Somebody Else's Music(23)

Emma had started to drag Peggy through the aisles between the shelves. She had to drag, because Peggy didn’t seem to be moving her legs or her feet. She was moving her head, but that was more disconcerting than if she had been holding herself absolutely still. Her head bobbed back and forth on the top of her neck, as if they weren’t securely connected.

“Jesus Christ,” Emma said. “I can’t believe you came in here at this time of day. Does he know where you are?”

“I’ll just leave this twenty-dollar bill,” Gregor said again.

The plaque cost $14.95. He didn’t really care. Emma continued to drag Peggy toward the back of the store, and in no time at all, they were out of sight. They were not, however, out of earshot. Peggy had the kind of clear-bell voice that carries for yards, even though it isn’t loud, and Emma was hissing.

“He knows I had to work late,” she was saying. “You know what he’s like. He understands when I have to stay at school to do the chess club.”

It was, Gregor thought, like listening to someone talking during an episode of sleepwalking. The voice had no affect.

He anchored the twenty-dollar bill firmly under a small vase of silk flowers. The vase was made of bubble glass. At the last minute, he left the plaque there, too. He couldn’t imagine what he’d do with it. Then he headed out the door and across the porch and down the steps back to the sidewalk, having no idea at all why he should feel so much in a hurry.

When he got back to the car and slid into the backseat and gave the robot-driver directions to go straight to Betsey Toliver’s house, he reached into his jacket again and looked up the entry on “Peggy.”





3


Fifteen minutes later, after some confusion about the difference between Meadow Farm Road and Meadow Farm Lane, the car pulled into the long driveway leading to a low ranch house that stretched out across its property like a ruler made of Silly Putty. It was a fifties ranch, not a modern one, but it had been kept up. The flagstone walk that led from the front door to the street—the one that nobody would ever walk on, because nobody would ever park on the street, out here—was well set and swept clean. The flagstone walk that led from the driveway to the side door was positively new. There were no cracks in the driveway’s asphalt paving. The front door had been freshly painted a glossy metallic red. Gregor could easily see how this might have been the biggest and most expensive house in town thirty years ago, especially since Hollman was hardly a bastion of the rich and famous, or even of the rich and bored. He popped open his door, swung his feet out of the car, and vaulted out into the air. At the end of May, it was warm out here, although not as warm as Philadelphia would have been. There was a slight breeze brushing through his hair. The grass smelled as if it had just been mowed. The house looked so quiet, and so deserted, he thought he might have come at the wrong time. Maybe Elizabeth Toliver had taken her mother to a restaurant. Maybe nobody was home.

Gregor was just turning to watch the robot-driver take his suitcases out of the trunk—ever since Bennis had bought him luggage, he looked like a software billionaire when he traveled, or maybe like Steven Spielberg—when there were sounds from the back of the house, and then the clear tap and crack of hard heels on a stone surface. A moment later, a small woman came into view from the backyard. She was small in every way, not only short but very slight, with a fine-boned, high-cheekboned face with edges so sharp they looked as if they’d been drawn with a fountain pen. Gregor recognized her by her eyes, and her hair. Her eyes were enormous. Her hair had that overpuffed look it got when the people it belonged to were interviewed too often on television.

“Shit,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Gregor said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, running her right hand through her hair and making it puff all the higher. Then she walked up to him and stuck out her hand. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to sound as if—oh, I don’t know. It’s Gregor Demarkian, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Liz Toliver. And I really am sorry. I know I’m saying it over and over again. I’m not making any sense. But if that nurse quits, we’re all up shit creek without a paddle, and the fool woman is totally losing it. I mean, for God’s sake—”

“She’s changed her mind,” a tall man called, coming around the house from the same direction Liz Toliver had. A moment later, Gregor saw that it wasn’t a man at all, but a boy, and a fairly young boy—no more than fourteen, he was sure, in spite of the height and the stubble of a beard just beginning to grow at the edges of his jaw. Still, Gregor thought, it would take another man not to be fooled. He’d bet anything that that boy got away with telling girls he was at least seventeen.