Somebody Else's Music (30 page)

Read Somebody Else's Music Online

Authors: Jane Haddam

Belinda Hart Grantling's apartment turned out to be barely half a block up Grandview Avenue, in one of those brick storefront buildings whose false fronts made it difficult to know just how many stories they really were. In this case, Gregor found, there were two, the one that held the store on the ground floor, and the one reached by a single, narrow staircase to the left of the store's front door. It was the kind of climb that needed a landing. The ground-floor story must have had fairly high ceilings, because the railing was needed as much to help the ascender pull himself up as to steady him on the way down. It was also absolutely dark. There was a single bare lightbulb in the ceiling of the floor above, but it was inadequate for anything but a horror movie special effect. Gregor was winded before he'd gotten a third of the way to the top.
Gregor thought he might do nothing more than see spots, but they were at the top of the stairs, finally, and he had a chance to stand still and breathe in. When Bennis was first quitting smoking, she used to say that there were times when she thought she would never be able to get enough air. He thought he now knew what she meant.
Kyle Borden knocked hard on the single door on the floor. Gregor heard a bustling and a coughing on the other side of the door.
“If you've lost your keys again, I'm going to scream,” a woman said, and then the door swung back, and Gregor was faced with one of the oddest-looking people he had ever seen. In some ways, she was still a child. Her dress was frilly and pastel. Her hair was dyed blond and curled up and back in a way that was thirty years out-of-date, and even when it had been in style it had been a style for a teenager. In other ways, she was peculiarly ancient. Her
skin was a mass of wrinkling and deep trenches. Her hair was far too thin on her scalp. Her eyes drooped. She looked them up and down and said, “Kyle, for God's sake. I thought you were Maris. Come on in. Who's your friend?”
“Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.
“He's a consultant,” Kyle said, coming in and signaling Gregor to come after him. “He's a consultant to the police department. We thought you might be at work.”
“I'm only at work
sometimes
,” Belinda said. “Honestly. It's only fifty dollars a week, and no matter how I try, I can't get anything else. How I'm supposed to live on fifty dollars a week, I don't know.”
“Did you say that Ms. Coleman lost her keys?” Gregor asked.
Belinda blinked. “Oh. Well, I don't know. I mean, she did, about a week ago, when she first came. Lost them in the Sycamore one night when we were all there to catch up, you know. Before Betsy Wetsy came back to town. We all went one afternoon right about five, and of course I drove her, because Maris won't drive, even though the car she's got is better than mine, it's new and mine has a hundred thousand miles on it. She didn't even realize she'd lost them for two days, and then she had to go back over everything and trace her steps and like that, and I had to drive her out to the Sycamore, and there they were. It's just selfishness, if you ask me. She just likes riding around like she's got a chauffeur. It drives me crazy.”
By now, Gregor and Kyle were fully into the apartment.
“Listen,” Kyle said. “Maris had her keys last night, didn't she?”
Belinda blinked again. “I suppose so. I don't know. I didn't see her. She went out to Betsy Wetsy's around five o'clock or so and she didn't come back. She probably spent the night over there. She's got to suck up to Betsy because Betsy has money now. It really isn't fair.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
Belinda sat down in a big overstuffed armchair upholstered in white violets and cherries on twigs and gestured
for the two of them to sit down, too. “This is all my own furniture,” she said. “I brought it from the house. It was all I could hold on to. It was terrible the way that worked out. He should have been arrested.”
“What did he do?” Gregor asked, curious.
“He refused to go on paying the mortgage,” Belinda said. “He just stopped paying it, as soon as he moved out. The bank came and padlocked the house. It was humiliating. The only good thing was that Hayley was grown and out on her own, because if she'd still been a child I think I would have killed him. And then the lawyer said there was nothing I could do about it. It was only his name on the deed and only his name on the mortgage. Imagine that. I mean, of course I didn't work when Hayley was small. I'm not one of those lesbian feminists like Betsy Wetsy. But everybody knows that a husband and a wife own everything together. That's what marriage is all about.”
