Not all small towns are alike. Some are small because they are kept that way, deliberately, by residents whose lives are really in a city not too far away, by people who know very well that a modern and efficient police force is indispensable, even if it seems not to be on a day-to-day basis. Other small towns are really small towns. They exist naturally. The people in them live in a bubble that allows them to think that they are immune from the disease of violence that infects every other place, and that has infected even small towns from the beginning of time. Gregor often thought that if you wanted to do something effective to teach people about crimeâand to convince them to protect themselves from itâyou would run a sixty-second commercial that did nothing but spell out the mayhem that had occurred in small towns in the last two years, any two years, pick them. Serial killers in Richmond, Nebraska. Domestic violence deaths in Mortimer, South Dakota. Drug gang wars in Leeland, Oklahoma. Envy, jealousy, and spiteâeverywhere, Gregor thought, because those things were part of being human. He had no idea where so many people had gotten the idea that crime was an aberration. To him, it seemed that crime was a constant. Anthropologists found evidence of murder in fossil remains.
In Hollman, they found it on Grandview Avenue, and they found it in full view of at least a hundred people. Kyle
Borden hit the brake as soon as he saw them, crowding out over the sidewalks and into the street, heedless of the rain. Gregor leaned forward in his seat and tried to make some sense of what he was looking at.
“What is that?” he said.
“That's why we called the state police,” Kyle said. “That's just about everybody in town who could walk up here. Plus some people I don't recognize. They must be the reporters.”
Gregor was sure there would be reporters. He knew about reporters. He also knew about rubberneckers. This looked as if the whole town had come out in a body to stand on the porch of Country Crafts, and the ones who hadn't were in the street, waiting, pushing forward every once in a while to see if people would move.
“To hell with this,” Kyle said. He jerked his steering wheel to the right and bumped up onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street, then up onto the lawn of the Hollman Public Library. Gregor felt the wheels of the police car sink a little in mud. “If they don't like it, they can sue me. Let's go.”
Gregor snapped off his seat belt and climbed out. His shoes sank into the ground just as the wheels of the police car had. He moved as quickly as he could without falling, off the grass and onto the sidewalk. Kyle came up beside him and cupped his hands. How could people stand in the rain like that? Gregor wondered. Some of them had umbrellas, and some of them had bags or newspapers they were holding up for protection, and some of them had hats, but most of them were bareheaded. Gregor ran a hand through his own hair and water flew out of it as if he had splashed against the surface of a pond.
“This is the Hollman Town Police,” Kyle shouted. “Please move out of the way. Please move out of the way.”
Some people on the edge of the crowd closest to them heard, and turned, and moved away, and that was enough to get them started. They waded in, with Kyle shouting through his hands at intervals and sometimes tapping somebody
he knew on the shoulder. It was hard to hear above the rain and even harder to hear above the low hum of people talking. Gregor kept his hands close to his sides and himself as close to Kyle as he could, nodding at people when they stared at him. He had no idea if he was being recognized or not. Nobody talked to him. Nobody he heard said his name.
“This is the Hollman Town Police,” Kyle said, over and over again, as they inched forward. “Please get out of the way.”
They reached the porch before Gregor was expecting to. At the steps, Kyle Borden had to shove a few people away. They wouldn't move just because he told them to. Gregor would have thought that these people were the reporters, except that some of them so obviously weren't. One was the middle-aged woman who had waited on him the day before in Mullaney's, when he had run in for a newspaper. Another was the woman he recognized as the waitress from Hollman Pizza. Kyle pushed at these people without ceremony and reached the door. He turned the knob and found it locked.
“Open up,” he said, pounding on the glass front. Far away, Gregor could hear the cowbell tinkle.
The face of a man appeared in the glass on the other side of the door. It seemed to stare at Kyle for a moment, and then nod. There was a rattling and then the door swung open on blank space.
“Hurry,” Kyle said, grabbing Gregor by the sleeve and pulling him inside. Several people tried to follow. Kyle whipped around and shut the door in their faces. Then he looked up at the man who had opened up for them. “George. What's going on? What is this?”
“I knew they'd come,” George said. His face was as white as good quality typing paper. “I knew they'd all be here as soon as they heard, and they'd hear. They always hear. Why is that? Why do people behave that way?”
“I don't know,” Kyle said. “I've called the state police.
They should be here any moment. They'll clear the crowd out. Try to tell us what happened here.”
“I don't know what happened here,” George said. “I justâcame home, that's all. I was showing a house out in Stony Hill and then I, I don't know, I just thought I'd come home and talk to Emma for a while and sit in the store if she wanted to go out, you know, down to JayMar's or something and when I came inâ” He looked quickly to the back of the shop. “They're still there, I think. Both of them.”
“Both of them?” Kyle was startled. “There are two bodâpeople hurt?”
“I called the ambulance, but I know it isn't any good,” George said. “You can see she's dead. There are, I don't know, parts of herâpieces of herâ”
“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 themâ”
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 materialsâpipe 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 openâbut 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 oneâand 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 ifâ”
“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 thinksâ”
“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.”
“Jesus,” Kyle said.
Peggy Smith Kennedy stared at the linoleum cutter. “That was inside her. It was sticking out of her. And I thought, you can't leave it like that. You can't leave Emma on the floor with a thing like that in her. So I took it out, and then there was blood everywhere. There was blood all
over me. I'm never going to get it out of this dress.”
The ambulance men took the stretcher with Emma Bligh on it out of the room. A few moments later, George Bligh stuck his head through the curtains.
“Is it true? Is she really still alive?”
“She was when I listened to her heartbeat,” Gregor told him. “In spite of how awful it looks, my guess is that the wound isn't anywhere near as serious as it would have to be to kill her. Sheâ”
“I'm going to follow the ambulance to the hospital,” George said. “If you want to arrest me, you can do it later. I'm going to the hospital now.”
He ducked back out of the curtains, and Kyle shook his head. “It's not like he's going anyplace we can't find him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“There was blood everywhere even before I took it out of her,” Peggy Smith Kennedy said. “I stepped in it.”
All of a sudden, there were sirens, lots of sirens. Some of them would be the ambulance taking Emma Kenyon Bligh to the hospital. Some of them turned out to be the state police. Gregor heard them as they came up the porch steps, barking orders. Gregor went out into the little room and then beyond it into the bigger one. He watched as one of the state police officers tried to push people back onto the porch. The other officer came up to him.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said.
“How do you do.” If he'd met the officer by name, Gregor didn't remember him. “You'd better go on back, through the next room and then through a curtain. There's another one.”
“Another body?”
“Another woman. The woman the ambulance just took is alive. That's why she's gone. Go on back. There's something I've got to do. I'll be with you in a moment.”
“Is the other woman dead?” the officer asked.
She might as well be
, Gregor thought, but he didn't say it. He watched the officer at the door finally get all the unauthorized people out onto the porch and then lock the
door behind him. Then he sat down behind Emma Bligh's counter and picked up the phone.