Somebody Else's Music(101)

Peggy Smith Kennedy was hobbling when she walked. The chalk whiteness of her face made the growing bruises around her eyes all the more noticeable. If she’d been trying to hide what was going on in her marriage, she was about to lose the fight—but Gregor knew she’d already lost it. She went out onto the porch holding on to a state police officer the way swooning maidens held on to rescuing lovers in bad nineteenth-century novels.

Kyle Borden came up and said, “Who’re you calling? We’ve got to get back to the station.”

“Give me a minute,” Gregor told him. There were suddenly voices on the other end of the phone, and Gregor distinctly heard Bennis say “halvah.” He shook his head. “Bennis?” he said into the phone.

“Mr. Demarkian?” It was not Bennis’s voice. “This is Liz Toliver. I’m sorry. From what Bennis said, it seemed to make more sense if I talked to you directly, but—oh, thank you, this is wonderful—but we didn’t know where you were to call you back from upstairs. Bennis says someone was attacked but not killed. Was that Maris? Is Maris hurt?”

“What’s she feeding you?” Gregor asked.

“What? Oh, halvah, you know, the stuff that’s like a brick with a tahine base. You can get it in New York in some places. This is better. Is Maris hurt?”

“I have no idea,” Gregor said. “I don’t know where she is. I was hoping you did.”

“Oh, no. I don’t. We haven’t seen her all morning. We were worried about it earlier. We thought she might still be back at the house.”

“Still? You mean, she was there this morning?”

“We don’t know,” Liz Toliver said. “I remember last night. She passed out on the couch. And that was the last time I saw her. But she didn’t have her car, so if she was passed out on the couch last night she should still be in the house, because she wouldn’t have any way to get home. Back to Belinda’s, I mean.”

“I didn’t see her,” Gregor said. “Not at the house this morning.”

“She isn’t usually at the house in the morning,” Liz said, “so you don’t expect to see her. But we’re very worried that she wandered off and fell asleep somewhere and didn’t hear all the commotion this morning and got left behind, and maybe she’s still out there. She couldn’t call anybody. Not with the phone lines cut. She could be stranded.”

Gregor almost said that if Maris Coleman were stranded in that house, it was because she had stranded herself there. There was no way that anybody who wasn’t in a coma could have slept through that hysteria this morning.

“We’ll go out there and check,” he said, waving away Kyle’s protest. “What I wanted to know was if you’d seen her, and now I know. I take it you’ve been with Jimmy and the boys ever since you left your house this morning?”

“Well, I took a shower by myself, but it was only for about twenty minutes.”

“That’s fine,” Gregor told her. “That’s much too short a time to have done what you’d needed to do. What about in the last hour? Have you been mostly visible?”

“Oh, yes. Jimmy and I have been—discussing things.”

Gregor heard Bennis whoop with laughter in the background. He ignored her. “Good,” he said. “That puts you out of it, at least for this attack. That’s helpful.”

“Who was it? Who got attacked? You said she isn’t dead?”

“Not dead, no, but badly hurt,” Gregor said. “It’s a woman named Emma Kenyon Bligh.”

There was a silence on the other end of the phone. “Emma Kenyon. My God.”

“I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen enough people who’d been attacked to say with some certainty that she’s likely to be all right in the long run. I don’t know how long a run.”

“Maris said she’d gained a lot of weight,” Liz Toliver said.

“I’d estimate that she weighs close to four hundred and fifty pounds,” Gregor said. “She’s very large. It probably saved her life.”

“Well,” Liz Toliver said.

“Would you mind if I talked to Bennis again?” Gregor said.

There was more talking in the background, and more passing around of food. Bennis was promising to pack up a box of pastries for the boys, and Liz Toliver was insisting that she come upstairs and have coffee with Jimmy and the rest of them. So much for Bennis’s worries about how Liz would take to being around one of Jimmy’s former lovers. Gregor thought it was interesting that Bennis never seemed to have worried for a moment about how he would feel about being around one of her former lovers. She picked up the phone.