by Jane Haddam
The other problem with cars was the years since Vassar, when Maris had been living in New York, where she neither kept a car nor wanted to. She hated to drive, and hated everything that went along with driving. She had never been very good at it, and was probably even worse now. She hadn’t been behind the wheel for longer than fifteen minutes in ten years. She didn’t have any automobile insurance. There was also the problem of the laws against “drunk driving,” which didn’t really mean driving drunk, but only driving when you’d had anything to drink at all. Maris knew that much from the public service announcements that played late into the night when she was watching PBS or MTV because she couldn’t sleep. In some places, police checked people who didn’t look drunk at all. It wouldn’t matter that Maris never showed her liquor, or even felt it, most of the time. She had been careful since that day in New York, but not because she believed for an instant that Debra knew what was going on. Debra thought she’d had food poisoning. It had been the talk of the office for days afterward, according to the reports she’d heard—she’d been at home, where Debra insisted she stay, “recuperating”—and the women from the office had trekked down to Greenwich Village every afternoon to bring her boxes of pastry and take-out specialty salads from the little hole-in-the-wall gourmet delicatessen where they always got their lunches. Maris had thought, more than once during that period, that that was as good as life could get. She had never had to go out except to go to the liquor store, and that was only at the end of her own block. The only thing she could think of that might have made it better was a change in location, say to somewhere in the Caribbean, but she wouldn’t have been able to afford that. It bothered her no end that Betsy got to go to the Caribbean all the time these days, even though she didn’t like the beach.
It was because of the way she felt about cars that Maris was staying with Belinda Hart, and it was because she was staying with Belinda Hart that she saw Betsy get out of the big green Mercedes parked at the curb in front of English Drugs. Obviously, Maris thought, Betsy didn’t realize that English now had a parking lot out in back. Maris heard a rustle in the apartment behind her. Belinda was coming out of the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. This apartment was worse than the one Maris had in New York. It had more square footage in absolute terms, but it was much more cramped, and its claustrophobic airlessness was not helped by Belinda’s mania for knickknacks. The walls were covered with fake needlework samplers, trumpeting inanities. He prayeth best who loveth best/All creatures great and small, one of them said in ornate script made of navy-blue thread to contrast with the faux-natural linen background. The verse was surrounded by kittens, puppies, and birds, frolicking in fields of tiny flowers. The tables were full of fake Limoges porcelain and knockoffs of Hummel figurines: white boxes trimmed in gold and scattered with painted purple violets; three-inch-tall goat girls wearing dirndls and carrying pails. The only thing that was missing was a statue of the Virgin in a grotto—but of course that would have to be missing, since Belinda was a Methodist.
“Look,” Maris said, pointing toward the window next to the only dining table in the place. Of course, Maris thought, her own apartment had no room for a table of any kind, but that didn’t really count, because it was in Manhattan.
Belinda went to the window and looked out. “Is that Betsy Wetsy?” She sounded startled. “She’s so incredibly thin.”
“She works out nine hours a week. We’ve even got a room full of exercise equipment in the office so that she can work out there when she doesn’t have time to do it in Connecticut. She hates gyms.”
“God, she was bad at gym in high school. Do you remember?” Belinda pressed her face closer to the glass. “Still,” she said.
“Still what?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought she’d look more like herself.”
“Meaning what?” Maris said.
Belinda backed away from the window and sat down in one of the other two chairs. Down on Grandview Avenue, there was no longer any sign of Betsy or the two boys. Belinda bit her lip.
“I’ve seen pictures of her, of course,” she said, “and I’ve seen her on television, but somehow I thought that when I saw her in person, she’d look more like herself. You know. Sort of lumpy and … whatever. Sort of gray.”
“She doesn’t look gray. She can manage to look pretty damned spectacular when she wants to make the effort, which she usually doesn’t.”
“Oh,” Belinda said. She tapped her fingers against the tabletop. The top was peeling along the edges, much the way Belinda’s nail polish was peeling along the sides of her nails.
