Bennis Hannaford was not only in but showered and dressed, and just two floors down from Jimmy Card and Elizabeth Toliver.
“Nobody knows we're here yet, if that's what you're worried about,” she said, when she'd heard Gregor out. “Although I don't expect that's going to last long. If I recognized the car, somebody else will. I mean Jimmy Card's car. Didn't you say you had Elizabeth Toliver's car? Where is it?”
“At Andy's garage,” Gregor said. “Do you think you could go up there and ask them if they've seen anything at all of Maris Coleman?”
“Who's Maris Coleman?”
“Somebody who works for Ms. Toliver. It's a long story. Do you think you couldâ”
“What, Gregor? Just march upstairs, muscle my way onto their floor and walk up to Elizabeth Toliver and say âHello, Ms. Toliver. It's nice to meet you. I've always enjoyed your work. Where is Maris Coleman?'”
“Bennis, for God's sake. I don't have the phone number. I wasn't even sure where they were until you told me. I was just calling you up to see if you could find out. Since you're there, go ask them if they've seen Maris Coleman at any time this morning. All right? There's a woman half dead out here andâ”
“Another one? Where? At Elizabeth Toliver's house?”
“No. Nowhere near there. In town. It's a long story. Now will you pleaseâ”
“It'll take forever. Five minutes. Ten.”
“I'll wait.”
“Butâ”
“I'll
wait
,” Gregor said. “I've got to know if they've
seen anything of Maris Coleman this morning, all right? Go. It's only going to take longer if you stand there arguing.”
“Hell,” Bennis said.
Gregor heard a clunk that he supposed must be the phone receiver hitting some kind of surfaceâthe night table, the floorâand sat back to watch the state police help Peggy Smith Kennedy out of the back room and through the front rooms toward the door. There were still dozens of people on the porch outside, but there was also a state police officer.
Peggy Smith Kennedy was hobbling when she walked. The chalk whiteness of her face made the growing bruises around her eyes all the more noticeable. If she'd been trying to hide what was going on in her marriage, she was about to lose the fightâbut Gregor knew she'd already lost it. She went out onto the porch holding on to a state police officer the way swooning maidens held on to rescuing lovers in bad nineteenth-century novels.
Kyle Borden came up and said, “Who're you calling? We've got to get back to the station.”
“Give me a minute,” Gregor told him. There were suddenly voices on the other end of the phone, and Gregor distinctly heard Bennis say “halvah.” He shook his head. “Bennis?” he said into the phone.
“Mr. Demarkian?” It was not Bennis's voice. “This is Liz Toliver. I'm sorry. From what Bennis said, it seemed to make more sense if I talked to you directly, butâoh, thank you, this is wonderfulâbut we didn't know where you were to call you back from upstairs. Bennis says someone was attacked but not killed. Was that Maris? Is Maris hurt?”
“What's she feeding you?” Gregor asked.
“What? Oh, halvah, you know, the stuff that's like a brick with a tahine base. You can get it in New York in some places. This is better. Is Maris hurt?”
“I have no idea,” Gregor said. “I don't know where she is. I was hoping you did.”
“Oh, no. I don't. We haven't seen her all morning. We were worried about it earlier. We thought she might still be back at the house.”
“Still? You mean, she was there this morning?”
“We don't know,” Liz Toliver said. “I remember last night. She passed out on the couch. And that was the last time I saw her. But she didn't have her car, so if she was passed out on the couch last night she should still be in the house, because she wouldn't have any way to get home. Back to Belinda's, I mean.”
“I didn't see her,” Gregor said. “Not at the house this morning.”
“She isn't usually at the house in the morning,” Liz said, “so you don't expect to see her. But we're very worried that she wandered off and fell asleep somewhere and didn't hear all the commotion this morning and got left behind, and maybe she's still out there. She couldn't call anybody. Not with the phone lines cut. She could be stranded.”
