by Jane Haddam
“I know you do. She told me. But it’s like I said, you don’t want to know. She’s been absolutely nuts all day, and I don’t mean her usual nuts. She’s been berserk. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Perhaps she’s upset about the death of, ah …” Gregor drew a blank. He kept thinking of the dead woman as “Chris.” He always seemed to think of all the women in Hollman by their first names, even if he hadn’t met them.
“She isn’t upset,” Lisa said as she opened the counter to let them through. “She’s furious. She’s having one of those full-scale attack things where she thinks she can storm the walls of Troy and bring it down single-handedly. Just a second and let me knock.”
Lisa knocked on a door at the very back of the big room. There was a sound from inside, and she opened the door and stuck her head in. “Kyle is here. With Mr. Demarkian.” There was another sound from inside the inner office, and Lisa stepped back to let them in. “I’ll get coffee,” she said, disappearing behind them.
Gregor let himself get ushered into an office that was small by federal standards, but probably huge by the standards of a small-town school system.
The woman behind the desk rose to greet them. She was a thin, driven-looking woman with hair much too black for her face, or for nature, but other than that she looked like hundreds of “professional” women in small towns across the country: a tailored blazer and equally tailored blouse topped a wide, floral-print skirt that fell low on her leg. She could have been on the cover of the latest Talbot’s catalogue.
“Well,” she said as they came in. “Kyle. Introduce me.”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Nancy Quayde, this is Gregor Demarkian. Gregor Demarkian, this is Nancy Quayde.”
“Dr. Quayde,” Nancy said.
“Dr. Quayde,” Gregor repeated politely.
“I just don’t see what the point is of going through all the trouble to get yourself a Ph.D. if you’re going to be ashamed of it,” she said. “Oh, never mind. Sit down. I’m not having a good day. Do you know there isn’t any way to sue somebody for telling lies about you to the newspapers ? I’ve been on the phone to my attorneys for half the day.”
“Who’s telling lies about you to the newspapers?” Kyle asked.
“Never you mind. The parent of a student. God, I hate parents. I really do. They are such self-righteous sons of bitches. And don’t look at me like that. I don’t talk that way in front of the students. Although I should. God only knows they talk that way, and to my face, too. They don’t give a damn. And then there’s Peggy. Whatever the hell am I supposed to do about Peggy?”
“I heard she was out sick,” Kyle said mildly.
“Out sick?” Nancy Quayde nearly exploded. “You know as well as I do what she’s out for, Kyle. Stu bashed her face in again last night and now she’s got a shiner the size of a dinner plate and she’s afraid to be seen with it. That’s the third time this term. If she didn’t have tenure, she’d be out on her ass. If he ever shows up here looking for her, she will be out on her ass. God, that whole situation drives me insane. Why doesn’t she leave him? Why doesn’t she turn him the hell in? Christ, given the amount of cocaine that man snorts, she ought to be able to put him away for thirty years. If she’d turned him in thirty years ago, she’d be much better off.”
“Thirty years ago?” Gregor asked.
“Thirty years ago,” Nancy said. Then she laughed. “God, don’t you know? Stu sold marijuana to the entire senior class. Well, not all of it, just the ‘cool’ people and the hoods. Peggy thought he was going through a phase. But you could see it even then. You could tell he was going to end up an addict. It was written all over him.”
“Well, not so I could read it,” Kyle said. “Maybe we ought to go a little easy on just who Stu was selling marijuana to senior year.”
“You mean because it included you?” Nancy said.
“Never mind. It included me, too. It was a novelty, at the time. Now we practically execute people for smoking a couple of joints. We’re all so afraid they’ll end up like Stu. Christ. So what do you want to know? I was here yesterday. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Chris.”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Mostly, I think what we want to know is what has been going on with Chris for the past few days. We could ask Dan, but he’s been in Hawaii, and besides—”
“Besides, he probably wouldn’t know,” Nancy said. “That was a marriage of convenience. Or mutual assistance. I don’t know. Anyway, what’s been going on with Chris is what’s been going on with the rest of us. Betsy Wetsy triumphantly returns. Chris was organizing a cocktail party for her.”
