by Jane Haddam
She skirted the lake and the back of the lifeguard’s seat—there was nobody in it at the moment, which for some reason figured—and went into the woods on the hill above it. The path she remembered was still there. A few feet down the path, there was something new: a pair of signs, wooden blocks with one end carved into a point to turn them into arrows, announcing that men should go in one direction and women should go in another. Chris turned toward the “women’s” outhouses—the old outhouses—and climbed through the pines to the clearing where the outhouses were. They had not changed, except that they’d been painted. They looked exactly as rickety as she remembered them, so that she wondered, yet again, what Betsy had been so frightened of the night when she had been locked in. It wasn’t as if she would have been entirely in the dark. There were enough cracks in the walls and doors to let in all the light in the Western Hemisphere.
She turned away from the outhouses and started climbing again, off the path now, through the pines. As she went, she began to feel that she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t been out here—all the way out here—since the night of the catastrophe. There couldn’t be anything left to see. She wasn’t going to stand still in the clearing near the river and hear that voice floating up over her head again, keening and wild. She wasn’t going to hear the rushing of the water, either. That night there had been too much water in the river because there had been too much rain over too many weeks. Now the river would be nearly dry. They hadn’t had a drop of rain in weeks. Ghosts did not haunt the places where they had become separated from their bodies. Auras did not cling forever to those places where murder had been done.
The real problem with the clearing was that it was so dark. The pine trees around it were too high. They blotted out the sun. If it wasn’t for the glint of sunlight that shimmered on the face of the water, she would have thought it was the middle of the night. Her throat was very dry, and tight. She felt dizzy. No, there wasn’t anything out here, nothing but pine needles on the ground and the whisper of the wind, like a voice, that was always just a little too far away for her to be able to catch individual words. The river was not dry, but close to it. A trickle of water slithered along the bottom of the bed, leaving the rocks above it dirty and untouched. If blood had soaked into this ground thirty-two years ago, it had soaked away by now, stolen by rain storms and snowstorms and small animals. Small animals would eat dead bodies if they were left to rot in wooded areas. She had read that in the newspaper, once, she didn’t know when. She really was dizzy. She was going to throw up.
She had no idea when she left the clearing, or when she started running. It wasn’t really running. In her bare feet, the best she could do was stumble and make a mess of things. She reached the outhouses and went right past them. They had never meant anything to her. She went down the narrow path and came out at the sanded clearing around the lake. Nobody new had come while she was gone. The lifeguard’s chair was still empty. She went quickly along the very highest edge of the sand to the small path that led to the wrought-iron gate. She went through the trees and through the gate and got to her car just as she heard the sound of crows in the air above her head. Weren’t crows supposed to be bad luck? She was tugging at her car door. It was locked. She’d forgotten about locking it. She hadn’t even taken out her keys. She got them out and let herself in behind the wheel and just stopped.
Somebody new drove into the parking lot. Chris sat right up. She wasn’t going to let anybody see her like this. The last thing she wanted was for some stranger to tap at her car window to ask if she was all right. The car was hot. It got hot early in Hollman in May. It wasn’t safe to put on the air conditioner if the car wasn’t running. People overheated their engines that way.
She watched a woman and two small children make their way from the newly parked car toward the pines and the wrought-iron gate. The children were too small to be in school and carried bright plastic buckets, one blue and one red. Chris started her engine and eased out into the openness of the field. What was this place like when it got really busy, when it mattered that it had no clearly marked parking spaces and no corridors partitioned off for people to drive through? Out on the road, the green of the grass looked fake, as if somebody had come along and dyed it with that stuff you colored Easter eggs with.
She decided not to go through the middle of town this time at all. She didn’t want to look at it. She went around by the side roads instead, in a big circle that would bring her through Plumtrees and Stony Hill, and that was why she ended up seeing Betsy Toliver after all. She’d forgotten that Betsy’s mother lived in Aunt Hack’s Ridge, or that Betsy had grown up there, in one of those enormous ranch houses with the three-car garages and the fieldstone walks that led to the fieldstone steps that led to the fieldstone-framed double front doors. Fifties nouveau riche chic, Chris thought, and then Betsy was right there, in the big open drive, getting out of a green Mercedes and talking to a woman in a nurse’s uniform at the same time. Chris had no idea why she was so certain that this was Betsy Toliver. The woman was a good ways away from her, and the car was moving, and this was neither the Betsy she remembered from high school nor the Betsy she remembered from television. Still, she knew. Other people were getting out of Betsy’s car, two boys, probably her sons. Betsy was wearing one of those loose-fitting tunic-y things that women in their fifties wore when they were being “casual” or “artistic” in the city. She had a thick clutch of gold bracelets on her left arm, supple and bright.
Damn, Chris thought. She had slowed to a crawl, and she was gaping. None of the people around the Mercedes seemed to have noticed it. Betsy had her back to the road. The two boys were unpacking the trunk, piling one black leather suitcase onto another. Chris stepped on the gas. A few seconds later she couldn’t see them anymore. They couldn’t see her.
