by Jane Haddam
“Liz,” Jimmy Card said, angry now, “refuses to believe it.”
TWO
1
Somehow, when Liz Toliver had dreamed of coming back to Hollman, what she had imagined was a kind of triumphal march: she would arrive, not only famous but impossibly rich, sitting in the back of a pitch-black superstretch limousine, driven by a driver in livery with her initials on his jacket. Well, she thought now, as she turned off the two-lane blacktop onto the first of the narrow country roads that lay between her and Hollman like a tangled mess of capillaries, that probably wasn’t how she had really imagined it, at least not since she was seven or eight years old. Maybe the problem was that she had not imagined coming back at all. There was, Liz thought, no point to it. It had been so long since she had lived in this place, so long since she had even visited it, that it sometimes seemed to her to be one of those mythic archetypes they had studied about in Dr. Weedin’s course in Shakespeare. This was not her life. This was a universal expressive form, meant to mirror the reality of all people everywhere: the ugly duckling emerging from a pond of prettier ducklings, with the pond inexplicably populated by snakes. Liz liked that idea better than she liked the one that had been nagging at her since they left Connecticut this morning, and that was that she was fundamentally a coward. She had not come back because she was afraid to come back, and because she knew—as well as she had ever known anything—that she had not really changed at all. The more familiar the roads got, the stronger the feeling got. She didn’t have to dig through her tote bag for the copy of the Hollman High School Wildcat, 1969, to know what she was really like. She looked at the backs of her hands on the steering wheel and half expected the nails on them to split and go ragged, the way nails do when you bite them, day after day. She found herself expecting the car to change, too, so that instead of this ridiculous Mercedes—$140,000 before sales tax, right off the showroom floor—she would be driving the little blue Ford Escort wagon she had had the year after Jay died, when everything was falling apart, and they had had no money at all. That, God help her, didn’t make any sense, because there hadn’t even been any Ford Escorts when she was living in Hollman, and it didn’t matter what there had been, because she hadn’t had a car at all. Besides, she’d actually liked the Ford Escort. It had been the one thing in her life that year that had gone more right than wrong, and when she had walked back to it across the parking lot at the supermarket or the mall, she had always been relieved to see how shiny and new it looked. It was a kind of camouflage. Her life that year, their lives that year, had been anything but shiny and new. They had been living in a rented cabin out at Lake Candlewood, because they’d lost the house, and there were cracks and leaks in every room. When it rained, water came in through the roof and soaked the living room. When anyone took a bath, the water leaked out of the bathtub and turned the bathroom floor into a lake. The only dry space in the whole cabin had been in the little corner of the kitchen where she had set up her computer. After a while, that space had become holy. They had all worshiped at the altar of it. If their lives were ever going to change, if they had a hope in hell of getting back to being the way they were before Jay got sick, then the change was going to come from that corner. That was why Geoff was not allowed to touch the computer keyboard, ever, and Mark was only allowed to touch it when he had an important report for school, the kind that needed illustrations and charts that had to be taken off the Net. God, Liz thought, she ought to remember that better than she did. She ought to have nightmares about the foreclosure or the Christmas they’d spent with two candles, no tree, and presents that consisted of exactly one small box of Russell Stover candy for each of the boys, wrapped in aluminum foil. Instead, she woke up not only obsessed by snakes, but obsessed by trivialities. She had nervous breakdowns remembering the way Emma Kenyon—who’d always had expensive things mail-ordered from Philadelphia, even though the Tolivers had far more money than the Kenyons ever would—laughed at her clothes.
They were passing a road called Watler Marsh, with an empty field on the corner that looked as if it had sunk in the middle. That used to be a pond, Liz thought, and the school bus stopped on that very corner to let off a girl named Penny Steele, who was fifteen and going out with a boy in the army. The next year, the boy came back from the army and decided to marry her. Penny stayed in school right up through the week before the wedding, bringing Polaroid pictures of her wedding dress onto the bus to show all the other girls what she would look like when the day came. The wedding was held on a Saturday afternoon in late April at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in town. The honeymoon was a week at a resort in South Carolina. Liz had no idea what had happened to Penny after that. She did know that if she took this turn to the right and went to the end of that road, she would come to Belinda Hart’s old house, where, one afternoon when they were all eight years old, Belinda and Emma had pushed her headfirst into a rain barrel full of bugs and slime and rotting fall leaves that had stuck to her skin like face paint.
Mark stirred in the passenger seat beside her, moving his copy of Metamorphosis from one leg to another. He was only fourteen, but he was as big as most grown men—nearly six feet tall, and massive, the way Jay had been, but without the tendency to go to fat. Geoff was in the back, secured in a seat belt and a safety harness, fast asleep. Liz found herself wishing that she still smoked cigarettes. It would give her something to do with her hands, and something to distract her, so that she wouldn’t still be thinking about the rain barrel and about Belinda trying to seal it shut with the side of a big cardboard box she’d found lying against the garbage cans along the back of the house.
“Are you intending to drive this car, or do you mean for Scotty to beam us up the rest of the way?” Mark said. He had put his book down. It was dog-eared and half destroyed. Liz thought of the set direction at the beginning of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. You knew the people in that house really read books, because the books did not look new.
