“Yes,” Gregor Demarkian said gently.
“Somebody should have warned me,” Faye said. “I know that with the press in the kind of insane snit it’s in now, it’s hard to do the right thing, but somebody should have warned me. I shouldn’t have had to hear it on the news like that, out of the blue.”
“Her parents are going to be saying the same thing,” one of the policemen said.
Gregor Demarkian moved closer to where Faye was sitting and bent toward her. “Listen,” he said, “this is important. Did you give Zara Anne a ride out to Margaret Anson’s house?”
“No, of course not.”
“Did you know she was intending to go to Margaret Anson’s house? Was she intending to go to Margaret Anson’s house?’
“I don’t think so. She didn’t mention it to me. And I think she would have. She wasn’t good at keeping secrets, especially of information she thought might make her seem important.”
“Would she have hitchhiked out to Margaret Anson’s house?”
Faye sat up a little straighter. “I don’t think so. She wasn’t an energetic person, if you know what I mean. She tended toward lethargy. Hitchhiking is a lot of work, especially on back roads on Sunday afternoon. And there’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure she actually knew where the Anson house is. I know she’d seen pictures of it, but I don’t think she’d ever been out there. And it wasn’t in a direction she would be likely to go. To Waterbury to the mall, you know, or even here in Watertown to Kmart or one of those places, but not farther up into the hills. Unless there was a meeting or a conference or something of the sort, and then we would have gone together.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “One more thing. What about friends. What kind of friends did she have, who did she see, other than yourself?”
Faye blushed. “No one,” she said. “The whole time she was here, she never saw anyone at all except me.”
“Really? But that’s—she was local, wasn’t she? Woodbury is somewhere close to here?”
“Oh, yes, it’s very close. But I was just as surprised as you seem to be. I thought she must have been from out of state, or at least way off on the eastern corner, because she never saw anybody. Or called anybody. Or wrote to anybody. Not anybody at all. And now it turns out she had parents in Woodbury. I can’t believe it.”
“Did you know if she’d had problems with her parents? If there was some reason for an estrangement?”
“Well, there must have been, mustn’t there?” Faye said. “You don’t just stop talking to your parents completely unless something has come up. But she never mentioned anything to me. She never even mentioned her parents. She never mentioned school, or friends—and yet she was always talking about herself. How she felt about things. What she meant to do. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“I think it’s nuts,” one of the policemen said. Faye noticed that it was the state policemen this time, the one with the very blond hair.
“I think it’s nuts, too,” she said. “But it’s the truth. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded a little and stepped away. “Well, we’ll just have to talk to her parents, then. And any acquaintances from high school we can find. But you must realize how important it is, determining just how she got out to Margaret Anson’s house.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And why,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“I think I’d stopped thinking about why when it came to Zara Anne,” Faye said. “I think I’d just come to accept that Zara Anne did what she did.”
Gregor Demarkian nodded a little—and then, suddenly, the whole lot of them were in motion. Faye stood up herself, realizing with something like franticness that they were all headed out her front door. They were going to leave her alone. And what was she going to do when she was alone?
She trailed behind them through the front hall and stood in the doorway as they filed out. She watched them get into their cars one after the other. Gregor Demarkian got into the state police car. He was not driving. Faye pulled at her hair and felt a raft of pins come lose.
It was worse than swimming through Jell-O. It was like being drugged. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was on her own. She only knew that she did not want to be on her own, here in this house, by herself. She wished she had thought to ask them how Zara Anne had died. She envisioned Zara Anne’s face, mottled and bug-eyed from strangulation, which was what was supposed to have happened to Kayla Anson. Then she bent double and wrapped her arms around her body. She thought she was going to be sick.