“Well?” Maris said.
“Emma said the same thing. That she didn’t look like you’d think she would, when you saw her in person. Emma and George saw her somewhere, in England, I don’t remember. Emma didn’t even tell me about it until last week. I don’t understand people sometimes. The only thing is, well—”
“What?”
“Well,” Belinda went on, looking stubborn. “It might not work. This thing. I mean, if she’s like that, and not like we remember her, then it might not work. So maybe we shouldn’t try it. Because she’s different.”
Maris looked into her cup of coffee, the pale coffee she had made from freeze-dried stuff out of a jar that was all Belinda kept for coffee. She would have to find a way out to a decent grocery store to pick up some beans and a grinder. Made like this, the coffee tasted too much like gin, which wasn’t supposed to have a taste, but did. She was not surprised at Belinda’s wavering. She had expected something of the kind, from all of them, because they really had no idea what they were dealing with. They all thought they could go back to 1969 and behave as if nothing had ever happened.
“Listen,” she told Belinda. “She hasn’t really changed. Not the way you think. It’s all an act.”
“It can’t all be an act,” Belinda said seriously. “She really does look like that. She can’t be doing it with mirrors.”
“But she is doing it with mirrors,” Maris said. “That whole attitude, that thing she’s got of not giving a damn what anybody thinks, it’s all an act. She cares just as much now as she ever did. She cares so much, it makes her sick.”
“Well,” Belinda said dubiously, looking out the window at the Mercedes again. “Maybe she cares about people like Jimmy Card and, you know, those people she’s with on CNN. George Stephanopolous. Like that. That doesn’t mean she’s going to care about us.”
“You’ve got it backward,” Maris said. “She can take George Stephanopolous or leave him, it’s us who still get to her. And that gives us our chance. If things go on the way they’ve been going on, something will happen. You know it will. And it won’t be good for us.”
“Maybe it won’t be good for her, either.”
“Don’t bet on it. She’s got Jimmy Card to run interference for her. Christ, Belinda, aren’t you sick of it? All those stories in the magazines, making it seem like we were all a bunch of brain-dead hoodlums, torturing the poor genius throughout her whole blameless childhood. That last story in People damn near made me throw up. And now she’s here, and you know what? Within twenty-four hours, at least two reporters are going to be here, too—”
“I don’t understand all this about the reporters,” Belinda said querulously. “It’s not like she’s Julia Roberts. She’s not a movie star. She’s just on all those news shows and you know nobody pays any attention to the people on those news shows. Why do they pay attention to her?”
“Because they think she’s going to marry Jimmy Card,” Maris said patiently, “and because she’s got a hot-selling book and looks like she’s going to have another. Everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame. This is Betsy’s fifteen minutes. Does it matter why?”
“I never got fifteen minutes of fame,” Belinda said.
Maris considered the possibility that Belinda had never heard the phrase before, or even that she had never heard of Andy Warhol, and dismissed it. Belinda read Vogue the way fundamentali
sts read the Bible, and had, for forty years. The problem with Belinda was that she never remembered anything. Maris knew enough to realize she had only a small window of opportunity. If they started to doubt, it would all fall apart, and in the end nothing would happen but a dull month’s visit, with Betsy speaking at the library and the high school and going back to New York to write an essay for Dissent on the death of small-town America.
Maris looked up and out the window again, and all of a sudden, there she was: Betsy, coming out of English Drugs’ front door, holding Geoff ’s hand while Mark followed close behind, carrying an enormous brown bag. Belinda moved closer to the window to get a better look, and as she did, old Mrs. Cardovan stopped at the side of the Mercedes to talk. Maris couldn’t hear, but she could see what was going on. Betsy and Mrs. Cardovan were exchanging greetings and introductions. The boys were being made to prove that they had been well brought up, and knew how to shake hands and say the right things to older women. Mrs. Cardovan was very, very old. When they were all children, she had been the chief salesgirl at Noe’s Dry Goods, which is what Hollman had had for a basic clothing store until the big discount places opened up in the new shopping center out on Route 6. She was as tiny as a dwarf, and hunchbacked. All the girls had wondered how she’d ever been able to get somebody to marry her. Now her gnarled olive-skinned face was beaming under her Darth Vader helmet of white hair.