It was only then that she realized she was still shaking. Her muscles were still twitching. She pulled over onto the side of the road, at the edge of a property that belonged to no one she knew. She put her head down on the steering wheel and told herself to breathe. It didn’t work. She pushed the seat back as far as it would go and tried to put her head between her knees. That didn’t work, either. She kept thinking of the dark of that night and the whole bunch of them standing in a circle and the blood on the ground and, in the background, like a sound track, Betsy Toliver screaming.
Chris pushed open the door at her side, leaned out over the road, and threw up.
THREE
1
Her name was Grace Feinmann. Bennis found that out and then wrote it down on a three-by-five card along with the five or six other things she thought Gregor should remember while he was away: Tibor’s e-mail address and new cell phone number; the hotel she would be staying at in Los Angeles for all of the coming week; the name of the brand of coffee bags he was supposed to buy in case he was in danger of having to make his own; the title of Elizabeth Toliver’s last book (Conspiracy: The Rise of Paranoia and the Death of Politics).
“She says she met you in Connecticut,” Bennis told him, packing his white shirts into the big suitcase he always took when he was traveling, “that time when Kayla Anson died. She had something to do with the case. But I don’t remember her.”
Gregor didn’t remember her, either. The sight of Bennis packing his shirts was oddly unsettling. It wasn’t the kind of thing Bennis did, and for a moment—obviously, he wasn’t getting enough sleep—he had that gut-twisting reaction that people are supposed to have when they realize they are confronted by a shape-shifter. Maybe he hadn’t moved in with Bennis at all, but with Lida, in a body she had put on the way she put on her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat to go to church in the winter.
“Gregor?” Bennis said.
“I’m here.”
“Barely.”
“Why does she have the harpsichord?”
Bennis pulled the clothing guard down over the shirts and tied it tightly to the suitcase’s side with ribbons. “It’s what she does. Play
s the harpischord, I mean, and the—what. Virginals. That’s something else that looks like a piano. She got a job with the Philadelphia Early Music Ensemble.”
“And she moved in here?”
“She says she saw the ad and thought she remembered the name of the street and that you lived here, so she figured it must be a nice street. Or something. You really ought to ask Tibor and Lida about this. Ask Lida. I think what Tibor mostly did was get her to tell him what books he should read on early Renaissance polyphonic song.”
“I’m surprised there was an ad. I take it that was Russ’s idea.”
“Probably. I don’t know where the ad appeared, though, so don’t jump to conclusions.”
“Is she buying or renting?”
“Oh, renting,” Bennis said. “Donna says she hasn’t got any money. Apparently, you don’t make much playing early instruments. Didn’t I tell you all this before? Whatever. From what Russ is hinting, I think that if they like her and really want her on the street they’ll make some arrangement so that she’ll be able to buy. You know what it’s like around here. Even Howard Kashinian behaves himself when it comes to apartments and town houses. Are you sure you want to take all these suits? It’s practically summer and you’re going to the country.”
“I’m supposed to be working.”
“Sometimes I think you think it’s still 1965 and you can’t get dinner in a good restaurant unless you wear a tie.”
“There aren’t any restaurants where I’m going,” Gregor said. “From what I understand, there isn’t even a place to stay in town.”
Bennis hung his suit bag on the high arm of his silent valet and unzipped it all the way around. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Tibor’s absolutely insisting that we all have to go see Grace play when she plays, so he’s buying season tickets to their shows, the Ensemble’s shows, for when they play here in Philadelphia. They play in a church, but they travel some, so it’s a little confusing. At any rate, Lida’s buying some, too, and so are Donna and Russ, and they’re getting extras. I don’t know how many sets there will be in the end, but—”
“You said you’d buy some for us.”
“It seemed like the least I could do. And I like early music, or at least some of it. I mean, I don’t like chant, but I don’t suppose they can be doing chant, not if they have a harpsichord. Anyway, they don’t even start playing until September. This summer, they’ve got rehearsals and some Renaissance fairs and then they’re going to make a CD, which is why they needed Grace so early. Their old harpsichordist quit. Grace says—”
“Bennis.”
“Right,” Bennis said. She took a deep breath. “I’m acting like an idiot. I always seem to. I’m going to go put on a pot of coffee.”
