“Came back to town and met up with Nancy Quayde and went to her house,” Kyle said promptly.
“Nonsense,” Daisy Houseman said.
“What?” Kyle said.
“I said nonsense. That's not what she did unless she changed her plans that very morning. I heard her talking in this very house before she and Michael left for the Sycamore.
She was going to stay in the park and meet with that pack ofâwell. Those girls. Emma Kenyon and Belinda Hart and Maris Coleman and Peggy Smith. Oh, and Nancy Quayde, too, of course. Always Nancy. I'm glad I left teaching long before she ever got into it.”
“Mrs. Houseman,” Kyle said patiently, “I've read the reports. And I was here at the time, don't you remember? Chris went to Nancy's house, and the other girlsâ”
“Nonsense,” Daisy Houseman said again. “They'd been planning that operation all summer. Chris told Michael about it, right in my dining room, weeks before it happened. Michael had a fit. He didn't want it happening on his watch. He'd have to go investigate it. They'd put him in a terrible position. I think that's why they waited until after five. So that Michael would be off duty and the park would be closed and he couldn't turn them right in for what they'd done.” She wheeled around to look at Gregor Demarkian. “I know you must think we're all a bunch of savages in this town, Mr. Demarkian, but believe me. If Michael hadn't died the same night, those girls would have been in major league trouble for what they did. At the very least, they'd have been hauled in front of juvenile court. Betsy Toliver's father was the most important attorney in this part of the state. He'd have seen to it. And the rest of the town would not have stood behind them. We are not jerks. Did they really tell the police they hadn't thought up that stunt until the day it happened?”
“They told
everybody
that,” Kyle said.
“Well, what can I say?” Daisy's hands fluttered again. “I wasn't paying much attention at the time. I had other things to think about. I didn't realize. But if I had, I would have told somebody. Belinda Hart discovered the snakes' nest two weeks before graduation, in June. There were eggs and the eggs would hatch. That's how they were sure of getting enough snakes. Chris sat down at my dining-room table and drew a whole diagram for Michael to show him what it was about. They wanted him to help, but he wouldn't do it. He told me he didn't believe they'd do it.
And you know what he was like. He would have turned them in, just the way he always said he'd turn in whoever it was who was selling the marijuana at the high school, if he ever found out. But don't you dare let that pack of bitches tell you that what they did to Betsy Toliver that night was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
It was only later, when he was in the car with the robot-driver on his way back to Elizabeth Toliver's house, that Gregor Demarkian thought how odd it was that Daisy Houseman had called that incident at the outhouse an “operation.” Of course, television had changed the world, and so had paperback fiction. Lots of people talked like private eyes these days. Even cultivated peopleâthe kind of people who contributed every year to their local affiliate of PBSâthought of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie as “classics,” as if they were Jane Austen and Henry James. There was also the fact that Mrs. Houseman had ended up calling the girls “bitches,” but Gregor put that down to simple honesty. Daisy Houseman had said it, but lots of other people should have. Most of the people Gregor had gone to school with had either been sinking into juvenile delinquency or working their asses off to get the hell out, as Gregor himself had, in the end, with a four-year all-tuition-paid scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. The Armenian kids tended to stick together. It was safer that way, and they had their own events, on Cavanaugh Street, to compensate for the lack of events at school. Gregor could remember going to dozens of “youth” dances in the basement of Holy Trinity Church, carefully watched over by the Very Old Ladies who had been Very Old even then. Once, he'd kissed LidaâLida Kazanjian as she was thenâright on the mouth in the little niche behind the boiler in the basement's back room. She'd been shocked, and before either of them had had a chance to say a word, Mrs. Varmesian
had leaped out of the dark and whacked Gregor in the leg with an umbrella, screeching all the time in Armenian, which by then Gregor no longer understood. Mrs. Varmesian had died the next year, of some “female complaint” Gregor's mother would never specify. Like everybody else on the street, he had gone to her funeral and then followed her casket out of the church and down a long three blocks to the waiting hearse. In Armenia, they would have followed the casket all the way to the cemetery, but Mrs. Varmesian was being taken to an Armenian-American cemetery in Sewickley. That was the same year he had graduated from high school, and his parents had come to the ceremony in their best clothes that even he knew, by then, made them look as if they were just off the boat. That didn't matter too much, because most of the other parents looked as if they were just off the boat, too. Gregor had graduated second in his classâthe boy who had graduated first had picked up a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1987âand his mother had carried his diploma around for weeks, showing its gold summa cum laude star to strangers on the street, and discussing Gregor's plans and scholarships with everyone from the men who came around on the garbage truck to the driver of the bus she rode to get to her doctor's appointment. Bennis said she didn't know any more about places like Hollman than Gregor did himself, but it wasn't true. She at least didn't find discussions of things like proms and homecoming queens completely alien. She'd seen all the movies and read all the books, even if she had spent her adolescence at subdebutante dances and champagne teas. Now that he'd spent a day in Hollman, he felt as if he'd landed on another planet.
