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Authors: Jane Haddam

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They waited until they could order, and they each seemed to be intent on ordering as little as possible. The menu was a horror of pretentiousness that included things like “sea bass en croute” and “crepes Madeleine,” both described in flourishes that made the restaurant critic for
Gourmet
magazine sound like Ernest Hemingway. It was, Gregor thought at one point, the Banana Republic catalogue of restaurant menus. Every offering had a story, and every story had a wry, whimsical, pixie-sophisticated tone to it, like the brightest kid without ambition in an Ivy League freshman class. He asked for something he hoped would turn out to be a steak, and Perrier, because it was obviously going to be impossible to get something as simple as a glass of ginger ale. They did have Diet Coke on the menu, but Gregor never drank Diet Coke. He couldn't imagine asking for a Cafe' Creme Virginite, which seemed to be a Kahlua and cream made without Kahlua. The other two men asked for salads, with dressing on the side, probably the safest thing, under the circumstances. If they couldn't cook it, they couldn't ruin it.
They all waited, talking about nothing, until the food was served. Gregor's lunch turned out to have something to do with steak, but only vaguely, as it was covered in grapes and a thick brown sauce that reminded him of the stuff that came with Egg Foo Yung. He ignored it in favor of the green beans, which had nothing more complicated on them than almond slivers and melted butter.
“I warned you,” Jimmy Card said.
“I'm not in the habit of eating at restaurants in central Philadelphia,” Gregor told him.
Bob Haverton picked up his attache' case, laid it on the clear end of the table, and snapped it open. He had his
initials on it in polished brass, and the brass sparkled in the light.
“I've had our people put together as complete a dossier on this case as it's possible to get,” he said. “It is, as you've pointed out, over thirty years in the past, but the records are still available, not only police records but newspaper files, the file from the Parks and Recreation Service, a couple of articles that ran in the true crime magazines. It's not as good as being there at the time, I admit, but it's something to go on. Would you like to see?”
Gregor took the thick stack of papers Haverton was handing out to him and put it down next to his plate. “I can keep these?”
“If you take the case, yes. I've got copies.”
“Have you read them?”
“We both have,” Jimmy Card said. “I've read them over and over again. I think, from what Liz told me, well, I hadn't expected—”
Bob Haverton cleared his throat. “Liz told him they locked her in an outhouse with some snakes. She didn't tell him that she'd had a phobic reaction and beaten herself bloody on the outhouse door, trying to get out.”
“Beat herself bloody and practically unconscious,” Jimmy said. He gestured at the papers. “It's all in there. When they found her, the skin was flailed off her arms and the sides of her hands and she just fell out onto the ground at this police officer's feet. There were still snakes in the outhouse, two or three. She—”
“She really is phobic,” Bob Haverton said. “Genuinely. She can't be in the room with a picture of one, and we found school records going back to kindergarten of her panicking when there was one on the playground, having complete screaming fits—”
“So,” Gregor said. “All the people she knew, knew she was afraid of snakes? And one of these people locked her into an outhouse and put snakes in there with her?”
“Right,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them, according to Liz. But the thing is, with Liz and snakes, a lot could mean only
three. And she really doesn't know how many.”
“What was the point?” Gregor asked. “Were they trying to kill her? People have died of shock from phobic reactions.”
“I doubt they were actually trying to kill her,” Jimmy said. “They were all, what? Eighteen. Seventeen. And this was 1969. And it wasn't the first time.”
“It wasn't the first time they'd locked her in an outhouse with a lot of snakes?” Gregor's eyebrows raised.
“Liz,” Bob Haverton said carefully, “was not exactly popular in high school. Or in elementary school. As far as we can make out, she was one of those kids who's sort of like a target, the one all the other kids pick on. It had been going on for years. And some of the incidents were pretty damned nasty. They took all her clothes while she was showering after gym once. They told her they wanted to meet her at this place they all went to—”
“The White Horse,” Jimmy said. “It was a bar. The kind of place you could go drinking and not get carded.”
“Right.” Bob nodded. “Anyway, they told her they wanted to meet her there and then they took off for a different place in a different town and left her stranded so that she had to walk home, in the dark, or call her parents and tell them where she was. She walked home. Jimmied her locker and took all her books. Spray-painted ‘big wet turd' in red on the back of her best black sweater during an assembly and then laughed at it all day—”
“And this was everybody in the whole school?” Gregor asked. “Nobody told her about the spray paint?”
