Somebody Else's Music(108)

“Maybe we’ll skip it. Do you want these?” Bennis jangled the keys in the air.

Liz took them, and looked at them, and then looked up. “Listen,” she said, “come with me. I mean it. I don’t want to talk to Jimmy, and I don’t want to talk to the boys, and God only knows I don’t want to talk to the police or the reporters or even to Mr. Demarkian. But I could use someone to talk to.”

“Someone you don’t know?”

“Maybe. But not any somebody.”

“Are you all right?” Bennis said.

“No,” Liz said furiously. “No, I’m not. Deep down, in the pit of my stomach, I have this awful sick feeling that I’ve been a complete idiot nearly all my life. I’ve based everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt—I’ve based it all on a delusion and it’s all my fault. It’s been my delusion. Nobody lied to me. Nobody tried to confuse me. The truth was right there in front of my face all along and I just chose not to see it. Oh, Christ. Am I making any sense at all?”

“No,” Bennis said, “but you’ve convinced me. I’ll drive. Why don’t you come in and sit down for a minute while I put something on. Do you know where it is you want to go?”

“Sort of.”

Bennis made a little grunting noise and disappeared into the room’s bathroom. Liz came in and shut the door behind her and went over to the window. There was more parking lot out this side, too. At least, with Bennis Hannaford, she wouldn’t have to listen to a lecture about how she shouldn’t be spending her time—right this minute, under the circumstances—looking for Maris Coleman.





2


It had seemed to Maris Coleman that the best possible course of action would be silence, and that the best possible way to maintain silence would be to disappear for a few hours. When she’d gotten back to town from the Toliver house, she’d gone up to Belinda’s apartment dreading the kind of conversation she was going to have to have to keep Belinda happy, but she’d only been happy herself for a moment or two. After that, she’d started flipping back and forth through the channels on Belinda’s cable system, getting nowhere. It was like that old joke: fifty-two channels and nothing on. There was something on CNN and the twenty-four-hour news shows, but not nearly as much as Maris would have liked. For the moment, the legitimate press were being very careful about what they said about Betsy Wetsy’s involvement in Chris Inglerod’s murder, and what coverage there was of the case seemed to focus on the return of Chris’s husband Dan from his convention in Hawaii. What was really disturbing was the fact that CNBC seemed to be treating Chris’s death as if it were an attempted attack on Betsy, gone wrong, making Betsy look like a martyr or a victim, not like somebody who could have been responsible for a woman being eviscerated on her lawn. Local news was nonexistent. It wasn’t the hour for it. They were showing syndicated episodes of Maury Povitch and Sally Jesse Raphael and Ricki Lake. The Cartoon Channel had cartoons. Comedy Central had reruns of Saturday Night Live shows. Court TV was broadcasting a drunk driving trial in North Carolina. Maris paused a little on that one to listen, but she couldn’t understand much of what was going on.

When the commotion started up Grandview Avenue, she went out and tried to blend into the crowd around the door to Country Crafts. It took her a while to figure out what was going on inside, and to hear the story of Peggy Smith Kennedy and her “near coma” as one woman put it, while another corrected that to “near catatonia, poor dear, it must have been such an awful thing to find.” The crowd was full of reporters, some of whom knew her, and that was the last thing she wanted at the moment. She wasn’t ready to talk to the Enquirer, or the Star, and she had a feeling that they would not be ready to talk to her. The big prize now would be Emma, who had survived being cut in the belly with something that sounded like a Saracen’s sword. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t made some kind of terrible mistake. That was why she hung around in the rain only long enough to find out what had happened, but not so long that the crowd started to thin out and leave her stranded.

She went back to Belinda’s apartment and locked herself in. She threw all three of the bolts—whatever did anyone want bolts for in a place like Hollman? Maris didn’t have bolts on her apartment door in New York—and went into the bathroom. As soon as she saw the sampler on the wall next to the medicine cabinet, she felt her stomach start to heave. She arched up over the toilet bowl and let it out, all at once, a thick hot stream of it that came from so deep inside her she thought she was pulling up her own organs. She had no idea what it was. She hadn’t eaten anything in hours. She hadn’t even had much in the way of dinner the night before, just a half a tuna-fish sandwich that Mark DeAvecca had made her. She seemed to be finished heaving. It was gone as capriciously as it had started. She stood back, flushed the toilet—she’d clean up later, when she had a chance to relax for a while—and washed her face.