The last time Gregor Demarkian was in a small town, it was nearly winter, and in New England, so that both the weather and the landscape fit the occasion. Discussions of murder should take place on gray days or in the night. In Hollman, in the spring, Gregor felt as though he were playing a movie scene on the wrong set. It was as if John Sayles had decided to make a movie of Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery,” in the bright greens and very early sixties
Happy Days
spotlessness of
Matinee
.
“What are you thinking about?” Kyle Borden asked as he pulled the town's one police car into a parking place on Grandview Avenue.
They were parked right in front of a largish store whose purpose he couldn't decipherâhardware, maybe, or home furnishings. Just across from them, there was a side street split around a small triangular island. On the far side of that from where they were, in a place where the sidewalk curved in a great sweep up the hill, was Hollman's Pizza, where they were headed.
“I was thinking about âThe Lottery,'” Gregor said.
“The Pennsylvania lottery?”
“No. There's a short story, byâ”
“Shirley Jackson,” Kyle finished. “Yeah, I know it. Small town where they draw lots every year to pick somebody to stone to death. I did two years at the junior college.
We had to read it in English. You think Hollman reminds you of Shirley Jackson? That's funny, you know, because she used to say that. Betsy. I mean, Liz. When we were all in high school.”
“I can imagine,” Gregor said. He got out of the car, looking up and down Grandview one more time. There was really nothing remarkable about it. He just hated it. The last place he had ever truly hated like this was Fort Benning, Georgia, and that didn't count, because what he'd really hated about Fort Benning was the fact that they kept making him make forty-mile forced marches with a fifty-pound pack on his back in ninety-degree heat.
Kyle's idea of crossing the street was to look both ways and run. There was no streetlight on this section of Grandview, and no crosswalk, either. Gregor looked both ways, crossed his fingers, and followed. If Kyle did this all the time, it was a miracle he wasn't dead. Gregor got to the opposite sidewalk just ahead of a green Jeep Cherokee with a very loud horn. Kyle watched the Jeep go up the hill and shrugged.
“This is a famous place,” he said, pointing at Hollman's Pizza. “In the story of Betsy Toliver in Hollman, I mean. When we were all freshmen, a bunch of them asked her to have pizza with them one day after school, and then they all snuck out on her one by one and stuck her with the tab. Eight pizzas, they'd ordered. She had to call her mother to pay the bill.”
Kyle held open the swinging glass door and ushered Gregor through it, apparently oblivious to the fact that the story he had just told was nasty as hellâthat
all
the stories about “Betsy Toliver in Hollman” were nasty as hell, the kind of stories you'd expect to hear about psychopaths. Gregor looked around the small room with its dozen wooden tables and spotted the pay phone on the wall next to the door they'd come in by.
“I want to make a call,” he said. “I've got a cell phone with me, but I can't seem to get it to work, and I've been trying to get in touch with someone all day.”
“Cell phones don't work up here,” Kyle said. “It's the mountains. You go ahead. I'll order us a pizza. Sausage and pepperoni be okay?”
“Fine.” Gregor congratulated himself for bringing lots of antacids, and went over to the pay phone to see what he could do. He found his long-distance calling card at the back of his wallet and tried Tibor's first. He got a busy signal. Tibor must be on the Internet. He tried his own number and felt instantly relieved when somebody picked up.
“Hello?” Bennis said in that deep voice of hers that could never quite lose the Main Line debutante, boarding-school accent.
“It's me,” Gregor said. “How are you? I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. I was just listening to the news. There's a story about a dog found eviscerated in Elizabeth Toliver's garage. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. But don't even begin to think that's the strangest thing about this place. It's insane. It's like living in
Lord of the Flies
.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. It's a long story. I wish you were here. I've got no way to judge what people tell me about this place. And they all tell me things. A minute ago it was about a bunch of kids who asked Liz to have pizza with them and then they sneaked out of the restaurant after they'd ordered and stuck her with the bill. Eight pizzas.”
“Well, that was sucky of them.”
