“Elizabeth Toliver has a brother, doesn’t she? Did he have tools?”
“He kept them at Andy’s Garage,” Kyle said. “And it’s been years since he’s been back here, too. He moved out to California about two decades ago. What is it you’re getting at?”
“We ought to go check the basement, just in case,” Gregor said.
“I can’t do that without a search warrant,” Kyle said. “You don’t want to get me into a position where—”
“Don’t worry about it. I won’t get you into any kind of position. There will be no searching the house in the ordinary sense. We will not be conducting a criminal investigation. I’ve got the key. I’m going in to get some of my things, which I’m going to need. You coming with me?”
“Shit,” Kyle said.
“Turn off the lights,” Gregor told him.
Gregor waited until the lights were out and then went out into the driveway again through the bay. He waited until Kyle got out and then pulled the garage door down. The rain really had let up by now. It was still coming down, but it was of only ordinary force, and there was no thunder in the distance. Gregor led the way across the backyard toward the kitchen lawn.
“For a long time,” he said as he and Kyle let themselves into the mudroom, “I was very confused. I didn’t go to what you’d call a normal high school. I grew up in central Philadelphia, in what was at the time I suppose a slum. I went to high school with a lot of other people just like me. We had parents who’d come from Armenia. English was not our first language. We didn’t have proms and prom princesses and cheerleaders and any of that sort of thing—well, the school did, to an extent, but that had nothing to do with us. Our parents wouldn’t have let us near things like that. If we wanted to meet members of the opposite sex, we went to dances at the neighborhood church. So you see, it didn’t make any sense to me. The ‘popularity’ thing. Have you noticed how odd that is? The ‘popular’ people are ‘popular’ by virtue of being envied and hated by ninety-nine percent of the people they go to school with. Does anybody but me think that’s very strange?”
“No,” Kyle said. “It had occurred to me on occasion, too.”
“Here”—Gregor held open a door on the other side of the mudroom—“there’s a basement down here. ‘Finished.’ That way’s the main house. Down here there’s a recreation room and some kind of workroom.”
“I’ll bet there aren’t any tools in it,” Kyle said.
Gregor led the way down the stairs. “I got very tangled up in it at first,” he went on. “The emotions were so strong, it seemed to me that they could lead to the murder of just about anyone. But the longer I thought of it, the more I realized that if somebody was going to get killed over this kind of thing, it would be Liz Toliver herself who ended up dead. Because the key here is the disjunction. What people really hate is that things haven’t turned out the way they expected them to.”
They were at the bottom of the basement stairs. Gregor knew where the light switch was. He flipped the flat of his hand against it and turned on half a dozen lights at once. “It would be different if Liz Toliver was still what she had been. That’s how you get school shooters. You think that kind of anger and hurt would dissipate in time, but I don’t think it does. I remember a woman who wrote to the Philadelphia Inquirer after the Columbine incident who said that whenever she heard about a school shooting, she cheered, because it was a triumph for the losers. She was forty-three. I thought she was psychotic when I read the letter. Now I’m not so sure. If she’s psychotic, practically everybody else in the country must be, too.”
“Is this going anyplace?” Kyle asked.
Gregor led the way through the recreation room—which was large, and carpeted, and contained a television set the size of Oklahoma. He tried the first door he came to on the back wall of the room. It opened onto a closet. He tried the next one and met blackness. He snaked his hand inside against the wall and found the light switch. The lights went on, big fluorescents behind patterned plastic panels. There was a table in the center of the room. There was a sewing machine. There were a lot of things in boxes.
“Here we are,” Gregor said.
“You do spend a lot of time talking about nothing,” Kyle said. “And then you don’t finish your thought.”
“My thought? Well, my thought is that reality is not very much like the movies. You know those movies, where the small-town loser goes off to the big wide world and comes back a success and everybody finally loves him?”