2
It wasn't until Bennis got back to her own apartment that she saw the boxed article about the lawsuit, and for a moment it didn't really register on her brain. Grace was home, too, upstairs on the fourth floor practicing something on her harpsichordâ
one
of her harpsichords, Bennis amended to herself. Grace had three or four of them, all made by somebody named Peter Redmond in Virginia, which was apparently a very important thing, as Peter Redmond was a very important maker of harpsichords. Or something. Bennis spread the paper out on the bed that was never slept in anymore, since she always spent the night with Gregor these days and Gregor did not like to sleep in beds other than his own. Then she sat down at her computer and
booted up. She had an article she had promised to send to
Good Housekeeping
about herself, which she'd promised the publicity department at her publisher that she'd write, because it was good exposure even if her ordinary reader wasn't much like the ordinary reader of
Good Housekeeping
. She had six fan letters to answer, snail mail, because they'd come snail mail and she didn't have e-mail addresses for them. She had begun to really hate having to put stamps on envelopes. In fact, she'd begun to hate having to use her printer at all. She used it for her books, because she couldn't send them e-mail without using something called a zip file, which she had no idea how to operate, and because she couldn't put them on disk. They were so long, they didn't fit on disk. Other than that, though, she usually got along without making hard copies, and she didn't really want to return to the process just to write a simple letter.
There was a lot of work she really ought to do, but what she did do was to sign onto the Internet and go to Amazon to see how her books were doingâAmazon listed every book's rank in sales just under the buying information on the book's page.
Zedalia Serenade
was at number 18. Not bad. Then she went to
www.booksnbytes.com
to see how Vicki had put up the new cover for display. The cover was up and looking fine. Bennis thought Vicki ought to establish Wish Lists the way Amazon did, so that people who wanted to buy a book for a friend's birthday or a cousin for Christmas would know which ones to get. She also thought that the picture of Jane Haddam didn't do her justice. Then she looked around for the picture of herself and decided that didn't do
her
justice, either, it was just something about pictures published on the Internet when they hadn't come from a digital camera. She got up and went to the kitchen to make herself some tea. She came back and typed in the Web address of the
Times
of London, read the front page, and went to the BBC. It was one of those days when nothing was really going on in the world. There was violence in the Middle East, but there was always violence in the Middle East. George W. Bush had done something
that one-third of the country found smart, one-third of the country found stupid, and one-third of the country found outrageous. Senator Hillary Clinton had given an interview to
Vanity Fair
that had conservative pundits muttering about the totalitarianism of the nanny state. Attorney General John Ashcroft had given an interview to
Christianity Today
that had the liberal pundits muttering about the Taliban. Edith Lawton had a new essay up on her Web site, based on the (incorrect) premise that
Humanae Vitae
was an infallible document. CNN had pictures up of Elizabeth Toliver's wedding.
The kettle went off. Bennis got up to get it, got a huge cup down from the cabinet, and poured boiling water over one of the little round coffee bags Donna had turned her onto. She brought the cup of coffee back to the computer and was just starting to sign on to rec.arts.mysteryâTibor was involved in a really insane discussion about gun controlâwhen she saw the boxed article with its two small pictures and its completely uninformative headline:
Another Year, Another Outcast
. She turned sideways in her chair. She used a big wicker chair to work at the computer. She hated those wheeled swivel things that were supposed to be so good for you. She picked up the paper. One of the small pictures was a formal head shot of the kind they took every year in public schools, the kind that eventually went into the yearbook in the section for seniors. That one was of a girl who, even posed and smiling, looked awkward and ill at ease. Discomfort seemed to flow out of every pore in her face. The other picture was a head and shoulders shot cropped from something larger. Bennis could see the arms and shoulders of other people at the edges of the frame. The woman who faced the camera was middle-aged, but very handsomely middle-aged. She had a good head of hair and a commanding bearing. Bennis looked at the caption and saw:
Nancy Quayde
. She looked at the picture of the uncomfortable girl and saw:
Diane Asch
. The pictures meant nothing to her, and the name Diane Asch meant less than nothing, but there was something about the name
Nancy Quayde that nagged at her. She read through the article, but there wasn't much to it. Diane Asch's father was suing Hollman High School and Nancy Quayde as principal of Hollman High School for harassment, or failing to prevent harassment, or something along those lines. The piece was not exactly clear. It did mention a couple of incidents involving Diane Asch and “three senior students,” who remained unnamed. The incidents were nasty in that casual way adolescent incidents of that kind always are: stealing Diane's clothes while she was taking a shower after gym; hounding Diane out of a mixer in the school's auditorium; getting up en masse from a lunchroom table when Diane tried to sit down.