“One story would be sucky. I've heard maybe half a dozen since I got here, and the thing is, when they tell you about them, they act as if it's all perfectly normal. Liz Toliver doesn't, but she was the victim. The rest of them behave as if there's nothing unusual about the stories at all. And what do I know about it? My high school was in an inner city and all I ever did in it was study like a maniac so the University of Pennsylvania would give me a scholarship. If we had a Homecoming Queen, nobody ever told me about it.”
“My high school was a rich girls' boarding school where the girls brought their horses and boarded them, too. I'm not really much more of an expert on this sort of thing than you are.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I keep feeling that you could tell me what's real and what isn't in this place. You've got to know more about it than I do. Sometimes, I stop in the middle of everything and it all just feels absurd. These are grown people. Most of the ones we're dealing with are fifty or close to it. Can they really still be soâobsessedâwith what happened when they were in high school? And I do mean obsessed. It's like they don't have any other frame of reference.”
“Well, the murderâ”
“Forget the murder. It might as well not have happened. You mention it and people say, âOh, I forgot about that.'”
“Well,” Bennis said in her “soothing” voice, “they're all stuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Maybe high school was the only interesting thing that ever happened to them.”
“I wish you'd come,” Gregor told her. “Just get in the car and drive up. If the news about the dog has been on television, it's only a matter of time before we're inundated with reporters. Maybe not the full-court press, but at least a few of them making nuisances of themselves. I could use your point of view, even if you do think I'm crazy.”
“I don't think you're crazy. I think you're having a bad case of cultural dissonance. Besides, I can't come up. There's no place for me to stay. We looked it up in the triple-A handbook, don't you remember?”
“The room I'm staying in has a double bed.”
“Oh, marvelous. I can just camp on Elizabeth Toliver's doorstep and announce I'm staying. She won't mind. What's the harm of having one of Jimmy Card's old lovers installed in her guest room?”
“Bennisâ”
“Be reasonable,” Bennis said. “Besides, I'm supposed to go over to Donna's and help her with the flags. Tibor was
supposed to help her, but he's having an argument with his friend Vicki about gun control, and it's really heated up, so he spends all his time on the computer posting messages to RAM, and Donna says that if she wants to make the Kashinian's building look like the Armenian flag she's got to order the materials now, and she can't do that until she gets a good picture of what the Armenian flag looks like, and she's hopeless with search engines.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Donna wants to make Howard Kashinian's house look like the Armenian flag?”
“Right. The Kashinians are the Armenian flag, Lida is the American flag, and we're the U.N. I forget what she's doing to her own place, but it's another flag.”
“Why?”
“Because June fourteenth is Flag Day,” Bennis said reasonably.
On the other side of the room, a middle-aged waitress was putting an enormous pizza down on the table in front of Kyle Borden. Kyle looked up, saw Gregor staring, and waved.
“I'm supposed to eat a sausage and pepperoni pizza the size of a cow,” Gregor said. “You know that's bad for me. You could come and make sure I ate right.”
“I'll tell you what,” Bennis said. “If you don't have this whole thing cleared up by the end of next week, I'll find a hotel someplace within screaming distance and come out and take you to lunch. If we keep this up, Tibor is going to start in again with all that talk about us getting married, probably coupled with how I ought to enter the church. Of course, why he's worrying about me joining the church, I don't know. You're the one who never goes. Are you going to be all right?”
“I'll be fine. We've got an appointment to see Michael Houseman's mother in about an hour and a half. That ought to be some help.”
“At least you'll be talking about a murder,” Bennis said.
“Right.” Gregor thought of saying other thingsâ“I love you,” for instanceâbut he had one of those temporary interior
clutches that made him incapable of saying anything, and the next thing he knew the receiver was buzzing in his ear. He hung up and stared at the phone for a moment. They were together so often these days, it no longer seemed natural to him when she was gone.
Kyle Borden waved at him again. Gregor left the phone and went to the table with the pizza spread out across it. It looked even bigger than the large pizzas they sometimes ordered on Cavanaugh Street when they were all playing Monopoly at Tibor's and nobody wanted to deal with the state of Tibor's kitchen.
