by Jane Haddam
This book is for Joan Gaffney Burke
Id quot circumiret, circumveniat—and sometimes we win
Table of Contents
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
ONE
1
2
3
TWO
1
2
3
THREE
1
2
3
FOUR
1
2
FIVE
1
2
3
SIX
1
2
3
SEVEN
1
2
3
PART TWO
ONE
1
2
3
TWO
1
2
THREE
1
2
3
FOUR
1
2
3
FIVE
1
2
3
SIX
1
2
SEVEN
1
2
PART THREE
ONE
1
2
3
TWO
1
2
3
THREE
1
2
3
FOUR
1
2
3
FIVE
1
2
3
SIX
1
2
3
SEVEN
1
2
3
EPILOGUE
DON’T MISS THESE GREGOR DEMARKIAN NOVELS BY JANE HADDAM
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR JANE HADDAM’S GREGOR DEMARKIAN NOVELS
KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM JANE HADDAM’S NEXT MYSTERY: CONSPIRACY THEORY
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the longest book I’ve ever written, and both the easiest—and the hardest—to write. I’d like to thank my sons for putting up with me during a year when I often woke up having dreams in my characters’ heads, and spent dinner discoursing nonstop on Why Americans Are Obsessional About High School. I’d like to thank Joanne McGahagan for her invaluable help getting me information about the area to which I’d transposed a very real town from another state, complete with weather details I’d never have been able to discover on my own without actually going up there and camping out for a winter.
I’d like to thank Don Maass, my agent; and Keith Kahla, my editor; and Teresa Theophano, the world’s greatest editorial assistant, for all the help and encouragement it took to write this—and for not fainting dead away when the manuscript arrived looking like a first draft of the Oxford English Dictionary.
And finally, I’d like not to thank—I’m not that much of a masochist—but to acknowledge RH, MC, EK, PC, and NW. I’ve found myself thinking about them, and what they’re doing now, at the oddest times. I hope they will take some satisfaction, or something, in knowing they were the inspiration for this book.
PROLOGUE
“Pinch Me”
—BARENAKED LADIES
“Be True to Your School”
—BEACH BOYS
“Broadway”
—GOO GOO DOLLS
1
Stopping at the newsstand on the corner of West Fourteenth Street and Broadway, Maris Coleman told herself that she was only buying this copy of the National Enquirer because she bought everything she saw with Betsy’s picture on it. Then she laid two dollar bills down on the newsstand counter and wished that it was not so very bright. It was ten o’clock on the morning of May second, and she was feeling guilty. It was much too late to tell Debra, once again, that she had slept in, and yet she had no other excuse she could give. She had been sleeping in more and more often lately. She had even bought a new alarm clock, a loud one, when it became clear that the old one wasn’t going to do her any good. The new one hadn’t done her any good either. It rang so loudly that the neighbors complained, later, when they met her in the narrow front hall of the building, everybody trying to squeeze by everybody else to get their mail out of the slotlike metal boxes set into the wall. If they’d come and complained to her at the time, they would have done her some good—but then, nobody in that building ever came to anybody else’s door, if they could help it. Or maybe they did, and they just didn’t come to Maris’s. For some odd reason Maris could never quite determine, the residents of her building were still exactly what they had been on the day she first moved into it, in 1974: young men with jobs on left-wing radical newspapers; young women with jobs in restaurants and dreams of ending up on a soap opera; middle-aged men who taught at the New School; middle-aged women who—what? Maris could see her hand in the hard light from the sun. The skin on the fingers sagged, loose and too soft. Lines ran from between her knuckles to her wrist. Liver spots dotted the surface like freckles. Nobody ever knew what the middle-aged women in the building did. They seemed to be dissolving, like sugar cubes in hot tea.
I should have moved out years ago, Maris thought, taking the paper and folding it, meticulously, into her Coach Legacy small tote. That was, after all, what the people who had been living in that building when she moved in had mostly done. The young men had left their radical newspapers for major publishing houses, or The Nation, or law school. The young women had won their soap opera roles and moved uptown or married and moved out to Westchester. The middle-aged men had found better living arrangements by moving in with a friend from the sociology department who owned a loft on an iffy street in SoHo. She passed over, without pausing, what it was the middle-aged women had done, because she didn’t actually know. All she was sure of was that one morning they were gone. The doors to their apartments stood propped open so that the landlord could send in a team of exterminators. If you stood there and looked through, you saw that their apartments had been much like the others in this building, small, cramped, with high ceilings but peeling paint. Maris did stand there and look through. Once every three years, she painted her apartment by herself, with a careful precision born of both habit and desperation. She didn’t want to wake up one morning and find strips coming down off the wall above her head as she lay in the pullout bed, the bed she’d bought at Castro Convertibles her third year in the city, for $5,500 plus tax.
