by Jane Haddam
“Have you checked the papers the way I asked you to?”
“Absolutely,” Lisa said. “It’s still only the tabloid press. The only mentions of it in the regular papers have been along the lines of ‘who could be planting these rumors after all these years.’ Do you think somebody is planting rumors?”
“I’ve got an old friend who apparently thinks Ms. Toliver is planting the rumors herself, but she’s not a very intelligent old friend. I suppose somebody could be, or maybe it’s just opportunism. The case is there, after all, and she’s been in the public eye a lot lately because of her relationship to Jimmy Card. Maybe it’s just serendipity. Or another friend of mine could be right, and she could be writing something about that night in the park. And that friend ought to know.”
“Do you think Jimmy Card will come here if she does?” Lisa asked. “That would be interesting. Jimmy Card on Grandview Avenue.”
“I have no idea. You’ll get a chance to find out, though. I just got word that she definitely will be coming, at the end of May. The question is, what are we going to do about her coming?”
“I think we’d be silly not to ask her here to speak. Or even to spend the day. When I was in high school, they used to bring in artists from the local community every year, and they’d spend the day, they’d teach a couple of classes, they’d give a talk, they’d eat in the cafeteria, that kind of thing. Think about all the kids in Honors English.”
“Just in Honors English? We’d get a rash of complaints from the rest of the parents.”
“All the kids, then. What was she like, do you remember? Was she nice? I suppose people don’t stay the same as they grow older and, you know, as they get more successful, but if she was nice I guess there’s always a chance. I’m dying to see what she looks like in person. On television, I always see her sitting down.”
Nancy shook her head. “The thing with the murder still bothers me. Not that I think she had anything to do with it, mind you. In fact, I know she couldn’t have. But all the publicity has not been good, even if it has been restricted to the tabloids. That’s the problem with an unsolved crime, really. It hangs around to haunt you. So to speak. I’m not thinking clearly today.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t want to speak because she’d be afraid somebody would ask her about the murder,” Lisa said. “There’s always that. We could, you know, guarantee that that wouldn’t happen.”
“However would we guarantee that?”
“We’d forbid it.”
Nancy laughed. “I can think of three students we have right this minute who would come armed and ready to ask if we did forbid it. Lord, I think it’s so annoying that they never caught whoever it was—oh, they probably did, in Indiana or Ohio or someplace, and we just don’t know about it, or he didn’t confess to Michael’s murder along with whatever others he’d done. It happens like that all the time. But it does cause a great deal of difficulty for those of us who have to live with the uncertainty. And the utterly rank stupidity of the general population.”
“Right,” Lisa said.
“I think we ought to at least assume we’re going to invite her,” Nancy said. “I know Laurel at the library is going to invite her there, murder or no murder, because of course she doesn’t have to worry about Dickie Baird having the vapors or some deputation of Full Gospel Christian Mothers marching down the sidewalk accusing her of trying to destroy their children by exposing them to a Satanist and a murderer. God, it’s ridiculous. People can’t keep two ideas in their heads at the same time. They can’t keep even one in their heads. And if we don’t invite her, someone might think—”
“Someone might think what? That you thought she was a murderer?”
“No,” Nancy said. “Don’t be stupid. Why don’t you try drafting a letter for me. Something suitably general, that we’d like to talk to her about the possibility of doing something at Hollman High School. Just ‘doing something.’ Nothing more specific than that. We’ll send it to her mother’s house and see what she answers.”
“All right,” Lisa said.
“Fine,” Nancy said.
Lisa hesitated, as if she were not sure if their conversation was over, and Nancy nearly bit her head off—what could the confusion possibly be? Then she went out and left the door open behind her, but Nancy didn’t mind. She could use the air. She seemed to be having some kind of mild hot flash, and with it that odd feeling of uneasiness that made her think she had forgotten to do something very important, something that was going to change her entire life, or maybe had changed it already. At the very core of her, there was something that wished she could avoid this whole thing, just forget about it, just go on doing what she did every day as if Betsy had not come back to town at all, or as if she had, but hadn’t been anybody Nancy needed to pay attention to.