“Earth to Elizabeth. Earth to Elizabeth. Are you okay?”
Geoff stirred in the backseat. He always woke up when the car stopped.
“Are we there?” He was going to say “are we there yet?” but stopped himself just in time. He had heard enough, from his mother and his brother, to know that was something you never said. It was worse than saying “shit.”
“Not exactly,” Mark said. “What about you?” he asked Liz. “Are you all right? You’re looking a little green. You could always change your mind, you know. We could always turn around and go right back to Connecticut—”
“I’m hungry,” Geoff said.
“We could eat on the road. We could get a motel room for the night. We could use that nifty cell phone you’ve got and call Jimmy to come and get us—”
“Cell phones don’t work up here,” she said. “The mountains are too high.”
Liz took her foot off the brake and let them roll slowly forward. She hadn’t realized, until Mark had pointed it out, that they had stopped. The field that had once had a pond in the middle of it glided past them, along with the side road it bordered and the side road’s destination, a big white ranch house with green shutters and the first three-car garage Hollman had ever seen. Liz had a distinct memory of Belinda talking about it at school while it was being built, and the girls talking behind her back about it in the lavatory, because she never mentioned the real reason it was going up: Belinda’s father was an undertaker, and Belinda’s mother couldn’t stand it one more minute, living in the same house as the funeral home, with the dead and embalmed bodies in the basement.
“Driving usually requires you to put your foot on the gas after you’ve taken it off the brake,” Mark said.
Liz put her foot on the gas, but not very hard. “I was thinking about this girl I knew in school. Belinda Hart—”
“Is this one of the vampire nation?”
“What a way to put it. Anyway, yes. The thing is, her father was an undertaker. Funeral director, she said, and we
all had to say it, too, you know, because she was powerful as hell, even more powerful than Maris, and we were all afraid of her. But I was thinking, in most places, that would have gotten her killed. Having a father who was a funeral director, I mean, and living in a house with dead bodies in the basement—”
“They did? Cool.”
Liz sighed. “They moved. Down that road.” She tossed her head in the direction of the side road they were rolling away from. “That’s why I was thinking of it. Are you like this all the time? Are you like this in school?”
“Yep.”
“That must have an interesting effect on your social life.”
“My social life is fine. It’s incredible how much mileage you can get out of just not giving a—damn. I wasn’t kidding at all about going back. I think you’re nuts to be here. I don’t get what you think you’re doing at all.”
“I’m taking care of your grandmother.”
“My grandmother is senile. You could send Batman in a cape and she wouldn’t know the difference.”
Liz picked up the pace a little. “I was thinking about that year we spent in New Milford, do you remember? About how we had tuna-fish sandwiches on toast, and I felt like a fool, like I’d ruined Christmas for you and Geoff because I was just so damned arrogant, so—I don’t know—prideful …”
“You have the pride of a sea slug.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. I don’t know how I’m ever going to get this through to you, but I loved that Christmas. Okay, we didn’t have a turkey and we didn’t have a tree and we didn’t have much in the way of presents—although I still love Russell Stover, let me tell you, if my soccer coach would let me eat chocolate—”
“Mark.”
“I really am serious. I loved that Christmas. I loved the way we were with each other. Before that, you know, we were all kind of numbed out, because of Dad dying, and I’d been thinking that maybe we wouldn’t ever be really together again. And that Christmas came and we were us, together, not three separate people. That was the first time from when Dad first got sick that I knew I was going to be happy again and—you know, you can’t drive too well if you’re crying your eyes out, either.”
“I’m not crying my eyes out.”
“That’s Niagara Falls I see falling down the front of your face.”
“Is it really?” Geoff said. “Can I see it, too?”
“Sit down and keep your seat belt on,” Mark said.
They had reached another intersection—it was incredible how many small roads there were, crisscrossing each other back and forth under this thick cover of trees—and Liz turned automatically to the right. At the top of the road’s steep embankment, there was a long Cape Cod–style house that she had admired as a child. When she passed it on the bus going to sports games or “special events,” she found herself wishing she lived in it. Now it looked impossibly small, and worse than small, dated. She knew, even though she had never been in it, that the ceilings would be no more than eight feet high and the kitchen would be fitted with the kind of laminated cabinets that peeled in the corners after a year or two.
“You know,” Mark said, “I don’t think you’re being stupid, feeling the way you feel. I mean, from some of the stories I’ve heard—”
“From whom? Has Maris been telling you things?”
“Ms. Coleman barely speaks to me. She thinks I’m cow dung. Okay. I’ve been reading a few of those stories in those papers, you know the ones—”
“Where are you getting the National Enquirer?”
“At the drugstore. And don’t say it. Nobody cares what I read in the drugstore, and I’m not buying them. Except that I did buy the Weekly World News. You’re not ever in that one. To get into that one, you’ve got to meet with a space alien. George Bush did.”
“What?”
“Not this George Bush. The other one. George Herbert Walker Bush. The principal reason why I’m not applying to Andover.”
“Right. Mark, where the hell is this going?”
