by Jane Haddam
“What?”
“Covered with blood,” Kyle said. “And then it started to get crazy, because people were screaming, Betsy was screaming, there was thunder. Maris said in her interview at the time that if it hadn’t been raining so hard they would still have it all over them, over their arms, over their legs. The rain washed it off. And Belinda was there, on her knees, laughing her head off and screaming, and Peggy Smith was screaming, too, and they were all screaming, ‘slit his throat, slit his throat.’”
“Jesus,” Gregor said.
“I told you it was weird,” Kyle said.
Gregor walked up and down by the side of the river. They were not very far from the little beach. Gregor guessed they weren’t even a full tenth of a mile. The trees around him were tall and straight, so tall they blocked off some of the light from the sun. It was a dark and quiet place.
“And that was it?” he said finally. “Nobody was ever charged with this crime? Even though a whole group of girls was found with the body and they were covered with blood, literally or metaphorically, nobody was ever charged with this crime?”
“There was nobody to charge,” Kyle said. “They were all together most of the time. When would any of them have had the time to do it? And there was no murder weapon. The police searched the park. They brought in state police. They tore this place up. There was no sign of it. And it wasn’t on the girls, trust me. They kept the girls in the town jail overnight until they could get a matron in to search them. This town went crazy over the next couple of weeks, but nobody ever figured out what happened, and nobody ever got arrested for killing Michael Houseman.”
“Crap,” Gregor said.
He walked back and forth along the river, counting steps, thinking hard. It wasn’t the alibis that were the problem. With people wandering around in the dark like that, it was foolish to believe they all had their eyes on each other all the time.
The problem was going to be the weapon.
SIX
1
For Liz Toliver, the oddest thing about being back in Hollman wasn’t being back in Hollman, or even that damned dog—although she had dreamed about the dog, as well as the snakes, and had ended up taking a call from Jimmy at three o’clock in the morning—but the fact that she was completely without a schedule. All that morning during breakfast, she’d kept looking up, expecting Debra to call to tell her what was on her book for the day. Then she’d had to walk around the kitchen a few times, feeling dizzy, because there was nothing at all on her book for the day, or for the day after, or for the day after that. On Friday, she had a phone interview with a woman writing an article for the Vassar Quarterly, and strewn in and out of the next two weeks she had appointments with her mother’s lawyers and doctors and acupuncturist. The appointments were all fluid. She could cancel any of them she wanted to cancel, at will. She could write or not write. She had cleared her deadline schedule to keep the month free. Even the one idea she’d been able to come up with—somebody ought to do a skeptical update on New Age medicine—fell flat. She didn’t much approve of New Age medicine, and she certainly didn’t believe it worked, but lots of people took comfort in it, and there didn’t seem to be much harm as long as they didn’t ditch their insulin and chemotherapy.
“I think I’m going to go insane,” she had told Debra, right after breakfast, when she’d checked in to the office. “I know I don’t need to call you, but I had to hear a businesslike voice.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You know what I mean. I’m dropping my mother and her nurse off at the physical therapist’s. Then I’m meeting Maris for lunch. Then I’m picking my mother up and taking her to her gynecologist’s. Anyway, that’s my day. How do people retire?”
“Have you told Maris yet that we’re firing her?”
“I haven’t even seen her.”
“You’re seeing her at lunch. Tell her. I’m serious, Liz. If you don’t tell her, I will, and you don’t want the news coming from me.”
“I know. I know. It’s okay. It’s just—well, never mind. I’m not in a very good mood this morning. You’re sure there aren’t any urgent telephone calls?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Right.”
Now, pulling into the parking lot at the Sycamore, it hit her: she hadn’t told Debra about the dog, and Debra hadn’t asked, which meant Debra didn’t know. She shut down the engine and looked at Geoff through the rearview mirror, safely strapped into a backseat.
“You ready?”
“I want to go to McDonald’s.”
“There isn’t a McDonald’s in Hollman, as far as I know. This is where we used to go out for hamburgers when I was a kid. I’ll buy you an ice cream soda.”