“Are you serious?” Kyle said. “That’s crazy. Whatever made Chris think she’d come?”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Nancy said. “That’s why Chris went out there yesterday, to try to talk to Betsy face-to-face. She was the best one to send, really. I don’t have the patience, and the rest of them—” Nancy shrugged.
“When you say she was the best one to send,” Gregor said, “do you mean this was something you all cooked up together? It was a group project?”
“Well, sort of,” Nancy said. “It was—well, she was going to be here. And she’s famous. And a lot of people, the superintendent of schools, the head librarian, thought it would be a good thing to have her speak, you know, to classes and to the Friends of the Library and like that. And we thought—Chris and I thought—that we ought to do something to calm everything down.”
“Calm what down?” Kyle said. “It’s been over thirty years.”
“It may have been over thirty years,” Nancy said, “but it’s not like she disappeared and was never heard from in all that time. She’s been in our faces now for a decade at least. And it … rankles … some people.”
“Some people such as whom?” Gregor said.
“Mostly,” Nancy said, “there’s Belinda, who’s just livid. I think Belinda’s entire worldview came apart at the seams when Betsy got famous. And there’s Maris Coleman, of course, but she doesn’t really live here anymore. I don’t know if she counts.”
“So,” Kyle said. “What was it exactly that you and Chris thought you were going to do?”
“Chris was going to throw her a party,” Nancy said, “and I was going to take her out to dinner—not by herself but with all of us, or nearly all of us. Stu being what he is, Peggy can’t usually make it. Anyway, all of us except Peggy and Belinda were going to do something and see if we couldn’t sort of just bury the hatchet, so to speak. So Chris drove out there to talk to her. She was trying to make an effort.”
“How did she know Betsy would be home?” Kyle asked. “Did she call ahead?”
“She tried to call ahead,” Nancy said sourly, “but you just couldn’t get through on that phone. It was hooked up to an answering machine. Chris left a few messages, but she could never get Betsy to call her back.”
“I’ll bet,” Kyle said.
“You don’t need to be such a snot about it, Kyle. You’re the one who said it had been over thirty years. It had been over thirty years. You’d think some people would grow up. Especially famous people. Somebody as successful as Betsy Wetsy shouldn’t still be obsessing about high school.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“You said she drove over there on her own,” Gregor said. “Do you know what time that was? Did you go with her?”
“I didn’t go with her, no,” Nancy said. “I’m almost never out of here before five, even though the school day ends at quarter to three. She intended to go out there at around three-thirty or four, but I don’t know if she went then or earlier or later, at least not for sure. I do know she was intending to go alone.”
“This Miss Smith,” Gregor said.
“Mrs. Kennedy,” Nancy corrected.
“Was she out sick that day, too?” Gregor asked.
Nancy shook her head. “She was right here, all day. Trust me, if she ever pulls one of these two days in a row,
Hollman will hear about it. No, Peggy was in as usual, yesterday. I picked her up and drove her in. But I forgot to pick her up this morning.”
“How could you forget?” Kyle asked.
“I met Emma in JayMar’s and she made me furious,” Nancy said. “So I came in early to do some work. If Peggy had called to say she was stranded, I would have gone back out to get her.”
“Back to Chris,” Kyle said. “She was supposed to go out to Betsy’s house between three-thirty and four. As far as you know, she did it.”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“You were here. Peggy was here—”
“Well, not at three-thirty, she wasn’t. Shelley Brancowski gave her a ride home at three. Shelley does that when I have to work late. Peggy only stays late when she’s got French Club, and they only meet twice a week.”
“Right,” Kyle said again.
