by Jane Haddam
“We are home,” Liz said reasonably. “Except for Maris, of course, and she’s passed out on the couch in the living room. My mother is asleep. The night nurse is with her. Geoff is asleep, too, but Mark’s in with him reading something or the other. Jimmy’s taking a shower.”
“It might be best if you got him out of here,” Gregor said. “It might be best if you got yourself out of here, too, and your mother, as soon as you can manage it. There’s no way to cordon off this house. When the press hits, you’re going to be overrun and there isn’t going to be much you can do about it.”
“I know.” Liz got up. “I’m going to make myself some tea. Do you want some?”
“No, thank you.”
“Coffee? Wine? Maris has a Chanel No. 5 bottle full of Gordon’s gin, if you want me to make you something stronger. One thing you have to say about Maris. She never stoops to cheap liquor.”
“She’s also a disaster waiting to happen. Mr. Card is probably right about her feeding stories to the tabloids. I’m sure you already know that.”
“Oh, absolutely. She’s probably getting paid for it, too. It would explain how she could afford to buy some of the things she does. Steuben glass. All those Ann Taylor dresses. Unless she’s running up her credit cards again. Which she probably is.”
Gregor cocked his head. “Doesn’t any of this bother you? You must know she doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Why do you put up with her?”
Liz opened the refrigerator door and got out a large glass tray. When she put it down on the table, Gregor saw that it was piled with sandwiches, some ham and cheese, some turkey and Swiss, some tuna fish. The kettle went off on the stove and she took it and poured water into the cup she’d left at her place.
“I’ve tried to explain it to Jimmy,” she said as she put the kettle back and sat down, “and I’ve tried to explain it to Mark, and I think maybe it’s a girl thing. Or maybe it’s just that I ran into Maris for the first time in years just after Jay had died.”
“Jay was your husband?”
“Exactly. Anyway, I don’t know if I can explain it. It’s just that, I can remember her, Maris, our first day of school, ever. Kindergarten, Center School, 1956. I remember sitting at this table in the middle of all these other children I didn’t know, and Maris walked through the door with her mother and she was—perfect. I don’t think I’d had a definition of perfect before then. She was so perfect I wanted to cry, and the more I watched her, the more perfect she got. She was beautiful and smart and—golden. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes sense that you felt that way. It makes sense that there are children like that. I don’t see how it explains the present situation.”
“Yes, well.” The sandwiches on the tray were cut into triangular quarters. Liz picked up a triangle of tuna fish on whole wheat and looked it over. “She was like that all through school. Oh, there were other girls who were prettier, really. Belinda Hart was phenomenal when she was young, all huge china-blue eyes and blond hair. But Maris, you see, Maris was smart as well as pretty. Very smart. She could do anything. She was salutatorian of our class. She was president of half a dozen clubs, and not just social nonsense, either. She was a championship debater.”
“But you must have been a good student, too,” Gregor pointed out.
Liz shook her head. “Not really. For one thing, I was too recalcitrant and contrary. One year they gave us an assignment to write an essay to submit to the Veterans of Foreign Wars for their Memorial Day essay contest. The winner got to read his essay in front of the whole town at the end of the Memorial Day parade. I wrote an essay about how evil war was and how we should never allow the government to draft anybody. If it had been a couple of years later, I might have gotten away with it, but it was 1965.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yes, exactly. Anyway, I was always getting myself into that kind of trouble, so my grades were up and down. And my class rank was mediocre. I squeaked into the National Honor Society at the very bottom of the list.”
“But Vassar took you,” Gregor said.
Liz smiled. “I aced my boards—perfect scores on both aptitude tests and all three achievements. And I got a National Merit scholarship. I actually made the Philadelphia papers for it. So Vassar took me. They were, by the way, the only one. I got turned down at everything from Yale to Tufts. If Vassar hadn’t come through, I’d be waiting tables at JayMar’s right this minute.”
“Somehow, I doubt it.”