Gregor thought about saying Bennis again, but didn’t. He watched her leave the bedroom and head down the hall instead, wishing that the hall weren’t so dark. It was a bright day outside, so bright that the bedroom looked as if it were about to become the landing area for the Second Coming. Sunlight streamed in in those hard-edged rays artists used to represent the gaze of God. If he went to the window and looked down to the street, he could see old George Tekemanian sitting under a huge umbrella at a round table his nephew Martin had sent to him from L. L. Bean. Lately, old George had not been looking as well as he might, and Bennis had begun to look formidable, the way women did when they entered middle age with both confidence and resources. It didn’t bother him to think of Bennis reaching middle age, although he doubted she’d look it in quite the same way Lida or Hannah had. He was middle-aged himself, and one of the things that had stopped him for so long from realizing what he felt for her had been the simple fact that he’d thought she was too young for him. His wife—another Elizabeth; he was surrounded by them—had been almost exactly his own age, and they had grown up together, so that by the time they’d been married half a dozen years, they’d no longer really needed to direct whole sentences at each other. He almost went to the drawer where he kept Elizabeth’s picture under his socks. When he’d first moved back to Cavanaugh Street, he couldn’t remember how many years ago now, he’d kept it out where he could see it at all times. Even after he’d finally made himself put it away, he’d taken it out to look at it almost daily. Now he thought it must have been weeks since he’d seen it, and that part of him that had been able to hear her voice all around him when he was alone had apparently died. Things changed. That was reality. It scared him to death.
He got off the bed and went out into the hall himself. He could hear Bennis in the kitchen, banging around, as if she were doing much more than making coffee. Sometimes she washed a few of the dishes, but not often. One of the first changes she’d made in his life when they’d finally begun to be together was to hire the kind of cleaning lady who came in every weekday and did the dishes and laundry as a matter of course. Some changes, he conceded, were good ones. He had found that he truly loved having his things taken care of so thoroughly that he never had to think of them. His wife had done that for him once, but in the years since her death he had gotten used to always missing things. Suit jackets disappeared and then reappeared under the bed. Clean white shirts became balls of sweat and dust in the bathroom hamper. He went through the living room and stopped long enough to look at the street from the wide picture window there. Then he turned around and looked through the pass-through to the kitchen at Bennis doing something unnecessary at the stove.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m not all that happy about our spending a month apart, that’s all. If not longer.”
“It won’t be longer.”
Bennis cocked her head. “Why do you think that? You’re going off to solve a murder that’s thirty years old or more. Why do you think you can get it done in four weeks? I mean, for God’s sake, they had an investigation once, didn’t they? And they didn’t come up with anything. Why do you think you will?’
Gregor went all the way into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. “I don’t think I will. Nobody wants me to solve that murder. I told you that. They only want me—”
“To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Maris Coleman is planting those stories in the tabloid newspapers. I thought you said that wasn’t even a question. I mean, that it was obvious.”
“It’s obvious if you’re looking, yes, but according to Mr. Card, Ms. Toliver refuses to believe it.”
“Well, people get like that, don’t they, about friends?” Bennis said. “And about family. Look at the way I was about Anne Marie, right up to the end. The way I still am about Anne Marie, really. What good does Jimmy think this is going to do?”
Gregor shrugged. “I’d be the same way, if I thought somebody was exploiting you. I was the same way with what’s-her-name—”
“Edith.”
“Edith. Except that in that case you realized it perfectly well and I couldn’t get you to do anything about it. But Mr. Card’s emotions are completely natural. I don’t know if Ms. Toliver will actually believe anything I manage to find, but I can at least find it. She sounded like a nice woman, when I talked to her on the phone. From what I’ve heard of her, she’s the kind of nice woman it’s fairly easy to take advantage of, and Maris Coleman has been taking a lot of advantage. Let’s call it a moral imperative.”
“You’re going to go spend a month in some godforsaken town in north central Pennsylvania because of a moral imperative?”
“Well,” Gregor said judiciously, “there’s always the obvious.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is that it bugs the hell out of me that nobody seems to give a damn that this boy was murdered. And I do mean nobody. Jimmy Card wouldn’t. That doesn’t matter. But even the police officer I talked to in Hollman seemed to think that the dead body was secondary to the question of who locked Elizabeth Toliver into an outhouse stall with a bunch of black snakes, and the tabloids—”
&nbs
p; “You’ve been reading the tabloids?”
“I do, every once in a while.” Gregor looked around. Surely, he had heard Bennis doing something about coffee, but nothing actually seemed to have been done. There was no kettle boiling on the stove. There were no coffee cups set out on the counter next to the sink. “Well, the tabloids give the details—found in a clearing near a small river, his throat cut straight across; weapon never discovered; motive never discovered—but they treat him like a cartoon—”
“They treat everybody like a cartoon, Gregor. I’ve been in them.”
“I know. My point is that they don’t report the story as if it were the story of a murder. The murder is secondary to Elizabeth Toliver. Or maybe I should say secondary to Jimmy Card’s girlfriend. It’s the oddest thing. It’s not that it’s hard to get information. I can get all the information I want. It’s that nobody can seem to understand why I’d want it.”
“Well,” Bennis said, “maybe it’s like Lizzie Borden. You know, maybe everybody in town already knows who killed him, and they’ve got some kind of tacit agreement going not to do anything about it—”
“About an eighteen-year-old boy getting his throat slit from ear to ear during the summer after his high school graduation?”