“Spectacular, isn't it?” Kyle Borden said happily. “Largest pizzas you can buy in the county. They're famous for them.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He looked Kyle up and down. The man was thin almost to the point of emaciation. So much for the stereotype of the potbellied small-town cop.
The waitress came back to the table with a tray of drinks, both very large on the same scale as the pizza, both dark.
“I ordered you a Coke,” Kyle said. “I figured that was safe. Everybody loves Coke. They even love it in China.”
Gregor took a single slice of pizza and put it on the plate that had been provided for just that purpose. Except for the size of their largest offerings, this could have been any of hundreds of pizza places from one end to the other of the country, although not in any of the big cities, where real Italians lived. The waitress looked like one more Hollman mayonnaise-and-American-cheese-on-white-bread type, and the woman behind the counter cooking pizza did not look any different.
“You're drifting off again,” Kyle Borden said. “If you're tired, we could probably make this appointment for another day. Daisy hasn't got that much to do with her time. She won't be unavailable.”
“No, that's all right. I'm not tired. I' m just thinking. Do you always eat this much pizza when you get pizza?”
“Of course not,” Kyle said. “I figured you'd have half.”
Gregor Demarkian wasn't sure what he had expected Daisy Houseman's life to be like, but he knew it wasn't what he got: a neat little brick house on a leafy corner lot on a residential street near the center of town. At first glance, the house seemed to be a story and a half, but as Gregor and Kyle moved up the walk Gregor realized it was an illusion. The roof was steeply pitched, but the house itself was a ranch, probably of the same vintage as the Tolivers', but much smaller. The lot was smaller still. It would be the work of less than a minute to walk out Daisy Houseman's front door and into the front door of the house next door. It would take all of three minutes to make it to the front door of the house on the other side, around the corner. Still, there was nothing crowded about this neighborhood. The lawns were well kept and adequate at the back. The houses were just far enough apart to allow for privacy and fresh air. The trees and grass were lush, and some of the yards already had sprinklers working to keep them watered.
Kyle went up to the front door and started to ring the bell, but his hand was still in the air when the door opened and a neat, trim, well-kept elderly woman came out. Gregor thought she was about seventy or seventy-five, which would make sense, if she had married and had her children young. Kyle said something to her that Gregor couldn't hear, and the woman turned to look him over as if he were a new representative from the gas company.
“I've been telling her all about you,” Kyle called, his voice echoing down the quiet, deserted street.
Gregor came up to the little stoop in front of the front door and took the hand Daisy Houseman was holding out to him. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said.
“I know.” Daisy Houseman nodded. “He
has
been telling me all about you, Mr. Demarkian. And I must admit that I've been looking for somebody to talk to. Although
not on my front walk for the whole of the town to hear.”
“She thinks I talk too loud,” Kyle said.
“Come in,” Daisy Houseman said.
She retreated through her front door, and Gregor and Kyle followed her. The door opened directly into the living room, which was high-ceilinged but small and undergirded with wall-to-wall carpeting. The carpeting was relatively new, and it had been vacuumed recently. The furniture had been dusted. Gregor recognized it. It was the “country” set sold by a well-known national chain of discount furniture storesâsofa, love seat, chair and ottoman, all upholstered in the same “country” print, for $799 the set. The coffee table had come from the same source. The television was very old, but very well kept, and encased in a polished wood console that made it look like a piece of furniture itself. On top of it was a doily, and across the doily were a whole set of framed photographs of what looked like high school yearbook pictures, three of boys and one of a girl with her hair held back in a stiff blue headband.
“I have three children besides Michael,” Daisy Houseman said, seeing Gregor looking at the pictures. “Two other boys and a girl. They all went to UP-Johnstown and came back to live in town, or near it. My daughter is Caroline Houseman Bray. She teaches at the high school.”
“Mrs. Houseman here used to teach at the high school, too,” Kyle said. “I had her for sophomore English. She gave me a D.”