“I don’t,” Liz said. “The thing is, I’ve always been like that. My record at Vassar wasn’t all that good, either. I got into graduate school on the strength of my Graduate Record Exam and some recommendations. I wasn’t ever like Maris. I didn’t shine, you know. I wasn’t brilliant. I didn’t—earn any of it.”
“What?”
“I didn’t earn any of it,” Liz said. “If you’re going to tell me I’m crazy, don’t bother. Jimmy’s already done it and so has Mark. But it’s true. Everything that happened, you know, CNN and Columbia and the doctorate, I didn’t earn any of it. They just sort of happened. I can think of a dozen people who are better than I was at all these things who just didn’t make it, and there’s no sensible reason for why. It’s all chance and circumstance and sheer dumb luck. Like Jay getting some weird cancer that nobody had ever heard of and dying at forty-four. Like Maris, really. Chance and circumstance.”
“You know,” Gregor said slowly, “that’s a very dangerous attitude for somebody in your position to have.”
“Is it?”
“I’d say so, yes. You leave yourself open to a lot of nastiness that way, and you aren’t in a position to protect yourself.”
“I don’t see that I have anybody to protect myself from.”
“Don’t you?’
Liz waved a hand in the air. “Oh, Maris. All right. Maris. But none of you understand. She really doesn’t mean any harm by it. She’s just upset, and depressed, and ashamed, I suppose, and so she lashes out at me because I’m convenient. I don’t understand why it is that people can’t see that she’s in so much pain. It’s like watching a child who’s been run over by a truck and is taking a very long time to die. That’s an image, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s a faulty analogy. From what I saw, Maris Coleman isn’t a child, and she hasn’t been run over by a truck. She’s a middle-aged alcoholic with a mean streak.”
“I know. But she’s still a child who’s been run over by a truck, and if the world were a just and honorable place, she’d be the one in this position and I’d be the one in hers. I don’t know why things don’t work out the way they’re supposed to. I just know they don’t.”
“And if things had worked out the way they were supposed to,” Gregor said, “what would have happened to you?”
“I’d still be an editorial assistant at Simon and Schuster.” Liz laughed. “Except I wouldn’t be. I was a terrible editorial assistant. I was disorganized. I was stubborn. I was a mess. Listen, I think that’s Jimmy getting out of the shower. I’m going to go check on him. Get yourself whatever you want. Finish the sandwiches. Rummage through the refrigerator. You must be starving.”
“I’m all right,” Gregor said.
Liz stood up. “And don’t worry about Maris,” she told him. “Maris is not somebody you have to worry about. She’s helpless, really. And harmless, in spite of all that nonsense with the tabloids. I’m just trying to make sure she doesn’t disintegrate completely.”
Gregor thought about saying that it wasn’t Maris Coleman’s disintegration he was worried about, but he didn’t. A moment later, Liz Toliver was gone, her footsteps almost inaudible on the back hall carpet. Gregor picked up a triangle of ham and Swiss on rye and wished, for the hundredth time since he’d arrived in Hollman, that he had Bennis with him to hold his hand. In some ways, he was even beginning to wish he’d never left Cavanaugh Street. He looked at the ham and Swiss and thought about Chris Inglerod’s body lying out on the lawn with the i
ntestines strung out on the grass like ribbons. He put the sandwich back on the tray and stood up.
He would go down to his room and get ready for bed, and then he would call Bennis again to see if she would talk to him until he could go to sleep.
