Somebody Else's Music(111)

It was at that point that Belinda had run, really fast, out the door and across the porch and down Greenview Avenue in the rain—and it had still been raining then, hard, so that she was sure that if anybody had seen her running, they would only have thought it natural in the weather. She had started walking more slowly when she got to JayMar’s, which was about the time she had seen George pull in. Then she had gone down the block a little more to find her car. She didn’t really want to drive anymore today. She had been driving since early this morning. She had driven all the way out to Betsy’s house, only to find not much of anybody home and the whole front lawn a mess. She had driven all the way out to the hospital to see if she could catch Betsy there, but when she’d arrived at the hospital, there had been no sign of Betsy anywhere, and when she’d asked the receptionist, the receptionist had clammed right up. In the end, she had been about ready to scream. Then she had driven all the way back to town and parked on Grandview and gone walking up the street to Country Crafts, and all she had really wanted to do was—

All she had really wanted to do was to talk to Emma, Belinda thought now. She was sitting in a little turnoff on Jefferson Road in Grassy Plains, right above the Sycamore. That was where she had gone when she had run out after seeing Emma bleed, although she couldn’t remember why she’d come there in particular, instead of just driving all the way out onto the highway and going to the mall. She put her head on the wheel and closed her eyes. Her hands were jerking around against the steering wheel. Her body was twitching almost uncontrollably. She hurt.

Belinda took a deep breath. It was too bad she didn’t have a full-time job. A full-time job would at least give her someplace to be. She got the car started and backed out onto Jefferson Road again. She headed down the hill. She went slowly, because she was still trembling, and because she didn’t know what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go. Then, when she got to the very bottom of the hill, she did. She pulled into the parking lot of the Sycamore and cut the engine.

If she’d been thinking straight, she would have noticed that the parking lot was chock-full, which it never was in the middle of the afternoon, even when it was raining. Instead, she didn’t realize how packed the place would be until she got inside and saw that all the booths and all but two of the stools around the counter had been taken. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she ought to leave—she’d never seen most of these people, and she knew everybody in town—and then Bonnie Cantor had waved to her from behind the counter and she began to relax a little.

“What’s going on around here?” she asked, sitting down on one of the two empty stools. “Who are all these people?”

“Reporters,” Bonnie said solemnly.

“What are they reporting?” Belinda asked.

Bonnie started setting her up for a Diet Coke. “They came in because of Chris, being dead, and it being Betsy Toliver’s house where the body was found, because Betsy Toliver is famous. Or they say she is. Did you know Betsy Toliver was famous?”

“I wouldn’t call it famous,” Belinda said stiffly. “She’s on like CNN and like that.”

“Oh. Well. No wonder I haven’t seen her. So that’s why they’re here. Except,” Bonnie lowered her voice, “something happened to Emma Kenyon. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it—”

“It was on the radio,” Belinda said, because it was true. It had come on the radio news on the oldies station while she was parked up on Grassy Plains. “She was—attacked.”

“She was stabbed,” Bonnie said, looking around quickly. “She was stabbed right in the stomach. I called Sue Cameron out at the hospital and she checked up on it for me. She’s not dead yet, though. Emma, I mean. She’s just unconscious. But Sue says she could be dead any minute now, and then there would be a double murder. Doesn’t that just shock the socks off you? I’ve lived in Hollman all my life and nothing like this has ever happened here.”

“Michael Houseman was murdered,” Belinda said. “In 1969.”

“But that was just the one, wasn’t it?” Bonnie said. “And it was some old tramp who did it, if I remember. It wasn’t like this. It didn’t have famous people in it.”

“I wouldn’t call Betsy Toliver famous,” Belinda said again. She looked down into the Diet Coke Bonnie had brought her. It had a lemon in it, just the way she always drank it.

“Listen,” Bonnie said, leaning on the counter and putting her lips up close to Belinda’s ear, so that she could whisper and maybe really not be overheard by everybody in the place. “You see the corner booth? The man in the black jacket with the red shirt under it? That guy is from the National Enquirer. No kidding. I read the Enquirer all the time and now there’s somebody from there in here and I can’t even wait on him because he’s not at the counter. LeeAnne gets all the good jobs.”