Mark picked up his copy of Metamorphosis and ruffled the edges of the pages with the pad of his thumb. This was why his books all disintegrated. He not only read them, he abused them. Liz had grown up treating books as icons, or maybe as incarnations of God. She was no more capable of dog-earring a book than she was of lighting one on fire. The two acts had some strange connection with each other in her mind.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Mark said. “I’m not stupid. I know why we never came here to visit Grandmother when Dad was alive. I don’t need the tabloids or Jimmy Card to tell me that this place sucks for you, it leeches something out of you, and you get, I don’t know, odd. Not yourself. Not you the way I know you. So far, all the signs have been all bad, except the car—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“—and you can’t take credit for the car, because Jimmy nearly browbeat you into it, and you know it. If it had been up to you, we’d have come out here in the Volvo—”
“A Volvo is a prestige car.”
“Our Volvo looks like you’ve been using it to haul horse manure. Literally. I mean, I’m glad we bought the Mercedes. It’s neat as hell. I’ve always wanted cream leather seats, just to see how long it takes to get them dirty. But I can just see you sitting there feeling you don’t deserve it. Feeling guilty about it. Because that’s what this place does to you. It makes you feel guilty about everything good that’s ever happened to you.”
They were at Plumtrees School. Back in the days when Pennsylvania had still been a colony, and for years afterward, this had been Hollman’s one-room schoolhouse. Back in the early sixties, when the town had begun to bulge with the never-ending baby boom, this had been painted barn-red and used as a kindergarten for the children of the people who lived in Plumtrees and Stony Hill. Now, Liz checked the sign on its side, it was some kind of office for the Health Department.
“It’s so odd,” Liz said. “I can’t imagine Hollman having its own Health Department.”
“I give up,” Mark said. He opened Metamorphosis and flattened it out against his leg. That was another reason why all his books fell apart. He had no respect for spines. “Someday, you ought to sit down and figure out what it is you want to do when you grow up. Try to get that done before I leave for prep school, so I don’t have to worry about you stranded in the house on your own with nobody but Geoff to take care of you.”
I thought you were counting on Jimmy to take care of me, Liz almost said, but didn’t, because that was another whole can of worms and she had no intention of going there. They’d reached that odd T-intersection where going to the left led to some kind of industrial plant Liz had never actually understood. It called itself a sand company. She had no idea what a sand company did. She looked in its direction and saw that the big square funnels were still up. She had no way to know if they were running. When they were all growing up together, the girls who lived down that road were the ones they all officially labeled “Poor,” and then ignored, because everybody on earth knew that poor people were not as important as rich ones.
She turned to the right, past the houses with the low white rail fences that made her think of horses, although nobody had ever owned horses this close to town, at least since the advent of the automobile. The road sloped upward to yet another intersection. On both sides, there were large frame buildings painted white and gray, with blank windows, like college dormitories in New England. Surely there had to be changes here, somewhere. The old high school was being used for something else now, and a new high school had been built as part of an educational park back there in Plumtrees. The library was supposed to have a new wing. The problem was that it all looked exactly as she remembered it. She felt she could get out of the car right now and walk on out to Mullaney’s on Grandview Avenue or to the Sycamore farther down the road, and never miss a step or be confused by an uncertain landmark. This was Hollman as Brigadoon. It only woke up and came back to life when she was ready to vi
sit it.
In the passenger seat, Mark put down his book again and reached out to take her hand. He flattened her fingers against his palm and pointed to them, silently, as if they were characters in a movie by a foreign director who believed in moments of significant pause.
Liz looked down at her own hand and saw that, somewhere between Plumtrees and here, she had bitten her fingernails so far down that the skin on her fingertips was split and bleeding.
2
Maris Coleman had been very careful about liquor since that day in New York that had ended so badly, and she was being especially careful about it now, in Hollman, because of the problem of the cars. Like most teenagers—and unlike Betsy—Maris had gotten her driver’s license as soon as she turned sixteen, but unlike people like Belinda and Emma and Chris, she hadn’t used it much in the years since. Vassar had been very picky about undergraduates with cars when she was there. It made more sense to stick close to campus when she wanted to go “out,” and cross the street to Pizza Town, where the drinks were larger and more impressive than any she’d ever seen since. Harvey Wallbangers. White Lightnings. They came in tall ice cream soda glasses, and there was some kind of contest going on that only the boys entered. Drink three and get the fourth one free, or maybe it was four and get the fifth one free—whatever it was, it was dangerous, because those drinks had three or four shots of liquor in them. One White Lightning made her head spin. Of course, she was better than Betsy, who, when she went to Pizza Town at all, nursed along a single rum and Coke or 7UP and Seven, all night, and looked as if she were hating even that. Maris had never understood what it was about Betsy and liquor. Even later, when they had met up together in New York and Betsy had been drinking a fair amount in the evenings, she had never seemed to like it, and she’d treated hangovers as catastrophes. Maris had always thought there was something—prissy—about somebody who pretended not to like liquor, something sour and stuck-up, and she had never believed that bit about how Betsy couldn’t stand to be hungover. A hangover was nothing. You could get rid of it in sixty seconds flat by spiking your morning coffee.