Christine Inglerod Barr was found dead at the home of a friend in the Mars Road section of Hollman this evening …
She picked up the phone and called the school. She asked for Nancy, and waited. She was not going to stay in this house all day, no matter how much it hurt to walk. She wasn’t going to wait in the kitchen with her hands folded until Stu woke up and figured out she had never gone in to work, because that would start him off again. It always did. He was scared to death that she’d lose her job.
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“It’s Peggy. I’m sorry to call so late. I’m—not feeling very well today. It might be a good idea if you got a substitute.”
“It’s eight-thirty.”
“Yes, I know. I seem to have slept through the alarm. If you’d knocked on the door, I might have heard you, but you must have realized when I wasn’t outside and waiting—”
“Realized what? That Prince Charming had been beating you into a pulp again?”
“I’m just sick, Nancy. That’s all. I’m just sick. I’m nauseated and I’ve got a headache. And I’m a little … confused … about this thing with Chris.”
“What’s there to be confused about? Somebody took a knife or a razor or something and eviscerated her. Her guts were all over Betsy Toliver’s lawn.”
Peggy blanched. “Oh,” she said.
“Half the town has been on the phone to me, telling me they just know it was one of us,” Nancy said.
“Yes,” Peggy said, feeling a little desperate now. The students in her homeroom had to be already in their places with nobody to watch over them, and she knew what that meant. “There’s homeroom,” she said carefully. “Somebody should go down to my homeroom and make sure—”
“Oh, Christ,” Nancy said. “All right. I’ll send Lisa. She can read announcements as well as the next person. You don’t need a teaching certificate for that. I can’t believe you did this to me. I really can’t. If you have to call in, for Christ’s sake, do it at seven, will you please?”
“Yes,” Peggy said, yet again. It seemed to be the only word she knew. “Yes, Nancy, I understand that. I slept through the alarm. I didn’t do it intentionally.”
“You stay with Prince Charming intentionally.”
“I’m going to hang up now and lie down,” Peggy said.
Nancy hung up instead, and Peggy found herself listening to a dial tone buzzing in her ear. She got up and put the receiver back in its cradle on the wall. Then she sat down again and put her face down on the palms of her hands. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. She counted to ten. She thought that when she began to feel a little less as if every bone in her torso was broken, she would take a walk to Grandview Avenue and have a coffee and English muffin in JayMar’s and just sit there for a while, just sit, without thinking about anything, not even about the six of them, that night, gathered around Michael Houseman’s body in the rain.
THREE
1
Gregor Demarkian fell asleep in his clothes, and when he woke up—too late, with the sun too high in the sky and the air too warm around him—he saw that he’d mashed his suit jacket into a ball of wrinkles. He checked his watch. It was only eight-thirty, which meant Kyle Borden wouldn’t be in the office yet. Gregor was supposed to meet him there at ten. He shook his legs out and eased his shoes off his feet. He took off his suit jacket and dropped it on the floor. He took off his tie. He picked up the phone and heard dead air. Either the service was out, or somebody had cut the phone lines—but that wasn’t a very good thought, under the circumstances. It was one thing to watch a butcher work when he was a serial killer who cared not at all about the people he slaughtered. Serial killers were about butchery. They were always looking to take one more step into the surreality of gore. It was another thing to see something like that at least ostensibly committed by a sane person—although, Gregor admitted, he’d always thought that the vast majority of murderers were peculiarly sane. It didn’t take madness to kill, although people who were mad sometimes did. It took determination, and a commitment to logic so pure that nothing else was ever allowed to get in its way. What kind of logic would have been required, to rip the guts out of a woman on a bright spring day in the unimpressive setting of a small-town backyard? He tried the phone one last time, because the thing he needed most of all in the world was to talk to Bennis, but the phone was still dead.
I need to take a shower, Gregor told himself. His clothes hung on him the way clothes do when they have been wet with sweat and dried without being washed. The fabric of his shirt was scratchy against his skin. He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled them back. He unbuttoned his top shirt button and set his neck free. Bennis was right. He was captive to an aesthetic that most people had abandoned decades ago.