Betsy was shooing the small boy into the back of the car. Then she turned and shook Mrs. Cardovan’s hand, and Mark shook it, too, as if they had all just met in some big crush of a cocktail party. Betsy got in behind the wheel. Mrs. Cardovan waved a little and started to walk again along the sidewalk. The Mercedes kicked into life and edged out onto the road. There were other Mercedes in Hollman these days—no place was as provincial as it had been in 1969—but this particular Mercedes looked bigger than the others, or shinier, or more intimidating.
“Well,” Belinda said when the Mercedes was out of view.
“Exactly,” Maris said. “You’ve got to see what I mean, right? We can’t just let it go.”
“Maybe,” Belinda said.
Maris drank down the last of what was in her coffee cup. It was nearly straight gin. She bit her bottom lip to keep herself from heaving. The muscles in her arms started to twitch. She could see the green glint of the car’s roof far up on Grandview Avenue, past the place where Noe’s had been, past reality. Belinda was staring in the same direction.
“Well,” Belinda said again, still sounding uncertain.
“We’ve got to do something,” Maris said, getting up to go back to Belinda’s kitchen counter. She put her cup down next to a ceramic spoon holder with “Home Sweet Home” painted on it in yet more ornate purple script, next to yet more ornate purple violets. She wanted to pick the silly thing up and smash it into shards.
“We’ve got to do something,” she said again, instead. “If we don’t do something, this whole situation is going to jump right up and bite us on the ass.”
3
Chris Inglerod had no intention of doing anything at all about the fact that Betsy Toliver was coming back to town today. In spite of at least three long phone calls with Emma, and one even longer one with Maris, she had her mind made up. As soon as she could, she filled her schedule book with the kind of Things To Do she had always loved best. It was Monday, so she had Literacy Volunteers of America first thing. She had to drive out to a tiny roadside restaurant on Route 47 and tutor a girl named Natalya in the rudiments of English, spoken as well as written. The restaurant smelled of all the food she had learned to despise in the years since high school. It served deep-fried pasties full of meat and beets and heavy soups made with sour cream. Natalya was not only slow and fat, but she wasn’t an American. Chris had imagined herself playing Enlightening Angel to one of Hollman’s own downtrodden poor—a member of one of the black families who lived in shacks near the edge of the river on the south side of town, or one of the waitresses at JayMar’s diner. Volunteering, Chris had learned, was much like anything else. You needed to do it if you wanted to be put on the kind of committees that really mattered to you—the invitation committee at the Club, for instance, or the ball committee at the American Heart Association chapter—but it wasn’t what everybody said it was, and it wasn’t fun. Still, Chris was nothing if she wasn’t somebody who played by the rules. If there was scut work to be done, she did it. She tutored Natalya in the same spirit she had once pushed the magazine tray around the hospital as a candy striper or picked up garbage from the side of the road as a pledge for Alpha Chi Omega. If she hated the work, she could always get it done by being determined to get it done. If she was determined to get it done, she could excel at it, and in her way, she excelled at tutoring Natalya. They’d been at it for six weeks, and Natalya could already read the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer without a hitch and explain what she’d read in English that was still halting, but no longer incomprehensible. If she was also much shyer, more frightened, and more depressed than when the lessons started, Chris didn’t notice it.
