Somebody Else's Music

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor was just turning to watch the robot-driver take his suitcases out of the trunk—ever since Bennis had bought him luggage, he looked like a software billionaire when he traveled, or maybe like Steven Spielberg—when there were sounds from the back of the house, and then the clear tap and crack of hard heels on a stone surface. A moment later, a small woman came into view from the backyard. She was small in every way, not only short but very slight, with a fine-boned, high-cheekboned face with edges so sharp they looked as if they’d been drawn with a fountain pen. Gregor recognized her by her eyes, and her hair. Her eyes were enormous. Her hair had that overpuffed look it got when the people it belonged to were interviewed too often on television.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” Gregor said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, running her right hand through her hair and making it puff all the higher. Then she walked up to him and stuck out her hand. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to sound as if—oh, I don’t know. It’s Gregor Demarkian, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Liz Toliver. And I really am sorry. I know I’m saying it over and over again. I’m not making any sense. But if that nurse quits, we’re all up shit creek without a paddle, and the fool woman is totally losing it. I mean, for God’s sake—”

  “She’s changed her mind,” a tall man called, coming around the house from the same direction Liz Toliver had. A moment later, Gregor saw that it wasn’t a man at all, but a boy, and a fairly young boy—no more than fourteen, he was sure, in spite of the height and the stubble of a beard just beginning to grow at the edges of his jaw. Still, Gregor thought, it would take another man not to be fooled. He’d bet anything that that boy got away with telling girls he was at least seventeen.

  The boy came up to them and stopped. “She’s changed her mind,” he said again. “She’s calmed down and she’s going to stay, which is a good thing because Grandma is not going to be calmed down until that sedative kicks in. You’re Mr. Demarkian, aren’t you? Cool.”

  “How do you do?” Gregor said.

  The boy had grabbed his hand and started pumping it. “I’m Mark DeAvecca. Liz is my mother. Jay DeAvecca was my father. He was—”

  “Mark.”

  “Well, whatever. It’s complicated to figure out. I’ve got this whole monologue I use on new people from school. You know how conventional people are. Any sign of the cops?”

  “You called the police?” Gregor said.

  “We had to,” Liz Toliver said.

  “Come on back and I’ll show you,” Mark DeAvecca said. “It’s in the garage. It’s a detached garage. That’s why we didn’t hear. But it couldn’t have been too long ago. I mean, it was still bleeding when Mrs. Vernon saw it—”

  “Who’s Mrs. Vernon?” Gregor said.

  “Grandma’s nurse,” Mark said.

  “And you only know she said it was bleeding,” Liz Toliver said. “Considering the way she was behaving, God only knows what she actually saw—”

  “I saw it bleeding,” Mark said confidently. “Not much and not for very long, but the blood was definitely liquid. I was the first one out there after Mrs. Vernon had her fit, and it was oozing—”

  “Mark.”

  “She’s got that sound programmed on a chip inside her skull,” Mark said. “She doesn’t have to make any effort to say it anymore. It just comes out automatically, every time I—”

  “Mark,” Liz Toliver said, more calmly, but not much more. “If you don’t start behaving like a human being—”

  “I am behaving like a human being,” Mark said. “I am behaving like a very upset and frightened human being, and also like a very angry human being, because I told you so, I told you that this was a bad idea. And it’s a good damned thing—don’t you dare tell me not to say ‘damn’—it’s a good damned thing that Geoff didn’t see it, because if he had he’d be up with nightmares for weeks.”

  “Wait,” Liz said. “Geoff—”

  “I’ve got the garage barricaded off. I didn’t want to touch anything, so I piled up a bunch of stuff at the end of the drive so he can’t get over it. And as soon as the police get here, I’m going to call Jimmy and tell him about this whole thing, and after that I hope you’re going to listen to reason, because this is fucking stupid. And don’t you dare tell me not to say ‘fuck.’”

  “What?” Liz said. “We’re in some kind of crisis so it doesn’t matter what you say? I don’t get that. Since when—”

  Mark turned his head to Gregor. “You want to come out back and see before the police get here? It’s really lovely. There’s blood all over everything. We’re never going to get it out of the cement floor. If the real estate agents know about it, we’re never going to sell the place. It’s unbelievable.”

  “All right,” Liz said. “It’s unbelievable. I’ll give you that.”

  Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of a police siren. Gregor wondered if Liz and Mark had been as incoherent with the police as they had been with him, or if they’d sounded this panicked. That would be enough to bring a siren. Of course, so would boredom, cops with nothing else to do in a small town on a Monday night. He cocked his head at Mark.

  “What is it?” he asked. “I take it nobody is dead.”

  “Not somebody,” Mark said. “Some thing.”

  “It hardly seems right to call it a thing,” Liz said.

  “A dog,” Mark said. “Grandma’s dog. She’s had it forever. That’s one of the things we were supposed to do up here this vacation. Find someplace to put the dog. Except the dog looks as decrepit as Grandma. Although that could just be me. I can’t really tell you how good my perceptions are in a situation like this, because I’ve never been in a situation like this, and I never intend to be in one again. If we can’t talk my mother into packing up and going back to New York, I may just tie her up and throw her in the trunk and take her back myself.”