TWO
1
The news got through, even though it wasn’t supposed to. Coming downstairs to open the shop, Emma couldn’t even remember who’d told her, although there had been enough phoning back and forth during the night, and enough getting up one last time to turn the television on and see if there was just a little more news. Emma had even called the girls, late, to make sure they were all right. It made her cold to think of what went on in the world. She was sure it had not been that way when she was growing up, not even if you took into account what had happened to Michael Houseman. At least Michael hadn’t been left with his guts spilling out onto the ground in broad daylight—and it had to be broad daylight, Emma thought, because the man on the news said the body had been found at just about six, and it was still light at six. The details had been dancing through her head all night. She had lain awake next to George for at least two hours, thinking odd things that there was no point to: that she should have gone to the junior-senior semiformal that first year with somebody besides Carl Pittman; that she should have let Tiffany get a second piercing in her ears when she’d first wanted it, when she was fifteen; that Chris had become snobbish and annoying in the years since high school. The images would not go away, no matter how hard she tried to make them. Chris in the Volvo out by the farmer’s market stand on Hawleyville Road. Chris in polo shirt and golf skirt buying a paper at the register in JayMar’s. Chris checking her eighteen-karatgold bought-from-the-Tiffany-catalogue watch for the fifteenth time, as much to make sure everybody saw what she was wearing as to check the time.
Somewhere around three, Emma hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. She’d gotten out of bed and gone into the living room at the front of the apartment. There wasn’t a bar or restaurant open this late anywhere in a hundred miles. Even the Sycamore shut down no later than one on weekends. On weekdays, it closed at eleven.
At five o’clock, Emma took a shower. She had to be very careful to lift and wash under the thick folds of flesh that hung off her torso like garlands on a Christmas tree. If she didn’t lift each one and wash under each one, they smelled, the way armpits did, and people in the shop would step back away from her and smile in that odd, strained way that meant they knew something discreditable about her. She got out of the shower without bothering to wrap a towel around herself. The lights were all out in the apartment, except for the one in the bathroom itself. She walked back to her bedroom stark naked and started dressing in clothes she pulled out of a thick oak wardrobe that had belonged to her mother. Her underclothes bit into her flesh and left red welts.
At seven o’clock, restless and with nothing else to do, Emma went down to open the store—well, not to open it, but to get everything ready for the time when she would open it, even if that was a couple of hours away. She set up the cash register and counted the money in the drawer. She spread furniture polish on the counter and wiped it down. She straightened the yarn and muslin dolls on the shelves at the front. She thought about Chris with her guts spilling out across Betsy Toliver’s backyard. Years ago, Chris wouldn’t have been caught dead in Betsy Toliver’s yard, but things changed. It was really disturbing the way things changed.
At seven-twenty, she couldn’t stand it anymore. The alarm clock next to the bed upstairs wouldn’t go off until eight. George wouldn’t be up until then. She couldn’t open the store to customers before nine. She checked her wallet and found $6.27. She wondered what it looked like when intestines spilled out of a body. Were they white, the way they looked in the book in biology class? Were they green? In the movies her brother used to watch when she and he were children, guts were always green. Red blood on a green lawn just made her think of Christmas.
She let herself out the front door and locked it behind her. She went down the steep steps to the sidewalk and watched as a garbage truck stopped for a pile of boxes somebody had left out in front of Dan Barr’s office. She wondered what Dan would do now that Chris was dead. He was off somewhere, at a convention in Seattle. At least he wouldn’t be a suspect.
She went down Grandview Avenue slowly, stopping only once, to look into the window of Emily’s Cheese Shop. When she got to JayMar’s, she pushed through the glass door and immediately began to shiver. The air-conditioning was turned up full blast. The men at the counter were all people she had known forever. They had copies of the newspapers and cups of coffee. At the very end of one side of the counter, Nancy Quayde was sitting by herself. She had a paper spread out in front of her.
“Hey there,” Emma said, sitting down next to her.
Nancy folded her newspaper into quarters. The headline on the page she’d been reading said: Fatty Food, Stress, Chief Culprits in Heart Disease. Joyce came down the counter in her white polyester off the rack uniform and said, “Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks,” Emma said.
“Oh, God,” Joyce said.
Joyce went back on up the counter. Nancy Quayde stared after her, annoyed. “She’s been acting like that all morning. Like I’m some kind of a goddamned accident victim. She’ll be the same way with you. Was it like this after Michael Houseman died?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said.