Kyle cleared his throat. Gregor sat down on the edge of the couch, which was some kind of pink.
“So,” Kyle said. “We were just over talking to Emma. About how you and she took Mark DeAvecca home from the library yesterday.”
“DeAvecca? Is that his name? I thought his name was Toliver. Betsy Wetsy kept her name after she got married. I read it in the newspapers.”
“Just because she kept her own name doesn't mean her children wouldn't have her husband's name,” Kyle said patiently. “Now, the thing is—”
“I think it's really terrible, the way she behaves,” Belinda said. “I mean, who is she, anyway? She's nobody at all. Nobody even said hello to her in high school except to tell her what a jerk she was being. It's Maris who should be the famous one.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“And I do know Maris drinks,” Belinda said. “I'm not that stupid. But I know why she drinks, Kyle Borden, and so do you. She drinks because she can't stand seeing what Betsy Wetsy's done, that's why. It isn't fair.”
Kyle cleared his throat again. Gregor bit his lip.
“Belinda,” Kyle said. “About yesterday afternoon. You and Emma took Mark back to the Toliver house, from the library.”
“Right,” Belinda said. “I was getting off work. We wanted to know what Mark was like. He was terrible. I really hated him. He was such a snot. I told him all about Hayley and you could see he was impressed, but he wouldn't say so. He just went on about the library and how he couldn't find this book.”
“What book?” Gregor asked.
“I don't know,” Belinda said. “I never spend much time with books except, you know, at work, and then I don't read them. They give me a headache. It was a book about carpentry, I think.”
“Carpentry?” Gregor asked.
“It had carpenter in the title,” Belinda said. “He couldn't find it. He went looking for it, and he got Laurel to help him, but she had to tell him we didn't have it. We used to have it, and it was in the card catalogue, but it disappeared and we never got it back, because nobody used to take it out anyway. Honestly, you'd think, with a book on carpentry, at least some people would want to take it out. At least it was about something useful. It wasn't like Betsy Wetsy's books. They're just a lot of bull about what everybody thinks and why they think it and how we're all too stupid for liking to wear makeup and going on diets.”
“You've read one of Betsy's books?” Kyle said.
Belinda shrugged. “Parts of one. It wasn't a whole book straight through. It had chapters in it that were separate, you know, and not all about the same thing.”
“Essays,” Gregor suggested.
Belinda shrugged again. “Something. It was stupid. The first chapter was all about high school, and how we all have this sound track to our lives like our lives were a movie, and so instead of really living we have other people's words and emotions and, I don't remember. It was really, really stupid. It was like she was saying we shouldn't ever listen
to music except maybe classical music. Or like that.”
“Right,” Kyle said.
“It was stupid,” Belinda repeated.
“Look,” Kyle said. “About driving Mark DeAvecca out to the Toliver house. We're trying to get a few things straightened out. Emma says it was around three. Is that right?”
“It was a little before,” Belinda said. “Betsy Wetsy had gone and abandoned him, so Emma and I decided to take him home.”
“Okay,” Kyle said. “Now. You take him out to the Toliver house, and then what?”
“He asked us in for some coffee, but Emma wouldn't go,” Belinda said. “I thought she was being stupid, myself. I would have loved to go in. Betsy Wetsy could have come home anytime and then we'd be able to see for ourselves.”
“But she didn't come home,” Gregor said.
“No, she didn't, and we didn't even get out of the car.” Belinda pouted. “We just stayed parked there at the curb while Emma talked to Mark, which was awful, because he's just like Betsy Wetsy was. Stuck-up. Snotty. You wouldn't believe the books he had. I don't think anybody ever really reads books like that. They just pretend to.”
“Now, pay attention,” Kyle said. “Did you see Chris when you were out there?”
“Of course we didn't.”
“Could she have been parked in the driveway behind the house?”
“No,” Belinda said positively. “If her car was parked in that driveway, I'd have seen it.”