“A teacher did, eventually,” Jimmy said. “But you know, I've seen it happen, mostly with girls. Boys get cut a lot more slack. But some girls are just—I mean, even the teachers can't stand them, they're just—”
“Targets,” said Bob Haverton wryly. “I've had a better education than Jimmy did. I actually went to college, instead of just hauling ass to New York City to make my fortune. You can tell by our bank accounts who made the wiser choice.”
“It was only Adelphi,” Jimmy said.
“It was Yale Law. My point, however, is that I've read
Lord of the Flies
a few times. And that's what this was, as far as I can make out.
Lord of the Flies
on a somewhat attenuated scale. Although, considering the thing with the outhouse and the snakes, it's probably just as well that she was getting out for college the following fall.”
“I think that's part of what did it,” Jimmy said. “Drew them over the edge, I mean, into doing something that could have been dangerous. Because she got into a good college and that just made them madder.”
“Back up,” Gregor said. “This was when—the day it happened?”
“July twenty-third, 1969,” Bob Haverton said.
“And what time of day?”
“Early evening,” Jimmy said. “A lot of them worked, you know, and when they got off work they'd go to this park where there was a lake for swimming and a lifeguard. And the park had woods around it and this set of outhouses—”
“Set?”
“I think it said four stalls in a row,” Bob Haverton said.
“Okay,” Gregor said. “It was early evening, and people went to this park, including Ms. Toliver. Was she getting off work, too?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “Her father was this hotshot lawyer. She was taking the summer off. She used to go to the park in the daytime when pretty much everybody she knew was working, and then she'd leave as they started to drift in.”
“But this evening she stayed?” Gregor asked.
“I don't think so,” Jimmy said. “I think she was going to leave the same as always, but then things happened. One of them called her over and told her they needed her to see something, and I suppose she should have known better by then, I mean, for God's sake, it had been going on long enough, but she went to look. And that's when they pushed her into the outhouse and locked the door.”
“To be specific,” Bob Haverton said, “they nailed it shut.”
“What?” Gregor said, bolt upright. “They
nailed
it shut?”
“That's what I said.” For the first time, Haverton looked thoroughly disgusted. “I know adolescents can be evil, but this was a bunch of sociopaths, if you ask me. They gathered a bunch of snakes, granted small black snakes, perfectly harmless—”
“—except to somebody like Liz,” Jimmy said.
“Except to somebody like Liz,” Haverton agreed. “Anyway, they put them in there, and then one of them, Maris Coleman, called her over and asked her to look inside, I don't remember what the pretext was—”
“He can ask Liz himself when he gets to Hollman,” Jimmy said.
“—and when she looked in the rest of them rushed up from out of the bushes where they'd been hiding and pushed her in. Then they slammed the door and nailed it shut. She says she was screaming the whole time, and I believe her. I've seen her around snakes.”
Gregor considered all this. “Most of them were hiding. How many of them is most of them?
“Six,” Jimmy said. “Maris Coleman, Belinda Hart, Emma Kenyon, Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod, and Peggy Smith.”
“We don't actually know that all of them were there, or that all of them were involved,” Haverton said, “but that was the group of them and they were together later, when the body was found, along with a couple of other people who were not ordinarily part of their circle. Liz says she heard them laughing while they nailed up the door.”
“And Ms. Toliver was screaming all the time?” Gregor said. “Why didn't somebody else hear her?”
“There may not have been anybody to hear her,” Haverton said. “The lifeguards go off at five. They left promptly. This might have been fifteen or twenty minutes later.”
“What about the other people in the park?” Gregor said. “Surely, there were other people in the park. This boy, the one who died, Michael Houseman—”
“He was sort of part of the same crowd,” Jimmy said. “He dated one of the girls, or something like that. I'm not exactly clear on that. And yes, later, there were a few other people in the park. When the body was found there were maybe fifteen people present, at the bank of a small river that runs through the place—”
“And those people should have been able to hear Elizabeth Toliver scream?” Gregor asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy said.
“And they didn't investigate what was happening? They didn't try to help her? Or did they? Did somebody go try to release her?”
