Somebody Else's Music(44)

“What does that have to do with you telling things to the National Enquirer?”

“Nothing.” Maris went back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. “I tell things to the National Enquirer because they pay me for them. And because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. She gets very upset at those stories. You have no idea. Don’t you just love it when you see things like that at the supermarket?”

“Not really.” Emma watched as Maris got a huge Chanel No. 5 bottle out of her pocketbook and emptied half its contents into the tumbler. “You’re drinking perfume?”

“It’s gin,” Maris said. “I’ve got a couple of real bottles around here somewhere, but it’s inconvenient to take them out for the afternoon. Places without a liquor license protest when they know you’re trying to fortify their soft drinks. I just love it when I see things like that in the supermarkets. And on the newsstands. In New York, we’ve got these newsstands, these kiosk things, and they hang magazines and papers and things from a clothesline sort of arrangement over their open windows. You can see the headlines for miles.”

“Why didn’t you use a pay phone here?”

“The only one I know of is in English Drugs. It’s the first place Jimmy would check.”

“Why wouldn’t he check here?”

“How would he ever get Belinda’s phone records?” Maris had already finished a third of her tumbler of “fortified” orange juice. She looked much more sober than she had before. “It’s not so easy to get hold of private information. The government can get it, but the rest of us have a very hard time, and if Jimmy did manage it Belinda could probably sue him. Not that she’d think of it. Christ. Was Belinda this stupid when we were all in school?”

“You were her best friend. You should know.”

“She was this stupid,” Maris said. “Never mind. Just don’t bother to look shocked, will you? It’s depressingly hick of you. I come back here and I just can’t believe how god-awful provincial this place really is.”

Emma looked away. This apartment was so tiny it would have made her breathless even if she hadn’t climbed a steep flight of stairs to get to it, or been so shocked that she could barely defrost her mind enough to think of what she had to do next. Good people, decent people, did not do things like this. If there was one thing she had never questioned, it was that she and all her friends were good and decent people. Of course, there was all that other stuff, about Betsy, not only the outhouse but stuff that had come before, but that was different, somehow. That hadn’t been real cruelty, but only kids and the way kids behaved. This was—

Maris had her legs stretched out on top of the coffee table now.

“You are going to get all provincial on me,” she said. “What the hell. I’m not sorry I did it. I’m really not.”

“I’ve got to get back to the store,” Emma said. “We’re supposed to be open straight through the day. I’ve probably missed half a dozen customers.”

“Why did you come? Were you looking for Belinda? Belinda works today. Were you looking for me? How did you know I’d be home?”

“I just thought I’d drop by and see how things were going,” Emma said. She looked around her, helpless. “I’d better get going,” she said. “I really shouldn’t be away for long. George has a fit if he finds out.”

“Make sure you lock the door when you leave,” Maris said.

Emma turned around and shuffled out, past the little dining table, through the kitchen, into the hall. The stairwell was dark. Emma went down half the stairs and then stopped, breathless again.

What struck her, suddenly, was that she did know a way for that dog to have ended up in Betsy Toliver’s garage—but that was because she knew the way Michael Houseman had ended up dead.





3


At first, Nancy Quayde thought she would take it easy. It was a nothing much of a day. There wasn’t a school board meeting for at least a couple of weeks, and that one would be the end-of-year report, where she spent most of her time listing all the supplies they’d used over the last ten months. Then she would spend even longer explaining, or trying to explain, why they needed at least that much or more for next year: so many cartons of chalk; so many sophomore biology textbooks. Some of the school board members resented the idea that there was any school going on in school at all. Their philosophy of education amounted to the belief, fervently held, that schools should be places where “kids were allowed to be kids.” Anything that got in the way of that—say, for instance, the new mandatory state mastery examinations that would retain any student at grade level if she didn’t pass—was an obvious evil. Anything that helped that along—like proms, and football games, and the annual class vote for who would be named Most Popular and Cutest Couple for the yearbook—was just as obviously good. Nancy had a fight every year with the mothers who wanted to double the semiformal dance schedule. Aside from the junior and senior proms, they already had a junior-senior semiformal and a Valentine’s Day formal and a harvest dance at homecoming in the fall. It wasn’t enough for people like Emma, who didn’t remember much of anything about high school except the dances, and maybe some of the football games, assuming she ever watched any of the ones she cheered at. Nancy thought it was doubtful. She hated parents, if she were honest about it. They existed only to make her life difficult, and the more involved they got in the school, the worse they were. The rich parents were the worst of all, because it wasn’t enough for them if their child was popular. He had to have good grades, too, to make sure he could get into some college whose name their friends would recognize. It was impossible to enforce an honor code. If a student was caught cheating, she couldn’t expel him, because if she tried the parents would sue. It was impossible to discipline anybody for anything, except maybe bringing a weapon to school. There had been enough violence that the parents couldn’t get away with suing for that. There were days when Nancy Quayde knew exactly why some people got hold of shotguns and strafed their workplaces from one end to the other. There were days when she wanted to do it herself.