“Are you sure?” Kyle asked. “Because I asked Emma, and she said she couldn't see anything.”
“That's because Emma was driving,” Belinda said. “She was on the other side of the car. She wasn't right up next to the curb. I was right up next to the curb, and I was practically in front of the driveway entrance, and I could see right down it. The only car there was that Ford Taurus the nurse drives Betsy Wetsy's mother around in.”
“Could there have been cars in the garage?” Gregor asked.
“Oh,” Belinda said. Then she put on a show of thinking really hard. “I suppose there could have been. I don't remember the garage doors being open, but I don't remember them being closed either. Was Chris's car in Betsy Wetsy's garage?”
“No,” Kyle said.
Gregor got up. He was finding it almost impossible to sit still in this room.
“You've got a good view here,” he said. “And that's where you work? Right across there?”
“It means I don't have to drive when the weather gets bad,” Belinda said. “But it's not like it was when I was growing up. My parents had a really nice house in those days, and we had big trees. Even when I was married, I had a better house. It's a good thing Hayley was grown when her father decided he wanted a divorce. She'd have been ashamed to bring her friends here.”
Gregor wished he could open a window. The room was virtually airless. Unfortunately, although the window had screens, they wouldn't keep out the rain, and the rain was still coming down in sheets.
“It's so weird,” Belinda said pleasantly. “Do you know what I was thinking? It was raining just like this, the night Betsy Wetsy got stuck in the outhouse. Not in the beginning, you know, but at the end, when we were all at the river and then—then—” She looked from one to the other of them and blushed.
“And then Michael died,” Kyle Borden said. “What is it with you people that you can never say that right out loud?”
Belinda got out of her chair and bustled off in the direction of the kitchen. She was one of the few people, Gregor thought, who could actually be said to bustle.
“I don't know why everybody makes such a big deal about it,” she said. “It's as if it were some kind of catastrophe or something.
Chris
is the catastrophe. She was somebody who really mattered.”
The really odd thing, Liz Toliver thought, was that, when it was happening, she'd behaved as if she'd been through it all a dozen times in the last six weeks. The reporters were storming the house. The phone lines were cut. Her own picture was on the news segment of the
Today
show, as if she were O. J. Simpson—in fact, exactly as if—and yet through it all she had been perfectly calm, and perfectly clearheaded, and perfectly focused.
Now she turned over on her side and looked out the window. They had commandeered an entire floor of the Radisson, almost as much space as they had on the first floor of the house in Connecticut, and maybe more. She was lying on this bed because it had been handy when she wandered out of the shower, and she had taken a shower because she'd needed something to do that wouldn't require her to talk to anybody for a while. There was so much thunder and lightning it amazed her that they still had power.
She got up and went to the door of the room and looked down the hall. Several of the other doors were standing wide open. Through one of them, she could hear the sounds of Mark and Geoff playing a video game. She went back into the room she'd come from and got the robe she'd left lying across the little desk near the window. She got the robe wrapped around her and went out into the hall again.
She bypassed the room where the boys were playing—if Jimmy had been in there playing with them, which he sometimes did, she would have been able to hear him cursing at the joystick—and went down to the other end of the hall where she could see a door standing wide open and hear the sounds of classical music spilling out. The music was Paganini, whom Jimmy claimed was his favorite composer after Paul McCartney.
When she came to the door, he was still on the phone. When she knocked, he was just hanging up. He looked at her and smiled. “Hey,” he said. “I wish I'd known it was you. I was talking to Debra.”
“My Debra?”
“Your Debra, yeah. I thought I'd check in and see how things were going. There's been a certain amount of fuss over there this morning. You might want to call her back when you get the chance. She was a little frantic.”
“My Debra? Frantic? The world must be coming to an end.”
Jimmy picked up a cup of coffee from a large round table beside the bed, and Liz realized he'd ordered room service while she'd been showering. She went over to the table and found enough hot water and Constant Comment tea bags to last the afternoon.
“So,” she said. “I've been thinking.”
