by Jane Haddam
“True,” Liz said, and they were at the lobby right this minute. They were in front of the glass doors and then inside them, out of the cold and wet and into the carefully climate-controlled atmosphere of a place that was trying very hard to be a real hotel, even if it was far out into the rural wilderness. Liz could see the reporters massed around the desk. None of them was looking in their direction. She thought there might be just a chance to make the elevators before they realized she’d come in. Then one of them turned around and made a grunt and they were all turned around, some of them shouldering cams, some of them carrying notebooks, as if anybody ever really used a notebook anymore.
“Liz,” one of them shouted.
Liz didn’t turn around. She pushed her way to the reception desk and asked the shell-shocked young woman for her room key. The young woman handed it over as if it had been contaminated with the Ebola virus.
“Liz,” somebody behind her shouted. “What do you think about the arrest? Does it upset you that one of your childhood friends has just been arrested for murder?”
“Ms. Toliver,” somebody else shouted. “Can you give us your reaction to the arrest of Margaret Kennedy for the murder of Christine Barr?”
“Maiden names,” Liz said to Bennis, under her breath, without moving her lips. She marched determinedly to the elevator, thinking about the old cliche’, as if it were entirely new. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. When she and Bennis got to the elevators, she stopped and pushed the call button. Of course, she didn’t have the kind of luck that meant the elevator would already be right here at the proper floor.
People were still calling questions at her, and other people were photographing her. She could see the flashes as they went off behind her, reflected in the polished steel of the elevator doors. She ignored them all. There was no point in even saying “no comment.” When the elevator doors opened in front of her, she stepped inside the car and pulled Bennis after her. She turned around and punched the button for the fourth floor. She smiled. The elevator doors closed.
“Sheesh,” Bennis said. “Does that happen to you all the time? It would drive me crazy.”
“It’s not me, it’s Jimmy. And it doesn’t even happen to him all the time anymore. I think it does happen to people who are more current. Like Madonna.”
“She can have it. This is all because of the murder?”
“The first time I got stuck in it, it was just after Jimmy and I started dating,” Liz said. “And then it was mostly because they wanted to know who it was who had Jimmy on a string. It calmed down after we did the interview for People magazine.”
“Right,” Bennis said.
The elevator doors opened on four. Liz stepped out and looked around. Nobody had made it upstairs yet. She went to the door to the west wing and poked her head inside. “Anthony? It’s me. Us. It’s okay.”
The door swung wide. Liz pulled Bennis onto the floor. Jimmy and Mark were way up at the other end of the hall. Geoff was closer, and saw her first. He came barreling down the corridor and threw himself at her.
“Mom! Mom! You’re alive!”
“You didn’t think I was going to be alive?” Liz said.
“Mark said—” Geoff turned to look.
“I did not,” Mark said. “What do you take me for?”
“We’ll discuss that later,” Liz said. “What’s been going on around here? Who got arrested?”
“Margaret Smith Kennedy,” Jimmy said. “At least, that’s what the news bulletin said. Gregor Demarkian called and said to tell you that if the name didn’t ring a bell, I should tell you it was Peggy Smith. You know a Peggy Smith, right? She was on that list you gave me to give to Demarkian?”
“Yes, she was,” Liz said. “But that’s all? They arrested Peggy? They didn’t arrest anybody else?”
“Not as far as I know,” Jimmy said. “What did you expect, they’d arrest the whole lot of them? I’d be more than happy if they did, mind you, but I don’t think anything you’ve got on them could be classified as a crime. You look odd. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’ve been asking her that since we left here,” Bennis said. “She’s been behaving very oddly the whole time.”
“That’s just so odd, that they only arrested Peggy,” Liz said, and then she let it go, because it was none of her business now. It had been none of her business for years. “Look,” she said. “Does that proposal still stand? Do you still want me to marry you?”
“You mean have I changed my mind since I asked you again this morning?” Jimmy said. “No. I know I have a reputation for being easily distractable, but I usually am much better than that. Even about breakfast food. Never mind getting married.”
“Fine,” Liz said, ignoring all the rest of it. She ignored Mark and Geoff, too, who looked like they’d frozen in place. “Do me a favor. I want to get married three weeks from Sunday, in Paris. I want a suite for the four of us at the Georges V. It’s the start of the high season. Is that possible?”
“It is if I spend enough money.”
“Do you mind spending a lot of money?”
“Hell, Liz. I’d take grocery bags full of cash and throw the contents on the street if that’s what it took. Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious. I want to have the reception at that place you took me to last year, the one with the mirrors—”
“Voltaire’s.”
“That’s the one. Make your side of the guest list good. Make it very good. Do you think you could get Paul McCartney to come?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. I always wanted to meet a Beatle. And yes, I know I shouldn’t say that to his face. I want that wedding on the cover of every tabloid from New York to Hong Kong and back around again. Can we manage that?”
“We can try,” Jimmy said. “Liz, for God’s sake, I’m delighted, but what’s gotten into you? Are you all right?”
“Shut up,” Mark said. “You go make reservations. I’ll pack.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Jimmy said.
