“So,” Gregor said. “There’s a dead dog on the floor of your garage. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the whole story.”
“It’s not just dead,” Mark said flatly. “It’s been killed. It’s been eviscerated, to be exact. Slit right down the stomach with something sharp and the guts are all the hell over the garage floor, intestines that look like intestines, everywhere—”
“Mark.”
“That’s the cops,” Mark said as a white and blue car pulled into the drive, “and what I just told Mr. Demarkian here is the truth and you goddamned know it. Somebody slit that dog open while it was still alive and dumped its guts all over our garage floor and that didn’t happen by accident, Ma, that happened on purpose, and you know it as well as I do. And I am going to call Jimmy, I really am, because if you can’t get your act together, somebody has to. I want to leave. I want to leave tomorrow morning. Let’s take Grandma and the goddamned nurse with us if we have to, but let’s go. Somebody who did that to a dog could do that to Geoff. Got it?” He swung around to Gregor again. “You know how I know it was alive? Because it was alive when I saw it. It was in pain but it was conscious and it made eye contact with me and you know I’m not making that up, either. Jesus Christ. I’m going to go talk to the cops.”
“Cop,” Liz said automatically, because only one man had gotten out of the blue and white car. “It’s incredible, the kind of language they learn in very expensive private schools.”
Gregor looked up the drive. The garage was a small detached building at the very end of it—maybe at the very end of the property—that had been built to hold three cars, in a style meant to match that of the house. At the moment, there was a huge pile of debris in front of the doors, which were the kind that opened out, like barn doors, rather than the kind that folded up. Behind the garage, there were trees, tall pines that lined the property like a gate.
“What’s back there?” Gregor asked. “Behind those trees, I mean?”
“More trees,” Liz said. “I don’t know. I never was one for going outdoors when I was a child. Do you think the person came from there, from the trees?”
“I don’t know. I was really wondering if there was another house back there, but that we couldn’t see it except for the trees.”
“I don’t think so,” Liz said. “But you’re asking the wrong person. This is the first time I’ve been back in decades.”
“I know.”
The cop had finished talking to Mark, or Mark had finished talking to the cop. They were both walking down the driveway toward Gregor and Liz, and Gregor suddenly realized that the warm breeze had come back, or that his awareness of it had. For the first time, he was fully cognizant of just how isolated this house was. This was not a subdivision, or a suburban street. It was a country road, with not too much of anything else on it except this house. The nearest neighbor was a good trek away. The way things sounded around them, the entire landscape might be uninhabited. Gregor did a 360-degree turn, checking things out. It was still light. There were still birds.
Mark and the cop came up to them and stopped. The cop stuck his hand out and grabbed Gregor’s. “I’m Kyle Borden,” he said, shaking vigorously. “You must be the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
FOUR
1
Peggy Smith Kennedy knew her old friends didn’t take her seriously anymore. She was kept as carefully out of things as the unpopular people had been when they were all back in high school, and sometimes, these days, some of the unpopular people were let in. It was worse than it seemed, because Peggy knew she wasn’t just shut out. It was more like she had ceased to exist. Belinda and Emma and Nancy and Chris had whole conversations around her that they wouldn’t explain. If she tried to ask questions, they acted as if she weren’t there. They even talked right over her sentences. She could have been a television set, white noise for the background, or a dog, except that they would have petted a dog. They would have made a positive fuss about a cat. She still went to lunch with them because she couldn’t imagine not doing it—she’d been going to lunch with them at least once a week since she was twelve years old—but more and more she felt as if they wouldn’t miss her if she were gone.
Now she went into the master bedroom of her small house and looked at Stu asleep on the bed. As always, he slept above the covers and in nothing but his underwear. The underwear was stained yellow in a little line at the back. When they were first married, she had tried to insist that he change every day, for the sake of hygiene, and he had often agreed. That was back when there were still times when he acted as if it mattered what she thought of him. He would change clothes, or try to go three or four days without a beer, or bring her flowers after one of their fights. She found it hard to credit, after all this time, that one of the reasons she had been so eager to marry him was that she had been so sure he would worship her for the rest of his life. After all, she was the one who had been popular in high school, when he had been negligible, if that. He hadn’t even played a sport, and he certainly hadn’t had the kind of cachet boys like Lowell Tomlin and Chet Jabonowitz had, when they finished up senior year clutching their early acceptances to Caltech and MIT. Now, he had even less cachet than he had ever had. The drugs had kept him from getting fat—he was always telling her that if she wanted to keep her weight down, she should get more familiar with cocaine—but his skin sagged horribly all over his body. His stomach hung down like an apron, the way the stomachs of very thin women do right after they’ve given birth. His face looked pitted and marred. Once, coming up behind him while he was standing at the counter at English Drugs, she had caught sight of his face in the overhead mirror. He had looked like one of the pictures on the FBI’s most wanted poster at the post office. He had looked like Johnny Cash. His face was scarred the way the faces of men in prison were, even though he had never been in prison. He’d never even been arrested except once or twice for drunk driving, and those were the worst times of all. He felt caged up when he couldn’t drive. He ended up rampaging through the house, and breaking things. Once, when he’d lost his license for six straight weeks after having been caught doing ninety-five on Clapboard Ridge at two o’clock in the morning, he’d gone at the walls of their little basement recreation room with a ball peen hammer and his fists, smashing away until he’d reduced all the drywall to dust and slivers. Then he’d smashed the picture tube of the little television set they kept on top of a small wheeled table so that Stu could watch wrestling when Peggy was asleep. Neither one of them had ever gone back into the recreation room again. Peggy had unplugged the television set, because she was worried it might cause a fire. Stu had moved his base of operations to the living room, where he spent most afternoons and evenings sprawled out along their battered couch, dressed or not, as the fancy took him. Even if he hadn’t reacted the way he did when Peggy brought people home, she still wouldn’t have been able to entertain. She never knew when he’d be there in his underwear and when he’d be there in a pair of jeans. She did know that he’d be hostile. He’d been hostile for years, especially to the girls they had both known when they were growing up. When Nancy Quayde was made principal of the high school, he had cut her picture out of the Hollman Home News and urinated on it.