Bennis took a chance and punched “Hollman Home News” into the Yahoo! search engine. She got what looked like the right address three recommendations down. She clicked on the link and waited. She was rewarded with a front-page spread on exactly the story she was looking for, complete with pictures with serious captions, and continuing coverage “inside.” The “three senior students” turned out to be three girls named DeeDee Craft, Lynne Mackay, and Sharon Peterson. The
Home News
had their cheerleading pictures, complete with uniforms and pompoms. Nancy Quayde turned out to be one of those women who gives professional a bad name. In a tailored skirt and blazer, she looked oddly like a dominatrix in a bad mood. Here was the virtue of weekly small-town newspapers. There wasn't much of anything else going on in Hollman to report, so instead of wasting its time fretting over the depredations of either George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton, the
Home News
reported on this. Bennis clicked a few more times to find the “inside” pages and came across a headline that said:
Lawsuit Ends Quayde Hopes for Superintendent's Job
. Out in the foyer, the apartment door opened and closed.
“Bennis?”
“I'm in the bedroom,” Bennis said.
There were heavy steps in the hallway. Bennis leaned closer to the screen to read, but the article was not much
more informative than the one in the
Inquirer
had been. The
bad
thing about weekly small-town newspapers was that their staffs assumed their readers to have a working knowledge of all the local scandals and tensions. Bennis didn't know anything about anything about Hollman, Pennsylvania, except that it was boring as hell and Liz Toliver had once lived there. Gregor came in and sat down on the bed.
Bennis said, “Why does the name Nancy Quayde ring a bell with me?”
“She was one of the women in that group of girls who were involved in that night in the park when Liz Toliver was nailed into the outhouse. She's principal of Hollman High School now.”
“It says that here. Somebody's suing her. Did she want to be superintendent of schools?”
“I don't know,” Gregor said. “She may have. She was a very professional woman.”
“You talked to her?”
“When Kyle Borden and I were interviewing people after the murder of Chris Inglerod Barr. She was on my list to talk to from the beginning, though. The list Jimmy Card gave me. What's this all about?”
“Look.” Bennis pulled away from the screen.
Gregor came forward and scanned the article. “That's not surprising, is it?” he said. “It's more or less what you'd expect of her. Considering the history, I mean.”
“You mean considering what happened to Liz Toliver in high school?”
“Considering that, yes. People don't really change, you know. At least, they don't really change into something completely different from what they were. If you look at the pictures of Liz Toliver, going all the way back to kindergarten, you'd probably see that streak of charisma that's what's made it possible for her to be on television and make a success of it. Why would it be any different with Nancy Quayde?”
“Do you think that's what happens, that the principals
and the teachers all harass the outcasts, too, or something? That's what this article seems to be saying. Diane Asch's father is suing because when these girls did awful things to Diane, Nancy Quayde told her it was all her own fault, and wanted Diane to go into therapy, and that kind of thing.”
“I think I want to go somewhere and do something today. The Art Museum. Except not the Art Museum. I don't feel like being intellectual.”
“We could go for a drive and have lunch out in the country somewhere.”
“No, thank you. Not unless you hire a chauffeur. I don't feel like being dead, either.”
“I got you back here from Hollman without any problem.”
“You got me back here from Hollman. That's as good as it gets. Why don't we go shopping for that lamp you want? It sounds awful, but I suppose I might as well look at it.”
“Thank you. I love the confidence you have in my taste.”
“Come on,” Gregor stood up. “Let's go find a cab. Let's go do something. I'll go insane if I have to hang around here doing nothing for the fourth day in a row. Maybe you want to see a movie?”
“I don't hate your movies. I hate your
films
. Come on, let's go. I want to see something with Mike Meyers in it.”
He grabbed Bennis by the hand and pulled. Bennis barely had time to sign off before she found herself on her feet.
“Mike Meyers,” she said. “You probably used to watch the Three Stooges when you were a kid.”
“I watch them now,” Gregor said solemnly. “But only when you're asleep.”
3
Several thousand miles away, in Paris, Mark DeAvecca was having a very good day. His mother and his new stepfather
were headed for the Bahamas, where they would probably have an excellent time doing things he had no intention of thinking about, and Geoff was safely back at the hotel with Debra, who had volunteered to baby-sit until they all got back to New York on Thursday afternoon. This had left Mark free to wander around on his own, which was something he had never been able to do before in Paris. He had on a pair of Dockers slacks and a black T-shirt and an almost-expensive sports coat. He would have had a much more expensive sports coat except that his mother refused to buy them for him until she was sure he had stopped growing, and he was already six inches taller than Jimmy Card. Whatever. He was sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the front of the Cafe' Deux Maggots. He had a small cup of the blackest, bitterest, and strongest coffee he had ever tasted. If all those old wives' tales about how coffee could stunt your growth were true,
his
growth would have stopped dead in its tracks with the first sip. He had the memory of Debra's brutal conversation with Maris this morning on the telephone, during which it had become clear, even to Geoff, that they would not have to put up with Maris Coleman ever again. And just to make everything perfect, two days of trying had left his face with a very nice coating of designer stubble.
What was really making Mark happy at the moment, however, was a girl. Her name was Genevieve, and she had both the eyes and the accent he had always hoped for in a really witchy French woman. At the moment, she was telling him, very sincerely, why it no longer made sense to read Jean-Paul Sartre and why he should read Luce Irigaray instead. She could have been talking about baseball, and it would have made no difference.
Mark was sure he had no idea how she'd gotten the impression that he was eighteen years old, and a sophomore at Brown.