“You know what she’s like,” Mark said. “She’ll change her mind. Make reservations. Go now.”
“Does this mean Jimmy’s going to be our stepdad for real now instead of for pretend?” Geoff said.
Liz thought she ought to pursue that one—how long had they been playing that Jimmy was their stepdad for pretend? —but she didn’t have the heart, and she didn’t mind anyway. She ran her hands through her hair. It was wet.
“I’ve got to call Debra,” she said. “I just fired Maris in rather dramatic terms and she needs to know about it as soon as possible. Can we leave here now? If an arrest has been made, that means we’re not under suspicion anymore, right? I want to pack up and get out as soon as possible. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. Can we do that, too?”
“Sure. We’ll send one of the drivers to pack up at your mother’s house,” Jimmy said.
“You fired the ultimate bitch goddess?” Mark said.
Liz ignored him and started to hike down the hallway to her room, or the room with her suitcase in it, anyway. None of the rooms here had ever really been her room, any more than the bedroom at her mother’s house had ever been her room. Brian Wilson sang about the joys of being in the safe haven of his room, but Liz’s room at home had not been a safe haven. It had been a place where her mother could get to her, just as school had been a place where the girls could get to her, so that her entire childhood and adolescence had been one long resistance to a siege. Now she felt as if it had never happened—no, that wasn’t right. It had happened, but it hadn’t meant what she’d thought it meant at the time. It had never been of any importance, even while it was going on. If she had been able to understand that, it would not have been so terrible. Most of it might never have happened. It was one thing to live your life to somebody else’s music. It was something else to live it by somebody else’s screenplay, especially when it was such a terrible screenplay, so badly written, and so tr
ite.
She sat down on the bed, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of the office in New York. It wasn’t quite five. Debra would still be in. The phone rang and rang, and on impulse Liz got up and went over to her suitcase to rummage around in the bottom of it. There was one thing she always had with her. Even in the wake of Jay’s dying, when there had been no money, when she had had no career, when they had had nothing at all, she had this, the way somebody else might have had a talisman. That was her problem in a nutshell. Other people carried lucky charms. She carried the evil totem for a voodoo curse.
She found it just as the receptionist picked up in New York, the Hollman High School Wildcat for 1969. She flipped open to the first page with its picture of the yearbook staff under the outsized numbers for 1969: Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod, Emma Kenyon, Maris Coleman, some boys she didn’t recognize. She tore out the page and then tore the page itself into quarters. She flipped to the next page and the page after that and did the same thing, methodically, page after page.
“Kathy,” she said, when she’d been bid a good afternoon in Kathy’s best professional voice. “This is Liz. I need to talk to Debra for a second.”
“Oh, my God,” Kathy said. “Ms. Toliver. Are you all right? They said on the news that they’d arrested somebody we’d never heard of, so we thought—”
“I’m fine,” Liz said, ripping out another page and tearing it, too, into quarters. She was going faster than she’d realized. There was a whole pile of page quarters on the floor now. Some of them had scraps of pictures on them with people she remembered.
“I’ll get Debra on the phone right this minute,” Kathy said.
Liz said “thanks” and found herself staring down at a photograph of herself. She was standing next to Belinda Hart, who looked so relentlessly vapid she might as well have been a cartoon. The shock was the picture of herself, which was not a picture of how she remembered herself, or even as she remembered seeing herself in this same picture all the other times she looked at it. This Elizabeth Toliver was not a Betsy Wetsy. She had high cheekbones and enormous eyes, and even the incredibly awful way she dressed did not stop her from being beautiful. She started to tear it and then hesitated. She wondered if this was one she ought to keep. Then Debra came on the line and she looked away.
“Debra? This is Liz. Get ready. I’ve just fired Maris Coleman in the most offensive possible way and agreed to marry Jimmy in three weeks in the same afternoon. I need to order a dress at Carolina Herrera and get hold of those checks Maris forged. Do you think that’s too much for me to ask of you?”
“If you’ve really fired Maris Coleman,” Debra said, “I will make myself your slave for life and peel every grape that even comes into the same room with you until the end of time.”
Liz laughed, and as she did she looked down at her hands. She was still holding the same page with the same photograph on it. She still looked beautiful. Belinda still looked vapid. She tore it in quarters and then in eighths.
Sometimes you could keep a few things from the past and they wouldn’t hurt you. Sometimes you couldn’t. This was one of those times when you couldn’t. Besides, she thought, she didn’t care if she’d really been beautiful instead of ugly. She’d felt ugly. She’d lived in the conviction she was ugly. She’d been treated as if she were ugly, and stupid, and worthless besides.
She let the pieces of the page fall to the floor and then pulled out three pages at once, as much as she could get and still tear. She went on tearing all the while that she and Debra talked, until all the pages of the yearbook were nothing but scraps and confetti on the floor.