“The cops released her when they came to look at the body,” Jimmy said. “They heard her screaming and they went to see what was up. It's in the police reports.”
“So you're saying that she stayed in this outhouse, screaming her head off, for—how long?”
“At least an hour,” Bob Haverton said.
“An hour. While screaming her head off within hearing range of two dozen people. And nobody went to help her. Nobody went to see what was wrong with her. Nobody paid any attention at all.”
“I told you it was like
Lord of the Flies
,” Haverton said.
“It's more like
Ripley's Believe It or Not
. Hasn't it occurred to any of you, hasn't it occurred to her, that this makes absolutely no sense? People don't behave this way, not even in groups.
Lord of the Flies
had a hero. Put that many people into one place and at least one of them should go see what's wrong and try to do something about it. Instead, they did what? Wandered around the park? Had a campfire? What?”
“Chris Inglerod and Peggy Smith said they went swimming,” Jimmy said. “Maris Coleman says—said—whatever.”
“She told the police that she went with Belinda Hart to
the lake to sit by the water. She says now that she and Belinda took a walk by the river.”
“You've talked to her recently,” Gregor said.
“I talk to her every day,” Jimmy said. “Much as I'd prefer not to. She works for Liz.”
“Works for her?” Gregor blinked.
“She's some kind of personal assistant,” Jimmy said. “Liz hired her when she got fired a few years ago. When Maris got fired, that is. For the third time. In two years. Don't get me started. She's going down to Hollman with Liz. You'll meet her yourself, if you decide to do this for us.”
“That's what we meant about there being something else to this than finding the person who murdered Michael Houseman,” Bob Haverton said. “We're both—Jimmy and I are both—convinced that it's Maris Coleman who's been feeding those stories to the supermarket tabloids. In fact, we don't see who else it could be. We just need you to prove it.”
“Liz,” Jimmy Card said, angry now, “refuses to believe it.”
Somehow, when Liz Toliver had dreamed of coming back to Hollman, what she had imagined was a kind of triumphal march: she would arrive, not only famous but impossibly rich, sitting in the back of a pitch-black superstretch limousine, driven by a driver in livery with her initials on his jacket. Well, she thought now, as she turned off the two-lane blacktop onto the first of the narrow country roads that lay between her and Hollman like a tangled mess of capillaries, that probably wasn't how she had really imagined it, at least not since she was seven or eight years old. Maybe the problem was that she had not imagined coming back at all. There was, Liz thought, no point to it. It had been so long since she had lived in this place, so long since she had even visited it, that it sometimes seemed to her to be one of those mythic archetypes they had studied about in Dr. Weedin's course in Shakespeare. This was not her life. This was a universal expressive form, meant to mirror the reality of all people everywhere: the ugly duckling emerging from a pond of prettier ducklings, with the pond inexplicably populated by snakes. Liz liked that idea better than she liked the one that had been nagging at her since they left Connecticut this morning, and that was that she was fundamentally a coward. She had not come back because she was afraid to come back, and because she knew—as well as she had ever known anything—that she had not really
changed at all. The more familiar the roads got, the stronger the feeling got. She didn't have to dig through her tote bag for the copy of the Hollman High School
Wildcat
, 1969, to know what she was really like. She looked at the backs of her hands on the steering wheel and half expected the nails on them to split and go ragged, the way nails do when you bite them, day after day. She found herself expecting the car to change, too, so that instead of this ridiculous Mercedes—$140,000 before sales tax, right off the showroom floor—she would be driving the little blue Ford Escort wagon she had had the year after Jay died, when everything was falling apart, and they had had no money at all.
