Somebody Else's Music(85)

“He’s a bright kid,” Gregor said.

Emma shrugged. “He’s weird, really. Just like she was, except that he’s less, I don’t know, less prickly. More sure of himself. She was always cringing around, acting like a big crybaby. He’s almost—if it wasn’t for the books and that stuff I’d have thought he was popular, you know, wherever he went to school.”

“So,” Kyle said. “You got to talking to him, and Belinda got to talking to him, and you offered him a ride home. And he accepted.”

“Yes. Well, you know, Laurel, the librarian. She promised to tell his mother where he’d gone if Betsy came in looking for him, and she told him she knew who we were, and that kind of thing. And then he accepted.”

“Good,” Kyle said. “So, you all went around where, to the back of Country Crafts, to get your car?”

“Right.”

“And Belinda just came along for the ride because she was curious?” Kyle said.

“We were both still pretty curious. We thought maybe Betsy had gone home and gotten tied up and not gotten to the library in time, and we would get there and she would be in the house and we would see her. I’d give a lot to actually be able to see her. In the flesh, if you know what I’m saying.”

“But she wasn’t home,” Kyle said.

Emma shook her head. “Nobody was home. It was disappointing. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Mark didn’t invite you inside?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, he invited us,” Emma said. “He even offered to make us coffee, although I don’t know how a man is going to make coffee. You see all these chefs in famous restaurants who are men, but they’re all gay, and I could tell right off Mark wasn’t gay. And there didn’t seem to be any point. If Betsy had come home and found us sitting at her kitchen table, she’d have thought we were lying in wait for her.”

“Right,” Kyle said. “Did you pull into the driveway, or did you park out on the street?”

“We parked out in front. I hate that driveway. It’s too long.”

“Could you see down the driveway?” Gregor asked.

Emma shook her head. “If you mean, did we see Chris’s car, the answer is no. But why would it be out there, anyway ? Nobody was home.”

“Chris could have just arrived and not realized nobody was home,” Kyle said. “She could have been parked out there meaning to knock on the kitchen door, and when she did nobody would have been there. So—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Emma said. “If she’d been there and been just getting out of her car, she’d have heard us. Mark stayed on the walk for a good minute talking to us before he went inside, and we sat watching him until he was safely in the house, too. You know how you do that. But he’s got a really loud voice, and there isn’t anything else around there. She’d have heard. She’d have come around to see.”

“Maybe she was already back in her car and on the way out,” Gregor suggested.

“Then we’d have seen her come out,” Emma said. “I told you. We sat there waiting until we were sure he was back in the house. It’s a long drive, but it’s not Manderley, for God’s sake.”

“Right,” Kyle said.

“Face it,” Emma said. “Chris wasn’t there when we were. Why don’t you ask Dan what he was doing that afternoon ? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? The husband is the one who’s always responsible.”

“He was in Hawaii,” Kyle said. “At some kind of medical convention.”

“Maybe he hired a hit man,” Emma said. “I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s cold as anything. She wasn’t there when we were there. If she was, we would have seen her, one way or the other.”

Of course, Gregor thought, there was always the possibility that Chris Inglerod had been there when they were there, but hadn’t been alive—or alive enough to let them know where she was. It was always so hard, in real life, to establish where anybody was, and when. It was only in murder mysteries that the detective could construct a timetable, and all the times on it would come out right.





3


Belinda Hart Grantling’s apartment turned out to be barely half a block up Grandview Avenue, in one of those brick storefront buildings whose false fronts made it difficult to know just how many stories they really were. In this case, Gregor found, there were two, the one that held the store on the ground floor, and the one reached by a single, narrow staircase to the left of the store’s front door. It was the kind of climb that needed a landing. The ground-floor story must have had fairly high ceilings, because the railing was needed as much to help the ascender pull himself up as to steady him on the way down. It was also absolutely dark. There was a single bare lightbulb in the ceiling of the floor above, but it was inadequate for anything but a horror movie special effect. Gregor was winded before he’d gotten a third of the way to the top.