Gregor almost said that if Maris Coleman were stranded in that house, it was because she had stranded herself there. There was no way that anybody who wasn't in a coma could have slept through that hysteria this morning.
“We'll go out there and check,” he said, waving away Kyle's protest. “What I wanted to know was if you'd seen her, and now I know. I take it you've been with Jimmy and the boys ever since you left your house this morning?”
“Well, I took a shower by myself, but it was only for about twenty minutes.”
“That's fine,” Gregor told her. “That's much too short a time to have done what you'd needed to do. What about in the last hour? Have you been mostly visible?”
“Oh, yes. Jimmy and I have beenâdiscussing things.”
Gregor heard Bennis whoop with laughter in the background. He ignored her. “Good,” he said. “That puts you out of it, at least for this attack. That's helpful.”
“Who was it? Who got attacked? You said she isn't dead?”
“Not dead, no, but badly hurt,” Gregor said. “It's a woman named Emma Kenyon Bligh.”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. “Emma Kenyon. My God.”
“I'm not a doctor, but I've seen enough people who'd been attacked to say with some certainty that she's likely to be all right in the long run. I don't know how long a run.”
“Maris said she'd gained a lot of weight,” Liz Toliver said.
“I'd estimate that she weighs close to four hundred and fifty pounds,” Gregor said. “She's very large. It probably saved her life.”
“Well,” Liz Toliver said.
“Would you mind if I talked to Bennis again?” Gregor said.
There was more talking in the background, and more passing around of food. Bennis was promising to pack up a box of pastries for the boys, and Liz Toliver was insisting that she come upstairs and have coffee with Jimmy and the rest of them. So much for Bennis's worries about how Liz would take to being around one of Jimmy's former lovers. Gregor thought it was interesting that Bennis never seemed to have worried for a moment about how
he
would feel about being around one of
her
former lovers. She picked up the phone.
“Gregor? Are you coming on out? Because if you are, I'm going upstairs for some coffee and you might as well meet me up there.”
“I probably won't be home for hours,” Gregor said. “Have you called Russ for me?”
“Yes. Already did it. You asked Tibor to check, too. Russ said to tell you that he'll check, but he isn't very hopeful. He said it would be easier for him if you knew exactly what you were looking for. Do you?”
“Yes. But if I tell him, he'll go looking for that in particular, and I might miss something I'm not expecting. There's always a chance that there's something I'm not
expecting. Although I don't believe there will be, in this case. Go up and have coffee with Liz Toliver. Say hello to Mark for me.”
“All right. Where are you? How do we get in touch with you?”
“I'm at a store on Grandview Avenue called Country Crafts, but I won't be here for long. Your best bet is to call the police department, but I'd feel much better if you don't have to. There's more going on here than I can tell you about yet. Take care of yourself.”
“You take care of yourself. You sound funny.”
“I feel fine. I'll talk to you later, Bennis.”
Gregor put the phone down in the cradle and looked up to see that Kyle Borden was hovering over him, glowering.
“We can't go back out to the Toliver house now,” he said. “We've got to go back to the station. We've got reports to file. We've got the Staties to worry about. We'veâ”
“I'll go back by myself if you want me to. Maris Coleman seems to be missing.”
“Missing from where?”
Gregor gave Kyle a rundown of the events of the night before and this morning, and Kyle kicked the side of the counter.
“Shit damn,” he said. “She must still be out there, right? She's probably wandering around in that house drinking coffee spiked with whatever she spikes it with and pretending nobody ever notices. Shit damn. We'll have to go get her. Or send somebody else to.”
“Oh, I don't think she's still out there. There were a hundred people who could have given her a ride, if she was willing to pay for it by talking a blue streak, and I think she'd have been willing to do that. Don't you?”
“She'd have paid them to let her. If we're not rescuing Maris, what are we doing? Why are we going out there?”
“I want to make sure something isn't there.”
“What?”
“Just something,” Gregor said. “Listen, what about here?
