Somebody Else's Music(17)

She had no idea when she left the clearing, or when she started running. It wasn’t really running. In her bare feet, the best she could do was stumble and make a mess of things. She reached the outhouses and went right past them. They had never meant anything to her. She went down the narrow path and came out at the sanded clearing around the lake. Nobody new had come while she was gone. The lifeguard’s chair was still empty. She went quickly along the very highest edge of the sand to the small path that led to the wrought-iron gate. She went through the trees and through the gate and got to her car just as she heard the sound of crows in the air above her head. Weren’t crows supposed to be bad luck? She was tugging at her car door. It was locked. She’d forgotten about locking it. She hadn’t even taken out her keys. She got them out and let herself in behind the wheel and just stopped.

Somebody new drove into the parking lot. Chris sat right up. She wasn’t going to let anybody see her like this. The last thing she wanted was for some stranger to tap at her car window to ask if she was all right. The car was hot. It got hot early in Hollman in May. It wasn’t safe to put on the air conditioner if the car wasn’t running. People overheated their engines that way.

She watched a woman and two small children make their way from the newly parked car toward the pines and the wrought-iron gate. The children were too small to be in school and carried bright plastic buckets, one blue and one red. Chris started her engine and eased out into the openness of the field. What was this place like when it got really busy, when it mattered that it had no clearly marked parking spaces and no corridors partitioned off for people to drive through? Out on the road, the green of the grass looked fake, as if somebody had come along and dyed it with that stuff you colored Easter eggs with.

She decided not to go through the middle of town this time at all. She didn’t want to look at it. She went around by the side roads instead, in a big circle that would bring her through Plumtrees and Stony Hill, and that was why she ended up seeing Betsy Toliver after all. She’d forgotten that Betsy’s mother lived in Aunt Hack’s Ridge, or that Betsy had grown up there, in one of those enormous ranch houses with the three-car garages and the fieldstone walks that led to the fieldstone steps that led to the fieldstone-framed double front doors. Fifties nouveau riche chic, Chris thought, and then Betsy was right there, in the big open drive, getting out of a green Mercedes and talking to a woman in a nurse’s uniform at the same time. Chris had no idea why she was so certain that this was Betsy Toliver. The woman was a good ways away from her, and the car was moving, and this was neither the Betsy she remembered from high school nor the Betsy she remembered from television. Still, she knew. Other people were getting out of Betsy’s car, two boys, probably her sons. Betsy was wearing one of those loose-fitting tunic-y things that women in their fifties wore when they were being “casual” or “artistic” in the city. She had a thick clutch of gold bracelets on her left arm, supple and bright.

Damn, Chris thought. She had slowed to a crawl, and she was gaping. None of the people around the Mercedes seemed to have noticed it. Betsy had her back to the road. The two boys were unpacking the trunk, piling one black leather suitcase onto another. Chris stepped on the gas. A few seconds later she couldn’t see them anymore. They couldn’t see her.

It was only then that she realized she was still shaking. Her muscles were still twitching. She pulled over onto the side of the road, at the edge of a property that belonged to no one she knew. She put her head down on the steering wheel and told herself to breathe. It didn’t work. She pushed the seat back as far as it would go and tried to put her head between her knees. That didn’t work, either. She kept thinking of the dark of that night and the whole bunch of them standing in a circle and the blood on the ground and, in the background, like a sound track, Betsy Toliver screaming.

Chris pushed open the door at her side, leaned out over the road, and threw up.





THREE





1


Her name was Grace Feinmann. Bennis found that out and then wrote it down on a three-by-five card along with the five or six other things she thought Gregor should remember while he was away: Tibor’s e-mail address and new cell phone number; the hotel she would be staying at in Los Angeles for all of the coming week; the name of the brand of coffee bags he was supposed to buy in case he was in danger of having to make his own; the title of Elizabeth Toliver’s last book (Conspiracy: The Rise of Paranoia and the Death of Politics).

“She says she met you in Connecticut,” Bennis told him, packing his white shirts into the big suitcase he always took when he was traveling, “that time when Kayla Anson died. She had something to do with the case. But I don’t remember her.”