“Christ,” Nancy said again. “Do you really think any of us would kill Chris off? Whatever for? I mean, I know she was a pain and a snot and all the rest of it, but there’s just no reason for any of us to have done it. And you can’t really think Betsy did it, no matter what Belinda says. Why would she kill Chris? If she was going to kill any of us, it would be Belinda. And I say if she hasn’t killed Maris yet, she’s not capable of killing anybody.”
The door opened and the young woman named Lisa poked her head in. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but somebody from the police department is on the phone for Kyle.”
PART THREE
“Babylon”
—DAVID GRAY
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
—BOB DYLAN
“My Life”
—BILLY JOEL
ONE
1
Not all small towns are alike. Some are small because they are kept that way, deliberately, by residents whose lives are really in a city not too far away, by people who know very well that a modern and efficient police force is indispensable, even if it seems not to be on a day-to-day basis. Other small towns are really small towns. They exist naturally. The people in them live in a bubble that allows them to think that they are immune from the disease of violence that infects every other place, and that has infected even small towns from the beginning of time. Gregor often thought that if you wanted to do something effective to teach people about crime—and to convince them to protect themselves from it—you would run a sixty-second commercial that did nothing but spell out the mayhem that had occurred in small towns in the last two years, any two years, pick them. Serial killers in Richmond, Nebraska. Domestic violence deaths in Mortimer, South Dakota. Drug gang wars in Leeland, Oklahoma. Envy, jealousy, and spite—everywhere, Gregor thought, because those things were part of being human. He had no idea where so many people had gotten the idea that crime was an aberration. To him, it seemed that crime was a constant. Anthropologists found evidence of murder in fossil remains.
In Hollman, they found it on Grandview Avenue, and they found it in full view of at least a hundred people. Kyle Borden hit the brake as soon as he saw them, crowding out over the sidewalks and into the street, heedless of the rain. Gregor leaned forward in his seat and tried to make some sense of what he was looking at.
“What is that?” he said.
“That’s why we called the state police,” Kyle said. “That’s just about everybody in town who could walk up here. Plus some people I don’t recognize. They must be the reporters.”
Gregor was sure there would be reporters. He knew about reporters. He also knew about rubberneckers. This looked as if the whole town had come out in a body to stand on the porch of Country Crafts, and the ones who hadn’t were in the street, waiting, pushing forward every once in a while to see if people would move.
“To hell with this,” Kyle said. He jerked his steering wheel to the right and bumped up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street, then up onto the lawn of the Hollman Public Library. Gregor felt the wheels of the police car sink a little in mud. “If they don’t like it, they can sue me. Let’s go.”
Gregor snapped off his seat belt and climbed out. His shoes sank into the ground just as the wheels of the police car had. He moved as quickly as he could without falling, off the grass and onto the sidewalk. Kyle came up beside him and cupped his hands. How could people stand in the rain like that? Gregor wondered. Some of them had umbrellas, and some of them had bags or newspapers they were holding up for protection, and some of them had hats, but most of them were bareheaded. Gregor ran a hand through his own hair and water flew out of it as if he had splashed against the surface of a pond.
“This is the Hollman Town Police,” Kyle shouted. “Please move out of the way. Please move out of the way.”
Some people on the edge of the crowd closest to them heard, and turned, and moved away, and that was enough to get them started. They waded in, with Kyle shouting through his hands at intervals and sometimes tapping somebody he knew on the shoulder. It was hard to hear above the rain and even harder to hear above the low hum of people talking. Gregor kept his hands close to his sides and himself as close to Kyle as he could, nodding at people when they stared at him. He had no idea if he was being recognized or not. Nobody talked to him. Nobody he heard said his name.
“This is the Hollman Town Police,” Kyle said, over and over again, as they inched forward. “Please get out of the way.”
