Somebody Else's Music(7)

“Beat herself bloody and practically unconscious,” Jimmy said. He gestured at the papers. “It’s all in there. When they found her, the skin was flailed off her arms and the sides of her hands and she just fell out onto the ground at this police officer’s feet. There were still snakes in the outhouse, two or three. She—”

“She really is phobic,” Bob Haverton said. “Genuinely. She can’t be in the room with a picture of one, and we found school records going back to kindergarten of her panicking when there was one on the playground, having complete screaming fits—”

“So,” Gregor said. “All the people she knew, knew she was afraid of snakes? And one of these people locked her into an outhouse and put snakes in there with her?”

“Right,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them, according to Liz. But the thing is, with Liz and snakes, a lot could mean only three. And she really doesn’t know how many.”

“What was the point?” Gregor asked. “Were they trying to kill her? People have died of shock from phobic reactions.”

“I doubt they were actually trying to kill her,” Jimmy said. “They were all, what? Eighteen. Seventeen. And this was 1969. And it wasn’t the first time.”

“It wasn’t the first time they’d locked her in an outhouse with a lot of snakes?” Gregor’s eyebrows raised.

“Liz,” Bob Haverton said carefully, “was not exactly popular in high school. Or in elementary school. As far as we can make out, she was one of those kids who’s sort of like a target, the one all the other kids pick on. It had been going on for years. And some of the incidents were pretty damned nasty. They took all her clothes while she was showering after gym once. They told her they wanted to meet her at this place they all went to—”

“The White Horse,” Jimmy said. “It was a bar. The kind of place you could go drinking and not get carded.”

“Right.” Bob nodded. “Anyway, they told her they wanted to meet her there and then they took off for a different place in a different town and left her stranded so that she had to walk home, in the dark, or call her parents and tell them where she was. She walked home. Jimmied her locker and took all her books. Spray-painted ‘big wet turd’ in red on the back of her best black sweater during an assembly and then laughed at it all day—”

“And this was everybody in the whole school?” Gregor asked. “Nobody told her about the spray paint?”

“A teacher did, eventually,” Jimmy said. “But you know, I’ve seen it happen, mostly with girls. Boys get cut a lot more slack. But some girls are just—I mean, even the teachers can’t stand them, they’re just—”

“Targets,” said Bob Haverton wryly. “I’ve had a better education than Jimmy did. I actually went to college, instead of just hauling ass to New York City to make my fortune. You can tell by our bank accounts who made the wiser choice.”

“It was only Adelphi,” Jimmy said.

“It was Yale Law. My point, however, is that I’ve read Lord of the Flies a few times. And that’s what this was, as far as I can make out. Lord of the Flies on a somewhat attenuated scale. Although, considering the thing with the outhouse and the snakes, it’s probably just as well that she was getting out for college the following fall.”

“I think that’s part of what did it,” Jimmy said. “Drew them over the edge, I mean, into doing something that could have been dangerous. Because she got into a good college and that just made them madder.”

“Back up,” Gregor said. “This was when—the day it happened?”

“July twenty-third, 1969,” Bob Haverton said.

“And what time of day?”

“Early evening,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them worked, you know, and when they got off work they’d go to this park where there was a lake for swimming and a lifeguard. And the park had woods around it and this set of outhouses—”

“Set?”

“I think it said four stalls in a row,” Bob Haverton said.

“Okay,” Gregor said. “It was early evening, and people went to this park, including Ms. Toliver. Was she getting off work, too?”

“No,” Jimmy said. “Her father was this hotshot lawyer. She was taking the summer off. She used to go to the park in the daytime when pretty much everybody she knew was working, and then she’d leave as they started to drift in.”

“But this evening she stayed?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jimmy said. “I think she was going to leave the same as always, but then things happened. One of them called her over and told her they needed her to see something, and I suppose she should have known better by then, I mean, for God’s sake, it had been going on long enough, but she went to look. And that’s when they pushed her into the outhouse and locked the door.”