Somebody Else's Music(37)

“All right,” Gregor said. “So, what time are we talking about?”

“Good question. Michael would have gotten off at five. With the rest of them, though, it’s hard to tell. I included all the paper on the incident with Betsy Toliver with what I gave you. Liz. It’s part of the story of Michael dying, or at least it was for the police at the time. From what I remember, she had been in the park before it closed, too, sitting on the beach or reading a book or something. But she wasn’t going to leave just because the park was officially closed.”

“How did she get here?”

“I don’t know, but I’d suspect she drove. Her father gave her a nice little car for graduation, I forget what kind. Two-door. Like that.”

“Do you remember if it was parked in the parking lot? And is that the same parking lot?”

“It’s the same parking lot. As to whether Bet—Liz’s car was parked there, like I said, I’d have to check. But as long as you’re going on about cars, Michael didn’t have a car parked there. His car was in for repairs. Chris Inglerod had dropped him off in the morning. Chris Inglerod was supposed to pick him up.”

“Chris Inglerod.” Gregor stopped on the path and took out his notebook. “She’s one of these people, isn’t she, one of the ones—”

“Who spent most of their childhoods torturing Betsy Toliver? Absolutely. She went up to Penn State and found herself a medical student. Now he practices here in town and Chris has a big house out by the golf course. Good luck getting to talk to her. She’ll know she doesn’t have to let you in the front door.”

“Was she Michael Houseman’s girlfriend?”

“No. The girls in that group didn’t go out with boys their own age, except for Peggy Smith, and that didn’t count, because she’d been after Stu when they were both in diapers. When the rest of them got to senior year, they dated guys at UP-Johnstown. The guys in our class dated the girls in the classes behind us.”

“You’ve said that Michael Houseman wasn’t important,” Gregor prompted.

“Not very important.” They had stopped walking to talk. Kyle started heading up the path to an opening in the pine trees. “He dated a sophomore our senior year. By summer it was over. He and Chris Inglerod had known each other for years. They lived next door to each other in these two little ranch houses that were built side by side in this neighborhood full of old people, so maybe for the first five years or so they had nobody else to talk to. And they were still living in the same places, so Chris took him places when his car messed up. According to her, she got to the park at five-fifteen. She was with Nancy Quayde at Nancy’s house and they forgot the time. And when she got here, the other girls were collecting the snakes.”

“How do you collect snakes?” Gregor asked. “That’s one of the things I haven’t been able to figure out about this.”

“It’s not hard to collect snakes,” Kyle said. “Especially not those little black snakes the girls had that evening. I think a couple of them—Belinda and Emma, maybe Maris—had been at it most of the day. They had a lot of snakes. Belinda said later that it was twenty-two. I figure she should know.”

“This took all day?”

“A good part of it.”

“And then what?”

“Well,” Kyle said. “That’s a good question. Because you’re now talking about maybe five-thirty, right?” He stopped walking and looked around. Gregor looked around with him. They were in the middle of a very small clearing, to one side of which was a low wooden shed with two outhouse stalls in it.

“These are the famous outhouses?” Gregor said.

“That’s right. Betsy was on the beach. The girls—Belinda, Emma, Maris, Chris, Nancy Quayde, Peggy Smith—had the snakes, and Maris went down to the clearing to call Betsy up from the beach. Betsy came up from the beach, and Maris started having this panic about how Emma was sick to her stomach in the latrine and Maris was on her own and couldn’t help Emma by herself, so would Betsy come, and as soon as they got near the outhouses a bunch of the girls jumped out of the trees, rushed Betsy into the one on the right, dumped the snakes right on her legs, and slammed the door shut. Then they nailed it shut. So how long do you figure that took?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Maybe another half hour?”

“Fine. Now we’re up to six. Where do you think Michael Houseman was?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“Good.” Kyle nodded. “Nobody else does, either. Chris said at the time that when she got to the beach, he was nowhere in sight. She thought he’d gone to the latrine—there are other latrines, for men, up that way a little—but then she met the girls and forgot about him temporarily. According to the rest of the girls, all they did after they nailed Betsy in was to go back into those trees”—Kyle gestured behind them—“and sit still and listen. Then it started to rain, thunder, lightning, and they thought they’d better get out of there and go home. So they got up and got moving, and a few of them went this way. Come with me.”