SEVEN
1
If he’d been somewhere else—back in Philadelphia, still with the FBI, on any case anywhere where the local law enforcement had experience in murder investigations that went beyond the religious viewing of NYPD Blue—Gregor could have gone back to Bennis until the police needed to take his statement, or written that statement up and gone straight back to Cavanaugh Street. He was tired and achy enough to do both. It had not been a good day. He’d never had time for a shower, and he felt it. Sweat was dripping off of him in odd places. His entire body felt sticky. He’d never really had a chance to take a breath and consider the situation they were all in in all its aspects. He really didn’t like working on cases in a haphazard way. That was the FBI experience coming back to haunt him. City cops worked haphazardly all the time. They had to. There was too much crime and too much confusion to give them much time to think things through. The whole point of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit—besides the practical one of providing a central database on serial killings that would make it possible for the police in one state to learn of a perpetrator’s possible actions in another—was to have agents who had the luxury of thinking through all the aspects of a case, and the ramifications, and the future problems. Right now he felt half-finished. He could lay out for Kyle Borden and the state police what Peggy Smith Kennedy had done and why. He could even rely on the fact that Emma Kenyon Bligh was an eyewitness to her own attack to get them out of the worst of the problems a case like this would cause. What he could not do was to make the whole story gel in his mind, psychologically. It seemed to him that there was something fundamental they needed to know about Peggy Smith Kennedy that they didn’t. Maybe it was just that he needed to know it. Cops and prosecutors were not famous for the deep way in which they understood the people they arrested and prosecuted. Cops were too busy making sure that they arrested the suspect without getting themselves or anybody else killed. District attorneys made their reputations on convictions. To get convictions, they needed only to be able to spin a coherent story for a jury and to keep that jury focused on the heinousness of a crime. The human aspects only got in the way. Gregor Demarkian was firmly convinced that the death penalty would cease to exist tomorrow if the majority of Americans were required to really know the men and women who were being put to death, instead of seeing them only when they were being painted as comic book monsters by the media. He was always profoundly shocked when an incident arose that seemed to indicate that he was wrong—like, for instance, the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Millions and millions of people had watched her interview on 60 Minutes. Millions and millions of people had heard her speak a dozen times in the days before her death. She was a quiet, ordinary, not very threatening woman. Her crime had been committed under the influence of drugs and—more telling to Gregor, although he’d never admit it to Bennis—of a man. She had even become religious in the way so many people said was so important to them. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care. They wanted her blood, anyway. It made Gregor wonder if there was any such thing as progress. We had trains and plains and automobiles. We had computers and microwaves and 1,500 television channels beamed in by satellite. We still reacted to our fellow human beings the way illiterate peasants had in the Middle Ages, when the old woman who had lived next door for forty years could suddenly grow horns and a tail and be in league with the devil. Any moment now, it would start here, the thing that happened in small towns in cases like this. This morning, Peggy Smith Kennedy was a woman they’d known forever, a local teacher in a bad marriage, someone most of them remembered as a popular girl in high school. Tomorrow morning, they would bring out every even slightly odd thing she had ever done. They would rewrite her life the way they rewrote their own, but in the opposite direction. They would find signs and portents in every word she ever spoke and every night she ever came in late from a date when she was a teenager, every drink she ever drank when she was underaged, every lie she ever told to get out of the fact that she’d forgotten to do her homework or had spent too long necking to make it in for her curfew. In the end, only one of the things about Peggy Smith Kennedy’s life would matter, and they’d get that wrong. Gregor could see it coming. He’d nearly gotten it wrong himself. He’d almost forgotten what it meant for someone to be an obsessive.
Now he walked down the long expanse of open room behind the counte
r in the main room of the Hollman police station and poked his head into Kyle Borden’s office. Kyle was sitting at his desk, surrounded by state police, a frown on his face. On the desk in front of him, he had a legal-sized sheet of paper covered with lines and arrows in black marker. Gregor had written it out for him to make sure he understood just what had happened when and that he could explain it. It wasn’t clear that this had actually worked. Kyle looked worried. The state police looked confused.
They all looked up when Gregor stuck his head in the office door, and Kyle immediately relaxed.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to explain this, but I think I keep getting bogged down in details. You want to tell them what you told me?”
“What I really want to do is call Bennis and have her come get me. She must be somewhere I can get in touch with her.”
“I’ll have Sharon call Ms. Hannaford. You sit down and explain things.”
Kyle left the office, but Gregor didn’t sit down. Peggy Smith Kennedy was downstairs, locked up in one of the town’s only two jail cells, but Gregor didn’t know how long that would last. Mrs. Kennedy was entitled to a lawyer. As soon as they got into court, she would get one, and that would almost assuredly mean bail. Gregor wondered what a judge would make of a prosecution move to deny bail on the grounds of wife battering—of Peggy Smith Kennedy being a battered wife. Because, assuredly, if that woman was allowed to go home, her husband would try as hard as he could to kill her long before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania got a chance.
Kyle came back. “I found her. She wants to talk to you, too. She asked if it was okay for Elizabeth Toliver to leave town, and I said yes. It’s okay, isn’t it? You’re not going to have us arrest her, too?”
“No,” Gregor said. “You may need her to testify to something or the other about what went on at the Toliver house on the day the dog was found or the day that the body of Chris Inglerod Barr was found, but if you can manage to keep Mr. Kennedy away from Mrs. Kennedy, that may not be necessary.”
