“I'll drop you off,” Liz said.
“Don't bother. Pay for lunch. You've got the money. And cheer up. Today, you achieved a lifelong ambition. You got to sit in the corner booth.”
Maris turned her back to them and walked off. She was not weaving. Liz watched her go all the way to the door and out of it. Less than a minute later, she came into view through the window, crossing the parking lot toward the sidewalk that edged Grandview Avenue. It was a long walk to Belinda's, at least half a mile, but maybe that would help.
“Mom?” Geoff said.
“What?” Liz wasn't really listening. She hadn't eaten any of her salad. She didn't want to. She was feeling a little sick to her stomach herself. It hit her, suddenly, that she truly hated this place: the Sycamore, the corner booth, the tables where little knots of girls had sat in triumphant exclusivity from which she had once been systematically and brutally shut out. Geoff was right. They should have gone to McDonald's, even if it meant getting into the car and driving back out to the Interstate to do it. If there was one thing she had earned, in thirty years of a very eventful life, it was the right not to be here, now, or ever to be here again. The waitress had left the check on the table. Liz picked it up.
“Tell you what,” she said. “You haven't eaten a single french fry. Why don't we get out of here and drive out to McDonald's and get you a Happy Meal? We could pick Mark up that chicken sandwich thing he likes and bring it back.”
“I only drank half my ice cream soda,” Geoff said solemnly. “Are you going to let me ask you something?”
“Ask away.” Liz got out her wallet.
“If Debra fires Maris, does that mean we don't have to see Maris anymore?”
Liz took out two ten-dollar bills. Lunch came to only $13.95. She put the bills down on the table and put the check upside down on top of them.
“Debra can't fire Maris,” she said slowly. “Only I can
fire Maris. And I wouldn't fire Maris. She's not as lucky as we are. She needs a job just to have food to eat and a place to live.”
“She could get a job with somebody else.”
“What may happen is that Maris may stop working in the office with Debra and start doing some things just for me. She'd come out to Connecticut when she needed to or I'd meet her at her apartment.”
“She shouldn't come out to Connecticut,” Geoff said quickly. “I hate it when she comes out to Connecticut. She makes up new rules for everybody and she's always mad at us.”
“Well,” Liz said lamely, “she's not used to children. She doesn't realize they make a lot of noise.”
She ushered Geoff down the long aisle and out the door they'd come in through. In the parking lot, the sun was brighter and the leaves on the trees were heavier than she remembered them having been when they'd arrived. She unlocked the doors to the Mercedes and got Geoff belted in the backseat. She stepped back and looked around her. If you went around the curve and to the left, instead of going back up Grandview Avenue, there was a school called Grassy Plains, a red brick one, just the same as the one called Center School where she had gone to kindergarten, first, and second grades. It was surely closed now, just like Center, since all those grades had been moved to the new complex out at Plumtrees. If you stayed on the curve and veered to the right, there was the house where a girl named Debbie had lived with her mother. She was the only single child Liz had known in those years, and the only one with a single mother, but not the only one who lived in an apartment instead of having a whole house.
Liz slid in behind the wheel. She wanted to cry, but that was not news. She had wanted to cry ever since she first pulled into this parking lot. She couldn't cry in front of Geoff. He associated her crying with his father dying. Still, she thought. It was all wrong. Everything was. She was all hollowed out inside, as if all that was left of her was a great
draining pulse of pain and guilt, and she couldn't figure out which one was true. It was the guilt that held her attention. She felt guilty every day, as if she'd stolen her own life and owed it back to somebody. It seemed to her that she was somehow to blame for what had happened to Maris, or had not happened to her. It didn't make any sense, but it wouldn't go away, and as long as it was right here in the front of her mind, she didn't know if she would be able to move. She tried fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. She got Geoff, staring at her, instead.
“Well,” she said.
“We should start the car,” Geoff said.
“You're right,” she agreed. “We should start the car.”
She started it, and backed out of her parking space, and headed for Grandview Avenue, but she couldn't help looking back at the Sycamore. Then she was winding up the hill on Grandview, headed for the center of town, and for a moment it seemed as if Maris was headed right back at her, driving that bright yellow Volkswagen she had said she'd rented, but that she wouldn't drive. Then the car passed and Liz realized that she recognized the woman driving it, but that that woman was not Maris.
She was halfway out to the Interstate when she pegged the face as Peggy Smith's.
Emma Kenyon Bligh had been restless all day. In fact, she'd been restless since some time the night before, when she'd sat in Chris Inglerod Barr's living room and listened to Chris and Nancy go on at length about image laundering and strategic campaigns.
Image laundering
. That was the first time she had ever heard that one, and she had been almost as annoyed with it as she had been with Chris's tray of perfectly matched china and monogrammed silverware.
