Bennis Hannaford showed up wet. Outside, it had started to rain again, steadily and hard, and to thunder and lightning, too. Gregor found it significant that he hadn't noticed it. All day, he'd been thinking of nothing but how much rain there was. He'd been listening to drops pounding on roofs and in gutters. He'd been feeling the thunder roll through him every time it passed. Now he watched Bennis maneuver past the little clutch of reporters sitting in the police department's narrow waiting area and thought at first that she must have been drenched in somebody's lawn sprinkler. It was only after she'd said something to a much drier woman who did stringer service for the
Washington Post
that he'd realized the weather must have gone back again. When he went to the window to look out, he saw another steady fall of water and sharp snaking electrical lights in the sky.
“They want to know if they can leave,” Bennis said, wedging herself into what room was left in Kyle Borden's office. There wasn't much. “You did say you were arresting someone else. You can hardly blame her.”
“As far as I'm concerned, she can leave anytime she wants,” Gregor said. “But I'm not the person in charge here. She wants to go back to Connecticut?”
“No, they want to go to Paris. It's all very romantic. They're finally getting married. And she's behaving very oddly. She said she wants to know if you're really going to arrest
only
Peggy Smith. And that's how she put it.
Only
. Is there any coffee in this place?”
“Not any that you'd want to drink,” one of the state troopers said.
Kyle Borden looked frustrated. “She can go all the way
to the moon as far as I'm concerned,” he said. “According to your Mr. Demarkian here, we ought to be out arresting Stuart Kennedy, except not. Does he usually make this little sense when he talks?”
The state trooper who had warned Bennis off the coffee now handed her some in a tall foam cup. She took it, sipped it, and got up to put serious amounts of milk and sugar in it, except the milk was that nondairy creamer in little plastic tubs that you got at very low-rent diners, served up to you in heavy ceramic saucers that were never quite as white as they should have been. Bennis took another sip and made a face. She sat down again.
“So,” she said. “What have you been telling these people to confuse them?”
Gregor sighed. He hated drinking coffee in foam cups. He thought it tasted funny. “There's nothing at all confusing about it,” he said. “There
are
a few loose ends, but the point of a police investigation is to clean up the loose ends. To recap what I've told them already: you start with that night in 1969 when the girls nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse and Michael Houseman was killed. None of the girls, including Peggy Smith, was intending to kill anybody, although what they did to Liz Toliver might have killed her. People don't take phobias seriously. They should. But they only went there to do that. They weren't intending to do anything else. So they nailed Liz Toliver into the outhouse, and then they retreated to the trees a little ways off to see what would happen.”
“What did they expect to happen?” Bennis said. “I mean, the girl was scared to death of snakes and they nailed her in with over twenty of them. Did they think she was going to bond with them? What?”
“They thought she was going to scream,” Gregor said calmly, “which is what she did. Now, Michael Houseman was in the park that night. So was Kyle Borden here. So was Stu Kennedy. But Stu Kennedy came to the park to do two things, to find Peggy, and to get high. He may have been meaning to sell some of whatever it was he had that
night. He almost certainly was selling it, to his friends and to other people, at the high school. And Michael Houseman either knew about it, or suspected it, or caught him in the act on that night. It doesn't particularly matter which. What does matter is the one thing everybody says consistently about Michael Houseman.”
“He was a Dudley Dooright,” Kyle said gloomily. “He was, too. These days everybody goes to church all the time. Practically nobody did then. Michael did. He was an Eagle Scout. He handed in his homework on time. If he caught you smoking in the bathroom, he took your cigarette away or he turned you in. Some of us had times when we wanted to strangle him.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “He was a Dudley Dooright. So, faced with Stu Kennedy and a pile of drugs, whatever Kennedy was doing with it, Houseman would have been determined to hand Kennedy over to the authorities and Kennedy would have been faced with a problem that he could only solve by shutting Houseman up. So he took out the linoleum cutterâ”
“Why a linoleum cutter?” Bennis said. “That never made any sense to me at all. I mean now, yeah, it might be what was around the house, but why would Stu Kennedy have a linoleum cutter on him in the park that night? Why not a knife? Or a straight-edged razor?”
“You think it would be more likely for him to have a straight-edged razor?” one of the state troopers said. “In 1969.”
“It's one of those loose ends that needs to be cleaned up,” Gregor said, “although not too strenuously, because it won't matter to the case against Peggy Smith Kennedy. The reason we know he had a linoleum cutter in the park that night is that Peggy Smith Kennedy used a linoleum cutter when she killed the dog and Chris Inglerod Barr. You know, you all sit around talking about how odd it was that he'd have a linoleum cutter in the park that night, but the fact is that it's even odder that Peggy Smith Kennedy has had one with her in the past few days. Several people have
told us that Stu Kennedy used to be fairly handy before he went completely under with booze and dope. So maybe he brought it for protection. A linoleum cutter
is
a kind of straight-edged razor. Or maybe he'd been doing something around the house for his parents that day and had it in his pocket or on his belt. Whatever the reason, he had the thing, and when Michael Houseman confronted him, he used it. And that's where things started getting bizarre. Peggy was either with Stu by the time Stu committed the murderâremember, she didn't have to go far from where they all started out near the outhouseâor she got there in the middle of the act, but whichever it was, she responded with a kind of trance hysteria. She started screaming
âslit his throat slit his throat'
and the rest of them heard her. And they came. Theyâ”
“That's not what they said to the police at the time,” Kyle said. “I remember it. They said they were wandering around in the park sort of lost in the dark and they stumbled on the clearing and Michael Houseman was bleeding to death.”