That
, God help her, didn't make
any
sense, because there hadn't even been any Ford Escorts when she was living in Hollman, and it didn't matter what there had been, because she hadn't had a car at all. Besides, she'd actually liked the Ford Escort. It had been the one thing in her life that year that had gone more right than wrong, and when she had walked back to it across the parking lot at the supermarket or the mall, she had always been relieved to see how shiny and new it looked. It was a kind of camouflage. Her life that year,
their
lives that year, had been anything but shiny and new. They had been living in a rented cabin out at Lake Candlewood, because they'd lost the house, and there were cracks and leaks in every room. When it rained, water came in through the roof and soaked the living room. When anyone took a bath, the water leaked out of the bathtub and turned the bathroom floor into a lake. The only dry space in the whole cabin had been in the little corner of the kitchen where she had set up her computer. After a while, that space had become holy. They had all worshiped at the altar of it. If their lives were ever going to change, if they had a hope in hell of getting back to being the way they were before Jay got sick, then the change was going to come from that corner. That was why Geoff was not allowed to touch the computer keyboard, ever, and Mark was only allowed to touch it when he had an important report for school, the kind that needed illustrations and charts that
had to be taken off the Net. God, Liz thought, she ought to remember that better than she did. She ought to have nightmares about the foreclosure or the Christmas they'd spent with two candles, no tree, and presents that consisted of exactly one small box of Russell Stover candy for each of the boys, wrapped in aluminum foil. Instead, she woke up not only obsessed by snakes, but obsessed by trivialities. She had nervous breakdowns remembering the way Emma Kenyon—who'd always had expensive things mail-ordered from Philadelphia, even though the Tolivers had far more money than the Kenyons ever would—laughed at her clothes.
They were passing a road called Watler Marsh, with an empty field on the corner that looked as if it had sunk in the middle. That used to be a pond, Liz thought, and the school bus stopped on that very corner to let off a girl named Penny Steele, who was fifteen and going out with a boy in the army. The next year, the boy came back from the army and decided to marry her. Penny stayed in school right up through the week before the wedding, bringing Polaroid pictures of her wedding dress onto the bus to show all the other girls what she would look like when the day came. The wedding was held on a Saturday afternoon in late April at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in town. The honeymoon was a week at a resort in South Carolina. Liz had no idea what had happened to Penny after that. She did know that if she took this turn to the right and went to the end of that road, she would come to Belinda Hart's old house, where, one afternoon when they were all eight years old, Belinda and Emma had pushed her headfirst into a rain barrel full of bugs and slime and rotting fall leaves that had stuck to her skin like face paint.
Mark stirred in the passenger seat beside her, moving his copy of
Metamorphosis
from one leg to another. He was only fourteen, but he was as big as most grown men—nearly six feet tall, and massive, the way Jay had been, but without the tendency to go to fat. Geoff was in the back, secured in a seat belt and a safety harness, fast asleep. Liz
found herself wishing that she still smoked cigarettes. It would give her something to do with her hands, and something to distract her, so that she wouldn't still be thinking about the rain barrel and about Belinda trying to seal it shut with the side of a big cardboard box she'd found lying against the garbage cans along the back of the house.
“Are you intending to drive this car, or do you mean for Scotty to beam us up the rest of the way?” Mark said. He had put his book down. It was dog-eared and half destroyed. Liz thought of the set direction at the beginning of
A Long Day's Journey Into Night
. You knew the people in that house really read books, because the books did not look new.
“Earth to Elizabeth. Earth to Elizabeth. Are you okay?”
Geoff stirred in the backseat. He always woke up when the car stopped.
“Are we there?” He was going to say “are we there yet?” but stopped himself just in time. He had heard enough, from his mother and his brother, to know that was something you
never
said. It was worse than saying “shit.”
“Not exactly,” Mark said. “What about you?” he asked Liz. “
Are
you all right? You're looking a little green. You could always change your mind, you know. We could always turn around and go right back to Connecticut—”
“I'm
hungry
,” Geoff said.
“We could eat on the road. We could get a motel room for the night. We could use that nifty cell phone you've got and call Jimmy to come and get us—”
“Cell phones don't work up here,” she said. “The mountains are too high.”
Liz took her foot off the brake and let them roll slowly forward. She hadn't realized, until Mark had pointed it out, that they had stopped. The field that had once had a pond in the middle of it glided past them, along with the side road it bordered and the side road's destination, a big white ranch house with green shutters and the first three-car garage Hollman had ever seen. Liz had a distinct memory of Belinda talking about it at school while it was being built,
and the girls talking behind her back about it in the lavatory, because she never mentioned the real reason it was going up: Belinda's father was an undertaker, and Belinda's mother couldn't stand it one more minute, living in the same house as the funeral home, with the dead and embalmed bodies in the basement.
“Driving usually requires you to put your foot on the gas after you've taken it off the brake,” Mark said.