What's left to do? Did the state police bring in some decent forensics this time? What about the linoleum cutter?”
“One of the Staties picked it up with a handkerchief and put it in a plastic bag. It's probably got my fingerprints on it. I took it away from Peggy and it didn't occur to me to use a handkerchief. It's been coming home to me, lately, just how well I was trained for this job. Meaning not at all. You have no idea how much I feel like a jerk.”
“It's a waste of time,” Gregor told him. “Right now, the real issue is that that linoleum cutter is almost certainly going to turn out to be the murder weapon in the death of Chris Inglerod Barr. It would be a good thing if we didn't lose it. Go back and tell the state policemen that. Whatever. Then let's pack up and go on out to Liz Toliver's house. With any luck, there won't be much of anybody left there to bother us.”
“Right,” Kyle said. He gave Gregor a long, puzzled, and faintly resentful look and then went on back to the curtained space, where more state police officers were crowded than it seemed that the building could hold.
Gregor sat down in the heavy chair Emma Bligh kept behind the counter and took his notepad out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped to the front and found the list that Jimmy Card had given him when he first agreed to look into the death of Michael Houseman. The list was not complete. Jimmy had been working off the things Liz Toliver had told him, not as part of a coherent story but as pieces in an ongoing conversation. The list did not include Stuart Kennedy's name, or Kyle Borden's. Gregor checked off the names of Chris Inglerod and Emma Kenyon, and then wrote Stuart Kennedy's and Kyle Borden's at the bottom of the list.
Kyle came up from the back of the store. “That's done,” he said. “They think it's going to turn out to be the murder weapon, too. Where would you get something like that?”
“In a hardware store,” Gregor said. “At Home Depot. A lot of people who do odd jobs around the house have them.”
“I think I'd cut half my hand off just trying to pick one up.”
Gregor stood up and shook the wrinkles out of his jacket. “Let's go,” he said. “Let's go see what's still out at the house and then let's try to do something sensible with what we find.”
It was odd, Gregor thought, that Elizabeth Toliver's house should look so much like he had seen it for the first time, and not at all as he had been seeing it sinceâexperiencing it since, Bennis would say, to indicate that he was really talking about a kind of emotional atmosphere. This afternoon, there was no atmosphere around the place at all. There was only rain, which was now slightly, but only
slightly
, less furious than it had been an hour or two before. Gregor looked up and down the road as they drove into the Toliver driveway, but it was as completely deserted as anything he had ever seen, which was a relief.
Kyle pulled the car into the driveway halfway to the garage and cut the engine. “Here we are,” he said. “What exactly is it that you want to do?”
“I want to look for something,” Gregor said. “Let's start with the garage first. And let me ask you something. Does Elizabeth Toliver make you angry?”
“Betsy? No, of course she doesn't make me angry. Why should she?”
Gregor got out of the car and headed for the garage. Kyle was behind him in a moment. “She makes a lot of people angry,” Gregor said, pulling up the first garage door he came to, “have you noticed that? I don't mean just envious or jealous or even resentful, but really down dirty furious. Belinda Hart could barely say Liz's name without spitting it. And then there's Maris Coleman. You haven't been watching Ms. Coleman's behavior from up close these last few days. I have. âAngry' is almost too mild a word
for it. The emotion runs so deep, I don't think Maris Coleman even wishes Liz Toliver dead. I think death would be too quick. The pain would be over. Maris Coleman wishes Liz Toliver a long life lived in unending pain and humiliation.”
“Don't you think that's a little strong?” Kyle said.
“No.” Gregor looked around the garage. It was dark at the best of times. Now, with so little light coming from outside, it was virtually pitch. “Are there any lights in this place?” he asked.
“Right here.” Kyle fumbled around for a moment, and then three weak bulbs, screwed into ceiling fixtures without benefit of shades, glowed on. Kyle blinked. “I guess I can't imagine Maris Coleman working up all that much energy about anything,” he said.