Gregor looked down at the attache' case he'd put on the seat beside him and wondered if he should be looking through the reports Kyle Borden had given himâbut he'd looked those over once, and in spite of the fact that they were filled with the kind of details that were fundamentally necessary to any murder investigation, he already knew he was going to find them unsatisfactory. The more he knew
about Michael Houseman, the more the boy bothered him, not because there was something wrong with him, but because there
wasn't
. In Gregor's experience, there were exactly two kinds of murders: the ones committed by psychopaths, for their own reasons, and the ones committed on the sort of people who had more enemies than hair follicles. Michael Houseman hadn't had any enemies. He'd been a nice, upright, conscientiously honest boy with a few bad adolescent tendencies to get high on the weekends, a little too much of a straight arrow, a little too much of an Eagle Scout, but not so much of either that he had been perceived by his classmates as a prig. It was so
trivial
. There was a boy dead, and all the reasons Gregor could think of that somebody might have had to kill him were on the level of the motives in a Hardy Boys' book. No wonder the police had written off the incident as the work of a stray tramp. At least that would make a certain kind of sense. The problem was, the solution didn't quite fit the facts as he had read them so far, and especially the fact that those girls had been so close to that body so soon after Michael Houseman had died, or maybe even before he was all the way dead. Even tramps have to be somewhere, and come from somewhere. Why would one be wandering around a small park in the middle of nowhere instead of hanging around the train station? How would he have found the park to begin with? Gregor had spent ten years of his life tracking serial killers. He knew how they worked, and unless you wanted to say that the one who killed Michael Houseman had been an old resident of Hollman come back to haunt, it made no sense that he would be in that park, prowling around for what he couldn't know would be there. Of course, an old resident wasn't impossible. Hollman must have produced its share of drifters. Every small town did. Gregor was beginning to make himself dizzy. If he followed his instincts and rejected the idea of a tramp or a drifter or a serial killer, he was left withâwhat? Nothing. Not even something ridiculous, like an argument over who
got to be voted Most Popular Boy or who got to date the captain of the cheerleading team.
I'm beginning to sound like a Gidget movie,
Gregor thought. Luis was turning the car off the road onto Elizabeth Toliver's driveway, which seemed to be full of vehicles, as if she were having company. The front of the house was dark in the dusk, but as they came around to the big paved area in the back, Gregor could see lights on in the kitchen windows. Mark passed back and forth a few times. The car pulled closer to the garage and Gregor saw Jimmy Card appear suddenly in the window. He was holding a large glass full of something dark. Twenty years ago, it would have been a Manhattan. These days, it was probably a Diet Coke.
“Oh, boy,” Gregor said, thinking it wouldn't be long before every celebrity photographer in America knew that Jimmy Card was here and in a house with no security protection whatsoeverâand no possibility of providing any, either. The Toliver house was what the Bureau would have called an “undefensible area.” It had no fences or gates, and it was surrounded on all sides by open land. Gregor grabbed his attache' case, expecting Luis to pull up to the back door and let him out before parking the car in the garage, but Luis didn't stop. He went straight across the asphalt to the garage and waited while the door pulled up automatically in front of him. If Gregor had been thinking clearly, he would have asked Luis to let him out right then. Instead, he found himself being pulled into the dark garage while security lights flicked on above his head. The garage was half full of things nobody had used for years and nobody would ever use again: an old rotary lawn mower, its long metal handles so thoroughly rusted they looked like sand; a stack of molded plastic garden chairs in black and pink; a pile of boxes marked “Betsy's Books.” There were a lot of boxes. Elizabeth Toliver must have been a terrific reader as a child.
Gregor got out of the car. The lights were still on, but the garage door had closed behind them, automatically, the
way it had opened. He saw an ordinary door to one side, propped slightly open.
“I'm going this way,” he said.
Outside the high windows on the three garage doors, the sky was streaked with bright, hard pink the way it was right before real sunset. The leaves on all the trees nearby were drooping. Gregor let himself out. After the air-conditioned sterility of the car, the air out here was humid and sickly sweet. The house up ahead looked the way houses do in house magazine articles about how to make your house into a home. There was a path that curved around a long, low hedge that had been cropped as closely as it could be and still be left alive. He took that rather than striking out on the lawn, in case the Tolivers cared seriously about the way their grass looked.
He was at the edge of the hedge, right before the lawn itself started, when he realized that something was wrong, and had been wrong, for a while. The sickly sweet smell was getting stronger. All of a sudden, it seemed to envelope him, the way skunk-smell did when a skunk was hit in the road. This was not the smell a skunk made. He knew this smell very well. He had had it around him more times than he liked to remember. He told himself that, in this case, it was most likely to be another dog, or a cat, or a woodchuck, another animal ritually slaughtered at Elizabeth Toliver's altar, another prank.
He looked down at his shoes and saw the snaking curve of something white against them. He was too aware of just how quiet it was. He couldn't even hear Luis in the garage. No sound was coming from the house. He moved slowly to his right, around the end of the hedge, looking at the ground the whole time. He did not want to do any more damage than he had already done.
I need a flashlight,
he thought idly. The dark was descending at record speed. The snaking white thing trailed around the end of the hedge and back toward the bushes that flanked that side of the garage. There were dozens of bushes, all evergreen, so densely placed that there was no
room for anything between them.
Follow the yellow brick road,
Gregor thought, moving carefully so as not to step on the white thing, not to disturb anything, not to cause any more trouble than he absolutely had to. If he had been one hundred percent certain, he would have gone straight into the house and called Kyle Borden and anybody Kyle could think of to use for reinforcements.
A second later, Gregor
was
certain. The long white thing was an intestine, stretched out by some accident he couldn't begin to determine, and on the end of it was a body, twisted and mauled as if it had been broken in half.
Not Liz Toliver's body,
Gregor thought with relief. Then he wished desperately that cell phones worked in these mountains.
It wasn't Liz Toliver's body, but it was the body of a woman, and she had been as thoroughly eviscerated as yesterday's dog.