She should take the subway, she knew that. She had already spent most of the money from her paycheck on Friday, and it was only Tuesday. The week stretched ahead of her endlessly, the trips she would have to take to and from the office, the lunches she would have to eat somewhere. She hated the women, like Debra, who brought their lunches in pastel Lord & Taylor bags, a small bottle of Perrier, a tuna sandwich without mayonnaise, and one perfect peach, all laid out across their desks as they tapped away at their computers, much too busy to take time to eat. She hated even more people like Betsy, who didn’t seem to notice what they ate, or if they ate it—just the way they didn’t notice what they wore, unless there was a reason to notice and three makeup people from the network bothering them about it. Maris was now, as she had always been, obsessed with appearance. If she had had the money, she would have put herself through enough plastic surgery to look respectable again. She didn’t understand women, like Betsy, who had the money and didn’t want to. For the same reason, she would never live in one of the outer boroughs or in the suburbs, no matter how much more space she could get for how much less money. It said something ab
out you that you could not stay in Manhattan, that you valued a few extra square feet over the chance to be close to art and literature and history. The six tall tumblers in her kitchen cabinet had come from Steuben Glass and cost $345 for the set. The green silk dress she was wearing had come from Brooks Brothers and cost $225 off the rack. Her head hurt, dreadfully, in that pounding, insistent way that told her she had not put enough Gordon’s in her coffee when she had first woken up. If she hadn’t put enough in the coffee in the thermos bottle she always brought with her to the office, her head would pound all day no matter what she did. It wouldn’t matter if she had swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin.
There was a cab a block and a half away, coming toward her. She stepped halfway into the street and flagged it down. When it stopped, she got in and gave the address of Betsy’s offices, on the Upper East Side, to a driver who didn’t find it necessary to give her a grunt of acknowledgment in return. Living in New York these days, she often got the impression that she had gone deaf to the sound of the human voice. She took her thermos out of her tote bag and poured a little of the coffee in it into the thermos’s own plastic cup. She hated drinking out of plastic—things tasted differently when they were drunk out of plastic, except things like soda pop, which didn’t matter—but she kept her good traveling cup at the office, and she didn’t feel ready to wait. The coffee was good Colombian, bought at a specialty store near Wall Street, ground in her own hand grinder next to her own kitchen sink. If it had been up to her, she would have changed everybody, men as well as women. She would have made them care about the things that really mattered, graciousness and style, uncompromising standards, that innate sense of perfection in art and life that cannot be taught and cannot be bought. Since that was not possible, she sometimes wished them all dead, machinegunned into pulp, laid out in the streets like so many rag dolls for the few real people among them to use as a carpet. Her head really was very bad, insane, pounding. When she got like this, she forgot that there was only one person she had ever truly hated.
Somewhere around West Fortieth Street, they hit bad traffic. She could have gotten out and walked from here—it was only twenty blocks, a single mile, plus the crosstown, she’d done it before—but she was afraid the headache would come back. She took her cell phone out of the black leather carrying case she kept it in and dialed. Her hands were shaking. She had to make them stop before Debra saw them, because Debra would know what to think.
“Hollman Public Library,” Belinda’s voice said.
Maris relaxed a little. The phone could have been answered by Belinda’s boss. That would not have been good.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Oh, hi. Where are you? Are you at work?”
“I’m in a cab stuck in traffic,” Maris said. “It’s official. We’re all coming down in two weeks. At least, she and the boys are, and I am, because she says she needs me. What do you think?”
“I think we’re all counting on it. It’s been in the papers so much. Well, it’s been in the Enquirer, but you know what I mean. People say they don’t read it, but they do. Do you think all those reporters will come down here, too? You know, to take pictures of her?”
“Probably. Mostly to take pictures of Jimmy Card, if he’s around.”
“Jimmy Card,” Belinda said. “Can you imagine, Betsy Wetsy going out with Jimmy Card? It makes me sick. I mean, who does she think she is?”
“‘The freshest new voice in American letters in a generation,’” Maris quoted.
“What?”
“Never mind. It was in a magazine called The New York Review of Books. You wouldn’t know it.”
“I know all about The New York Times Book Review,” Belinda said. “You don’t have to get that way with me. I hope she doesn’t think that everything’s going to be wonderful when she gets down here. I hope she doesn’t think we’ve changed our minds. I mean, my God, we know her for what she really is.”
