“I heard about it from Laurel. I was in the library for a while. It was quiet there, you know, but after a while I began to think that there might be other people. Somebody from the board of education. You know how it is in a town this size. Have you ever been sorry you didn’t get out and go do something? Like Betsy?”
“No,” Emma said.
Peggy looked around the shop. “I was looking through our yearbook the night before last. Do you ever do that? It was surprising me how many people we know are already dead. And that was before Chris was killed. People who died in Vietnam. People who died in car accidents. Nobody turned out the way you would expect them to, except maybe Chris. Nancy Quayde didn’t even manage to get married.”
“Is there some point to this conversation?” Emma asked. “Did you just drop in to muse? Because if you did, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Peggy smiled slightly. “You and I,” she said. “We didn’t turn out the way we were supposed to, either. We just sort of—approximated it. You’ve got a happy marriage, but you’re still living over the store. And I’ve got a house, but—” She shrugged.
“Don’t tell me you’re finally going to admit that your marriage isn’t happy,” Emma said. “I’ll sing glory hallelujah, I promise. Nancy will find you a good attorney. We’ll all go to court and testify against him, and maybe he’ll rot in jail for forty years.”
“You don’t understand him,” Peggy said.
Emma wanted to say that she understood Stu perfectly, and so did everybody else, but Peggy was getting that look on her face that she always did when she talked about Stu, the one Emma associated with religious fanatics. It was not true that Peggy hadn’t ended up where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up exactly where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up married to Stu.
“Well,” Emma said.
“Did you go out to Betsy’s yesterday afternoon? When Chris was killed?”
“We weren’t there when Chris was killed,” Emma said. “We just drove Mark out there from the library and sat parked at the curb for a minute or two. We didn’t see Chris. We didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t see Betsy?”
“She wasn’t home.” Emma shook her head. “You’re reminding me of Belinda. She wanted to see Betsy, too. I don’t know why. If you really want to see her, she’s on Grandview Avenue enough these last few days. She’s been in Mullaney’s. She’s been in English Drugs. I’ve seen her half a dozen times, getting in and out of that Mercedes.”
“Haven’t you wanted to talk to her?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. To see what she’s like. She used to hate Stu when we were all in high school, did you know that? She told Maris about it when they were in college. Maris says it was really just a cover story about her coming back here to take care of her mother. Jimmy Card was going to send people down here to do that for her. Maris says what she’s really here for is to write an article about us for one of those magazines. You know, the ones nobody reads.”
“Where did you see Maris?”
“She was in the library.” Peggy looked around, vague and vaguely startled at once, as if she had had no idea, until now, just where she was. “We’ve made it a kind of meeting place, Maris and I. She’s the only one of you I can talk to anymore. She’s the only one of you who doesn’t treat me like some kind of leper. Or mental defective. God knows I can’t talk to Nancy.”
“People are just worried about you,” Emma said stiffly.
Peggy smiled stiffly and drifted off between the shelves, picking things up and putting them down again. Emma had the almost desperate need to run down to where she was and grab her, as if Peggy’s touching the things in the shop would taint them somehow. She wished she wasn’t sweating so heavily that the sides of her dress had begun to feel damp.
“Look,” she said. Her voice sounded shrill even in her own ears.
Peggy looked up from a shelf full of hand-painted porcelain teacups and said, “I was just wondering if you knew anything about it. If you’d talked to her and what she’d said. That she was going to write an article about us. Maris said it was supposed to be some kind of true crime about Michael Houseman and her being stuck in the outhouse and all that. Because of the stories in the tabloids. To clear her name.”
“I don’t know, Peggy,” Emma said. “How would I know?”
“I went to the library,” Peggy said. “I went a couple of times. And I read some of her articles and her books, and it isn’t the sort of thing she writes about. But maybe I was looking at the wrong things. I don’t really understand how those things work. So I figured, if you’d talked to her—”