“It isn’t Wyoming, either. A kid with a joint in his high-school locker, they might care. A grown man smoking a little dope in his own living room, they wouldn’t even notice. The jails are full of hopheads, Teddy. Crack has made marijuana de facto legal in half the states in the union .”
“You look terrible,” Teddy said.
Christopher lay back down. “I feel terrible. You should feel terrible, too. Emma was a little sweetheart, and now she’s dead.”
The joint had been smoked to a nothing-but-paper wedge. Eyes closed, still flat on his back, Christopher rolled another one. It was astonishing to watch. Like a high-wire artist or a professional bicyclist, like an athlete doing a routine he had trained for every day for a decade, Chris went through the motions as perfectly as if he’d been sitting up and cold straight.
Teddy got off the love seat and went to the bookcase. The Sherlock Holmes was where it was supposed to be, on the third shelf from the top, in the middle. Teddy took it out and stared at its plain brown cover.
“Chris?” he said. He tried to think of some way to word the question he wanted to ask without sounding like a jerk. There wasn’t one. He took a deep breath and asked it anyway. “Does it really bother you?” he said. “Emma’s dying, I mean. Do you really care?”
“Don’t you?”
The reaction was milder than Teddy had expected. Thank God for marijuana. “I hardly knew her,” he said. “She was around when we were children, and then I went off to college, and I almost never saw her again. You’re older than I am. It must have been the same for you.”
“Not exactly.” The joint rolled, Christopher lit it. He did that with his eyes closed, too. “I saw a lot of her in the last five years. She used to come and visit me in California, when she had the chance and the money. Or when Bennis had the money and would lend it to her. Maybe once a year.”
“And you got along?”
“Of course we got along. Why shouldn’t we? She really was a sweetheart.”
Teddy put the Holmes back in its place on the shelf. “That’s not what everybody said, you know. There was all that business, back when Daddy changed his mind about the money, that got us all in trouble. And everybody said—”
“That Emma was responsible for it?”
“Yes,” Teddy said. “That Emma was responsible for it.”
Christopher blew a stream of smoke into the air. “I asked her about it once. She said she had nothing to do with it. I believed her.”
“Bennis thinks—”
Christopher sat up. “So what’s this? Bennis thinks and it must be so?”
“Something like that.”
“Bullshit. Especially coming from you.”
“I just think Bennis knew Emma,” Teddy said. “Better than the rest of us. She may have gone out to visit you once a year, but she went to Boston once a month. Bennis was with her all the time.”
“So?”
“So Bennis should know,” Teddy insisted.
Chris took a monumental drag on the joint, held it in for interminable minutes, then let it out again. His eyes were getting very red, in a dry, cracked way that was different from what they were like when he’d been crying.
“Look,” he said, “if you think Emma was responsible for that, how do you explain all this? How do you explain Daddy? How do you explain Emma herself? Emma got herself murdered.”
“Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t.”
“The police have already been here, Teddy. They say it was murder.”
Teddy shook his head stubbornly. “They’re going by those notes. But there are lots of explanations for those notes. The one they found in Bobby’s room could be real—”
“Then why was it in Bobby’s room?”
“Bennis put it there,” Teddy said. “Bennis didn’t want anyone to think Emma had committed suicide. You know how protective Bennis always was of Emma. She saw that note and she took it, and later she got rid of it and substituted her own letter. Then she acted like the letter was the only thing she’d ever seen.”
“To make the police and everybody else believe Emma hadn’t committed suicide.”
“Right.”
“To make them believe Emma had been murdered.”
“Right again.”
“Crap,” Christopher said. “Bennis is the most straightforward person I know. And the most sane. She’d have known doing something like that would get one of the rest of us in trouble. She wouldn’t have done it.”
“She wouldn’t have done it to you maybe.” Teddy came back to the love seat. Now that Chris was sitting up, it was easier to look at him while talking to him. It was less like having a conversation with a hyperanimated dead body. “I know you and Bennis have always been friends, but she isn’t the same way with the rest of us as she is with you. Especially not with me.”