Mercedes into the nearest parking space she could find and got out. She waited for Bennis and then tossed Bennis the keys. Bennis did something that made all the doors lock.

  “You really think I could get my car painted a color I like better,” Liz said. “I cou
ld just take it back to the dealership and have them do that.”

  “Probably. You could take it to a decent body shop, if you know one. They’d be faster and they’d be cheaper and they’d probably be just as good. What color do you want to paint your car?”

  “Lemon-yellow.” Liz looked up and through the big plate-glass windows that made up the wall that led to reception. “You ever done one of these before?”

  “Not where they were interested in me,” Bennis said. “And they’re still not interested in me, so that ought to be all right.”

  “Unfortunately, they are interested in me and you’re with me. Let me tell you what we do. We just walk in there, fast, looking straight ahead, and we don’t say anything at all. Just keep moving. Get to the elevators. They won’t usually follow you into the elevator because they’re afraid of injunctions.”

  “Injunctions?”

  “Yeah. The hotels get injunctions on them. Some of the real bastards have dozens in every city they go to, but nobody’s going to have any here because I can almost guarantee that none of them have ever been in Hollman before. My God, what an awful place. Did I tell you that, that this is an awful place?”

  “Several times, in the car.”

  “Well, it’s true. And I don’t just mean because it’s small. Don’t let them feed you all that crap about the wholesome goodness of small-town America. Some of small-town America may be wholesomely good, but some of it is Hollman. Petty, spiteful, envious, small-minded, provincial, stultifying—”

  “I don’t know that you should be in the middle of this lecture when we hit the lobby and there are a lot of microphones around,” Bennis said.