Somebody Else's Music(148)

“I knew from the very beginning that we’d never have what you would call a normal life,” she said. “I knew that when we were both in kindergarten. It used to upset him even then, the world did. He’d get so angry, just at little things. Because a teacher shouted at him. Because one of the other boys won some game they’d been playing. Little, little things that the rest of us wouldn’t see any importance in at all. But he saw the importance in them. He cared about them so deeply. And I knew, you see. I knew he’d never make an ordinary kind of life for anybody.”

“I’d have worried that he needed psychiatric help,” Gregor said. “What you’re describing sounds to me very much like one of the borderline schizophrenic states. And schizophrenics can be very violent.”

Peggy flicked this away. “You don’t understand. None of them understand. He was the only member of our class that had true greatness in him. He’s still the only one. I see it in him every day. He lets it out for me to look at it, even if he won’t let it out to show to you.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “I’m not as close to him as you.”

Peggy turned her back on him and went to the bunk again. She sat down and stretched her legs out in front of her. “They won’t be able to do anything to him. I’m the one who killed Chris. And … and the dog. I didn’t mean to kill the dog. I went out to the house to see if she was there. Maris said she was going to be there. And I thought I could talk to her. But I brought the cutter with me, anyway. Just in case.”

“I know.”

“I shouldn’t have killed the dog. I just—wasn’t thinking, that’s what it was. I was thinking when I got there, and then nobody was home. And it was so quiet out there. There wasn’t anyone around but the dog and it came up and bothered me. Poked me. With its snout, you know. Stu won’t have dogs. They make too much mess, he says, and besides they bother him, too. I’m not used to dogs. It kept poking at me and poking at me and I got—I got angry. I don’t get angry very often. But I got angry then. And then—then the blood went everywhere. Do you know what I mean? It spurted out. It got all over my clothes. I didn’t realize there would be so much of it. And then I got scared, so I went back to the car, but when I got into the car there was blood everywhere, too. There was blood on the seat. I must have brought it with me, from the dog. I got blood on the steering wheel. And then, you know, I started thinking. Because it was so much like it had been the night Michael Houseman died, except there wasn’t any rain. Do people always bleed so much, when they die?”

“It depends on what you cut on them,” Gregor said.

Peggy shrugged. “When I went back the next day, I had on some of Emma’s clothes. I took them out of her closet when she was busy in the store. It wasn’t hard. But when I went out there, she wasn’t there then, either. I walked around and around and then there was Chris. And then …” She frowned and shook her head. “There isn’t really any then. She never understood him. Chris didn’t. She never in her life understood him. And she started shouting at me about how I should have him arrested, or lock him up in an insane asylum, or something, and then—” Peggy shrugged. “And then there was blood all over everything again.”

“You need a lawyer,” Gregor said. “You do know that.”

“Of course I know it. It won’t matter, though. Emma will wake up and tell them. She’ll tell them it was me, at any rate. She doesn’t know all of it. Nobody knows all of it. Only I do. And Belinda is right. It isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t?”

“What happened to Betsy Toliver,” Peggy said. “She never understood anything, Betsy didn’t. She never understood Stu, and she never understood us, and she always—she always—she’ll probably write her article now, or her book or whatever it is. And we’ll all look like stupid little hick town jerks. But Stu isn’t stupid. If she accuses him of murder, he’ll sue her. I’ll help him sue her, too. I can do that even from jail, can’t I?”

“I think you need a lawyer,” Gregor said. “And I think, more than that, you need someone to talk to who can be of more help to you than I can. All I really know how to do is to follow the logic of criminal acts to their possible conclusions. I don’t know much about anything else.”

“I hear on the television sometimes, and in the in-service seminars we have, I hear about the people like Betsy and how put upon they all are. But that isn’t true. It’s people like Stu who are put upon. Really fine people. People that no one understands. You can’t let someone like Betsy destroy someone like Stu. It isn’t justice.”