Somebody Else's Music(30)

“It would have been different if it really fit,” Belinda said. “But she didn’t really wet herself. It was just a nickname.”

“Right,” Laurel said. She had finished putting up the folder. With its red lettering, it would be hard to miss. She stepped back and rubbed the palms of her hands against her sky-blue linen Talbots pants. “Pay attention to me. You will not call her Betsy while she’s here. In the library, I mean. I don’t care how natural it feels. If people had called me a name like that when I was growing up, I’d have gotten away as soon as I could and never gone back. It’s unbelievable how children treat each other, it really is. No wonder there are school shootings every spring. I’ve got to clean up the files on late returns this morning. Do you think you can handle things yourself?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Good.” Laurel looked her poster up and down. “Good,” she said again. “You’d think people would learn, but they never do. And it always comes out the same. Incredible. You can open up now. It’s five after nine.”

Laurel strode off through the big main room. Belinda watched her for a while and then did what she’d been asked to do. Laurel, obviously, hadn’t heard about the dog. Either she didn’t watch the local news in the morning, or the story hadn’t appeared there. It wouldn’t have appeared in the paper, because that only came out once a week. Belinda looked at JayMar’s, and English Drugs, and the railroad tracks, and Mullaney’s. She couldn’t imagine putting her hands in a dog’s intestines. She didn’t even like to handle raw chicken. Besides, this was the kind of thing that would appear in the news somewhere, and when it did it would make all of them look like—

—losers.

There were people on the street now, although not many of them. Belinda checked them out to see if she knew them—she didn’t—and went back inside and closed the door after her. For the first time, she considered the possibility that Betsy might take the dog seriously. Maybe, to Betsy, the dog would be a warning she needed to heed. Then she’d give this up as a bad job, and pack her children into her fancy expensive car, and go back to Connecticut.

For the first time, Belinda truly hoped that Betsy Toliver was scared to death.





FIVE





1


The first thing Gregor Demarkian did when he woke up that morning, before he’d taken a shower, was to get his notebook from the pocket of the jacket he was wearing the night before and make sure he had written down the name and address of the police officer he had talked to about the dog. He’d been dreaming all night that he’d lost both. Either he’d forgotten to write them down, or the ink had paled so much it was illegible, or the page was ripped from the notebook when he went to find it. Even during the first dream, he had been aware that he was dreaming. During the second dream and all the ones afterward, some part of his brain stood outside the action, analyzing. This was a kind of panic attack. He’d been prone to them when he was first in training at Quantico, which was odd, because he hadn’t been the least prone to them in the army, and he’d always been half afraid that the army would get him killed. He had no idea why he should suddenly be prone to them again, now, when—at least as far as he could tell—he had nothing at stake at all. It wasn’t the dog, although the dog still bothered the hell out of him. Mark had not been exaggerating. Somebody had cut that dog straight up the middle, with some kind of a sharp knife or a razor, while it was still alive. The intestines had been spilling out all over the garage’s cement floor, slippery and wet. Gregor could have understood it if he’d had dreams about that, the way he used to have dreams about the bodies they got pictures of when he was with the Behavioral Sciences Unit. The dog, though, had been worse. He couldn’t put his finger on why. Maybe there was some part of him that felt that it made sense for people to kill other people, even if the other people were children. There was something natural about human beings wanting to slaughter each other. Slaughtering a dog was not natural. He was making no sense at all.

Once he found the notebook—Kyle Borden; 555-2627—he put it on the rickety night table by the bed he was sleeping in and thought that it didn’t matter. This was a small town. If he’d lost the name and address, he only had to call the police department and ask a few questions to be put in touch with the officer again. For all he knew, Kyle Borden was the only officer. He looked around the small bedroom. It was the “spare bedroom” at the back of the ranch. In some places, it wouldn’t “count” as a bedroom at all, because it had no closet. For a fifties ranch, this was a fairly nice house, but it couldn’t escape being a fifties ranch. The ceilings were lowish. Gregor was used to the high ones in the turn-of-the-century town house in which he lived, or the equally high ones in new houses that specialized in tray and cathedral ceilings. The floor was wall-to-wall carpet, fortunately in a neutral navy-blue. Gregor imagined it had once been a fashionable color, like turquoise or black. That was what Gregor remembered best about fifties ranches in the fifties. There was all that turquoise, and all those bathrooms tiled in pink halfway up the wall and papered in black with metallic outlines of pink flamingoes on top of that. Just to make sure, he got his robe and went into the bathroom that was just outside his door, but it was an ordinary bathroom, tiled in white, with a tub-shower combination that you had to step into as if you were stepping over a runner’s hurdle.