“But you've noticed the anger with Belinda Hart Grantling.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kyle said. “And it isn't only her. It's Emma Kenyon Bligh, too, if you want to know the truth, and Chris and Nancy weren't too calm about the whole thing, either. I don't know about Peggy. I've never heard her talk about it.”
“What about everybody else in town?” Gregor asked. He had begun to move slowly along the garage's perimeter, studying the walls. “Are they angry at Elizabeth Toliver, too?”
Kyle cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “a lot of them, it's sort of the âwho do you think you are?' thing. They all knew her when she was growing up. They didn't think she was anything special. And now she'sâWe don't feel very comfortable with people who are different. People who go away and become famous are different.”
Gregor finished with the first wall and began on the second, moving carefully, running his eyes up and down as well as back and forth. “But that's not the way all small towns behave about all people who go away to become famous,” he said. “There's that country singer, what's her name, Shania Twain. Her hometown held a big celebration
for her when she returned. And that movie star. Meg Ryan. Her hometownâ”
“But that's different,” Kyle protested. “They were big deals even before they left. Meg Ryan was a prom princess. So, you seeâ”
“Yes,” Gregor said. He finished with the third wall. The fourth wall was garage doors. He looked around one more time, to make sure. “Where else would somebody keep tools?”
“Tools?” Kyle looked blank. “You can't be looking for tools here. Mrs. Toliver has Alzheimer's disease. Even if the Tolivers ever had any tools, they wouldn't have them around now. She could get hold of them and be dangerous.”
“Did they have any tools?” Gregor asked.
“Not a chance. Mr. Toliver was a hotshot lawyer. He never touched a tool in his life.”
“Elizabeth Toliver has a brother, doesn't she? Did he have tools?”
“He kept them at Andy's Garage,” Kyle said. “And it's been years since he's been back here, too. He moved out to California about two decades ago. What is it you're getting at?”
“We ought to go check the basement, just in case,” Gregor said.
“I can't do that without a search warrant,” Kyle said. “You don't want to get me into a position whereâ”
“Don't worry about it. I won't get you into any kind of position. There will be no searching the house in the ordinary sense. We will not be conducting a criminal investigation. I've got the key. I'm going in to get some of my things, which I'm going to need. You coming with me?”
“Shit,” Kyle said.
“Turn off the lights,” Gregor told him.
Gregor waited until the lights were out and then went out into the driveway again through the bay. He waited until Kyle got out and then pulled the garage door down. The rain really had let up by now. It was still coming down, but it was of only ordinary force, and there was no thunder
in the distance. Gregor led the way across the backyard toward the kitchen lawn.
“For a long time,” he said as he and Kyle let themselves into the mudroom, “I was very confused. I didn't go to what you'd call a normal high school. I grew up in central Philadelphia, in what was at the time I suppose a slum. I went to high school with a lot of other people just like me. We had parents who'd come from Armenia. English was not our first language. We didn't have proms and prom princesses and cheerleaders and any of that sort of thingâwell, the school did, to an extent, but that had nothing to do with us. Our parents wouldn't have let us near things like that. If we wanted to meet members of the opposite sex, we went to dances at the neighborhood church. So you see, it didn't make any sense to me. The âpopularity' thing. Have you noticed how odd that is? The âpopular' people are âpopular' by virtue of being envied and hated by ninety-nine percent of the people they go to school with. Does anybody but me think that's very strange?”
“No,” Kyle said. “It had occurred to me on occasion, too.”
“Here”âGregor held open a door on the other side of the mudroomâ“there's a basement down here. âFinished.' That way's the main house. Down here there's a recreation room and some kind of workroom.”
“I'll bet there aren't any tools in it,” Kyle said.
Gregor led the way down the stairs. “I got very tangled up in it at first,” he went on. “The emotions were so strong, it seemed to me that they could lead to the murder of just about anyone. But the longer I thought of it, the more I realized that if somebody was going to get killed over this kind of thing, it would be Liz Toliver herself who ended up dead. Because the key here is the disjunction. What people really hate is that things haven't turned out the way they expected them to.”