“I've been thinking, too,” Jimmy said. “Debra said you were supposed to fire Maris when you were up here. Have you?”
“I was only going to stop her from going back to the office,” Liz said. “Debra's right about that. She's a distraction. I was going to keep her on as a research assistant, or something like that. Keep Maris on, I mean.”
“I know who you mean,” Jimmy said. “Why?”
“Because she probably couldn't get another job. Because I don't really want to see somebody I've known since kindergarten sleeping in the street. Why do we have to go through this again?”
“Because,” Jimmy said, “I'm the most loyal person on
the planet, and you know that, but even I wouldn't go on taking care of somebody who spent all her time trying to screw me up. Is that why you won't marry me? Because you're afraid I'll make you fire Maris?”
“Be sensible,” Liz said. She got a cup of tea rigged up—why was it that places always gave you little tiny cups to drink tea in, as if they thought that only coffee drinkers were in it for the caffeine?—and took a seat on the edge of the bed. “Think about Maris for a minute,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“How should I know where she is?” Jimmy said. “Not here. That's enough for me.”
“Why isn't she here?”
“Is this a trick question? Maybe if we, you know, did a little rock and roll, it would clear my head and I could answer better.”
“Behave yourself,” Liz said. “Think about this for a minute. Last night, when Chris's body was found, Maris was at my mother's house. Right?”
“Right.”
“And then she fell asleep on the couch,” Liz said. “Passed out, really. You remember that? You went off to take a shower, and Mr. Demarkian came in to talk, and then Mr. Demarkian left and I went to bed and Maris was still asleep on the couch. I think I mentioned something to you about it at the time.”
“I think I said something about Maris going down one more step of the alcoholism ladder. I still don't see what you're getting at.”
“Well,” Liz said, “if she was asleep on the couch when we all went to bed, where was she when we all woke up?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe she woke up in the middle of the night and went home. Or to wherever she's staying.”
“At Belinda Hart's place. How?”
“How what?”
“How did she get home?” Liz insisted.
Jimmy looked thoroughly confused. “She got home the same way she got to the house in the first place,” he said.
“She must have driven out, right? So she got back in the car and went home, and it's probably a miracle she didn't kill herself or somebody else.”
Liz shook her head. “She didn't drive out. Or at least, she didn't drive herself out. She's got a car she rented, yes, but it's a bright yellow Volkswagen, one of those new bugs. She told me. There was no bright yellow Volkswagen in the driveway at my mother's house when Chris's body was found, and there wasn't one in the garage, either, because my mother's car is in there. Maris hates to drive. She even walked all the way back from the Sycamore yesterday after we had lunch.”
“Maris is scared shitless that she'll kill somebody,” Jimmy said. “It's one of the few signs of common human decency I've ever been able to attribute to her.”
“The thing is,” Liz said, “if she didn't have a car, then where did she go? Where was she this morning? And what bothers me, what I keep thinking about, is maybe that nothing happened to her this morning. Maybe she's still out there. Back at the house.”
“Doing what?”
“Waking up to find the house deserted,” Liz said. “Waking up to find the phone lines cut. Or, if you really want to write a worst-case scenario, waking up maybe an hour and a half ago and finding some reporters still outside the house and nobody in it and needing a ride into town and having only one place to get it from. If you see what I mean.”
“Shit,” Jimmy said.
“Exactly,” Liz said. “She could have been half a dozen places in that house and we'd never have seen her if we weren't looking for her. All she had to do was get up in the middle of the night, still mostly drunk, and go wandering around looking for a bathroom in the dark. Is there a way we could send somebody out there to check?”
“There's supposed to be a policeman posted,” Jimmy said. “Maybe he can check. Maybe he can find another cop
to get her a ride back into town. Assuming she's still there. Shit, shit, shit. I forgot all about her.”
“I forgot all about her, too,” Liz said. “Oh, damn. This is going to be messy, too. Maris, stranded while we flee, giving no thought to her comfort or well-being. Or however the papers will put it. And
People
. I'm beginning to be very glad that
George
folded when it did.”