Joyce was back with the coffee. She put the cup and saucer down on the counter in front of Emma and poured. “Isn’t it a terrible thing?” she said. “Just terrible. You don’t think things like that could happen in a little town.”
“It’s not like it’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Hollman,” Nancy said coldly. “Hollman is not Sunnybrook Farm.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Joyce said. “People have been talking about nothing else since we opened up.”
“This is true,” Nancy said. “People have been talking about nothing else since I got here, but I haven’t been talking with them. I mean, for God’s sake. Chris is dead. What’s there to talk about?”
“The police are going to have a lot to talk about,” Joyce said. “There’s going to be an investigation. And state troopers. Kyle Borden can’t handle something like this all by himself.”
“Kyle Borden has had his head up his ass since kindergarten,” Nancy said.
Emma put milk and sugar into her coffee, especially sugar. “I was out there yesterday,” she said. “At Betsy’s house, I mean. I was out there sort of in the midafternoon. Belinda and I gave the son a ride from the library.”
“The son?” Nancy actually looked curious. Joyce looked so eager, she could have been a drug addict in partial withdrawal presented with a packet of unadulterated heroin.
Emma took a long sip of her coffee. “Yes, well. He’s only fourteen. The son, I mean. Mark. And he was at the library, and he wanted to go home, but Betsy hadn’t come for him yet. So we gave him a ride.”
“There are two sons, not just one,” Joyce said. “There’s one that’s fourteen and one that’s seven.”
“This was the one that’s fourteen,” Emma said. “Really, he looked sixteen. I was really surprised when I found out he couldn’t drive. And he’s immensely tall. Betsy isn’t. He must take after his father.”
“God,” Joyce said. “Did you see anything? Was Mrs. Barr there? Did you meet Jimmy Card? I’d absolutely die if I met Jimmy Card.”
“I didn’t see anybody,” Emma said. “There wasn’t anybody home, not even old Mrs. Toliver, as far as I know. He said they were bringing his grandmother in to see the doctor.”
“It’s all over town that he’s here,” Joyce said. “He went into Mullaney’s yesterday and bought a paper and a package of Mentos. Five or six people saw him.”
“I forgot to mention,” Nancy said. “When they’re not talking about poor Chris being cut up like a salami, they’re talking about Jimmy Card.”
“I’ll just go put this
coffee away,” Joyce said.
Emma’s coffee was already cold, but that was probably because she kept putting milk in it. If she were completely honest with herself, she’d have to say she didn’t like coffee at all. She only liked having something in her hand and something to sip when she was sitting and talking with people like Nancy, who made her nervous.
“So,” Nancy said. “What’s he like? Not Jimmy Card. The son.”
“Mark,” Emma said. Then she shrugged. “He’s nice, I guess. Good-looking. And tall, like I said. Very preppy, except, you know, not preppy like around here. Preppy like in those pictures of the Kennedys. Ivy League preppy.”
“He probably actually goes to a prep school.”
“Not yet. Next year. That’s what he said, anyway. Right now he’s in some private school near where he lives. Oh, and he reads strange stuff. Like Betsy used to. That’s one thing he got from her.”
“What’s strange stuff?”
Emma concentrated. “The story about the bug. By the German guy. I forget his name, but we had to read it in senior year lit class and it was gross. And The Color Purple . I remember that because of the movie. Oprah was in it.”
“Right,” Nancy said again.
“There’s no point in getting snippy,” Emma said. “I never did see the point in books. You can get anything interesting on television or go to the movies for it. Do you remember all that stuff Betsy used to read when we were in school? Aristotle. And what’s his name, the French guy—”
“Jean-Paul Sartre.”
“That one. What good did it do her?”
Nancy looked astonished. “She’s about thirty seconds from marrying Jimmy Card, for God’s sake. She’s on television.”
“She’s still odd,” Emma said. “You can tell, even when she’s on television. What’s the point of being on television if you’re so odd nobody can stand you?”