“I haven’t.”
“We’d all look awful, if she wrote an article about us. We’d all look like Nazis. I don’t know what the board of education would think.”
“The board of education is made up of people who’ve known us since we were all in diapers, mostly because they were in diapers, too. This is a silly line of thought, Peggy. It doesn’t matter what Betsy Wetsy does. After yesterday, she won’t ever show her face in town again. Leave it alone.”
“Why after yesterday? Do you think she murdered Chris?”
“I don’t know if she murdered Chris,” Emma said, “but there’ve been reporters in town all day, and I heard from Mrs. Cadwallader who lives out in Stony Hill that there were hundreds of them out in front of Betsy’s house this morning. They practically stormed the front door. Betsy and Jimmy Card and the boys have all disappeared somewhere. I don’t even know if they’re in town anymore. And Betsy’s mother is in the hospital. It doesn’t matter what she was intending to do. This changes everything.”
Peggy put down whatever it was she’d been holding. Emma couldn’t tell what it had been.
“Well,” Emma said.
“Is it still raining?” Peggy said. “I ought to go back to the library. I ought to go up and see Maris and Belinda, if they’re home. I so rarely get a day free to myself.”
“I know what you mean.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t see Betsy in person,” Peggy said. “It’s too bad she’s hiding out now or whatever she’s doing. I would have liked to talk to her.”
“Call her office in New York and make an appointment.”
“You don’t take it seriously. You never take anything seriously. But she could make us sound like Nazis, if she wanted to.”
Emma couldn’t get past the feeling that there was no reason why Betsy Toliver should want to, but on this matter she knew she was in the minority.
Peggy came up from the shelves to the counter and picked up her pocketbook. She’d left it there when she first came into the store. “Well,” she said, “I’ll be going.”
“If you’re trying to fool Stu that you’ve been at work, you’d better be careful.”
“I can’t fool Stu about anything,” Peggy said. “You don’t understand. None of you do. Stu is a genius.”
Stu is a jerk, Emma thought, but that was something there was no point in saying, and she just clamped her mouth shut and watched Peggy go back on out the door. When the door opened the sound of the rain was deep and thunderous. When the door closed, the cowbell tinkled faintly in the wind the door created. Peggy went down the front steps. She did not hold her pocketbook over her head to stave off the rain. She did not hunch her head. She walked as if not a drop of water was landing on her.
Maybe, Emma thought, Peggy had always been schizophrenic, or whatever it was, and they had never noticed.
SEVEN
1
Gregor Demarkian had no idea how difficult it would be getting anything done in this kind of downpour. More than once over the course of the morning, he wondered desperately if Kyle Borden wasn’t engaging in some kind of criminal stupidity. For all Gregor knew, the National Weather Service might already have declared an emergency. The whole area might already be under orders to evacuate to higher ground—although it would be difficult to get much higher than they were now without climbing into the trees and brush that carpeted the mountains above them. It was eerie. Nobody they saw on the street seemed to be panicking, either. The stores were all open. The lights were all on. The people drinking coffee in JayMar’s were reading newspapers. The reporters were easily recognizable as people trying to use cell phones that didn’t work.
Now Kyle pulled into the parking lot behind the police station and shut off the engine. “That wasn’t very helpful, was it?” he said. “You got anything in those notes you took?”
Gregor flipped the pages of the notebook back and forth. “I was thinking about something. What about the others?”
“What others?”
“The other girls who were part of the group that night in 1969. So far, everybody we need to investigate seems to be part of that group. The victim was part of that group. Mrs. Grantling and Mrs. Bligh were part of that group. What about the others?”
“Well,” Kyle said, “Maris Coleman was part of that group. She’s on our list for investigation, too.”
“That makes four. There were six,” Gregor said.
“Peggy Smith and Nancy Quayde,” Kyle said. “They don’t have anything to do with this, do they?”