“You wouldn't have to worry if she didn't spend half her time talking to the papers.”
“Do you ever wonder what you'd be like if you hadn't ended up being a famous person named Jimmy Card?” Liz asked him. “Do you ever wonder what kind of jerk you would be if you'd tried all the things you tried but they hadn't worked out and you were still playing bars in Long Island City? You don't give any consideration to context.”
“I give my consideration to you,” Jimmy said.
He stretched out his hand and ran the tips of his fingers across her cheek, very slowly, the way he sometimes did when they first met at the apartment for an afternoon of making love. Liz knew that nothing like that was going to happen right here, right now. Her rule about sex in any place the boys were was absolutely unbreakable. It was just that she wished they really were married, as married as she had once been to Jay, so that she could stretch out on the bed with Jimmy beside her and not have to care at all what Mark thought might be going on on the other side of the door. It wasn't that she was horny, as Mark liked to put it. It wasn't as if she wanted sex the way she sometimes did when she was working in the city and knew she would be meeting Jimmy later, for lunch, or at the end of the day. She was not craving orgasm, but the comfort of a catharsis, something to prove that she was not Chris, she was not dead in somebody else's backyard, she was not dead at all, and she was not likely to be indicted for a murder she didn't commit. She wanted to twist around and wrestle Jimmy down to the bed and go at him the way she'd never dared to do when she
had
wanted sex.
“Are you all right?” Jimmy asked her.
“I'm fine,” she said, but she wanted to say something else, and it scared her. So she got up and went to the room-service table and made herself another cup of tea.
Emma was working on the checkbook when Peggy Smith came in, and for a moment she was even more disoriented than she had been. Was it after three o'clock already, that Peggy should be here? Had it really been raining all day? Peggy was as wet as Emma had ever seen anybody. Droplets as thick as the ones on chandeliers were falling from her hair.
Peggy seemed a little dazed. There was a slight swelling in her left eye socket that was going to turn into a shiner. At the moment, it only looked raw and painful. Peggy did not seem to notice it. Emma moved the checkbook around on the counter and bit the end of her pen. She didn't like having Peggy in the store at the best of times—there was always the danger that Stu might show up—and she really hated it when Peggy was banged up.
Peggy stopped at the counter and put her handbag down. Her handbag was as wet as the rest of her.
“I didn't realize it was raining so hard,” she said. “If I'd realized, I'd have worn my raincoat. Or brought my umbrella.”
“Right,” Emma said. She shut the checkbook, which was one of those big folderlike things for business checks. She had a regular-sized checkbook for her and George's personal account upstairs in the apartment. “So,” she said, “it's later than I realized. You're already out of school.”
“What? Oh, I didn't go in to school today. I wasn't feeling well. But then, I thought, you know, staying cooped up in the house. It didn't make me feel any better. So I thought I'd go for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“It's like I said. I didn't realize it was raining so hard.
I don't think it was, when I first started out. At least it wasn't enough so that I noticed it.”
Emma did not say that it had been raining in sheets since early this morning. She took a clean rag from the shelf under the counter and began to polish fitfully. “So,” she said. “How's Stu this morning? I haven't seen him around.”
Peggy gave her a sharp look. “Stu's fine. He was sleeping when I left the house. I didn't see any reason to wake him up.”
“Did you call in to the school to tell them you'd be absent?”
“Early this morning. God, Emma, what do you take me for?”
“You look sick,” Emma defended herself. “You look absentminded. People get that way when they're sick.”
“I even turned the ringer off on the phone before I left,” Peggy said. “I'm really not a complete fool, Emma. I know Stu gets upset when his routine is interrupted. Did you and Belinda really go out to Betsy Toliver's house yesterday afternoon?”
Stu got upset as a matter of principle, Emma thought. That was why you couldn't trust him. She put the clean rag back on the shelf. The counter did not need to be polished. “We drove her son back there from the library,” she said carefully. “Where did you hear about that?”