She picked up her phone and accessed her private line. The light would go on on Lisa’s phone as well as her own, but Lisa would never pick up to listen in.
If they didn’t ask her to speak at the high school, the papers would pick up on that, too, but it would be the good papers this time, or the entertainment press, which everybody read, instead of things like the Enquirer that sensible people dismissed out of hand. Then there really would be a lot of publicity—there might even be another interview on 60 Minutes—and in the end she would be lumped in with the rest of them, with Maris and Belinda and Emma and Peggy, just the way she was lumped in with them in the minds of half the people in town. Damn, she thought. Chris, for God’s sake, pick up.
Then she looked at the back of her hands, and for a moment she thought she saw blood on them again, just like Lady Macbeth.
6
The trouble with Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod Barr thought, snapping off the powder-blue McGrath cell phone her husband had given her for Christmas—the problem with Nancy was that she took things too seriously, as if everything that happened were part of a vast plot, and the plot existed only to determine whether or not Nancy Quayde would get what she wanted out of life. Chris had always known exactly what she wanted out of life, and as she looked around her big custom-fitted kitchen, with the Jenn-Air grill in the long center island and the breakfast nook that bumped out into a peninsula of windows to keep it chastely separate from the vaulted-ceilinged family room beyond, she thought she had it. Sometimes, on days when she was home alone, she walked through this house room by room just to experience it. She’d been planning it for a long time, longer than anybody knew. Daniel, her husband, thought that her mania for it had begun when he was doing his residency, but that was only when she had started to tell him about it, and when she had started drawing floor plans and room sketches on a spiral-bound pad of thick white paper she’d bought at a pharmacy on her way home from work. The truth was, she’d been thinking about it all the way back in high school. That was why she had been so careful to be nice enough—not quite nice, that could have ruined her—to the boys with pimples and badly fitting jeans who sat in the front of the room in chemistry and biology, getting straight As. She knew that they talked about her when she was out of the room: of all “that crowd,” Chris Inglerod was “the nice one.” Every year, her yearbook had more signatures in it than anybody else’s, and she signed more yearbooks than anybody else did, too. Shy, plain girls who only seemed to blossom in home ec, frightened math whizzes who had somehow reached the tenth grade at the age of nine, people she’d grown up with all her life and still didn’t know the names of, all of them counted her as their friend, or something close to it, and in spite of the rude things she had heard from Belinda and Emma, Chris had always known it would pay off. It had paid off. She’d met Daniel at Penn State instead of in high school biology—and she’d thought he was after Nancy, at first, because it was Nancy he’d spent all his time with at the first big mixer they’d gone to at Zeta Beta Tau—but they had come back to Hollman to live, and she had been able to present him with a patient list, on a platter, made up of all those people she had known forever who wanted to go o
n knowing her now. Sometimes, these days, she would catch sight of her reflection in the plate-glass windows of the little grocery store across the street from the Sycamore, this perfect woman in a golf skirt and pastel polo shirt, this vision in a three-quarter-length black cashmere coat and high-heeled boots, and be so happy she was barely able to breathe. She even kept clippings, from the Hollman Home News. It only came out once a week—if you wanted a real newspaper, you had to buy the one published in Kennanburg—but it had the news she loved most in it, and it had her picture almost every week: chairwoman of the Heart Fund Drive; organizer of the Friends of the Library lecture series; secretary of the Center School PTA; parent-adviser to the Hollman High School varsity and junior varsity cheerleading squads. Underneath all the pretentious nonsense, Chris Inglerod was a ferociously competent woman. If she’d been born ten years later than she had been, she would have picked up a good MBA as a matter of course. Having been born when she was, and where she was, she had ended up as Mrs. Dr. Barr, and that suited her as perfectly as anything ever would. She had told her mother, when she was small, that she would have a maid when she grew up, and she did. She had promised herself, in those days when all her friends cared about was having exactly the right kind of Bass Weejuns, that she would someday buy all her clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue and Peck and Peck, and the only compromise she’d had to make was to change Peck and Peck for Talbot’s, because Peck and Peck had gone out of business when she was barely out of college. If there were drawbacks to her situation—if she sometimes lay in bed in the dark with Daniel hunched and pumping over her, counting the seconds before she could start her ritual moaning to signal to him that he could safely finish, wondering how other women managed to do this night after night without throwing up—in the clear light of day, looking at the Volvo station wagon in the driveway and the Royal Doulton china stacked behind the glass doors in the butler’s pantry, they seemed too minor to really worry about.
