“What are you saying, exactly?” Gregor stretched out his legs. “That somebody might have—done that—to Mrs. Toliver’s dog in her own garage just because they were mad at Liz Toliver for getting to be successful when she wasn’t particularly successful in high school?”
“No, not exactly. I’m just saying that you maybe don’t want to make assumptions about what’s an overreaction to all that stuff about high school. I think the dog is too much myself, but I could see something close to it. I keep expecting to get a phone call that somebody’s taken the sharp end of a can opener to that car.”
Gregor shook his head. “I don’t get it. She seems like a perfectly nice woman. Does she turn into a vampire when the moon gets full? Why all this—emotion?”
“It’s werewolves who come out when the moon is full,” Kyle said. “And I don’t know why all this emotion. I didn’t understand even back then, although I know why they thought she was so odd. Everybody thought she was odd. She used to walk around with all these really strange books. Jean-Paul Sartre. I remember that one. That’s how I found out who Sartre was. I asked her.”
“Seems a little thin to cause the kind of reaction she got. Gets.”
“I agree. I don’t pretend to be able to explain it. She did get a reaction, though. Some of them—well, anyway. That was it. I wanted to warn you. You wanted to know something about the death of Michael Houseman.”
Gregor nodded. “Doesn’t it ever bother you that nobody talks about that? We wander around here talking about how people hated Liz Toliver in high school, and somebody is dead. I’ve been thinking of it all the way up from Philadelphia.”
“Now you can do something about it.” Kyle stood up, took a thick manila folder off the top of the debris, and handed it over. “That’s a copy of the complete file on the death of Michael Robert Houseman. You can look through the originals in the office if you want. Everything is in there, the stuff from the time, but other stuff that’s come up over the years. His mother’s still in town. She’s seventy-two. Not in too bad shape. She wants to talk to you one of these days. Most of the other people involved that night are still here, too, except that a couple of them have died. Some of them may not want to talk to you, and some of them may know they don’t have to. He was sort of a friend of mine. I wouldn’t mind if you did find out who killed him.”
“Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”
“Not a clue. The official but unstated premise around here is that he was killed by a tramp or a drifter who was out of the area before anybody started looking for a murderer. But the story is weirder than you know. It’s even weirder than the tabloids know. Whoever is giving them their information isn’t giving all the information there is to give. You want to go out to the park and look over the area?”
“You mean the area where he was killed?”
“Right,” Kyle said. “Also the area where Ms. Toliver got nailed into that outhouse. It’s all in the same general place. It’s hard to describe unless you see it. Let’s drive out there and I’ll walk you around.”
“All right.” Gregor stood up. Kyle Borden’s office window faced the parking lot. Gregor could see Luis the robot-driver standing idly by the car he was supposed to drive Gregor in. He wasn’t even reading the newspaper. “Maybe I’ll just give my driver the morning off,” he said as they both headed out the door.
3
When Jimmy Card, and Liz Toliver, and Kyle Borden had said “park,” Gregor had imagined something very large and open-ended, like Yellowstone, except not so large as that. It was the outhouses in the woods that had engendered that image. Gregor didn’t think he had ever been in a park with outhouses except the one time he was in Yellowstone, on kidnapping detail in his early years with the Bureau, and that might have been the only time he’d seen “woods,” too. In the one other case he’d consulted on since his retirement that had had a park in it, the park had been like Central Park, large but cultivated, with paved walkways through every part of it. When Kyle Borden pulled into the parking lot at Meldane Park, Gregor was disoriented. The parking lot was minuscule. It wasn’t even paved. The one other car pulling into it at the same time contained a young mother and two children with plastic buckets and shovels. Up ahead, there was what looked like an arched entryway to nothing. It had gates that could be shut, but it was not connected to anything on either side. “Meldane Park” was cut into the curve of the arch, all the way through, as if somebody had been trying to make a stencil. At the arch’s side was a sign with dates and times on it, announcing when the park was officially open.