“Can we sit at a different table from Maris?”
Liz made a face at herself in the mirror and got out to get Geoff out. The Sycamore looked the way it had always looked: a low, white building surrounded by trees, with a wide window on one side that had been built for the days when there had been “car service.” She couldn’t imagine that whoever owned the Sycamore now still sent girls racing out to cars with trays of food that could be hooked to a rolled-down window. The street—still Grandview Avenue—curved around the edge of the Sycamore’s lot. Across the curve to the front was a small grocery store. Across the curve to the side was something that called itself the Hollman Adult Theater. Liz blinked.
“What’s the matter?” Geoff said.
“Oh, nothing. I was just surprised at how some things have changed since the last time I was here.”
She locked up. Then she took Geoff by the hand and took him in through the Sycamore’s front door. It was more like a house than a restaurant.
Inside, in the dim cool put together from shaded windows and ceiling fans, Liz looked up and down among the tables and the booths, fully expecting to find no sign of Maris. Maris was always late. Maris turned out to be taking up the big booth in the back corner, and for just a second, looking at her, Liz went cold. She remembered all about that corner booth. By the time they’d all been seniors, it had been an unspoken but vigorously enforced social law: nobody sat in that corner booth but Maris and Emma and the girls they were friends with. Students who came in to the Sycamore when it was packed to the gills refused to sit in that booth if it was empty. Students who broke the law found their lives uncomfortable for weeks to come, especially if they were girls. Even the greaser boys didn’t take that booth, and they did everything they were supposed not to do.
“Crap,” Liz said, under her breath.
“You should say ‘carp,’” Geoff said automatically. Liz tugged him along to the back. The Sycamore was probably the one thing almost everybody who had gone to Hollman High School since 1950 had a memory of, but Liz’s memory of it was faint. She’d only been in it half a dozen times. When she was in high school, coming here had been like volunteering for abuse. No matter what Jimmy thought, she didn’t volunteer for abuse.
“Don’t you think this booth is a little big for the three of us?” she asked Maris as she slid Geoff in between them. “Or are you ambushing me with a bunch of people I have no intention of talking to?”
“It was just force of habit,” Maris said. She looked around the big room, at the empty tables and booths, at the empty stools at the fountain counter. “Nobody is in here anyway. It won’t matter. This place doesn’t start to get crowded until after school.”
“Is school still in session?”
“Until June fifteenth.”
“God, I don’t remember going that late. Did we? Sometimes it seems like the whole school year changed sometime while I was in graduate school. Do they start in August here, now? I think I would have killed somebody if I’d had to go back to school before Labor Day.”
The waitress came up, with her pad and a Bic pen, a tired-looking fortyish woman with deep lines on either side of her mouth and streaks of gray in her hair. Liz ordered Geoff a vanilla ice cream soda and a plate of french fries. She orde
red herself a salad and a Diet Coke. Around the corner on the other side of the booth, Maris ordered a club sandwich and a regular Coke. She only ordered regular Coke when she was spiking her drinks. Diet Coke tasted awful when you combined it with gin.
“Well,” Liz said. “Here we are. I don’t know why, but here we are.”
“It seemed like a place to go. And it’s quiet this time of day. I don’t understand what you’re all worked up about, Betsy. Nobody is locking you in the utility closet these days.”
“I’m not worked up. I’m just—I don’t know. Maybe Jimmy was right. Maybe I should have sent the lawyers. And there was the dog.”
“Just kids thinking they’re cute,” Maris said. She had that deep, contemplative look in her eyes that said she’d been drinking, seriously, for hours. When Maris got drunk, she did not get sloppy, or slurred, or uncoordinated. She got serious, so serious she seemed to be looking into a crystal ball where she could see all the secrets of time—until it got to be too much, and she threw up. She shifted on the booth’s seat. “Chris is putting together a cocktail party for you, out by the golf course. Or maybe it’s a lunch. I don’t remember. She’s going to call you this afternoon.”
