Somebody Else's Music(99)

“Where?” Kyle asked.

George looked astonished. “Back there. In the storeroom. Behind the curtains. I called out and she didn’t answer me so I went back there first thing because that’s where she usually is. I should have known something was wrong. She always comes out when the bell rings. And I went back there and there they were, the both of them—”

There were sirens outside, very close. “That’s the ambulance,” Kyle said. “George, listen to me. I’m going to go back to look. When the ambulance men get to the door, let them in. Okay? Do it fast. Just in case. Come on, Mr. Demarkian.”

Gregor came. They walked to the back of the store, through another small room filled with even more shelves. These shelves were full of materials—pipe cleaners, cloth, construction paper, glue, glitter, beads. At the back of this small room was a curtain. Kyle hurried toward it, pulled it aside, and sucked in his breath.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

Gregor came up beside him. Behind the curtain there was another small room. Unlike the two in the front, this one had not been decorated, and it had no shelves. Instead, there were boxes everywhere, most of them open and half-empty. On the floor among them was the bulky body of the woman Gregor had come to know as Emma Kenyon Bligh. The front of her dress was ripped, slit partly open—but George Bligh was wrong. There were no “pieces” of Emma anywhere. There was a lot of blood, but only pieces of her dress. It looked as if somebody had tried to carve her up from the front. Gregor’s head swiveled around, looking for the other one—and found her, sitting up and entirely conscious. She was not someone he recognized, but she was just as bloody as Emma Bligh, and maybe more, and she had a long razor-edged linoleum cutter in her lap.

Gregor ignored her and dropped down by Emma Bligh. He put his head on her chest and listened to the heartbeat. It was a little rapid, but it was not faint. “Are those ambulance men through the door yet?” he asked. “Tell them to hurry. This one’s alive.”

“What?”

Gregor stood up. “She’s alive. I doubt if she’s unconscious from anything but the pain. The artery isn’t cut. If it was, there’d be a lot more blood.”

“How much blood do you want there to be?” Kyle asked.

“Trust me. This is not enough. Tell her husband to thank God that his wife got fat. It saved her life. Who’s the other one?”

The ambulance men were at the curtain. They took one look at Emma Bligh’s body on the floor and went to it. Seconds later, one of them looked up and said, “She’s alive. Holy shit.”

Kyle went over to the woman sitting on the box. “Peggy?” he said. “Peggy, what happened here?”

This must be Peggy Smith Kennedy, Gregor realized. He looked her up and down, but it wasn’t a good time to check her out. She was dazed. She was covered with sticky blood.

“Peggy,” Kyle said.

Peggy looked up. “It was sticking out of her,” she said. “I looked down and it was sticking out of her and then I just grabbed it and pulled and I fell, and when I was trying to pick myself up George came, I heard him come in the door. And then I don’t know what happened. Is she dead?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And if we get lucky, she won’t be.”

“She isn’t dead?” Peggy looked confused.

One of the ambulance men must have been a paramedic. He had done something to stanch the flow of blood, and now two other ambulance men were lifting Emma Bligh carefully onto a stretcher. Peggy looked at them in astonishment.

“How could she be alive after all that blood? How is it possible?”

“Mr. Demarkian here says she had armor made of fat,” Kyle said. “Listen, Peggy, I think you should go to the hospital, too. You’re in shock. You need to be taken care of.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

“I don’t care if you want to go,” Kyle said. “You should go. You need to be looked at. You need to find out if—”

“If Stu finds out I was here, he’ll kill me,” Peggy said. “He really will. I stayed home from school today because I was feeling, well, you know, not well, and he hates that. He really hates that. He has to stay out sick so much himself. He’s always sick. He goes crazy when he thinks I am. He thinks I’m at school. He thinks—”

“Shh,” Kyle said.

“It isn’t just blood from Emma Bligh,” Gregor said. He got a handkerchief out of his pocket, reached forward, and took the linoleum cutter out of Peggy Smith Kennedy’s hands. The parts of the blade that were not streaked with blood gleamed. “She’s got a black eye. She’s got bruises on her arm. I think her left pinkie finger is broken.”