by Jane Haddam
Bennis took a chance and punched “Hollman Home News” into the Yahoo! search engine. She got what looked like the right address three recommendations down. She clicked on the link and waited. She was rewarded with a front-page spread on exactly the story she was looking for, complete with pictures with serious captions, and continuing coverage “inside.” The “three senior students” turned out to be three girls named DeeDee Craft, Lynne Mackay, and Sharon Peterson. The Home News had their cheerleading pictures, complete with uniforms and pompoms. Nancy Quayde turned out to be one of those women who gives professional a bad name. In a tailored skirt and blazer, she looked oddly like a dominatrix in a bad mood. Here was the virtue of weekly small-town newspapers. There wasn’t much of anything else going on in Hollman to report, so instead of wasting its time fretting over the depredations of either George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton, the Home News reported on this. Bennis clicked a few more times to find the “inside” pages and came across a headline that said: Lawsuit Ends Quayde Hopes for Superintendent’s Job. Out in the foyer, the apartment door opened and closed.
“Bennis?”
“I’m in the bedroom,” Bennis said.
There were heavy steps in the hallway. Bennis leaned closer to the screen to read, but the article was not much more informative than the one in the Inquirer had been. The bad thing about weekly small-town newspapers was that their staffs assumed their readers to have a working knowledge of all the local scandals and tensions. Bennis didn’t know anything about anything about Hollman, Pennsylvania, except that it was boring as hell and Liz Toliver had once lived there. Gregor came in and sat down on the bed.
Bennis said, “Why does the name Nancy Quayde ring a bell with me?”
“She was one of the women in that group of girls who were involved in that night in the park when Liz Toliver was nailed into the outhouse. She’s principal of Hollman High School now.”
“It says that here. Somebody’s suing her. Did she want to be superintendent of schools?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “She may have. She was a very professional woman.”
“You talked to her?”
“When Kyle Borden and I were interviewing people after the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr. She was on my list to talk to from the beginning, though. The list Jimmy Card gave me. What’s this all about?”
“Look.” Bennis pulled away from the screen.
Gregor came forward and scanned the article. “That’s not surprising, is it?” he said. “It’s more or less what you’d expect of her. Considering the history, I mean.”
“You mean considering what happened to Liz Toliver in high school?”
“Considering that, yes. People don’t really change, you know. At least, they don’t really change into something completely different from what they were. If you look at the pictures of Liz Toliver, going all the way back to kindergarten, you’d probably see that streak of charisma that’s what’s made it possible for her to be on television and make a success of it. Why would it be any different with Nancy Quayde?”
“Do you think that’s what happens, that the principals and the teachers all harass the outcasts, too, or something? That’s what this article seems to be saying. Diane Asch’s father is suing because when these girls did awful things to Diane, Nancy Quayde told her it was all her own fault, and wanted Diane to go into therapy, and that kind of thing.”
“I think I want to go somewhere and do something today. The Art Museum. Except not the Art Museum. I don’t feel like being intellectual.”
“We could go for a drive and have lunch out in the country somewhere.”
“No, thank you. Not unless you hire a chauffeur. I don’t feel like being dead, either.”
“I got you back here from Hollman without any problem.”
“You got me back here from Hollman. That’s as good as it gets. Why don’t we go shopping for that lamp you want? It sounds awful, but I suppose I might as well look at it.”
“Thank you. I love the confidence you have in my taste.”
“Come on,” Gregor stood up. “Let’s go find a cab. Let’s go do something. I’ll go insane if I have to hang around here doing nothing for the fourth day in a row. Maybe you want to see a movie?”
“I don’t hate your movies. I hate your films. Come on, let’s go. I want to see something with Mike Meyers in it.”
He grabbed Bennis by the hand and pulled. Bennis barely had time to sign off before she found herself on her feet.
“Mike Meyers,” she said. “You probably used to watch the Three Stooges when you were a kid.”
“I watch them now,” Gregor said solemnly. “But only when you’re asleep.”
3
Several thousand miles away, in Paris, Mark DeAvecca was having a very good day. His mother and his new stepfather were headed for the Bahamas, where they would probably have an excellent time doing things he had no intention of thinking about, and Geoff was safely back at the hotel with Debra, who had volunteered to baby-sit until they all got back to New York on Thursday afternoon. This had left Mark free to wander around on his own, which was something he had never been able to do before in Paris. He had on a pair of Dockers slacks and a black T-shirt and an almost-expensive sports coat. He would have had a much more expensive sports coat except that his mother refused to buy them for him until she was sure he had stopped growing, and he was already six inches taller than Jimmy Card. Whatever. He was sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the front of the Cafe’ Deux Maggots. He had a small cup of the blackest, bitterest, and strongest coffee he had ever tasted. If all those old wives’ tales about how coffee could stunt your growth were true, his growth would have stopped dead in its tracks with the first sip. He had the memory of Debra’s brutal conversation with Maris this morning on the telephone, during which it had become clear, even to Geoff, that they would not have to put up with Maris Coleman ever again. And just to make everything perfect, two days of trying had left his face with a very nice coating of designer stubble.