“You couldn't get lost in that park if you worked at it,” Gregor said. “They followed Peggy's voice to the clearing and they found Peggy standing over Michael Houseman and Michael Houseman either bleeding to death or already dead. And the rain was coming down. And everybody got completely and utterly caught up in the moment.”
Gregor said, “But the thing is, their first reaction was to protect Peggy from the consequences of anything Stu had done. And the only way they could do that was to keep their mouths shut and play dumb. And that's what they did. In other circumstances, it would have been a stupid move. The police could have found the murder weapon. The police could have pushed a little harder than they did and started Stu Kennedy talking. As it turned out, however, they didn't have anything to worry about. The case was never solved. It never came close to being solved. They went on living their lives. I wonder what they thought when Peggy married Stu Kennedy. Maybe they didn't think anything of
it. Peggy and Stu had been a couple for so long. Maybe they thought it was only natural.”
“Okay,” one of the state troopers said, “but that was all thirty years ago. What about now? You said it wasn't him who did it this time, it was her, but I still don't get it. You said it yourself. If he'd wanted to kill the people he knew, he had thirty years to do it. Why now? And the same goes for her.”
“It was her,” Gregor said. “Emma Kenyon Bligh will confirm that as soon as we can talk to her. But you have to realize that it must have been her, if only because Stu Kennedy is no longer in any shape to successfully commit murder and hide it. He could commit murder. He could smash somebody up or cause a head-on collision or do a dozen stupid, violent things that would end up with somebody dead, but he's in no shape to murder somebody with a linoleum cutter and then get clean away so that he isn't noticed and hide the evidence well enough so that we weren't stumbling all over it as soon as the investigation started. Thirty years of substance abuse does tend to make someone less than competent at activities requiring mental agility and intellectual integration.”
“But that still doesn't answer the question of why Peggy would want to kill Chris Inglerod Barr,” Kyle said.
“She didn't,” Gregor told him. “She wanted to kill Liz Toliver.”
“But
why
?” Kyle said. “The woman's been away from town for thirty years. It's not like she was going to come back and get into everybody's life. I mean, Christ, would you do that if you were her? The whole thing is completely nuts.”
“Think about it,” Gregor said. “Every single person we talked to from that group of people, Nancy Quayde, Emma Kenyon Bligh, Belinda what's-her-nameâ”
“Hart,” Kyle said, “or Grantling. Take your pick.”
“Whoever. Each one of them told us the same thing, that Liz Toliver was writing a piece on the night she was locked into the outhouse.”
“But that's not true, is it?” Bennis said. “I don't think she's writing a piece about anything at the moment. At least, she didn't mention any work. Why would they think she was writing something about being locked in the outhouse?”
“Guilty consciences,” Kyle Borden said solemnly.
“I think that if you check with the remaining members of the group, you'll find that Maris Coleman told them that that's what Liz Toliver was doing. The information really couldn't have come from anywhere else. The tabloid press isn't big on reporting writing projects. And nobody else would have had the authorityâI think I mean authoritativeness. You see what I'm getting at. Maris worked for Liz Toliver in New York. When Maris said that was what Liz Toliver was working on, the others naturally thought she knew what she was talking about.”
“Wait a minute,” Bennis said. “The car. Liz told Maris Coleman that she'd seen Peggy Smith Kennedy driving Maris's rented car. Rats. I can't remember how that went. We were in the middle of a terrific scene, and Liz was firing Maris and threatening to prosecute her over some checks and it was all because Liz had seen Peggy driving Maris's rental car.”
“Thank you,” Gregor said. “Kyle will have to check that out, too, but that solves the problem of the car. I knew she had to have had access to one, in spite of the fact that her husband won't allow her to drive, but I wasn't sure exactly where she was going to get it.”
“Wait,” Kyle said. “You mean that first Maris went around telling all the rest of them that BetsyâLizâI don't know, that she was going to write some big article on the outhouse thing and, what? Tell who murdered Michael Houseman? Did she even know who murdered Michael Houseman?”
“She figured it out eventually, I think,” Bennis said.
“The point isn't whether she knew,” Gregor said, “but whether the rest of them thought she knew.”
“And they did?” Kyle asked.
“I think Maris Coleman made sure they did,” Gregor said.
“Okay,” Kyle said. “So first Maris tells them Ms. Toliver is writing this thing on the outhouse incident and is, what, going to name names? Then she tells them that Ms. Toliver knows all about who killed Michael Houseman. Then she loans Peggy her car. What was she trying to do, get Ms. Toliver killed?”
“I don't think so,” Gregor said. “I doubt if it ever occurred to her that anybody would resort to violence. She'd have known as well as anybody that Stu Kennedy was in no condition to cause that kind of trouble. And remember, Peggy Smith Kennedy didn't kill Michael Houseman. As far as Maris Coleman knew, Peggy had done nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Stu Kennedy got violent. No, Maris Coleman didn't want Liz Toliver deadâheaven forbid. Liz Toliver was her meal ticket. Maris Coleman wanted Liz Toliver embarrassed.”
“Well,” Kyle said, “Ms. Toliver certainly ended up embarrassed. Royally embarrassed. And Chris Inglerod ended up dead. And Emma Kenyon Bligh nearly ended up dead. And this still doesn't make any sense. If she really wanted to kill Ms. Toliver, what was Peggy doing attacking all these other people? What was the point here?”
“The point,” Gregor said, “is what the point has always been for that woman, to protect her husband.”
“Crap,” Kyle said. “I mean, for God's sakeâ”
“Fucking
damn
,” somebody said in the outer room. “You can't
tell
me I can't come the fuck in there if I the fuck want to, you fucking little cunt, I'll cut you up, I really will, and then I'll cut up the other fucking little cunt, you let me at her, youâ”