Somebody Else's Music(133)

“I could sue you for that,” Maris said. “And you know how it would look. I’m not the one that would come off like trash.”

“You know, all the way back to Vassar, I thought I knew what was going on,” Betsy said. “I heard it, you know. That girl screaming. Slit his throat, she was saying. Slit his throat. And all that time, I thought it was you. When you started drinking like a crazy person in college, I thought that was what had caused it. I thought you’d gotten caught up in something and then in the heat of the moment one of you had killed poor Michael Houseman and now you were falling apart about it. I felt sorry for you.”

“You felt sorry for me in college? I was a star in college. You were nobody at all.”

“You were drinking every single night. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. You were completely out of control. And you were, of course, an utter bitch to me, relentlessly. But then you’d always been. And I thought I knew why you were behaving so oddly, and then, when we ran into each other in the city and you were so much of a mess—”

“I have never been a mess,” Maris said. “Not ever.”

“And you didn’t have a job and you’d been fired all those times and it was obvious you were drinking. And then I didn’t just feel sorry for you, I felt guilty, really, because I’d always thought of you as perfect. As golden. As destined for success in just the same way I was destined for failure. It’s odd how ideas like that can lodge in your head and refuse to leave. And I thought that it was all just an accident. You’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time with all those mediocre people and the moment had overwhelmed you and your life was ruined. And it was just chance. It was just fate. Just like I thought it was just fate that I’d landed at CNN and Columbia, just a matter of being in the right place at the right time instead of the other way around. And it seemed so unfair.”

Maris smiled. “Excuse me,” she said, reaching down into her bag. She came up with the bottle of Chanel No. 5, uncapped it, and took a long swig. “We don’t need to observe formalities, here, do we? It’s not like you don’t know what I keep in this thing. It was fate, you know. It was all chance and circumstance. There’s nothing else on earth that could have gotten you where you are.”

“On the night Michael Houseman died, I did hear a girl screaming ‘slit his throat,’ but it wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you, and if I’d been thinking straight I would have realized it. You were with Belinda and Emma, right from the beginning. The three of you were hiding out in the stand of trees just up the fork from that outhouse because you wanted to see what I’d do when you got the door nailed shut. It wasn’t you screaming ‘slit his throat,’ it was Peggy.”

“Crap,” Belinda said. “Why would Peggy Smith want to slit Michael Houseman’s throat? She barely even knew him. He wasn’t one of our crowd.”

“So I started to think about it,” Betsy said. “I started to wonder. If you weren’t behaving the way you were behaving because you were traumatized by having taken part in the death of Michael Houseman without meaning to, then why were you behaving the way you were behaving? Do you want to know what conclusion I came to?”

“Do tell,” Maris said.

“It seems to me that there’s only one reason why you do what you do. Because you want to do it. You’re not having a mental breakdown caused by post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever I thought it was. You really are one of those mediocre people. You just happen to be one of them with decent grades, and that got you into a good college, and so for a year or two you looked more impressive than you really were. But you belong here, Maris. You’re Hollman through and through. Small-minded, petty, envious, spiteful, and tenth rate—”

“Oh, dear. Let me tell a few strategic people all about that one. Won’t that one look lovely in People magazine.”

“What did you think she was going to do?” Betsy asked. “Did you expect her to murder me? What was the point of all this this past week?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Maris said.

“She had the keys to your car,” Betsy said. “To your bright yellow Volkswagen rental car. I saw her driving it on Grandview Avenue that day we had the big fight at the Sycamore, the day Chris Inglerod was killed.”

“So maybe she stole the keys out of my purse.”

“She wouldn’t have been capable of it, and you know it. You may sell that line to the police, Maris, but you won’t sell it to me. You gave her the keys to that car, and you told her when you thought I’d be home, and you were wrong both times, and that’s where the trouble was. You must have known she was dangerous. My children were in that house, or they were supposed to be.”