This morning, she would have preferred to be anywhere but in her apartment. She had spent most of the last hour going over her options. She could go down to JayMar’s. She could go over to Mullaney’s. She could get into the car and drive out to the Mountain View Shopping Center. She could drive a really long way and go to the mall. It made Belinda queasy in the pit of her stomach to think that she would never see Chris in the mall again. It made her even queasier to think of Chris with her insides spread out across Betsy Toliver’s lawn, white and oozing, tangled in the grass. This was another reason why Belinda didn’t like to read and didn’t like to listen to the news, either. It made images in your brain, and no matter how hard you tried to get rid of them, you couldn’t get them out.
The apartment was too quiet. The radio was on, which usually helped, but this morning the oldies station was not playing its regular round of songs that she recognized and could sing along to. There were only songs from the sixties, Bob Dylan and Janis Ian and folk music, which Belinda had always thought of as grungy.
If she didn’t go down to the mall and didn’t want to go to the shopping center—it bothered her to shop when she knew she couldn’t buy anything—she could go to Hollman Pizza and have lunch there. She thought about turning on the television and rejected the idea. Television shows at this time of day were all talky-talky and full of people with problems. The local stations had bulletins and news updates all through the day. The last thing she needed was some announcer coming on to tell her that Chris had been secretly pregnant or that her intestines had been carried off in the night by dogs.
She looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost eleven.
“It isn’t fair,” she said, out loud, to the air, and then she clamped her mouth shut. Surely it was a sign of mental illness to be talking to yourself in an empty apartment.
The radio was playing a song by somebody named Dave van Ronk. Belinda had never heard of him, and he had a terrible gravelly voice that sounded like it belonged to a bummy old drunk. She thought of Emma and herself—sitting in the car in front of the walk that led to Betsy’s front door and talking to Betsy’s tall teenaged son about what he liked to do in his spare time. That had been an event she wouldn’t want to repeat. It was like talking to an alien from a science fiction movie. How could anybody that cute want to spend his time going to art exhibits about Abstract Expressionism?
She heard the sound of footsteps. That had to be Maris coming home. She sat down at the table and began to play with the flowers, although there was nothing that needed to be done to them. It wasn’t as if they needed to be watered, or there were so many of them that they could be infinitely rearranged.
There was a fumbling at the apartment’s door. Belinda had given Maris a key. The key turned in the lock. The front door swung open. Belinda turned around on her chair and smiled.
“Where were you all last night?” she asked brightly. “I thought you’d been mugged and murdered and left on Betsy Wetsy’s doorstep with everybody else we know.”
Maris threw her own large shoulder bag down on the table and pulled out a chair. “This is the biggest frigging mess we’ve ever been in,” she said. “Don’t make jokes.”
3
The trouble, Nancy thought, was that this was such a small town. In even a medium-sized town, there would have been a good chance that most of her students would never even have heard of Chris Inglerod Barr. Now, of course, she had dozens of girls who had worked with Chris at the food bank as part of the country club’s “Good Samaritan Christmas Project,” or who’d been to her house with their parents for a holiday party, or who had waited on her in Elsa-Edna’s or Mullaney’s. It didn’t help that the gory details had been all over town in a split second, either. Just walking through the halls after third period, Nancy had heard at least six different versions of the murder scene, each more outrageous than the last. At first, Chris had just been stabbed, albeit eighty-five times. At last, Chris had been cut up into chunks and placed in a pile at Betsy Toliver’s back door—except they didn’t call her “Betsy,” they called her “Elizabeth,” and they seemed to assume that she was being persecuted. It was a privilege of celebrity. Nobody wanted to believe you’d really done anything wrong. If it appeared you had, they made excuses for you. That was how Nancy explained O. J.
It was now quarter after eleven, and Nancy needed at least two ibuprofen, which she wasn’t eligible to get for another half hour. She had found a substitute to take Peggy’s classes, but she’d had to teach the first one herself. There just hadn’t been time to jury-rig anything else. Nancy truly hated teaching. She had hated it from the first, and the five long years between the time she got her master’s degree and the time she had been able to find a job in administration had been the longest of her life. She would rather have gone back to that summer after her senior year in high school than do those five years over again.