What was really making Mark happy at the moment, however, was a girl. Her name was Genevieve, and she had both the eyes and the accent he had always hoped for in a really witchy French woman. At the moment, she was telling him, very sincerely, why it no longer made sense to read Jean-Paul Sartre and why he should read Luce Irigaray instead. She could have been talking about baseball, and it would have made no difference.
Mark was sure he had no idea how she’d gotten the impression that he was eighteen years old, and a sophomore at Brown.
In the very early hours of that morning, it rained. The water came down in a steady hissing stream, so that, lying in the too-large bed under too many blankets, Liz Toliver was sure she must be hearing snakes. Later, she would wonder what she had been thinking of. It made no sense to buy a king-size bed for just one person. It was like sleeping in the middle of the ocean, too open and free, too abandoned and lost. The water brushed against her fingertips. She jerked away from it. The snakes slid silently through the folds in the sheets. All of a sudden, she felt suffocated.
Slit his throat. Slit his throat. Slit his throat. The words bounced back and forth across the walls, the wooden walls, much too close to her. The snakes were coiled against her skin. Everything was dark. Slit his throat. Slit his throat. Slit his throat. Somebody was singing it. The blood was everywhere on the ground. It seemed to be soaking up the dirt. Slit his throat, she thought she heard again, but this time the voice was high-pitched and eager, the voice of a woman who can’t wait a moment longer to consummate an act of sex.
Slit his throat, something sang again—but then she knew what she was hearing. It was the phone. She sat up in the gray half dark.
“Liz?” Jimmy’s voice came through the answering machine. “Liz? Are you there? I thought you were having a nightmare.”
Liz reached over to the night table and picked up. “I was having a nightmare. How do you always know when I’m having a nightmare?”
“
I don’t know. I just do. Are you all right?”
Liz leaned over a little farther and turned on the lamp. She saw the book on the night table—the Hollman High School Wildcat, 1969—and looked away from it. The walls of her bedroom were plaster. There were pictures in frames hung in a line across one wall, the original paintings for the covers of all her books.
“Liz?”
“I’m fine. I was thinking of the paintings. Does it make any sense for me to keep the paintings? It seems so—conceited somehow.”
“Jesus Christ.”
This was the point where, ten years ago, Liz would have lit a cigarette. Instead, she sat up farther and stretched. This week’s copy of the National Enquirer was lying across the seat of the stuffed chair she kept next to the fireplace. She could see her own face on the cover of it. Her face and the picture of a snake.
“Liz?”
“I’m fine. I’m just not all the way awake yet. I think it’s a really bad idea to try to do color on newsprint.”
“What?”
“The Enquirer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. Like I said, I’m not all the way awake yet. And I’ve got a headache. And I’ve got to go into the city to teach this morning. What time is it?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“Maybe we’re having a snowstorm.”
“If you’re coming into the city, we could have lunch. At the apartment.”
“Good idea. Never mind the fact that there are probably twenty tabloid reporters outside the front door of the building right this minute.”
“Not that many. And they know we screw.”
“What a delicate way of putting it.”
“We’d be married if you’d have me. Listen, Liz, let me ask one more time. Let me send the lawyers down to take care of your mother, okay? There’s no point in your doing this.”
“She’s my mother.”
“She also hates you. She always has. And the rest of that town isn’t much better, and you know it. And you’re worried about the tabloids? Watch what they do when you get down there.”
“Watch what they do if I don’t go down there. Elizabeth Toliver abandons sick mother. I can see it all now.”
“Liz? Listen to me. Those stories aren’t an accident. Somebody’s doing that on purpose. Somebody’s feeding the Enquirer all kinds of—”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy said.
Liz threw off the covers and swung her legs off the bed. “I’ll meet you at the apartment at one,” she said. “I’m fine. Let me go check on the boys. I know you don’t get along with Maris. You don’t have to see her if you don’t want to. I’m all right.”
“I think of you as a saint,” Jimmy said. “Sort of the Mother Teresa of public intellectuals. No matter what the provocation, your faith in human nature will never waver—”
“I’m not Mother Teresa, and I’m not a public intellectual. Get off the phone. I’ll talk to you this afternoon.”
