“What did they expect to happen?” Bennis said. “I mean, the girl was scared to death of snakes and they nailed her in with over twenty of them. Did they think she was going to bond with them? What?”
“They thought she was going to scream,” Gregor said calmly, “which is what she did. Now, Michael Houseman was in the park that night. So was Kyle Borden here. So was Stu Kennedy. But Stu Kennedy came to the park to do two things, to find Peggy, and to get high. He may have been meaning to sell some of whatever it was he had that night. He almost certainly was selling it, to his friends and to other people, at the high school. And Michael Houseman either knew about it, or suspected it, or caught him in the act on that night. It doesn’t particularly matter which. What does matter is the one thing everybody says consistently about Michael Houseman.”
“He was a Dudley Dooright,” Kyle said gloomily. “He was, too. These days everybody goes to church all the time. Practically nobody did then. Michael did. He was an Eagle Scout. He handed in his homework on time. If he caught you smoking in the bathroom, he took your cigarette away or he turned you in. Some of us had times when we wanted to strangle him.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “He was a Dudley Dooright. So, faced with Stu Kennedy and a pile of drugs, whatever Kennedy was doing with it, Houseman would have been determined to hand Kennedy over to the authorities and Kennedy would have been faced with a problem that he could only solve by shutting Houseman up. So he took out the linoleum cutter—”
“Why a linoleum cutter?” Bennis said. “That never made any sense to me at all. I mean now, yeah, it might be what was around the house, but why would Stu Kennedy have a linoleum cutter on him in the park that night? Why not a knife? Or a straight-edged razor?”
“You think it would be more likely for him to have a straight-edged razor?” one of the state troopers said. “In 1969.”
“It’s one of those loose ends that needs to be cleaned up,” Gregor said, “although not too strenuously, because it won’t matter to the case against Peggy Smith Kennedy. The reason we know he had a linoleum cutter in the park that night is that Peggy Smith Kennedy used a linoleum cutter when she killed the dog and Chris Inglerod Barr. You know, you all sit around talking about how odd it was that he’d have a linoleum cutter in the park that night, but the fact is that it’s even odder that Peggy Smith Kennedy has had one with her in the past few days. Several people have told us that Stu Kennedy used to be fairly handy before he went completely under with booze and dope. So maybe he brought it for protection. A linoleum cutter is a kind of straight-edged razor. Or maybe he’d been doing something around the house for his parents that day and had it in his pocket or on his belt. Whatever the reason, he had the thing, and when Michael Houseman confronted him, he used it. And that’s where things started getting bizarre. Peggy was either with Stu by the time Stu committed the murder—remember, she didn’t have to go far from where they all started out near the outhouse—or she got there in the middle of the act, but whichever it was, she responded with a kind of trance hysteria. She started screaming ‘slit his throat slit his throat’ and the rest of them heard her. And they came. They—”
“That’s not what they said to the police at the time,” Kyle said. “I remember it. They said they were wandering around in the park sort of lost in the dark and they stumbled on the clearing and Michael Houseman was bleeding to death.”
“You couldn’t get lost in that park if you worked at it,” Gregor said. “They followed Peggy’s voice to the clearing and they found Peggy standing over Michael Houseman and Michael Houseman either bleeding to death or already dead. And the rain was coming down. And everybody got completely and utterly caught up in the moment.”
Gregor said, “But the thing is, their first reaction was to protect Peggy from the consequences of anything Stu had done. And the only way they could do that was to keep their mouths shut and play dumb. And that’s what they did. In other circumstances, it would have been a stupid move. The police could have found the murder weapon. The police could have pushed a little harder than they did and started Stu Kennedy talking. As it turned out, however, they didn’t have anything to worry about. The case was never solved. It never came close to being solved. They went on living their lives. I wonder what they thought when Peggy married Stu Kennedy. Maybe they didn’t think anything of it. Peggy and Stu had been a couple for so long. Maybe they thought it was only natural.”