“No,” Kyle said.
Gregor got up. He was finding it almost impossible to sit still in this room.
“You’ve got a good view here,” he said. “And that’s where you work? Right across there?”
“It means I don’t have to drive when the weather gets bad,” Belinda said. “But it’s not like it was when I was growing up. My parents had a really nice house in those days, and we had big trees. Even when I was married, I had a better house. It’s a good thing Hayley was grown when her father decided he wanted a divorce. She’d have been ashamed to bring her friends here.”
Gregor wished he could open a window. The room was virtually airless. Unfortunately, although the window had screens, they wouldn’t keep out the rain, and the rain was still coming down in sheets.
“It’s so weird,” Belinda said pleasantly. “Do you know what I was thinking? It was raining just like this, the night Betsy Wetsy got stuck in the outhouse. Not in the beginning, you know, but at the end, when we were all at the river and then—then—” She looked from one to the other of them and blushed.
“And then Michael died,” Kyle Borden said. “What is it with you people that you can never say that right out loud?”
Belinda got out of her chair and bustled off in the direction of the kitchen. She was one of the few people, Gregor thought, who could actually be said to bustle.
“I don’t know why everybody makes such a big deal about it,” she said. “It’s as if it were some kind of catastrophe or something. Chris is the catastrophe. She was somebody who really mattered.”
SIX
1
The really odd thing, Liz Toliver thought, was that, when it was happening, she’d behaved as if she’d been through it all a dozen times in the last six weeks. The reporters were storming the house. The phone lines were cut. Her own picture was on the news segment of the Today show, as if she were O. J. Simpson—in fact, exactly as if—and yet through it all she had been perfectly calm, and perfectly clearheaded, and perfectly focused.
Now she turned over on her side and looked out the window. They had commandeered an entire floor of the Radisson, almost as much space as they had on the first floor of the house in Connecticut, and maybe more. She was lying on this bed because it had been handy when she wandered out of the shower, and she had taken a shower because she’d needed something to do that wouldn’t require her to talk to anybody for a while. There was so much thunder and lightning it amazed her that they still had power.
She got up and went to the door of the room and looked down the hall. Several of the other doors were standing wide open. Through one of them, she could hear the sounds of Mark and Geoff playing a video game. She went back into the room she’d come from and got the robe she’d left lying across the little desk near the window. She got the robe wrapped around her and went out into the hall again. She bypassed the room where the boys were playing—if Jimmy had been in there playing with them, which he sometimes did, she would have been able to hear him cursing at the joystick—and went down to the other end of the hall where she could see a door standing wide open and hear the sounds of classical music spilling out. The music was Paganini, whom Jimmy claimed was his favorite composer after Paul McCartney.
When she came to the door, he was still on the phone. When she knocked, he was just hanging up. He looked at her and smiled. “Hey,” he said. “I wish I’d known it was you. I was talking to Debra.”
“My Debra?”
“Your Debra, yeah. I thought I’d check in and see how things were going. There’s been a certain amount of fuss over there this morning. You might want to call her back when you get the chance. She was a little frantic.”
“My Debra? Frantic? The world must be coming to an end.”
Jimmy picked up a cup of coffee from a large round table beside the bed, and Liz realized he’d ordered room service while she’d been showering. She went over to the table and found enough hot water and Constant Comment tea bags to last the afternoon.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking.”
“I’ve been thinking, too,” Jimmy said. “Debra said you were supposed to fire Maris when you were up here. Have you?”
“I was only going to stop her from going back to the office,” Liz said. “Debra’s right about that. She’s a distraction. I was going to keep her on as a research assistant, or something like that. Keep Maris on, I mean.”
“I know who you mean,” Jimmy said. “Why?”