“You deserved an F,” Daisy Houseman said. “I quit the year after Michael died. I hadn't intended to. My other children are all younger, and I'd meant to stay for them. And we needed the money, of course, because we're not wealthy people. My husband was a foreman at the Caravesh plant. They make steel casings, or used to. I guess steel's pretty much dead in this part of Pennsylvania, these days. Can I get you two some coffee? Tea? I know Kyle will take a Coke.”
“There's no need to put yourself to any trouble,” Gregor said.
“It's no trouble. It's just a matter of putting the kettle on. My daughter bought me a coffee grinder and a percolator for Christmas the year before last, but I still haven't the faintest idea how to work them. I'm a Philistine when it comes to coffee, I'm afraid. I can't taste the difference between fresh ground Colombian and Taster's Choice.”
Daisy Houseman left the living room. Gregor walked over to the television set and looked at the pictures on it.
“Is one of these Michael Houseman?” Gregor asked Kyle.
Kyle tapped the one at the very back. “That one. She used to keep it in the front, but maybe the other kids complained. Michael, Steve, Bobby, and Caroline.”
Gregor picked up Michael's picture. The boy who stared back at him was nice enough looking, but not particularly handsome. He had regular features and hair that was still more short than not. Gregor put the portrait down.
“Like I said,” Kyle told him. “Nice kid. Played decent sports.”
“And didn't stand out in any way,” Daisy Houseman said, coming back into the living room with a round wooden tray. The tray had a tall glass of Coke and two coffee cups, plus a sugar bowl, a small cream pitcher, two spoons, and the kettle, which was as small as everything else in this house and still steaming. She put the tray down on the coffee table. “Don't worry,” she said. “It won't offend me. He was special to me, of course, but he wasn't the kind of boy who really stood out among his peers. There are always a few of those, even in small towns like this, the ones you know will go on to good colleges and the kinds of careers most of us can only dream of. And then there are the other ones, the ones who have their fifteen minutes of fame at their senior proms. Michael wasn't one of those, either.”
“He looks like a very nice boy,” Gregor said.
“He was. Nice and steady and reliable. Oh, I know there were things. He drank beer sometimes, not often, but he couldn't really fool me when he did. And that last year
before they all went off to collegeâor didn'tâthere was a fair amount of marijuana in town. Michael was very disapproving. It upset him. Our principal then was an old fool named Deckart Crabbe. He came close to having a nervous breakdown over that marijuana. These days, they'd probably bring in the state police and send a lot of silly teenagers to prison for five years just for carrying a joint. Excuse me, Mr. Demarkian. I don't much approve of the drug war. You haven't sat down.”
“I'm sorry.” Gregor sat down.
Kyle reached across the coffee table and took the Coke. “So,” he said. “Like I told you, Mr. Demarkian has been asked to come in and look over what happened to Michael, becauseâ”
“Because the supermarket tabloids are making Elizabeth Toliver sound like a murderer, and her famous boyfriend doesn't like it. Yes, Kyle, I know what's going on. Not that I mind, really. If I were in her position, I'd probably do the same thing. Maybe some good will come of it. I've never been in the kind of financial position that would allow me to hire a famous detective to look into Michael's death.”
“What about at the time?” Gregor asked her. “Were you satisfied with the extent of the investigation? I keep getting the impression that not very much was done, and yet that makes very little sense. The murder of a teenager in a small town is usually major news.”
“And it was major news, for about two months,” Daisy told him. “I can't say I was dissatisfied with the investigation. They searched that park backward and forward. It stayed closed for the rest of the summer. They questioned all of those girls, the ones who found the body.” Daisy Houseman fluttered her hands in the air. “Maybe I shouldn't start on that. Geneâmy husbandâGene was very angry about that. He said they were the ones with blood on them. They were the ones the police ought to keep under observation. He was very bitter when the summer was over and they started going to college and nobody stopped them. But I could see the police point of view.
There was no weapon. And unless you thought they were all in it together, they all had alibis. They were all together, you see, not killing Michael in the dark.”
“Did anybody ever consider the possibility that they
were
all in it together?” Gregor asked.
