“Yes,” Betsy said. “Well. I think they’ve pickled you in sedatives. You ought to get some rest.”
“If you really love somebody,” Peggy said, “if you really, really love them, you don’t walk out on them because they’ve got a few imperfections. You love the imperfections. You cherish them. You protect them.”
“Sometimes you can’t protect them.”
“You shouldn’t have come back here,” Peggy said. “Belinda’s right about one thing. It isn’t fair. What happened to you and what happened to us. It isn’t fair. The world is supposed to make sense. It has an obligation to. You should have stayed in New York or Connecticut or wherever it is you live and left the rest of us alone.”
“I’ll leave you alone now. You should rest, and I need to get back to where I’m staying.”
“You should have left us alone,” Peggy said, but she was talking to air. Betsy was gone. Maybe Betsy had never been there. She felt very drowsy.
It was true, Peggy thought. You didn’t just walk out on somebody you loved because they weren’t as perfect as you wanted them to be. If you did, it wasn’t love. It was convenience, or sex, or prestige, or position, or even habit. Love is stronger than that. Love accepts the bad with the good. Love learns to—
She was very tired. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. Betsy had been right. They’d given her a lot of pills, a lot of sedatives. They’d been trying so hard to calm her down, and she hadn’t been able to understand why. She hadn’t been agitated. She hadn’t even been restless. She was sitting so still, she could have been frozen into a stone. Besides, she didn’t have anything to worry about.
Emma was all right. Emma would wake up, sooner or later, and tell everybody on earth who it was who had really attacked her.
FIVE
1
Gregor Demarkian decided to find out where the Radisson was because he couldn’t find Bennis Hannaford, who was supposed to be there, but who wasn’t answering the phone. If she was off on the floor where Jimmy Card and Elizabeth Toliver were hiding out, he was going to kill her. She hadn’t given him that number—probably because she hadn’t been authorized to—and she hadn’t given him any other way to reach her. Gregor was beginning to realize just how much he had come to rely on cell phones.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the notebook he’d been using since before he’d first come out to Hollman. Kyle was driving as if everything would get out of his way when he needed it to, even trees. It was better not to watch the road while that kind of thing was going on.
“So,” Kyle said. “What’s that you’ve got there? The answer to all my problems?”
“It’s a list.” Gregor turned the notebook sideways so that Kyle could get a look at it. He didn’t leave it up long, though, because he wanted Kyle concentrating on the roads. “In a way, it’s a suspect list. It just wasn’t supposed to be a suspect list for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr.”
“What is it a suspect list for, then?”
“Oh, it’s a suspect list for the death of Chris Inglerod Barr,” Gregor said. “It’s very efficient that way. It’s just that, when I wrote it, Mrs. Barr was still alive and well and I only knew her as Chris Inglerod. I should say knew of her. We hadn’t met. This is the list of names Jimmy Card gave me the afternoon he hired me. I’ve added a couple of names to it.”
“Okay,” Kyle said.
“I should have insisted on talking to Liz Toliver before I came up here.” Gregor sighed. “As it is, I only met her after we both got to Hollman, and that was in the midst of the crisis about her mother’s dog. And everything I knew about that night Michael Houseman died, I knew either from dry research or from Jimmy Card, and Jimmy Card doesn’t give a flying damn about who killed Michael Houseman as long as it wasn’t Elizabeth Toliver.”
“It wasn’t,” Kyle said quickly.
“I know. But the thing is, since the beginning, my focus on this case has been what Jimmy Card set it up to be. But what struck him most forcefully, and what naturally strikes Elizabeth Toliver, isn’t the murder but the outhouse. It makes much more sense for Elizabeth Toliver to be fixated on the outhouse and what happened to her in it than it does for her to worry about who killed Michael Houseman. She never even saw the body. And she never knew the boy very well.”
“She’d have recognized him in the corridors in school. But they never hung out or were friends or anything of that kind.”