They were at the bottom of the basement stairs. Gregor knew where the light switch was. He flipped the flat of his hand against it and turned on half a dozen lights at once.
“It would be different if Liz Toliver was still what she had been. That's how you get school shooters. You think that kind of anger and hurt would dissipate in time, but I don't think it does. I remember a woman who wrote to the Philadelphia
Inquirer
after the Columbine incident who said that whenever she heard about a school shooting, she cheered, because it was a triumph for the losers. She was forty-three. I thought she was psychotic when I read the letter. Now I'm not so sure. If she's psychotic, practically everybody else in the country must be, too.”
“Is this going anyplace?” Kyle asked.
Gregor led the way through the recreation roomâwhich was large, and carpeted, and contained a television set the size of Oklahoma. He tried the first door he came to on the back wall of the room. It opened onto a closet. He tried the next one and met blackness. He snaked his hand inside against the wall and found the light switch. The lights went on, big fluorescents behind patterned plastic panels. There was a table in the center of the room. There was a sewing machine. There were a lot of things in boxes.
“Here we are,” Gregor said.
“You do spend a lot of time talking about nothing,” Kyle said. “And then you don't finish your thought.”
“My thought? Well, my thought is that reality is not very much like the movies. You know those movies, where the small-town loser goes off to the big wide world and comes back a success and everybody finally loves him?”
“It's the American dream.”
“Exactly. And it's full of it. When the small-town loser comes back a success, everybody hates him, or is indifferent. But mostly there's the hate. And if you're not prepared for that, you're likely to get thrown very badly. I don't think Liz Toliver was prepared for that. I don't think she was expecting a hero's welcome, mind you. She's not that naive. But I don't think she was expecting the animus.”
“Why not?” Kyle said. “It's the way they always did treat her, before. The woman is completely phobic about snakes, and they knew that. And they nailed her up in that
damned outhouse with nearly two dozen of them. I'd say that's enough animus for anybody to notice.”
“True. I just don't think she was expecting it to have lasted. To tell you the truth, if I'd been in her position, I wouldn't have expected it either. It's not really very sane, is it?”
“Do you have what you came for?” Kyle asked. “It gives me the creeps, being in here like this. We could get nailed.”
“We could not get nailed. I have a key. I have the right of access. And, yes, I have what I came for. No tools. Not only that, no sign that there ever were tools. No drills. No saws. No linoleum cutters. No pegs in the wall. No toolboxes.”
“I told you so.”
“I know. I had to see for myself.” Gregor looked around. “It looks like it was used as a sewing room once. Now it's a storeroom. That's sensible enough. Here's another question. Is there some reason why the fever about Liz Toliver is so much higher in Maris Coleman and Belinda Hart Grantling than in the rest of them I've met so far?”
“Well,” Kyle said, “they were the ones who pulled the most crap on Betsy in high school. And before high school. Betsy's problems didn't start in high school.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I know. It's odd the way people are, don't you think? There's so much emotion expended over things that don't matter. Most people who are murdered are murdered over trivialities. Over emotions. Over slights and disrespect and arguments and dozens of other things that make no sense. Harris and Klebold murdered fifteen people over things that shouldn't matter to anybody, except that we make them matter. You'd think we'd learn.”
“You're not making sense again,” Kyle said.
Gregor sighed. He supposed he wasn't making sense, although he was making perfect sense to himself. He headed for the door again. “We'd better get out of here,” he said. “I'd better pick up some clothes upstairs. I should go out to the Radisson to see Bennis. Do you think you could call me there and let me know about Emma Kenyon
Bligh's medical condition? Or I could call you.”
Kyle said something about how Gregor should call him, and they both went far too quickly up the stairs. The house felt deserted, even though they were in it.