Somebody Else's Music(38)

Gregor came. Kyle made his way up the hill next to the outhouses, through the pines and across a thick carpet of needles. They came out on another small clearing, this one next to a small river. Gregor didn’t know if “river” was the right word. It didn’t have much water in it.

“Here,” Kyle said. “Right here. Maybe another ten or fifteen feet up that way. What Belinda said was that when they found Michael Houseman’s body, they just stood around it for a while, and they were all covered with blood.”

“What?”

“Covered with blood,” Kyle said. “And then it started to get crazy, because people were screaming, Betsy was screaming, there was thunder. Maris said in her interview at the time that if it hadn’t been raining so hard they would still have it all over them, over their arms, over their legs. The rain washed it off. And Belinda was there, on her knees, laughing her head off and screaming, and Peggy Smith was screaming, too, and they were all screaming, ‘slit his throat, slit his throat.’”

“Jesus,” Gregor said.

“I told you it was weird,” Kyle said.

Gregor walked up and down by the side of the river. They were not very far from the little beach. Gregor guessed they weren’t even a full tenth of a mile. The trees around him were tall and straight, so tall they blocked off some of the light from the sun. It was a dark and quiet place.

“And that was it?” he said finally. “Nobody was ever charged with this crime? Even though a whole group of girls was found with the body and they were covered with blood, literally or metaphorically, nobody was ever charged with this crime?”

“There was nobody to charge,” Kyle said. “They were all together most of the time. When would any of them have had the time to do it? And there was no murder weapon. The police searched the park. They brought in state police. They tore this place up. There was no sign of it. And it wasn’t on the girls, trust me. They kept the girls in the town jail overnight until they could get a matron in to search them. This town went crazy over the next couple of weeks, but nobody ever figured out what happened, and nobody ever got arrested for killing Michael Houseman.”

“Crap,” Gregor said.

He walked back and forth along the river, counting steps, thinking hard. It wasn’t the alibis that were the problem. With people wandering around in the dark like that, it was foolish to believe they all had their eyes on each other all the time.

The problem was going to be the weapon.





SIX





1


For Liz Toliver, the oddest thing about being back in Hollman wasn’t being back in Hollman, or even that damned dog—although she had dreamed about the dog, as well as the snakes, and had ended up taking a call from Jimmy at three o’clock in the morning—but the fact that she was completely without a schedule. All that morning during breakfast, she’d kept looking up, expecting Debra to call to tell her what was on her book for the day. Then she’d had to walk around the kitchen a few times, feeling dizzy, because there was nothing at all on her book for the day, or for the day after, or for the day after that. On Friday, she had a phone interview with a woman writing an article for the Vassar Quarterly, and strewn in and out of the next two weeks she had appointments with her mother’s lawyers and doctors and acupuncturist. The appointments were all fluid. She could cancel any of them she wanted to cancel, at will. She could write or not write. She had cleared her deadline schedule to keep the month free. Even the one idea she’d been able to come up with—somebody ought to do a skeptical update on New Age medicine—fell flat. She didn’t much approve of New Age medicine, and she certainly didn’t believe it worked, but lots of people took comfort in it, and there didn’t seem to be much harm as long as they didn’t ditch their insulin and chemotherapy.

“I think I’m going to go insane,” she had told Debra, right after breakfast, when she’d checked in to the office. “I know I don’t need to call you, but I had to hear a businesslike voice.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You know what I mean. I’m dropping my mother and her nurse off at the physical therapist’s. Then I’m meeting Maris for lunch. Then I’m picking my mother up and taking her to her gynecologist’s. Anyway, that’s my day. How do people retire?”

“Have you told Maris yet that we’re firing her?”

“I haven’t even seen her.”

“You’re seeing her at lunch. Tell her. I’m serious, Liz. If you don’t tell her, I will, and you don’t want the news coming from me.”