Somebody Else's Music(57)

“Maybe we should go inside and clean up,” she said.

“Clean up but leave the clothes intact,” Gregor told her. “Take them off, drop them in a plastic bag, put them aside for forensics. Take a shower and do what you have to do to make yourself feel better. A shot of brandy probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“Jesus,” Jimmy said. “You really are going to treat Liz as if she—”

“No,” Liz said. “He’s going to treat everybody as a suspect. So will the police. That’s, what, standard operating procedure.”

“You also have to worry about a process of elimination,” Gregor said. “If any of … that … has dropped on the ground, the forensics people may pick it up. It would be necessary to eliminate it. We could do that if we had samples of the—”

“Jesus,” Jimmy said again.

Mark DeAvecca came out of the house and walked across the lawn to them. “What did you guys do to Maris? She’s smirking.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy Card said.

“It’s just Maris,” Liz said. “It’s just the way she is. She panics and she acts like an idiot. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“I think you’d better get cleaned up,” Gregor said again, more firmly this time. “Get cleaned up. Have a brandy. Wait until the police want to talk to you. And don’t let anybody leave the house. No matter how much you might want to.”

“Meaning we’re stuck with the bitch of the Western world for the foreseeable future,” Mark said cheerfully.

“You go back in the house, too,” Gregor told him. “The police will be here any minute, and you don’t want to be in the way.”

“Yes, I do,” Mark said.

“Go.”

Mark shrugged. Liz backed up a little and looked in the direction of the body. Gregor didn’t think she could possibly have seen much, and she didn’t linger to see if she could get a better look. She took Jimmy Card’s hand and smiled at Gregor, faintly.

“Well,” she said, “I guess we’ll go back in the house and get cleaned up. Mark, you come with us.”

“Just a second,” Mark said.

Liz and Jimmy looked at each other, and then walked off, slowly. Mark stood silently until they were out of hearing range, his boy’s face shading in and out of adulthood in the dark and the artificial light. Gregor thought that when he hit twenty Mark was going to be a positive menace to female virtue.

“So,” Mark said. “I take it Maris has decided that Mom killed this—person. And she’s told you all about it.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Mark said, “if she tries to tell you Mom was here alone with Geoff and Grandma, she’s wrong. I was here, the whole time. I got back from the library at quarter after three. This woman Mom used to know gave me a lift. You might want to ask her about it.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“Emma Bligh. I remember because she reminded me of Captain Bligh. Marlon Brando, you know, in that ancient movie. Except it wasn’t Marlon Brando who was Bligh, it was some English guy. She had this other woman with her—Belinda something. Belinda had a daughter.”

“Oh?”

“Forget it. IQ in negative numbers, from what I could tell from what she was saying. What Belinda was saying, I mean. Belinda’s IQ was in negative numbers, if you want to know the truth, and Emma Bligh wasn’t much better. Is everybody in this town stupid? Belinda works in the library, by the way. I saw her there. She doesn’t know anything about books.”

“I know it isn’t legal,” Gregor said, “but you might want to take a swig of that brandy yourself. You’re shaking.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “I just—I just want to know what’s going on with my mom, you know. I just don’t get it. I mean, I’ve been hearing about these people all my life. They intimidate her, they really do, and I know that she always feels as if she doesn’t deserve her own life. The more successful she gets, the more guilty she gets, and I can’t figure it out. Now I’ve met these people and they’re stupid, they’re shallow, and if they’re not that, they’re Maris, who’s some kind of frigging sociopath. What’s the point here? Why does she care so much?”

“I don’t know.”

“They all care,” Mark said. “That’s the weird part. They all care. You should have heard the two of them driving me home. It was insane. And they hate her for it, you know. They hate her for what she turned out to be.”