Somewhere around three, Emma hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. She’d gotten out of bed and gone into the living room at the front of the apartment. There wasn’t a bar or restaurant open this late anywhere in a hundred miles. Even the Sycamore shut down no later than one on weekends. On weekdays, it closed at eleven.
At five o’clock, Emma took a shower. She had to be very careful to lift and wash under the thick folds of flesh that hung off her torso like garlands on a Christmas tree. If she didn’t lift each one and wash under each one, they smelled, the way armpits did, and people in the shop would step back away from her and smile in that odd, strained way that meant they knew something discreditable about her. She got out of the shower without bothering to wrap a towel around herself. The lights were all out in the apartment, except for the one in the bathroom itself. She walked back to her bedroom stark naked and started dressing in clothes she pulled out of a thick oak wardrobe that had belonged to her mother. Her underclothes bit into her flesh and left red welts.
At seven o’clock, restless and with nothing else to do, Emma went down to open the store—well, not to open it, but to get everything ready for the time when she would open it, even if that was a couple of hours away. She set up the cash register and counted the money in the drawer. She spread furniture polish on the counter and wiped it down. She straightened the yarn and muslin dolls on the shelves at the front. She thought about Chris with her guts spilling out across Betsy Toliver’s backyard. Years ago, Chris wouldn’t have been caught dead in Betsy Toliver’s yard, but things changed. It was really disturbing the way things changed.
At seven-twenty, she couldn’t stand it anymore. The alarm clock next to the bed upstairs wouldn’t go off until eight. George wouldn’t be up until then. She couldn’t open the store to customers before nine. She checked her wallet and found $6.27. She wondered what it looked like when intestines spilled out of a body. Were they white, the way they looked in the book in biology class? Were they green? In the movies her brother used to watch when she and he were children, guts were always green. Red blood on a green lawn just made her think of Christmas.
She let herself out the front door and locked it behind her. She went down the steep steps to the sidewalk and watched as a garbage truck stopped for a pile of boxes somebody had left out in front of Dan Barr’s office. She wondered what Dan would do now that Chris was dead. He was off somewhere, at a convention in Seattle. At least he wouldn’t be a suspect.
She went down Grandview Avenue slowly, stopping only once, to look into the window of Emily’s Cheese Shop. When she got to JayMar’s, she pushed through the glass door and immediately began to shiver. The air-conditioning was turned up full blast. The men at the counter were all people she had known forever. They had copies of the newspapers and cups of coffee. At the very end of one side of the counter, Nancy Quayde was sitting by herself. She had a paper spread out in front of her.
“Hey there,” Emma said, sitting down next to her.
Nancy folded her newspaper into quarters. The headline on the page she’d been reading said: Fatty Food, Stress, Chief Culprits in Heart Disease. Joyce came down the counter in her white polyester off the rack uniform and said, “Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks,” Emma said.
“Oh, God,” Joyce said.
Joyce went back on up the counter. Nancy Quayde stared after her, annoyed. “She’s been acting like that all morning. Like I’m some kind of a goddamned accident victim. She’ll be the same way with you. Was it like this after Michael Houseman died?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said.
Joyce was back with the coffee. She put the cup and saucer down on the counter in front of Emma and poured. “Isn’t it a terrible thing?” she said. “Just terrible. You don’t think things like that could happen in a little town.”
“It’s not like it’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Hollman,” Nancy said coldly. “Hollman is not Sunnybrook Farm.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Joyce said. “People have been talking about nothing else since we opened up.”
“This is true,” Nancy said. “People have been talking about nothing else since I got here, but I haven’t been talking with them. I mean, for God’s sake. Chris is dead. What’s there to talk about?”
“The police are going to have a lot to talk about,” Joyce said. “There’s going to be an investigation. And state troopers. Kyle Borden can’t handle something like this all by himself.”