  “You can’t drive,” Liz said.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Mark said.

  The sirens were much closer now. It was, Gregor was sure, only a single police car, but he had the noise on as high and fast as it would go.

  “So,” Gregor said. “There’s a dead dog on the floor of your garage. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the whole story.”

  “It’s not just dead,” Mark said flatly. “It’s been killed. It’s been eviscerated, to be exact. Slit right down the stomach with something sharp and the guts are all the hell over the garage floor, intestines that look like intestines, everywhere—”

  “Mark.”

  “That’s the cops,” Mark said as a white and blue car pulled into the drive, “and what I just told Mr. Demarkian here is the truth and you goddamned know it. Somebody slit that dog open while it was still alive and dumped its guts all over our garage floor and that didn’t happen by accident, Ma, that happened on purpose, and you know it as well as I do. And I am going to call Jimmy, I really am, because if you can’t get your act together, somebody has to. I want to leave. I want to leave tomorrow morning. Let’s take Grandma and the goddamned nurse with us if we have to, but let’s go. Somebody who did that to a dog could do that to Geoff. Got it?” He swung around to Gregor again. “You know how I know it was alive? Because it was alive when I saw it. It was in pain but it was conscious and it made eye contact with me and you know I’m not making that up, either. Jesus Christ. I’m going to go talk to the cops.”

  “Cop,” Liz said automatically, because only one man had gotten out of the blue and white car. “It’s incredible, the kind of language they learn in very expensive private schools.”

  Gregor looked up the drive. The garage was a small detached building at the very end of it—maybe at the very end of the property—that had been built to hold three cars, in a style meant to match that of the house. At the moment, there was a huge pile of debris in front of the doors, which were the kind that opened out, like barn doors, rather than the kind that folded up. Behind the gar
age, there were trees, tall pines that lined the property like a gate.

  “What’s back there?” Gregor asked. “Behind those trees, I mean?”

  “More trees,” Liz said. “I don’t know. I never was one for going outdoors when I was a child. Do you think the person came from there, from the trees?”

  “I don’t know. I was really wondering if there was another house back there, but that we couldn’t see it except for the trees.”

  “I don’t think so,” Liz said. “But you’re asking the wrong person. This is the first time I’ve been back in decades.”

  “I know.”

  The cop had finished talking to Mark, or Mark had finished talking to the cop. They were both walking down the driveway toward Gregor and Liz, and Gregor suddenly realized that the warm breeze had come back, or that his awareness of it had. For the first time, he was fully cognizant of just how isolated this house was. This was not a subdivision, or a suburban street. It was a country road, with not too much of anything else on it except this house. The nearest neighbor was a good trek away. The way things sounded around them, the entire landscape might be uninhabited. Gregor did a 360-degree turn, checking things out. It was still light. There were still birds.

  Mark and the cop came up to them and stopped. The cop stuck his hand out and grabbed Gregor’s. “I’m Kyle Borden,” he said, shaking vigorously. “You must be the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

  FOUR

  1

  Peggy Smith Kennedy knew her old friends didn’t take her seriously anymore. She was kept as carefully out of things as the unpopular people had been when they were all back in high school, and sometimes, these days, some of the unpopular people were let in. It was worse than it seemed, because Peggy knew she wasn’t just shut out. It was more like she had ceased to exist. Belinda and Emma and Nancy and Chris had whole conversations around her that they wouldn’t explain. If she tried to ask questions, they acted as if she weren’t there. They even talked right over her sentences. She could have been a television set, white noise for the background, or a dog, except that they would have petted a dog. They would have made a positive fuss about a cat. She still went to lunch with them because she couldn’t imagine not doing it—she’d been going to lunch with them at least once a week since she was twelve years old—but more and more she felt as if they wouldn’t miss her if she were gone.