Now she tapped her fingernails against the back of the phone—short fingernails, colored with an almost transparent polish, to distinguish her from her husband’s receptionist and the cashiers at the supermarket with their curving, three-inch, glitter-painted spikes—and decided there was nothing to do about it, she would have to call Dan. She made a face at the air, because she truly hated calling Dan, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he’d be impatient about her for worrying about high school. Chris swiveled around and looked at the clock on the wall. It was just after one, which meant that Dan would be taking his lunch hour, which he did by locking himself in a back room at the office and eating tuna-fish sandwiches while listening to the Grateful Dead cranked up so high it would split open a normal person’s skull. That meant he would have the ear phones on, and that meant that Chris would have to go through the receptionist, even when she used the private line, because Dan listening to the Grateful Dead was Dan dead to the world. Chris didn’t understand the attraction. She had gone to a Grateful Dead concert at Penn State with a boy she had had her doubts about, and the band had looked to her like the kind of men you see begging booze money on the side streets of Philadelphia when you got lost trying to remember where you parked your car when you got to the Art Museum. The boy she had had her doubts about had ended up going to New York and getting a job at some publishing company. Maybe he knew Betsy Wetsy himself these days. She tapped her fingernails against the phone again, and looked at the clock again, and promised herself not to let Dan get her all worked up again. Then she made herself dial.
The receptionist, Maura, picked up and sounded vague. Chris counted the minutes—Maura would have to go down the hall and shake Dan out of his reverie; Chris had done it herself from time to time; she knew what it took—and then, when the line was picked up again, heard Uncle John’s Band hammering along in the background.
“Jesus Christ,” she said before Dan had had a chance to say anything. “What would your patients think if they could hear that stuff you listen to?”
“They probably listen to it themselves. I’d have it playing in the offices while we worked, but I couldn’t make it loud enough. People tend to dislike loud noises when they’re sick. Is there a point to this call, Chris, or are you just having your monthly nervous breakdown about how the hell I really blew it by not getting a better paying specialty?”
Chris bit her lip. It was true, Dan could have had a better specialty. She would have liked to marry a man who was doing something more impressive than primary care physician, but no matter how often she had talked to Dan about cardiology and cancer, he had put her off.
“Look,” she said, “I just got a call from Nancy. Betsy Wetsy is coming back to town at the end of May. For a month.”
“Ah,” Dan said. “The conquering hero returns. Or heroine. This ought to be interesting. Has Belinda had apoplexy on Grandview Avenue yet, or is she going to wait until Betsy actually gets here?”
“This is serious,” Chris said. “God, I don’t know how you can make jokes about things that are serious. She’s coming here. For a month. And you know she won’t be alone, either. She’ll have reporters with her.”
“As part of her entourage?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Relax, Chris. There will only be reporters here if Jimmy Card comes with her, and I don’t think he’s going to agree to come down here for a month while she straightens out her mother’s affairs no matter how much he’s in love with her.”
“She’s famous all on her own, you know, even without Jimmy Card.”
“She’s not the right kind of famous. Women who appear on panels on CNN and get nominated for Pulitzers for writing books on the crisis of liberalism in America do not attract tabloid journalists and representatives of gossip magazines. The only reason she’s been getting the kind of press she’s been getting over the last year is because of Jimmy Card. If it wasn’t for that, Belinda wouldn’t even know she was famous. God only knows, Belinda doesn’t watch CNN unless she’s forced at gunpoint.”
“She would have known because of Maris,” Chris said.
“Possibly. I still think you’re getting all worked up for nothing. So she’s coming for a month. So what? Ignore her if you want to. You were never great friends with her in the past. Act like she isn’t here.”