Real
silverware, of course. Chris's whole life seemed to come out of an issue of
Better Homes and Gardens
. Years
ago, she'd even badgered her mother into getting her
real
engraved wedding invitationsânot just thermoplated onesâfrom Tiffany's in New York, and Emma knew for a fact that the Inglerods couldn't afford it. They'd probably had to put the expense on a credit card and borrow the rest of the money for the wedding, too. Emma had had her own wedding at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church right here in town, with a reception at the Holiday Inn out on the Interstate.
This morning, her restlessness had had some use. The store needed a good cleaning. She cleaned it. She took all the objects off each of the shelves, one by one, and dusted them, with a damp cloth if appropriate. Then she dusted and polished the shelf itself. Then she put the objects back. It had taken her two hours to get it all done, and when she was finished she had started in on the rest of the woodwork, the counter, even the windowsills. When
that
was done, she'd had a customer, and for half an hour she had been able to lose herself in an elaborate discussion of the differences between crocheting and knitting and the relative merits of needlework and brocade. It was only after that that she felt herself begin to fall apart. She didn't keep a television in the shop, because she thought it looked tacky. She had the radio on to the easy listening station out of Johnstown, but that wasn't enough to keep the brain of a fruit fly occupied. She had one of Betsy's books that she'd taken out of the libraryâ
Making It Out: A Look Into the Real American Dream
âbut she'd already tried three times to read it and never managed to make it through more than a page and a half. Betsy still used words so big no normal person could possibly know what they meant. Sometimes, when Emma felt like this, she went through the scrapbooks and picture albums she brought with her every day when she came in to workâpictures of herself as a cheerleader and in Tri-Y; pictures of herself in her formal dresses from every junior and senior prom and junior-senior semiformal from the day she started high school (it paid to go out with older boys); dance bids; prom cards; the certificates she'd
received for being voted Cutest Girl and Best Dressed four solid years in a rowâbut since she'd first heard that Betsy was coming home, she hadn't been able to get into the spirit of them. Even eating didn't help. She sat still next to the cash register in the empty store and felt weighed down and bloated, as if she'd eaten lead.
It was almost one o'clock when Emma went out to the porch to get some air. She looked up one end of Grandview Avenue and down the other. She saw Maris Coleman walking slowly across the railroad tracks near Mullaney's. Maris trudged up past the Opera House. At English Drugs, she stopped, looked at the newspapers in the rack outside, picked one up, and went into the store. She came out barely two minutes later, carrying the newspaper under her arm.
Under most circumstances, Emma would not have volunteered to spend time one on one with Maris Coleman. Maris Coleman
had
changed, at Vassar and in New York, and these days she didn't do much for Emma but make her uncomfortable. This afternoon, though, Emma thought she was going to go crazy, and so she raised her arm and tried to signal at Maris coming up the street.
Maris didn't see her. Emma watched her turn off the sidewalk into the small door that led to the little clutch of apartments where Belinda lived.
There wasn't a single customer in the store. There had only been a single customer since she'd opened up this morning. Emma turned back and went inside again. She switched the OPEN sign to CLOSED and stepped back onto the porch. She locked the front door of the shop and then tried the knob to make sure she hadn't made a mistake. She was sweating. She sweat when she did any sustained movement. Once, worried about her weight, she'd tried a Richard Simmons program, but she'd stopped after only three sessions with the workout tape. Each time, she'd sweat so much there had been big circles of black dampness in the armpits of her T-shirt, and more sweat down its back and on the inside of the thighs of her workout pants. She had been ashamed to look at her clothes in the mirror when she
went into the bathroom to take them off. Anything at all, even weighing five hundred pounds, would be better than seeing her clothes all wet like that.
She went down her front porch steps and onto the sidewalk. She went up the sidewalk past the half-dozen little stores. She stopped just past Elsa-Edna's, without bothering to look at the clothes in the display window. It had been a long time since she'd been able to fit into them, and when she had been able to fit into them she hadn't been able to afford them. She suspected that she wouldn't be able to afford them now. She went up the steep flight of steps at the side of the building, moving carefully, stopping every once in a while to take a breath. She didn't want to give herself a heart attack just because she'd run over to Belinda's on a whim.
When she got to the landing, the first thing she noticed was that Belinda's apartment door was standing slightly opened. The next thing she noticed was that Maris was talking, not only out loud, but loudly. Someone thinner than Emma, who had not had to concentrate so hard on getting up the stairs, would have heard Maris from the first-floor entry.
Emma pushed inside and closed the door behind her. Maris was in the living room, her back to the kitchen and the apartment's front door, holding the phone to her ear. It was Belinda's phone, not a cell phone.