  Now she went into the master bedroom of her small house and looked at Stu asleep on the bed. As always, he slept above the covers and in nothing but his underwear. The underwear was stained yellow in a little line at the back. When they were first married, she had tried to insist that he change every day, for the sake of hygiene, and he had often agreed. That was back when there were still times when he acted as if it mattered what she thought of him. He would change clothes, or try to go three or four days without a beer, or bring her flowers after one of their fights. She found it hard to credit, after all this time, that one of the reasons she had been so eager to marry him was that she had been so sure he would worship her for the rest of his life. After all, she was the one who had been popular in high school, when he had been negligible, if that. He hadn’t even played a sport, and he certainly hadn’t had the kind of cachet boys like Lowell Tomlin and Chet Jabonowitz had, when they finished up senior year clutching their early acceptances to Caltech and MIT. Now, he had even less cachet than he had ever had. The drugs had kept him from getting fat—he was always telling her that if she wanted to keep her weight down, she should get more familiar with cocaine—but his skin sagged horribly all over his body. His stomach hung down like an apron, the way the stomachs of very thin women do right after they’ve given birth. His face looked pitted and marred. Once, coming up behind him while he was standing at the counter at English Drugs, she had caught sight of his face in the overhead mirror. He had looked like one of the pictures on the FBI’s most wanted poster at the post office. He had looked like Johnny Cash. His face was scarred the way the faces of men in prison were, even though he had never been in prison. He’d never even been arrested except once or twice for drunk driving, and those were the worst times of all. He felt caged up when he couldn’t drive. He ended up rampaging through the house, and breaking things. Once, when he’d lost his license for six straight weeks after having been caught doing ninety-five on Clapboard Ridge at two o’clock in the morning, he’d gone at the walls of their little basement recreation room with a ball peen hammer and his fists, smashing away until he’d reduced all the drywall to dust and slivers. Then he’d smashed the picture tube of the little television set they kept on top of a small wheeled table so that Stu could watch wrestling when Peggy was asleep. Neither one of them had ever gone back into the recreation room again. Peggy had unplugged the television set, because she was worried it might cause a fire. Stu had moved his base of operations to the living room, where he spent most afternoons and evenings sprawled out along their battered couch, dressed or not, as the fancy took him. Even if he hadn’t reacted the way he did when Peggy brought people home, she still wouldn’t have been able to entertain. She never knew when he’d be there in his underwear and when he’d be there in a pair of jeans. She did know that he’d be hostile. He’d been hostile for years, especially to the girls they had both known when they were growing up. When Nancy Quayde was made principal of the high school, he had cut her picture out of the Hollman Home News and urinated on it.

  Peggy made sure, one last time, that Stu was asleep and likely to stay asleep. Then she walked down the short hall to their tiny living room, filthy and dark. There was enough dirt on the carpet to plant in. If she ran her finger across the top of the mantel, she would find not only dust but grime, slick as kitchen grease, half an inch thick.

  She went out the other end of the living room, into the dining room, where they never ate. She went into the kitchen and felt a little better. It was much cleaner here, because Stu never came into the kitchen except to get beer from the refrigerator, and he never did even that if she was at home to get it for him. When he was watching wrestling and getting coked up, she could come in here and get rid of her nervousness by scrubbing everything down. She only wished they could do something about the inevitable wear and tear. There were at least two holes in the linoleum floor, both deep enough so that she could see the plywood underneath. Two-thirds of the cabinets had lost their door handles. She went to the refrigerator and got out the little brown bag she’d packed with a Swiss cheese sandwich and a tangerine. She always took a brown bag lunch to school, even when she was eating out, so that Stu would think she wasn’t wasting money on what he considered inessentials—although he did less of that now than he had. He bought his stuff once a week, right after she cashed her paycheck, and from that point on it was just a matter of staying out of his way until he got high enough.

  Peggy went to the back door and looked out. Nancy Quayde picked her up every morning—Stu absolutely refused to let Peggy have a car, or to drive his unless he was in it, too—but she wouldn’t come to the door and knock. She wouldn’t even beep her horn. If Peggy wanted the ride, she had to be ready and waiting. Peggy let herself out onto the back porch. She was early. She just wished she knew what she should do about her anger, which had been spilling up inside her since she left Emma’s place last evening and come to full fruition while she’d been getting dressed for school. It was one thing to treat her like something less than a human being. It was another to treat her as if she were stupid. There were times these days when they all got her so mad, Peggy thought her head was going to split open. Whenever she thought that, she had a vision of it lying on the sidewalk smashed to pieces, like a dropped watermelon.

  There was the sound of a car in the street and then Nancy Quayde’s four-door Saab came rolling into Peggy’s driveway, but not very far in. Nancy liked to make quick getaways, especially from here. Peggy tried the door behind her to make sure it was locked. Then she walked down the drive to where Nancy was waiting. She really hated that damned S
aab. It was so stuck-up and pretentious. Nancy no more needed a four-door car than she needed a pogo stick. She’d only bought this one to let everyone know that she made more money than they did. If she ever got the superintendent’s job, she’d probably go out and buy a Mercedes.

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” Nancy said, backing out without waiting to make sure Peggy had her seat belt on.

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” Peggy said. “Gregor Demarkian was in Emma’s store last night. I saw him.”

  The car slid backward into the street. At this time of the morning, there was no real worry about traffic. Nancy looked her over. “How did you know that?” she said.

  “Because I saw him,” Peggy repeated. “I tried to tell Emma who he was, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I’m getting damned sick and tired of the bunch of you treating me as if I’d had all my brain cells removed by laser surgery. I knew who he was as soon as I saw him. He’s been in People. Emma didn’t have a clue.”

  “Well,” Nancy said. Then she fluttered her hands in the air. “Why didn’t you tell anybody else? Or was Stu refusing to let you make phone calls last night?”

  Peggy let that one pass. “It wouldn’t have been much use telling anybody else, would it? You’d all have just acted like Emma. What was the point?”

  “Do you happen to know what he’s doing here?”

  “I’d expect he was doing something with Betsy Toliver. About Betsy Toliver. About Michael Houseman. That’s the only murder mystery we’ve got around here, isn’t it?”

  The car was going forward again. Nancy leaned over the steering wheel and frowned. “He’s staying out at Betsy’s mother’s place. Nobody knows for how long. Apparently, she asked him to stay with her.”