“Somebody is planting those stories, Liz.”
Liz hung up. Outside, the sky was getting a little lighter. It looked like the gray muslin curtain that hung across the wooden cells in Carmelite monasteries in France. Once, when she and Jimmy were first seeing each other, before she got used to the fact that anything he did showed up on Entertainment Tonight as soon as anybody got wind he’d done it, she’d taken him to visit a friend of hers who’d left Vassar their junior year to become a nun. The resulting headlines had been ridiculous—Jimmy Card Converting to Catholicism!—but the day had been a good one. That had been the first time she’d realized, deep down, that he was in love with her. Before that, she had tried not to think about what he might be feeling. That had been the first time, too, when she had known that he could hear her thinking, even when they were not in the same room. The monastery where her friend lived was in a little town on the Normandy coast. When the visit was over, Jimmy rented a hotel room overlooking the water, and they fell into bed together, wordlessly, as if they’d thought of nothing else in all their time together. They started at four o’clock in the afternoon and lasted past midnight. They left the window open so that they could hear the sea pounding against the rocks as a storm moved in across the channel. They came to at one, hungry and out of luck. Everything in town was closed. The wind was so strong, it broke the glass in the window they’d left open and sucked a discarded bedspread into the street.
Once, when she was just seventeen, she had beaten her hands bloody against the locked door of an outhouse latrine, beaten and beaten them until her pain and her fear had become so loud in her ears that all she could hear was her own wailing. Above her head, the wind had become a shrieking howl—or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe that was just her own head, too, maybe it was all inside her, just herself, trapped where she was in the dark with the snakes covering the floor under the latrine seat and moving, moving steadily, in and among and between each other, trying to climb up to where she was. Out there, though, there was something: that woman’s voice singing “slit his throat slit his throat slit his throat” and then laughing as the blood poured out on the ground and over the water of the river and into the mouths of snakes, into the mouths of snakes, because the snakes were everywhere then, on the floor, on the seat, on her arms, crawling up into her clothes, crawling inside of her, until she felt full of snakes writhing and jamming and making her bleed.
She was standing next to the chair with the Enquirer on it. She had no idea how long she’d been there. Her mouth was very dry.
“I ought to go check on the boys,” she said to the air. Then she looked down at the Enquirer and made a face.
Shocking Secret Never Before Revealed! the headline said, Did Elizabeth Toliver GET AWAY WITH MURDER?
In the picture under the headline, her hair looked the color of spilled ink.
“Easily”
—RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
DON’T MISS THESE GREGOR DEMARKIAN NOVELS BY JANE HADDAM
Skeleton Key
True Believers
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“An absorbing, good-humored tale complete with vivid characters, multiple murders, and a couple of juicy subplots.”
—Orlando Sentinel on Bleeding Hearts
“Haddam’s usual deft writing, skillful plotting, and gentle humor … Refreshing and entertaining.”
—Booklist on Bleeding Hearts
“Go ahead, have this one wrapped and waiting with your name on it.”
—Detroit Free Press on A Stillness in Bethlehem
“Haddam is a fine and compassionate writer, and Demarkian, the retired chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit who now solves crimes in his spare time, is one of the more interesting series leads in the mystery marketplace. It’s a pleasure to find a solid mystery combined with engaging discussions of issues outside the genre. A guaranteed winner.”
—Booklist on True Believers
“Haddam’s large cast pulses with petty jealousies, vanities, and fears as they confront the mysteries of life and religion. This is an engrossingly complex mystery that should win further acclaim for its prolific and talented author.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on True Believers
“Dazzlingly ingenious, Jane Haddam’s novels provide style, humor, and philosophy—they’re real spellbinders, sparklingly written and smashingly plotted.”
—Drood Review
“Haddam plays the mystery game like a master … Bound to satisfy any reader who likes multiple murders mixed with miraculous apparitions and a perfectly damnable puzzle.”
—Chicago Tribune on A Great Day for the Deadly
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR JANE HADDAM’S GREGOR DEMARKIAN NOVELS
“A delightful read for lovers of classic crime stories.”
—Romantic Times on Skeleton Key
“[A] smoothly running mystery marked by lively ch
aracters, good descriptions, and enough misdirection to keep a reader’s interest high.”
—Publishers Weekly on Skeleton Key
“A sophisticated style, excellent delivery, and riveting plot make this an excellent choice for all collections.”
—Library Journal on Skeleton Key
“A real winner … Sure to grab readers from the first page … A fine entry in a fine series.”
—Booklist on Skeleton Key
“Bound to satisfy any reader who likes multiple murders mixed with miraculous apparitions and a perfectly damnable puzzle.”
