“Little Escort, bright blue. Keeps it parked behind English Drugs, and they let her. Because they’ve known her forever. They knew her parents.”
“So,” Gregor said, pulling a chair out of the corner of the room and sitting down himself. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon, Nancy Quayde, Elizabeth Toliver, all have cars and can drive them. Peggy Smith and Maris Coleman can drive, but Peggy Smith doesn’t have access to a car, and Maris Coleman tries never to drive hers.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “Elizabeth Toliver’s mother’s house isn’t within walking distance of town. It isn’t within walking distance of anything. That means that to get there, to kill the dog, to kill Chris Inglerod Barr, somebody had to drive. And we know already that some of them did drive. Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart gave Mark DeAvecca a ride back out there from the library. They went out of their way to do it, because they both live in town. They could just have been being helpful, or they could have been driving out to Stony Hill to see somebody else, or they could just have been curious about what Mark was like. Maybe they were even hoping to see his mother.”
“You’d think they’d want to stay the hell away from her,” Kyle said, “but I know what you mean.”
“It’s too bad about the way the dog was found. Anyone could have put it there at any time. It’s all well and good to say that the dog was still alive when it was found, but we’ve got no way of proving that. I wonder if there’s some kind of significance about late afternoons.”
“It’s a time when most people are able to take off work if they really want to?” Kyle suggested.
Bennis came in from the other room. “There’s a Radisson,” she said. “I got us a suite. If Elizabeth Toliver and Jimmy have any sense, they’ll be there, too. I couldn’t find another place within a hundred miles that had suites at all. Mostly, what you’ve got here is Holiday Inn.”
“I like Holiday Inn,” Gregor said.
“I know you do. I like suites. I’m going to drive out there and register. We’ll be under the name Mr. and Mrs. Tibor Kasparian.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Gregor said.
“I was just picking something everybody could remember. It would be nice if you could come on out for dinner and like that this evening, just so I could see you. It was your idea to have me come out there. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Borden.”
“It was nice to meet you, too,” Kyle Borden said.
Bennis gave Gregor a peck on the cheek. “Talk to you later,” she said. She turned around and went quickly out of the door. The reporters were gone.
Gregor sat back and wished that he’d remembered to grab his raincoat before bolting out of Elizabeth Toliver’s house.
2
They went to Emma Kenyon Bligh’s place first, because it was one of the closest, and because she was the most likely to be where she was supposed to be.
“We could try Belinda,” Kyle said as he eased one of Hollman’s two police cars out onto Grandview Avenue. “She’s just up the block. Thing is, though, she might be at work, or out at the mall, or anyplace. I think she’d live at the mall if she could afford it. And Peggy’ll be teaching until three.”
Gregor thought that Grandview Avenue in the rain was much like Grandview Avenue in the sunlight, except that it had a faintly biblical air about it. God was mightily displeased , Gregor thought, and then got an image of Hollman in a deluge, rowboats drifting through the water between the tops of nineteenth-century false-front commercial buildings.
Kyle found a parking space as close to Country Crafts as he could. “It’s a good thing for the rain,” he said. “Grandview is usually parked solid this time of day. I hate parking in the lot at English Drugs.”
Gregor gave one more thought to his trenchcoat, still hanging in the closet in the little guest room out at the Toliver House. He stepped out into the wet, and slammed the door behind himself. Then he turned and made a run for the Country Crafts porch. When he got up onto the porch itself, Kyle was waiting for him.
“I hate this weather,” Kyle said.
Gregor thought, not for the first time, that it was a good thing the store had an OPEN sign to hang in the window, because there would be no way otherwise to tell if the store was open or shut. He wondered why the Blighs hadn’t retrofitted the house with real display windows and a glass front door. Kyle held the front door open and let him through. Gregor went in and was caught, yet again, by the amount of froufrou and knickknacks and sheer clutter everywhere.