They reached the porch before Gregor was expecting to. At the steps, Kyle Borden had to shove a few people away. They wouldn’t move just because he told them to. Gregor would have thought that these people were the reporters, except that some of them so obviously weren’t. One was the middle-aged woman who had waited on him the day before in Mullaney’s, when he had run in for a newspaper. Another was the woman he recognized as the waitress from Hollman Pizza. Kyle pushed at these people without ceremony and reached the door. He turned the knob and found it locked.
“Open up,” he said, pounding on the glass front. Far away, Gregor could hear the cowbell tinkle.
The face of a man appeared in the glass on the other side of the door. It seemed to stare at Kyle for a moment, and then nod. There was a rattling and then the door swung open on blank space.
“Hurry,” Kyle said, grabbing Gregor by the sleeve and pulling him inside. Several people tried to follow. Kyle whipped around and shut the door in their faces. Then he looked up at the man who had opened up for them. “George. What’s going on? What is this?”
“I knew they’d come,” George said. His face was as white as good quality typing paper. “I knew they’d all be here as soon as they heard, and they’d hear. They always hear. Why is that? Why do people behave that way?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle said. “I’ve called the state police. They should be here any moment. They’ll clear the crowd out. Try to tell us what happened here.”
“I don’t know what happened here,” George said. “I just—came home, that’s all. I was showing a house out in Stony Hill and then I, I don’t know, I just thought I’d come home and talk to Emma for a while and sit in the store if she wanted to go out, you know, down to JayMar’s or something and when I came in—” He looked quickly to the back of the shop. “They’re still there, I think. Both of them.”
“Both of them?” Kyle was startled. “There are two bod—people hurt?”
“I called the ambulance, but I know it isn’t any good,” George said. “You can see she’s dead. There are, I don’t know, parts of her—pieces of her—”
“Where?” Kyle asked.
George looked astonished. “Back there. In the storeroom. Behind the curtains. I called out and she didn’t answer me so I went back there first thing because that’s where she usually is. I should have known something was wrong. She always comes out when the bell rings. And I went back there and there they were, the both of them—”
There were sirens outside, very close. “That’s the ambulance,” Kyle said. “George, listen to me. I’m going to go back to l
ook. When the ambulance men get to the door, let them in. Okay? Do it fast. Just in case. Come on, Mr. Demarkian.”
Gregor came. They walked to the back of the store, through another small room filled with even more shelves. These shelves were full of materials—pipe cleaners, cloth, construction paper, glue, glitter, beads. At the back of this small room was a curtain. Kyle hurried toward it, pulled it aside, and sucked in his breath.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Gregor came up beside him. Behind the curtain there was another small room. Unlike the two in the front, this one had not been decorated, and it had no shelves. Instead, there were boxes everywhere, most of them open and half-empty. On the floor among them was the bulky body of the woman Gregor had come to know as Emma Kenyon Bligh. The front of her dress was ripped, slit partly open—but George Bligh was wrong. There were no “pieces” of Emma anywhere. There was a lot of blood, but only pieces of her dress. It looked as if somebody had tried to carve her up from the front. Gregor’s head swiveled around, looking for the other one—and found her, sitting up and entirely conscious. She was not someone he recognized, but she was just as bloody as Emma Bligh, and maybe more, and she had a long razor-edged linoleum cutter in her lap.
Gregor ignored her and dropped down by Emma Bligh. He put his head on her chest and listened to the heartbeat. It was a little rapid, but it was not faint. “Are those ambulance men through the door yet?” he asked. “Tell them to hurry. This one’s alive.”
“What?”
Gregor stood up. “She’s alive. I doubt if she’s unconscious from anything but the pain. The artery isn’t cut. If it was, there’d be a lot more blood.”
“How much blood do you want there to be?” Kyle asked.
“Trust me. This is not enough. Tell her husband to thank God that his wife got fat. It saved her life. Who’s the other one?”
The ambulance men were at the curtain. They took one look at Emma Bligh’s body on the floor and went to it. Seconds later, one of them looked up and said, “She’s alive. Holy shit.”