“Crap,” Kyle said. “Yeah, that’ll be there, I remember it. It went around town for weeks, who had been out at the park that night and who hadn’t. And who, you know, was involved in nailing Betsy into the damned outhouse.”
Gregor pulled out a chair and sat down. “So,” he said. “Do you think it’s connected? The murder of Michael Houseman and the murder of Chris Inglerod?”
“How the hell do I know? It doesn’t make too much sense, does it?” Kyle said. “Why would anybody bother to kill Chris over something that happened over thirty years ago?”
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Gregor said. “Somebody may still have good reason to fear being caught.”
Kyle Borden snorted. “Crap on that,” he said. “How’d we ever convict him? Thirty years will wipe out reasonable doubt faster than Windex will wipe out water spots.”
“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “I’ve seen old cases end in convictions more than once. If you don’t think the murders are connected, you’re stuck with figuring out why Chris Inglerod was killed now, in that place, and in that way. Do you know of a reason why somebody would murder Chris Inglerod now?”
“She was an insufferable snot,” Kyle said. “But a lot of people are that, and we don’t off them. Maybe we should.”
“Can you think of a reason why Liz Toliver would murder Chris Inglerod now?”
“Betsy Toliver?”
Gregor sighed. “There’s a certain amount of logic to the idea Maris Coleman was putting forward yesterday. Michael Houseman was murdered when Liz was living here, and nobody else was murdered until Liz came back. Now that she is back, somebody is dead, and dead on her own mother’s lawn. The only problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it, unless you’re going to assume that Liz Toliver is secretly a sociopath carrying out some kind of vendetta against all the girls who hated her in high school.”
“There’s also the fact that Betsy Toliver is the one person in this town who couldn’t have murdered Michael Houseman,” Kyle said. “This is not a murder mystery. The outhouse isn’t going to turn out to have had a back door or a crawl space she could have gone in and out of. She was nailed into that thing and by the time she was found, she’d lost so much blood, she had to be taken to the hospital for a transfusion. She spent the whole rest of that summer bandaged up like a mummy. It’s a good thing Vassar didn’t start classes until after Labor Day. She’d have missed the first week of school.”
“I know,” Gregor said.
“So what is it you’re getting at?” Kyle said.
Outside, somewhere beyond the door, there was a sudden burst of loud, frantic activity. The bell on the counter rang out sharply. A hundred people seemed to be talking at once.
“Damn,” Kyle said.
Gregor moved out of the way. “You’ve still got a town here. Maybe there’s some business today that doesn’t have to do with Elizabeth Toliver.”
Kyle threw back the door and walked out, just as a woman wrapped in layer after layer of rubber poncho flipped back the counter’s hinged opening and stepped through.
“You can’t just walk in here,” Kyle shouted at her. “Visitors have to stay on the public’s side of the counter.”
“Jesus,” Gregor said as the woman began to flip layers of rubber off her head and shoulders.
“Jesus yourself,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I’ve been driving all night. I got lost on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my cell phone won’t work, and I’m wet. The last thing I need is a lecture on how I goddamned have to stay on the goddamned public’s side of the goddamned idiot counter. If somebody doesn’t give me a cup of coffee now, I’m going back to smoking cigarettes.”
FOUR
1
Maris Coleman knew, in that deep-gut visceral way that was the only way she ever really knew anything, that the way she was behaving now could—possibly—be considered out of control. She left the qualifier there because she wasn’t sure if she meant it. Sometimes, like at the Sycamore at lunch with Betsy, or out there on the lawn after Chris’s body had been found, she heard her voice spiking up into the stratosphere. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had been going at this for years, for decades, ever since she had first seen Betsy Toliver in the kindergarten classroom at Center School. That left out a lot of her life, including the seven years from the time she had finished college and run into Betsy again in New York, and the seven years after that when they had been in the same city, on and off, but never seen anything of each other. There really had been a time when she had not been obsessed either with Betsy or with Hollman. Or she thought there had. When she tried to think of the way she had been then, her mind went blank. The only image she saw was one of herself in Bloomingdale’s, carrying bags and wearing espadrilles. She had no idea why, when she imagined herself, she always saw herself wearing espadrilles.