“I won’t be home this afternoon.”
“Be reasonable,” Maris said. “You know, you just might be wrong. People are impressed with what you’ve done with your life. They really are. They just want to get a chance to catch up with you again—”
“About what? Maris, for God’s sake, what’s the point? It would be one thing if we’d all been friends, but the last real memory I have of Belinda Hart is from when she backed me up against the sinks in the west wing girls’ room and told me that I was nothing but a worm who made everybody I talked to sick. Why don’t we all just let it be? They do what they do. I take care of my mother. You have a vacation and come in here to eat twice a day. Then you and I go back to New York and back to work and—”
“You can’t let Debra fire me,” Maris said.
“What?”
The waitress was back, with the food. Liz looked up as she put down the plates one by one, her face impassive and marred, her body stiff. Geoff looked impressed with the ice cream soda, which came in one of those tall old-fashioned glasses that looked like a champagne flute on steroids.
“Cool,” Geoff said.
The waitress disappeared. Maris put her purse on the table, opened it up, and took out a Chanel Number 5 bottle, a big one, the kind that people gave their mothers for Christmas presents. She took a long suck on the straw that was stuck into her Coke. Then she uncorked the Chanel bottle and dumped about a quarter of the liquid in it into her glass.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” Liz said.
“Don’t worry,” Maris said. “I’m not drinking perfume. I cleaned the bottle very thoroughly ages ago.”
“I know what’s in the bottle. I can’t believe you did that. What are you trying to do to yourself?”
Maris put the Chanel bottle back in her purse. “You can’t let Debra fire me,” she said again. She was very calm. Liz thought she might even be depressed—except that with Maris, it was hard to tell. “If Debra fires me, I’ll have absolutely no place to go, and you know it. I was fired from my last three jobs before this one. It’s like a curse. Image is everything.”
“Image?”
“After a while, you start getting fired for things nobody else would ever get fired for. It’s like getting a reputation when you’re in high school. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lily-white virgin. Once you’ve got the reputation, you’ll get blamed for everything. If you let Debra fire me, I’ll kill myself. I’m not bluffing. I’ve got two months of prescription tranquilizers saved and I always carry them with me. I’ll down them all with straight gin and do it right in your own living room, here or in Connecticut, or I’ll do it in the office in New York.”
Liz looked swiftly at Geoff, who did not seem to be paying attention. “Maris, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
“I’ll do it where the papers will be sure to connect it to you. I’ll send my suicide note to Matt Drudge. I’ll go out with a bang. Just watch me.”
“Maris,” Liz said again. “What do you think you’re doing?”
What Maris was doing was almost finishing her Coke, and getting the Chanel bottle out, and spiking it some more. By now, Liz thought, it had to be not much more than caramel-colored gin. She had never seen Maris drink with this much determination, or subterfuge. It was always at parties, or in real restaurants with wine lists, so that—until just this second—it had seemed to Liz that the stories of Maris’s drinking were mostly exaggerated. She drank at home. She drank when she went out to eat. People did that. It was only the getting sick that was really a problem.
Maris sucked up gin and Coke through her straw. She had begun to sweat. A thin line of beaded wet snaked across her forehead just above her eyebrows. Her fair hair glinted and darkened in the uncertain light coming through the window above the booth. The polish on her nails was much too red. For just a single, surreal moment, Liz didn’t recognize her. She was not the girl Liz had seen for the first time in kindergarten and watched, with envy and frustration, for sixteen years afterward. She was not the girl who had always been everything Liz had ever wanted to be, the girl who had achieved what Liz only fell short of, the girl who really was what Liz only fooled people into thinking she was. She was just a middle-aged woman with a drinking problem and a chip on her shoulder, too expensively dressed, too out of shape, and too drunk—at noon—to think straight about what she was doing.
The air around them seemed to warp and snap. The fans whirred above their heads. Maris put her mouth around the straw and sucked down everything in her glass except the ice.
