Now she lay very still, listening, and decided that they had finally gone—Betsy and Jimmy Card and the two boys and the mother and the nurse. She had been lying very still for the better part of three hours, refusing to allow herself so much as a swig out of her Chanel bottle. She was most afraid of having to get up to go to the bathroom. The nearest one was half a level up and there were often people in it.
She’d still been drunk as hell when she’d made the phone calls the night before, and all she’d been able to think of was that if there was enough fuss and she stayed out of sight, nobody would remember she was in the house. Then she’d had to wait until Geoff was asleep and Mark had come upstairs to get something from the refrigerator, so that she could go downstairs, unseen, and set herself up in the little basement room. Then she had remembered that she’d forgotten about the phones, and had to do it all over again. She waited until Mark went to the bathroom, that time, and went out the sliding-glass doors to the patio and up against the side of the house to where the single phone line snaked in from the poles that lined the road the way they had in that Alfred Hitchcock movie about the birds. After all, they couldn’t be trapped if they could call out. It had been late, and dark, and she had been frightened the whole time that one of them would come into the pantry and see her at the side of the house. The little window in the pantry looked right out on where she was. There was no sign of the cop who had been left to guard the crime scene. Maris suspected that he had gone home to bed. Leave it to Kyle Borden to do his job in a thoroughly half-assed way.
Right now, the house was not just quiet, but dead silent. She tried to see the time on her watch, but it was too dark. There were no windows here at all. She sat up and swung her legs off the couch she had been sleeping on. It was something worse than lumpy.
If there was a cop upstairs, or anybody else, she could say that she’d fallen asleep down there, and just woken up, and didn’t know what was going on. It came in handy when people thought (falsely) that you were an alcoholic. She went up the half flight of steps to the family room. The sofa beds were still pulled out and their sheets and blankets rumpled.
Maris stopped in at the bathroom and washed her face and hands. She felt positively foul, but there was nothing she was going to be able to do about it until she got back to Belinda’s. She went up the steep flight of stairs to the main floor and came out near the kitchen. There were kitchen things left on the table in the breakfast nook, cups half full of coffee and curdling milk, a half-eaten piece of toast with margarine on it. Betsy always had margarine, never butter, the way she always had store-brand canned goods instead of the brand-name kind. It made Maris insane. She went through into the living room and then down the little hall to the bedrooms. Nobody was anywhere. Betsy’s mother’s room was so empty, it could have been a guest room nobody ever slept in. Maris went back into the kitchen and looked out the window at the backyard, but there was still no policeman where the crime-scene barriers had been put up. It was raining the way it did during hurricanes.
Maris went into the living room and opened the front door. Rain spattered on her shoes and face. The one car still parked at the edge of the road was not one she recognized, but she hadn’t expected to. All the other times she had met with Eddie Cassiter, it had been in New York, and he hadn’t been driving any car at all. Now she stood very still with the door open and waited. The blue Ford Taurus sedan waited, too. Maris counted to fifteen. Eddie Cassiter got out of the car when she reached twelve.
“It’s late,” he said, coming toward her at a run, his head and jacket drenched black. “For a while there, I thought you’d taken off with the rest of them.”
“Did you see me taking off with the rest of them?”
“Honey, I didn’t see anything. The drivers pulled those cars right up to the doors, and the ambulance got even closer. What is it with the ambulance thing, by the way? The old lady have a heart attack?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been busy staying out of sight. If I hadn’t stayed out of sight, you wouldn’t be getting in here.”
“God, this is a dump, isn’t it?” Eddie Cassiter said, stepping through the front doors. “It was probably hot stuff back in 1965, though. I can see that. What about you? Doesn’t this place make you nuts?”
“I never think about it.”
“Show me where they slept. Liz Toliver and Jimmy Card. If the bed’s still a mess, I can get a photograph.”
Maris considered telling Eddie what she had already told him half a dozen times before. Liz and Jimmy did not sleep together when the boys were in the same house. Liz thought it was tacky, since they weren’t married. She showed him down the hall to the bedrooms instead, and was glad that Liz was using the master with the big double bed and not one of the side bedrooms, which just had twins. Then she left Eddie there to root around in the mess of makeup and costume jewelry still spread across the top of the vanity table. If she hadn’t cut the phone line, she could have called Belinda. If she wasn’t so worried that they’d get caught, she could relax.