The tutoring lesson only lasted an hour. When it was over, Chris drove back to her own house by a side road, avoiding the center of town, and parked in her driveway, nonplussed. She had a date for tennis and lunch at the Club, but that wasn’t for hours yet. If she showed up this early, people would talk about it, and if they talked about it, they would probably make all the wrong inferences. At least one of the things Maris and Belinda had been saying was true: there had been a lot of ink spilled on the subject of poor Betsy Toliver’s terrible days in high school, persecuted by the evil witches of the Popular Crowd. It had become The Story whenever Betsy was mentioned in the popular press, and that was often, these days, now that she was connected to Jimmy Card. It didn’t help that the women Chris knew at the Club weren’t Hollman women, but transplants from other places whose husbands worked in research at one of the new tech companies with buildings on the interstate, or the kind of local girl Chris would never have known while she was growing up, because their parents had the money—and the sense—to send them away to boarding school. It sometimes seemed as if she had spent the whole of the last two weeks explaining herself, over and over and over again. She had the car’s radio turned to the classical music station. The only other automatic find on her scan function was for NPR, which she almost never listened to anymore, because Betsy was on it so much. She thought about getting out of the car and going into her house. She thought about picking up the phone to call Dan in the middle of the morning and being told by the receptionist that Dan was busy, or by Dan himself that it wasn’t Dan’s problem, not any of it, and she would have to fend for herself. If she hadn’t already had breakfast, she could go out somewhere and eat that. If it wasn’t so early, she could go out to the mall and shop—although she never shopped much at their local mall. It didn’t have the right kinds of stores. You had to go into Pittsburgh or Philadelphia for those, or buy from a catalogue.
She looked at the rings on her hands. She looked at the green grass on her broad front lawn. She looked at the peaks and gables on her house that let even strangers going past on the road know that several of the rooms inside had cathedral ceilings. She put the car into reverse and backed out onto the road again. Was it really possible she had lived in this place for fifteen years and not managed to make a single real friend? If she thought about it honestly, she would have to say she had never in her life made a single real friend. People were volatile commodities. One day they were good for you. The next day, they dragged you down.
She went straight through town—if she ran into Betsy, she didn’t have to stop, and she didn’t think she’d run into Betsy. It was still very early—and only when she got out the other side of it did she start to slow down. Her parents’ house had been out this way when she was growing up, but she rarely came here anymore. Her parents hadn’t been poor, but they hadn’t been prominent, either, and this was what she had looked forward to leaving behind. Some of the
houses were of a kind that would fetch serious money in a college town or major city: tall Victorians with round towers and gingerbread framing their broad front porches; Craftsman “cottages” with more square footage in their foyers than most of the newer houses had in their living rooms. Her parents, of course, had had one of the newer houses. Like a lot of people in their era, they had equated new with luxury and old with deprivation. They’d had a rec room in the basement, too, not a big family room built above grade on a lower level, like Chris had now, but a low-ceilinged space carved out underground for the kids to put their toys in. Chris had always hated her parents’ house. When she was in college, she’d been very careful never to ask her friends home to see it.
Past the houses, there were long patches of green, some of it belonging to houses built far enough off the road to be invisible, some of it belonging to the few small farms that still ran in this part of the state. Chris went past them all without paying attention to any of them, and then up a small hill whose road was entirely lined with tall pine trees. What she wanted was at the end of that—the wrought-iron gate to Meldone Park. Just outside the gate, there were places to park, slots left open in a big unpaved field where the grass had already shriveled into shards of paper brown.
Chris pulled to a stop as close to the entrance to the park as she could and got out of her car. She locked all her doors. The wrought-iron gates looked as if they had been well cared for. The grass at the edges of the park looked as if it had been mowed. As soon as she came through the little stand of trees, she could see the sandy beach and the small lake it circled, man-made by the town in 1967 so that the children of Hollman would have someplace to go that wasn’t a concrete public swimming pool. Chris took off her shoes and tucked them into the top of her tote bag. Thank God she wasn’t wearing panty hose. She looked across at the few people sitting on blankets near the edge of the water and counted three she knew. All three had been in high school with her, two in her class and one in the class behind. None of them had been important at the time, and all of them were now thick with middle age and ugly with bad hair coloring. It just went to show, Chris thought, that you couldn’t be too careful about keeping yourself up.