“Whyever would she want to talk to me?” Liz said. “She never did talk to me much when we were growing up. Why would she come here?”
“You were here all by yourself for an hour before any of the rest of us got here,” Maris said. “You must have seen her. You must have at least seen the car.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy said.
Maris’s drag on the cigarette this time was very long, so long it seemed an illusion. “What I’m doing,” she said, overprecisely, “is injecting a little reality into these proceedings. In another hour, or less, there are going to be hundreds of people here, only some of them from the legitimate news agencies. Some of the others are going to be shilling for the Enquirer and the Star. And let me tell you what this is going to look like to them. The last time Betsy spent any time in this town, Michael Houseman got murdered. Now that she’s come back, Chris Inglerod has been murdered—”
“You came back,” Jimmy said. “You’re back just as much as she is.”
“But not for the first time,” Maris shot at him. “I’ve been back dozens of times before. I’ve been here to visit my parents. I’ve been here to visit friends. It’s Betsy who took off and never wanted to set foot in this place again. Which is odd in and of itself, if you think about it. Who does that? Everybody comes home from college on vacations.”
“You,” Jimmy Card said, “are such an unbelievable, unmitigated bitch.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m not the one who’s going to say this stuff. I’m not even the one who’s going to think it. But everybody else will. And Betsy knows why Chris would be coming here. Chris was going to invite her to something, a party. I told Betsy all about it at lunch—”
“No,” Liz said. “What you said was—”
“And there’s the simple fact that all this stuff is happening right in Betsy’s garage,” Maris said, triumphant. “Swear your head off, it won’t matter. This will be in every supermarket tabloid by the end of the week and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”
“What about you?” Jimmy said. “How did you get here? You don’t have a car.”
“Nancy Quayde dropped me off when she got finished with school. Betsy was already here when we got here. Ask Nancy. Ask Betsy.”
“I didn’t realize it was Nancy in the car,” Liz said.
“She didn’t want to come in.” Maris looked up over her head. The night was dark enough now so that they should be able to see stars in the sky, but somebody—probably Mark—had turned out the security lights over the garage and the back porch door, and they couldn’t see anything but blackness. “You just don’t get it,” Maris said. “She wasn’t locked in an outhouse this time. She wasn’t beating herself bloody just because of a few stupid garden snakes. She was right here right now and nobody else was.”
“Geoff was,” Liz said softly. “My mother was.”
“Geoff is a child. Your mother is worse than a child. You’d have had a shot in hell if the nurse had been here, but she didn’t get back until after I did. Give it up. And then go back in the house and get clean. You’re both disgusting.”
Maris turned her back on them and strode across the lawn toward the back door to the house, wobbling a little on city heels. For a while they all watched her go, even Gregor.
“She never came to the door,” Liz said finally. “I hadn’t seen her in years. I hadn’t even thought about seeing her.” She looked down at the vomit smeared across the front of her sweater and on her arms. The sweater had short sleeves. She rubbed her hands against the sides of her slacks to clean them off and then rubbed her face, hard, as if she would never be able to rub it enough to wake herself up. “Well,” she said finally.
“You need to fire her,” Jimmy Card said finally. “You need to do more than that. You need to get her out of your life. I mean, what the hell, Liz, if you don’t want to marry me, you don’t want to marry me, but there’s no point in letting that woman go on screwing you over. You’re not doing yourself or anybody else any good.”
“She’s just—miserable, that’s all,” Liz said. “She’s just upset.”
“She just tried to pin a murder on you. And not one that’s thirty years old, either.”
Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of sirens, more than one, meaning that Kyle Borden had taken Mark DeAvecca’s call seriously. They all looked up and blinked, as if they’d been awakened from a light sleep. Liz put her hand on the mess on Jimmy Card’s sports jacket and shook her head.