Somebody Else's Music(110)
Debra hung up in her ear. Maris put the phone back in its cradle and finished off her coffee. Then she got up and made herself another cup. The rain had now eased to nothing but gray and drizzle. The gin had begun to taste bitter. She went back to the couch and put her hand on the phone.
It took much longer than she had expected it to, and the longer it took the more uneasy she got. She was sure, really, that Betsy would call her back. In spite of the craziness of the last few days, Betsy was nowhere near ready to cut her off just yet. Maris was fairly sure Betsy would never be able to cut her off. Even with Debra, even with Jimmy Card, even with Mark all hating the sight of her, Maris could always count on Betsy being Betsy, the same girl who had walked all the way out to the White Horse and back again, the same girl who had come when she was called to the outhouse.
Still, it was hard to wait, and she had to wait a long time. The minute hand on Belinda’s clock moved five minutes, then ten, then fifteen. Maris began to be afraid that Belinda would come back before Betsy rang. The last thing she wanted was to have to have this conversation with Belinda listening in. She finished her cup of coffee. She got up and made another one. She sat down next to the phone again. She thought if this went on much longer, she would be sick again.
When the phone rang, it startled her, and she jumped. Liquid jumped out of her mug and splashed against the front of her dress. She put the mug down next to the phone and picked up the receiver with that hand. She brushed at the wet spot on her breast with the other.
“Hello,” she said.
“It’s Jimmy,” Jimmy Card said. “Liz isn’t here.”
“What do you mean, she’s not there? She has to be there. Where else could she be?”
“I have no idea. You can ask her when she gets back. I’ll give her the number. Just stay where you are.”
“Why don’t you give me her number, instead, and tell me where she’s at so that I can get there. It was bad enough that you left me stranded at the house when you took off this morning—”
“We didn’t do anything of the kind. You were nowhere in sight. We thought you’d gone home while the rest of us were sleeping.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t think anything at all. If you had, you’d have remembered I didn’t have a car with me out there yesterday. Or Betsy would have remembered it. Right now, there’s been another murder—”
“There hasn’t been any murder, Maris. We already talked to the police. Mrs. Bligh is very much alive. She was attacked, but she wasn’t murdered.”
“Wonderful. She’ll be able to tell the police who attacked her. In the meantime, this town is full of reporters with appetites like vampires and I’m right in the middle of them. And you’re telling me that Betsy isn’t even where she’s supposed to be, for all you know she could have been right here in the middle of town cutting up the front of Emma’s disgustingly obese stomach—”
“Don’t,” Jimmy Card said.
“Don’t what? Do you think I’m doing anything different from what those reporters are going to do when they get hold of this?”
“Don’t,” Jimmy Card said again. “I’m not Liz, Maris. I’m not even Mark. If you try to pull this kind of crap on me, I’ll take you apart at the joints.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m the man who knows how to put a stop to you. In the meantime, I’ll tell Liz you called. She can call you back if she feels like it.”
He hung up. Maris sat listening to the receiver buzz a dial tone in her ear. She put the receiver back in its cradle and picked up her mug of coffee again. Coffee and gin. It was a mug of coffee and gin. Her head was starting to hurt the way it did when she was having a particularly bad hangover. Big drops of rain were dropping down from the roof gutters outside the living-room window. The apartment was absolutely silent.
Maris Coleman thought that everything would be all right if only she was able to think.
3
It was not that Belinda Hart Grantling did not know what happened to Emma Kenyon Bligh. She not only knew, she had known for minutes before anybody else, because she had been in the store minutes before anybody else, before even George. She told herself, a little self-righteously, that she would have called the police if it had been necessary, but it hadn’t been necessary. Almost as soon as she had darted out of the building and down the sidewalk, George had pulled into the best parking space out front and gone bounding up the porch steps to the front door. It made more sense to let George do what needed to be done than to get involved herself. The truth was, she had panicked. She had been really shocked at how much blood there had been, blood everywhere, blood spurting out of Emma’s middle as if Emma were that fountain people jumped into in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York.