She set herself up at the kitchen table with a large glass of orange juice and a cup to put coffee in, and spiked the juice from her Chanel bottle. She really did have to get back to Belinda’s. She was getting low, and her reinforcements were packed away in her big traveling case. She put the kettle on to boil. There was percolator coffee and a percolator, but it hadn’t been used this morning. She sat down and took a big long drink of orange juice. She put her head in her hands and willed it to stop throbbing.
Eddie came back from the bedrooms, looking happy. “That was great,” he said. “She uses cheap makeup, did you know that? Max Factor. Revlon. The stuff you buy in drugstores. None of that designer salon stuff at all. Maybe that’s what our angle should be. Liz Toliver, El Cheapo Supremo. Too cheap to get a professional out here to help with her mother. And now, what, her mother’s had a heart attack because of all the commotion and somebody is dead and she’s probably got something to do with it—”
“You don’t know that her mother’s had a heart attack,” Maris said.
“No, I don’t, and I won’t write anything until I do know, but it’s fun to speculate. Christ, I hate women like that. They think they’re so damned superior.”
The kettle went off. Maris got up and poured water over her coffee bag, but only halfway up the cup. The Gordon’s was clearing her head a little, and it had occurred to her that they ought to be in something of a hurry. She wished Jimmy Card would go back to New York. Betsy was a lot easier to handle when Jimmy wasn’t around.
Maris sat down in front of her coffee and said, “I’m going to chug this down, and then we ought to get out of here. There’s supposed to be a cop guarding the crime scene out back. There probably will be one any minute now.”
“It’s not much of a crime scene,” Eddie said. “I’ve looked at it. It’s just a lot of flattened grass. It would have been better if there’d been a concrete walkway or something like that. Concrete soaks up mud.”
“Right,” Maris said.
“There wasn’t any dirty underwear, either,” Eddie said. “I checked the hampers. We can always use dirty underwear. We got a shot of Nicole Kidman’s that we ran when we broke the story about the miscarriage. Liz Toliver must change hers three or four times a day. The stuff that’s there looks like it’s there by mistake. Clean as a whistle. Not a single stain.”
“Right,” Maris said again. She drained the coffee. She drained the orange juice. She was beginning to feel awake again. The rain was still coming down outside. She could remember a flood here once, although floods were rare in the mountains. She’d been four or five years old at the time, and the waters had washed out all the bridges between Hollman and the main roads.
“You want to get paid?” Eddie Cassiter said. “I brought it with me.”
“I want to get paid,” Maris said. “But I also want a ride back into town. I need to get a shower and some clean clothes. Let’s get out of here.”
Eddie reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. He took out twelve one-hundred-dollar bills and left them faceup on the table. “There you go. Not bad for one phone call and twenty minutes’ worth of work.”
Maris picked the money up and put it in her purse. “Why do you always have so much cash?” she asked him. “Do you guys keep it in a safe in the office so you can hand it out when it’s needed?”
“Maybe we get it out of the side of the bank,” Eddie said.
Outside, thunder rolled across the sky that sounded like bombing. It came close enough so that the house began to shake.
2
If Belinda had had to go into work today, she would have called in sick. She had a hard time putting up with the library on the best of days. The smell of books made her feel as if she were strangling. The loud-voiced older men who spent the day in the reading room made her lose her patience. The unattractive teenagers who came in after school made her positively crazy, as if teenagers didn’t have better things to do with their time than read. At least, she’d had better things to do with her time when she was a teenager. Sometimes she suspected that the teenagers who came to the library were all potential school shooters. Their minds were so addled with books and their souls were so starved for fun and light and air that one day they would just snap. She knew there were people who said they liked books, but she did not believe it. She thought they were putting on airs, the way people put on airs about liking the opera or watching only art shows on PBS instead of real television. Whatever it was, it was not something she liked to be involved in, and she would forever resent the fact that no other place had offered to give her a job, not even as a waitress. She could do what receptionists did. She could do what customer service representatives did, too. She would have preferred to have been in a place where people could talk out loud and laugh and have fun, and where nobody at all wanted to know if she’d read some book or the other that had come out only last week.