Daisy flashed him a smile. “I considered it. Gene did, too. Oh, I did not like that group of girls. Not a bit. I didn't like it when Michael stayed so close to Chris Inglerod, and I didn't like it when he was dating that other one, Emma. Although that came and went the summer between his sophomore and junior years. She dumped him as soon as they got back to school. She didn't think her reputation would survive if anybody knew she was dating a boy in her own class. If it was up to me, the system would be very different. I'd cancel all the proms and all the dances and all the cheerleading squads. I'd make school school. But nobody would listen to that.”
“Michael was close to Chris Inglerod all his life, wasn't he?” Gregor said.
“Oh, yes.” Daisy nodded. “We bought this house in 1953, and the Inglerods had the one next door around the back on Carter Street. We were the only families in the area who had children. Everybody else in the neighborhood was older. Their children were grown-up and gone. Most new young families in those days bought houses in the subdivisions that had just started going up. They had nobody to play with but each other, when they were very small children, and then later they walked to and from school together. That was why Gene and I bought this house, not so that Michael could walk to school but so that I could, when the children were bigger and I wanted to go back to teaching.”
“Excuse me if I'm wrong,” Gregor said, “but I keep getting the impression that that was unusual. That in this high school, the groups are pretty much closed off from each other.”
Daisy took a long sip of coffee. Gregor hadn't even noticed her making it, but now that he looked down at the
tray he saw that she'd made him a cup, too, but hadn't put any milk in it, and probably hadn't added any sugar. She put her cup down again and said, “You've got to understand. Hollman is a small town now, but in those days it was teeny. They all knew each other, all these kids, for most of their lives. In a large school, you can break up into groups and refuse to interact with anybody else, but in a small one you end up having to spend at least some time with almost everybody. There's no practical way to avoid it. And, if you want to know the truth, they probably don't want to avoid it. There's a psychological dynamic there that somebody ought to study. Somebody who isn't a complete fool, that is. I've read some of the literature on âadolescent status hierarchies,' as they call them. It's completely idiotic.”
“Was Michael going out with anybody in particular, that summer?” Gregor asked.
Daisy shook her head. “Nobody. He took the little Haggerty girl to the senior prom, but that was a matter of convenience. They both wanted to go, and neither of them had dates, and they were lab partners in biology. When summer came around, he was just working, just marking time. I'm sure he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. It seemed to Gene and me that he'd have plenty of time to find out.”
The silence in the room lasted for what felt like forever. Gregor tried his coffee and decided it was better, black, than the stuff he made for himself. Kyle, who had never taken a seat, shifted from one leg to the other.
“Well,” he said.
Gregor took another sip of coffee. “Do you mind if I ask you about the day in question, the day he died?”
“Of course not.”
“He left for work that day, when?”
“Well, he wasn't due at work until ten or eleven o'clock, but he left a long time before that. At eight, I think, or maybe quarter of. Chris picked him up and they went down to the Sycamore for breakfast.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Oh, no. They did that maybe twice a week. I think it made them feel adult to sit in a restaurant and order from a menu, even if it was only the Sycamore.”
“Do you know if they went by themselves, or if they met people?”
Daisy Houseman shook her head. “I have no idea. The impression I got is that they went by themselves, but the Sycamore is the main teenage hangout in this town. It still is. They might have met a dozen people. They never said so.”
“Not even on the day in question?”
“No.”
“I don't remember there being anything about them meeting other people that morning,” Kyle said. “You know, in the gossip in town after it all happened. Just that they'd gone to breakfast there in the morning.”
“Fine,” Gregor said. “So. Chris Inglerod took Michael to the park and Michael went to work as a lifeguard. He spent the day sitting on the lifeguard's chair. There's no indication that he was missing from that chair for any significant amount of time, is there?”
“He didn't even take a break for lunch,” Daisy Houseman said. “He ate sitting in the chair. I sent a bottle of orange juice and a bologna sandwich with mustard with him, in a brown paper bag. That's what he liked to take to school, too, but at school he had an apple with him, too. You can't send apples with them when they're lifeguarding. They cramp.”
“Michael started work in the lifeguard's chair,” Gregor said, “and Chris Inglerod did what?”