“You can’t let Debra fire me,” she said for the third time. “It would put an end to me. It would be everywhere. In all the papers. I wouldn’t even be able to come back to Hollman. Do you think it’s easy, even the way it is, coming back here when you’re Queen of the goddamned May and I’m, what, your secretary?”
Geoff was paying attention now. He’d gone absolutely still, the way children did when they wanted to listen to the conversations of adults and not be noticed doing it. The surreal moment was over. Maris looked like—Maris. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” Liz said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to all this.”
“Say you won’t let Debra fire me.”
“I would never let Debra fire you,” Liz said carefully.
Maris shot her a quick, calculating, amused look. “My, my. Aren’t we being Jesuitical this afternoon.” She zipped her bag shut and slid out of the booth, into the narrow aisle between it and the first row of freestanding tables. “I’m going to go. I had to walk down here from Belinda’s place. You know as well as I do that I don’t drive if I don’t have to. I’ve got a long walk back up the hill.”
“I’ll drop you off,” Liz said.
“Don’t bother. Pay for lunch. You’ve got the money. And cheer up. Today, you achieved a lifelong ambition. You got to sit in the corner booth.”
Maris turned her back to them and walked off. She was not weaving. Liz watched her go all the way to the door and out of it. Less than a minute later, she came into view through the window, crossing the parking lot toward the sidewalk that edged Grandview Avenue. It was a long walk to Belinda’s, at least half a mile, but maybe that would help.
“Mom?” Geoff said.
“What?” Liz wasn’t really listening. She hadn’t eaten any of her salad. She didn’t want to. She was feeling a little sick to her stomach herself. It hit her, suddenly, that she truly hated this place: the Sycamore, the corner booth, the tables where little knots of girls had sat in triumphant exclusivity from which she had once been systematically and brutally shut out. Geoff was right. They should have gone to McDonald’s, even if it meant getting into the car and driving back out to the Interstate to do it. If there was one thing she had earned, in thirty years of a very eventf
ul life, it was the right not to be here, now, or ever to be here again. The waitress had left the check on the table. Liz picked it up.
“Tell you what,” she said. “You haven’t eaten a single french fry. Why don’t we get out of here and drive out to McDonald’s and get you a Happy Meal? We could pick Mark up that chicken sandwich thing he likes and bring it back.”
“I only drank half my ice cream soda,” Geoff said solemnly. “Are you going to let me ask you something?”
“Ask away.” Liz got out her wallet.
“If Debra fires Maris, does that mean we don’t have to see Maris anymore?”
Liz took out two ten-dollar bills. Lunch came to only $13.95. She put the bills down on the table and put the check upside down on top of them.
“Debra can’t fire Maris,” she said slowly. “Only I can fire Maris. And I wouldn’t fire Maris. She’s not as lucky as we are. She needs a job just to have food to eat and a place to live.”
“She could get a job with somebody else.”
“What may happen is that Maris may stop working in the office with Debra and start doing some things just for me. She’d come out to Connecticut when she needed to or I’d meet her at her apartment.”
“She shouldn’t come out to Connecticut,” Geoff said quickly. “I hate it when she comes out to Connecticut. She makes up new rules for everybody and she’s always mad at us.”
“Well,” Liz said lamely, “she’s not used to children. She doesn’t realize they make a lot of noise.”
She ushered Geoff down the long aisle and out the door they’d come in through. In the parking lot, the sun was brighter and the leaves on the trees were heavier than she remembered them having been when they’d arrived. She unlocked the doors to the Mercedes and got Geoff belted in the backseat. She stepped back and looked around her. If you went around the curve and to the left, instead of going back up Grandview Avenue, there was a school called Grassy Plains, a red brick one, just the same as the one called Center School where she had gone to kindergarten, first, and second grades. It was surely closed now, just like Center, since all those grades had been moved to the new complex out at Plumtrees. If you stayed on the curve and veered to the right, there was the house where a girl named Debbie had lived with her mother. She was the only single child Liz had known in those years, and the only one with a single mother, but not the only one who lived in an apartment instead of having a whole house.