“ ⦠that's what I said,” Maris was saying. “Her mother's dog. Right. In the garage. Eviscerated. Jimmy's coming down this evening to make sure she's all right. I don't know what to make of it. I just tell you what's going on. She's going to be here until the end of June, unless this drives her out. I expect the usual, of course. If this gets any better, I may need a little more. Yes. Well. Yes. I'll talk to you when I have something.”
Maris put down the phone. Emma knocked on one of the kitchen counters. Maris turned around.
“How did you get in here? I thought that door was on automatic lock.”
“You left it open,” Emma said. “What were you doing?”
Maris cocked her head and smiled. “I was talking,” she said, “to a friend of mine at the
National Enquirer
. We have a little arrangement.”
“You tell the
National Enquirer
about stuff that happens to Betsy.”
“Where do you think they get it?”
“I don't know,” Emma said. “I thought they had, you know, reporters. That went and reported things. Dug things up.”
“It's much easier to dig things up if you know where to look,” Maris said. “Don't worry about it. It's not a secret. Everybody on earth knows all about it.”
“Betsy knows all about it?” Emma shook her head. “I don't believe that. I don't think she'd go on giving you a job if she knew you were calling up the
National Enquirer
and saying she murdered Michael Houseman.”
“Well, let's just say everybody knows, but nobody can prove it.” Maris brushed by Emma and went to the cabinet where the tumblers were kept. She got one down and opened the refrigerator. She got out a big carton of orange juice and poured the tumbler half full. “I think the deal is that Betsy Wetsy's been told, but she just refuses to believe it. In New York I make the calls from pay phones, never anything too close to my apartment or too close to her offices. Do you know she owns a town house on the Upper East Side? She's got an apartment on the top floor of it, but she never uses it anymore. Jimmy's got an apartment of his own and they go there. In the afternoons. To screw.”
“What does that have to do with you telling things to the
National Enquirer
?”
“Nothing.” Maris went back to the living room and sat down on the sofa. “I tell things to the
National Enquirer
because they pay me for them. And because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. She gets
very
upset at those stories. You have no idea. Don't you just love it when you see things like that at the supermarket?”
“Not really.” Emma watched as Maris got a huge Chanel
No. 5 bottle out of her pocketbook and emptied half its contents into the tumbler. “You're drinking perfume?”
“It's gin,” Maris said. “I've got a couple of real bottles around here somewhere, but it's inconvenient to take them out for the afternoon. Places without a liquor license protest when they know you're trying to fortify their soft drinks. I just love it when I see things like that in the supermarkets. And on the newsstands. In New York, we've got these newsstands, these kiosk things, and they hang magazines and papers and things from a clothesline sort of arrangement over their open windows. You can see the headlines for miles.”
“Why didn't you use a pay phone here?”
“The only one I know of is in English Drugs. It's the first place Jimmy would check.”
“Why wouldn't he check here?”
“How would he ever get Belinda's phone records?” Maris had already finished a third of her tumbler of “fortified” orange juice. She looked much more sober than she had before. “It's not so easy to get hold of private information. The government can get it, but the rest of us have a very hard time, and if Jimmy did manage it Belinda could probably sue him. Not that she'd think of it. Christ. Was Belinda this stupid when we were all in school?”
“You were her best friend. You should know.”
“She was this stupid,” Maris said. “Never mind. Just don't bother to look shocked, will you? It's depressingly hick of you. I come back here and I just can't believe how god-awful provincial this place really is.”
Emma looked away. This apartment was so tiny it would have made her breathless even if she hadn't climbed a steep flight of stairs to get to it, or been so shocked that she could barely defrost her mind enough to think of what she had to do next. Good people, decent people, did not do things like this. If there was one thing she had never questioned, it was that she and all her friends were good and decent people. Of course, there was all that other stuff, about Betsy, not only the outhouse but stuff that had come before, but that
was different, somehow. That hadn't been real cruelty, but only kids and the way kids behaved. This wasâ
Maris had her legs stretched out on top of the coffee table now.
“You
are
going to get all provincial on me,” she said. “What the hell. I'm not sorry I did it. I'm really not.”
“I've got to get back to the store,” Emma said. “We're supposed to be open straight through the day. I've probably missed half a dozen customers.”
“Why did you come? Were you looking for Belinda? Belinda works today. Were you looking for me? How did you know I'd be home?”
“I just thought I'd drop by and see how things were going,” Emma said. She looked around her, helpless. “I'd better get going,” she said. “I really shouldn't be away for long. George has a fit if he finds out.”
“Make sure you lock the door when you leave,” Maris said.
Emma turned around and shuffled out, past the little dining table, through the kitchen, into the hall. The stairwell was dark. Emma went down half the stairs and then stopped, breathless again.
What struck her, suddenly, was that she did know a way for that dog to have ended up in Betsy Toliver's garageâbut that was because she knew the way Michael Houseman had ended up dead.