“I can’t do that. She’ll get asked places. Nancy’s thinking of asking her to talk at the high school, and Laurel what’s-her-name at the library is going to ask her to talk there. She’ll be everywhere.”
“One more time, Chris. So what?”
Sometimes, Chris used the cell phone as if it were attached to a wall. She forgot she could take it with her when she walked. She went into the breakfast nook and sat down in the chair closest to the long wall of windows looking out on the deck.
“I was in the park that night, you know, the night Michael died.”
“You’ve told me.”
“I had blood on my clothes.”
Chris could hear Dan clearing his throat in the background. “Chris, be serious. We’ve been all through this a dozen times. It was, what, thirty years ago—”
“I had blood on my clothes,” Chris insisted.
“Yes. Yes,” Dan said. “You’ve told me. You all had blood on your clothes. Belinda and Emma had it all over them. The rain washed it off. Or nearly off. But the last I heard from you, you were actually—”
“Nailing Betsy Wetsy in the outhouse with a bunch of black snakes.”
“Was it a bunch? I thought Belinda always said it was only two.”
“There were twenty-two of them,” Chris said. “I know. I helped collect them. It took us all morning and most of the afternoon. And Betsy doesn’t know who it was. If she did, she’d never have hired Maris and kept her on all this time.”
“I’ll admit the whole thing with your friend Maris sounds odd as hell to me,” Dan said.
“She’s a drunk.” Chris propped one leg up on a chair on the other side of the table. “I don’t know why you’re having such a
hard time getting this into your head, but having Betsy here for a month could turn out to be a major league disaster, for you as well as for me. I don’t mean about Michael. Of course that’s stupid. Of course it was a coincidence, and even if it wasn’t, there’s nothing anybody can find now that wasn’t found out at the time, more or less. But it’s just the kind of story, what we did to Betsy, it’s just the kind of story—”
“I didn’t do it,” Dan said.
“What?”
“I didn’t do it,” Dan said, again. “If you’re worried about her finding out after all this time who did it to her, that’s your problem. I was growing up in Radnor at the time. And from what I’ve seen of that pack of wolves you had for high school best buddies, I fervently believe they’ve got it coming to them.”
“It’ll affect you, too,” Chris said, frightening herself by the high shrill voice that came out of her. “If she comes down here and does some smear job on the town, makes all the members of our class look like psycho killers, it will affect you, too. We’re married.”
“No,” Dan said. “I don’t think it will. My tuna fish is getting soggy, Chris, and my Dead album is almost finished. I’m going to get off.”
“It’ll affect you, too,” Chris said, and this time it came out in a shriek, high-pitched and wild, that reminded her of nothing so much as Betsy screaming that night in the outhouse while the rain started and the thunder began to pound overhead.
Dan had hung up. Chris clicked off herself and stayed where she was. The deck was wide and long and ended in a half hexameter. The trees beyond it were tall pines and maples, meticulously kept up by a lawn service she hired to come all the way out from Johnstown. Her hair felt damp. She had been sweating. Of course, it would figure, the one time she had broken her rule for herself, the one time she had not tried to be at least minimally nice, that one time would be the most important one, and now here it was, thirty some odd years later, coming back to haunt her. It bothered her even more because she had known, at the time, that she shouldn’t have had a part in it. She had almost tried to talk the others out of it, while they had been stumbling through the forest growth that morning finding the snakes, finding them one after the other, carefully, because if they heard you coming they slithered out of sight. She knew snakes were dry and not slimy wet, but they felt slimy wet to her, so that she could only touch them with two fingers right behind their heads, and she could only hold on to them by keeping her eyes closed while they struggled against her on their long way to the bucket. Twenty-two. Would it have mattered if they had had fewer of them? Would Betsy have screamed like that if there had been only the two snakes Belinda liked to say there were? They had all stood in the trees just out of sight of the clearing and listened as Betsy began to panic. They had stayed just long enough to be sure that she was losing it completely, going out of her mind—what had they expected her to do, exactly? She could have been locked up there for days, if it hadn’t been for the police in the park after Michael was murdered.