Maris closed her eyes. Her old headache was not coming back—it wasn’t that bad—but Belinda often gave her another kind of headache, a blunt-edged throbbing that was the strain of trying to get past the fire wall of her stupidity. It had been that way from the first time they had ever met, in the kindergarten that was held in the basement of Center School, where they had been the two prettiest and most important girls in the class. There was something odd about the fact that she could remember so much about that year, in such detail. It should have ceased to matter forty-five years ago. Still, she could remember, and not only about herself and Belinda.
“You aren’t listening to me,” Belinda said.
“I was thinking about kindergarten.”
“Excuse me?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Somewhere up ahead, the traffic had begun to clear out. She didn’t have much time, and she didn’t want to be seen talking into a cell phone on the sidewalk. That was one of those things, like smoking in the street, she would never allow herself to do. “I just wanted to let you know,” she said. “For sure. We’re coming. She’s got the boys in some private school up where she lives in Connecticut. They finish the year at the end of May, and then we’re coming.”
“Private school. Don’t you know she’d think her children were too good to go to public school? God, she’s such a snot. She’s always been such a snot. She makes me sick.”
“You can tell her so when you see her on Grandview Avenue.”
“What I’m going to do is call her Betsy, just like I always did,” Belinda said. “I don’t care what she likes to call herself now. And I’m going to try to talk some sense into you. You should get out of there, Maris, you know you should. You’re wasting yourself covering up for her. You’re the one who ought to be a big-shot panelist on TV. You’re the one who was Phi Beta Kappa in college. She practically flunked out.”
“True enough.”
“Betsy Wetsy,” Belinda said. “Do you remember that? Everybody used to call her that. Betsy Wetsy. Who does she think she is?”
The cab was moving across town now. In a second, it would be standing outside the tall, narrow town house where Betsy had her offices on the first two floors. Maris lifted the thermos to make sure there was still enough coffee in it. She could always pop out and get a little extra gin, but she couldn’t replace the coffee, and she needed it to stay awake. She got her wallet out of the tote bag’s zippered inside side pocket. Betsy Wetsy, she thought, and giggled, because of course, in her head, that’s the way she thought of Elizabeth Toliver. Elizabeth the Great, sitting on the podium at the press conference that announced the first big fund-raising drive in support of the senate candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Elizabeth the Great, being introduced to President George W. Bush at a White House press dinner. Elizabeth the Great, caught walking hand in hand with Jimmy Card on the beach at his private estate in the Bahamas. Elizabeth the fucking Great. Jimmy the fucking Card. Sometimes, she thought that something had come to her in the middle of the night and drained all the blood out of her veins and replaced it with poison.
“You never listen to me,” Belinda said. “I’ve been trying to tell you that nobody down here is fooled. We know she must have planted those stories herself. The ones in the supermarket papers. She’s just trying to get herself a lot of attention.”
“By accusing herself of murder?”
“Everybody knows she had nothing to do with Michael’s murder. God, Maris, who does she think she is? I mean, really. She isn’t anybody. Somebody should tell Jimmy Card that she wasn’t even invited to her own senior prom.”
“I’ve got to go,” Maris said. The cab had pulled to a stop at the curb. The spindly trees all seemed to be full of green and caterpillars. “I’ll talk to you later. I’m late as it is. Maybe we can all get together and have a drink at the White Horse when I get down here.”
“Maybe we could do it again,” Belinda said. “Do you remember? The time we told her to meet us at the White Horse and then we went out to the Blue Note in Johnstown instead, an
d she had to walk all the way back on the highway on her own.”
“I’ve got to go,” Maris said again. She came up with a twenty-dollar bill—she only had it and a ten and maybe another hundred in her checking account—and passed it over into the front seat. She left a two-dollar tip and got out onto the pavement with her tote bag held carefully on the tips of the three middle fingers of her right hand. She had been in New York long enough to know that image mattered more than substance did, and in the matter of image, she was something of a genius.
Up in the big window that looked out over the town house’s entrance, Debra was standing with a pen in her teeth, watching. If Maris could have taken out the thermos and poured herself a cup of coffee right that minute, she would have done it—but of course she couldn’t, and she had the copy of the National Enquirer to worry about, too, since none of them was supposed to bring the tabloids anywhere Betsy Wetsy would be able to see them. The wind coming down the street was unexpectedly cold. Her dress felt too thin for the weather. Debra looked murderous. It didn’t help to remember that it didn’t matter, because Debra was no more able to fire her than she was able to sprout wings.
She went up the front steps as slowly as she could, counting them as she went, not looking at Debra at all, and as she went she thought about what it would be like to be back at home, where everything belonged to her. It didn’t seem possible that she was really fifty years old. It hardly seemed possible that she was older than twenty-eight. God only knew, she wasn’t ready for her own personal story to be over.