When she got to the front foyer, she had a split second of worry. Maybe this would come back to haunt her when the hearings for the superintendent’s job came up. The worry didn’t last long. Most of the members of the school board were as exasperated with Diane as she was, and Diane’s own mother could barely stand the sight of her. Nobody was going to make an issue of the fact that somebody had finally told Diane what the score was, not even if that somebody was Nancy Quayde.
Nancy passed through the outer office. Lisa called out, “Harvey went back to his office. He had an appointment.”
Nancy went into the inner office and shut the door behind her. Her sandwich was on the desk. Her little bottle of Perrier water was still unopened. She pushed them aside and pulled the phone close to her.
After all these years, she still knew the number at Betsy Toliver’s house.
SEVEN
1
The last time Gregor Demarkian was in a small town, it was nearly winter, and in New England, so that both the weather and the landscape fit the occasion. Discussions of murder should take place on gray days or in the night. In Hollman, in the spring, Gregor felt as though he were playing a movie scene on the wrong set. It was as if John Sayles had decided to make a movie of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” in the bright greens and very early sixties Happy Days spotlessness of Matinee.
“What are you thinking about?” Kyle Borden asked as he pulled the town’s one police car into a parking place on Grandview Avenue.
They were parked right in front of a largish store whose purpose he couldn’t decipher—hardware, maybe, or home furnishings. Just across from them, there was a side street split around a small triangular island. On the far side of that from where they were, in a place where the sidewalk curved in a great sweep up the hill, was Hollman’s Pizza, where they were headed.
“I was thinking about ‘The Lottery,’” Gregor said.
“The Pennsylvania lottery?”
“No. There’s a short story, by—”
“Shirley Jackson,” Kyle finished. “Yeah, I know it. Small town where they draw lots every year to pick somebody to stone to death. I did two years at the junior college. We had to read it in English. You think Hollman reminds you of Shirley Jackson? That’s funny, you know, because she used to say that. Betsy. I mean, Liz. When we were all in high school.”
“I can imagine,” Gregor said. He got out of the car, looking up and down Grandview one more time. There was really nothing remarkable about it. He just hated it. The last place he had ever truly hated like this was Fort Benning, Georgia, and that didn’t count, because what he’d really hated about Fort Benning was the fact that they kept making him make forty-mile forced marches with a fifty-pound pack on his back in ninety-degree heat.
Kyle’s idea of crossing the street was to look both ways and run. There was no streetlight on this section of Grandview, and no crosswalk, either. Gregor looked both ways, crossed his fingers, and followed. If Kyle did this all the time, it was a miracle he wasn’t dead. Gregor got to the opposite sidewalk just ahead of a green Jeep Cherokee with a very loud horn. Kyle watched the Jeep go up the hill and shrugged.
“This is a famous place,” he said, pointing at Hollman’s Pizza. “In the story of Betsy Toliver in Hollman, I mean. When we were all freshmen, a bunch of them asked her to have pizza with them one day after school, and then they all snuck out on her one by one and stuck her with the tab. Eight pizzas, they’d ordered. She had to call her mother to pay the bill.”
Kyle held open the swinging glass door and ushered Gregor through it, apparently oblivious to the fact that the story he had just told was nasty as hell—that all the stories about “Betsy Toliver in Hollman” were nasty as hell, the kind of stories you’d expect to hear about psychopaths. Gregor looked around the small room with its dozen wooden tables and spotted the pay phone on the wall next to the door they’d come in by.
“I want to make a call,” he said. “I’ve got a cell phone with me, but I can’t seem to get it to work, and I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone all day.”
“Cell phones don’t work up here,” Kyle said. “It’s the mountains. You go ahead. I’ll order us a pizza. Sausage and pepperoni be okay?”
“Fine.” Gregor congratulated himself for bringing lots of antacids, and went over to the pay phone to see what he could do. He found his long-distance calling card at the back of his wallet and tried Tibor’s first. He got a busy signal. Tibor must be on the Internet. He tried his own number and felt instantly relieved when somebody picked up.