Liz put her foot on the gas, but not very hard. “I was thinking about this girl I knew in school. Belinda Hart—”
“Is this one of the vampire nation?”
“What a way to put it. Anyway, yes. The thing is, her father was an undertaker. Funeral director, she said, and we all had to say it, too, you know, because she was powerful as hell, even more powerful than Maris, and we were all afraid of her. But I was thinking, in most places, that would have gotten her killed. Having a father who was a funeral director, I mean, and living in a house with dead bodies in the basement—”
“They did? Cool.”
Liz sighed. “They moved. Down that road.” She tossed her head in the direction of the side road they were rolling away from. “That's why I was thinking of it. Are you like this all the time? Are you like this in school?”
“Yep.”
“That must have an interesting effect on your social life.”
“My social life is fine. It's incredible how much mileage you can get out of just not giving a—damn. I wasn't kidding at all about going back. I think you're nuts to be here. I don't get what you think you're doing at all.”
“I'm taking care of your grandmother.”
“My grandmother is senile. You could send Batman in a cape and she wouldn't know the difference.”
Liz picked up the pace a little. “I was thinking about that year we spent in New Milford, do you remember? About how we had tuna-fish sandwiches on toast, and I felt like a fool, like I'd ruined Christmas for you and Geoff
because I was just so damned arrogant, so—I don't know—prideful …”
“You have the pride of a sea slug.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious. I don't know how I'm ever going to get this through to you, but I loved that Christmas. Okay, we didn't have a turkey and we didn't have a tree and we didn't have much in the way of presents—although I still love Russell Stover, let me tell you, if my soccer coach would let me eat chocolate—”
“Mark.”
“I really am serious. I loved that Christmas. I loved the way we were with each other. Before that, you know, we were all kind of numbed out, because of Dad dying, and I'd been thinking that maybe we wouldn't ever be really together again. And that Christmas came and we were
us
, together, not three separate people. That was the first time from when Dad first got sick that I knew I was going to be happy again and—you know, you can't drive too well if you're crying your eyes out, either.”
“I'm not crying my eyes out.”
“That's Niagara Falls I see falling down the front of your face.”
“Is it really?” Geoff said. “Can I see it, too?”
“Sit down and keep your seat belt on,” Mark said.
They had reached another intersection—it was incredible how many small roads there were, crisscrossing each other back and forth under this thick cover of trees—and Liz turned automatically to the right. At the top of the road's steep embankment, there was a long Cape Cod–style house that she had admired as a child. When she passed it on the bus going to sports games or “special events,” she found herself wishing she lived in it. Now it looked impossibly small, and worse than small, dated. She knew, even though she had never been in it, that the ceilings would be no more than eight feet high and the kitchen would be fitted with the kind of laminated cabinets that peeled in the corners after a year or two.
“You know,” Mark said, “I don't think you're being stupid, feeling the way you feel. I mean, from some of the stories I've heard—”
“From whom? Has Maris been telling you things?”
“Ms. Coleman barely speaks to me. She thinks I'm cow dung. Okay. I've been reading a few of those stories in those papers, you know the ones—”
“Where are you getting the
National Enquirer
?”
“At the drugstore. And don't say it. Nobody cares what I read in the drugstore, and I'm not buying them. Except that I did buy the
Weekly World News
. You're not ever in that one. To get into that one, you've got to meet with a space alien. George Bush did.”
“What?”
“Not this George Bush. The other one. George Herbert Walker Bush. The principal reason why I'm not applying to Andover.”
“Right. Mark, where the hell is this going?”
Mark picked up his copy of
Metamorphosis
and ruffled the edges of the pages with the pad of his thumb. This was why his books all disintegrated. He not only read them, he abused them. Liz had grown up treating books as icons, or maybe as incarnations of God. She was no more capable of dog-earring a book than she was of lighting one on fire. The two acts had some strange connection with each other in her mind.
“I don't want to see you get hurt,” Mark said. “I'm not stupid. I know why we never came here to visit Grandmother when Dad was alive. I don't need the tabloids or Jimmy Card to tell me that this place sucks for you, it leeches something out of you, and you get, I don't know, odd. Not yourself. Not you the way I know you. So far, all the signs have been all bad, except the car—”

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