“I heard about it from Laurel. I was in the library for a while. It was quiet there, you know, but after a while I began to think that there might be other people. Somebody from the board of education. You know how it is in a town this size. Have you ever been sorry you didn't get out and go do something? Like Betsy?”
“No,” Emma said.
Peggy looked around the shop. “I was looking through our yearbook the night before last. Do you ever do that? It was surprising me how many people we know are already dead. And that was before Chris was killed. People who died in Vietnam. People who died in car accidents. Nobody turned out the way you would expect them to, except
maybe Chris. Nancy Quayde didn't even manage to get married.”
“Is there some point to this conversation?” Emma asked. “Did you just drop in to muse? Because if you did, I've got a lot of work to do.”
Peggy smiled slightly. “You and I,” she said. “We didn't turn out the way we were supposed to, either. We just sort of—approximated it. You've got a happy marriage, but you're still living over the store. And I've got a house, but—” She shrugged.
“Don't tell me you're finally going to admit that your marriage isn't happy,” Emma said. “I'll sing glory hallelujah, I promise. Nancy will find you a good attorney. We'll all go to court and testify against him, and maybe he'll rot in jail for forty years.”
“You don't understand him,” Peggy said.
Emma wanted to say that she understood Stu perfectly, and so did everybody else, but Peggy was getting that look on her face that she always did when she talked about Stu, the one Emma associated with religious fanatics. It was not true that Peggy hadn't ended up where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up exactly where everybody had expected her to. She had ended up married to Stu.
“Well,” Emma said.
“Did you go out to Betsy's yesterday afternoon? When Chris was killed?”
“We weren't there when Chris was killed,” Emma said. “We just drove Mark out there from the library and sat parked at the curb for a minute or two. We didn't see Chris. We didn't see anything.”
“You didn't see Betsy?”
“She wasn't home.” Emma shook her head. “You're reminding me of Belinda. She wanted to see Betsy, too. I don't know why. If you really want to see her, she's on Grandview Avenue enough these last few days. She's been in Mullaney's. She's been in English Drugs. I've seen her half a dozen times, getting in and out of that Mercedes.”
“Haven't you wanted to talk to her?”
“What for?”
“I don't know. To see what she's like. She used to hate Stu when we were all in high school, did you know that? She told Maris about it when they were in college. Maris says it was really just a cover story about her coming back here to take care of her mother. Jimmy Card was going to send people down here to do that for her. Maris says what she's really here for is to write an article about us for one of those magazines. You know, the ones nobody reads.”
“Where did you see Maris?”
“She was in the library.” Peggy looked around, vague and vaguely startled at once, as if she had had no idea, until now, just where she was. “We've made it a kind of meeting place, Maris and I. She's the only one of you I can talk to anymore. She's the only one of you who doesn't treat me like some kind of leper. Or mental defective. God knows I can't talk to Nancy.”
“People are just worried about you,” Emma said stiffly.
Peggy smiled stiffly and drifted off between the shelves, picking things up and putting them down again. Emma had the almost desperate need to run down to where she was and grab her, as if Peggy's touching the things in the shop would taint them somehow. She wished she wasn't sweating so heavily that the sides of her dress had begun to feel damp.
“Look,” she said. Her voice sounded shrill even in her own ears.
Peggy looked up from a shelf full of hand-painted porcelain teacups and said, “I was just wondering if you knew anything about it. If you'd talked to her and what she'd said. That she was going to write an article about us. Maris said it was supposed to be some kind of true crime about Michael Houseman and her being stuck in the outhouse and all that. Because of the stories in the tabloids. To clear her name.”
“I don't know, Peggy,” Emma said. “How would I know?”
“I went to the library,” Peggy said. “I went a couple of
times. And I read some of her articles and her books, and it isn't the sort of thing she writes about. But maybe I was looking at the wrong things. I don't really understand how those things work. So I figured, if you'd talked to her—”
“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.

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