Somebody Else's Music Read online

  2

  Belinda Hart Grantling knew with certainty that she was a very stupid person. She had known it since her very first week in school, which had begun as a great adventure (new children to play with, a good thing) and ended in a confusion so deep, it was something like terror. Even now, she could see Mrs. Thompson standing in front of the class, smacking her rubber-tipped wooden pointer along the long row of letters that hung over the blackboard. She knew the alphabet song from home, but it had never occurred to her that it was anything other than nonsense. She knew a lot of nonsense songs. Maybe they all meant something, and as the days went by she would be expected to know what that was, and to stand up in front of everybody else and say so. The worst thing was that she seemed to be the only one who did not know. When Mrs. Thompson wrote a letter on the board, all the rest of the class would call it out. Only Belinda would sit silently with her hands folded on her lap under the table, only pretending to let sounds come out of her. Some of the others knew it all so well, they were restlessly bored. One of the others could read the cover on the big hard-edged book Mrs. Thompson kept on the corner of her desk. “Teacher’s Manual,” Betsy Toliver said it said. Belinda wondered what “manual” meant, and then why Mrs. Thompson never opened it, if it was something for teachers.

  By the end of Belinda’s first month at school, she had developed a deep-seated resentment that would never leave her, a bone-crushing conviction that there was something truly evil, truly hateful, about all smart people. Another child would have acted out—and some of them did—but Belinda had a single gift, and that was the ability to know where the advantage lay. It didn’t take her long to realize that most people didn’t really like smart people. She wasn’t the only one who hated Betsy Toliver. Even Mrs. Thompson grew stiff and offended when Betsy jumped in with the answer to every question, or read a notice put up on the bulletin board for grown-ups only, or spent recess working out math problems from worksheets she’d found discarded in the wastebasket. What people really liked in other people was something Belinda had in abundance. They liked prettiness. Betsy Toliver wasn’t ugly, but her pale-faced, wideeyed darkness couldn’t begin to compete with Belinda’s own blond porcelain fragility. Belinda was everything little girls were supposed to be, and older ones too, when they grew up to become Claudia Schiffer or Christie Brinkley. Her hair was as blond as possible without becoming that odd hard whiteness that makes some people look like bleached rabbits. Her eyes were large and round and blue. Her features were so regular they could have been used as an illustration in a textbook lesson on proportion. In a room full of children, older people looked at Belinda first, and the children themselves gravitated to her, fighting among themselves to get her attention. Like a lot of stupid people, Belinda was also very shrewd. She knew power when she saw it. She was also sure of her own righteousness. It was just not fair that there were people like Betsy Toliver in the world. It was just not fair that so much of the school day should be taken up with classes, where she was always at a disadvantage, and where she never seemed to know the answer, when the teacher called on her even though she hadn’t raised her hand. It was not an accident, she thought, that so many of the women teachers were so plain, or that the women writers they studied in English and the women scientists whose pictures lined the margins of the enrichment booklets in General Science and the women everybody rhapsodized over in World History were all so downright ugly. Some women seemed to be able to get away with being intelligent—Maris Coleman, for instance—but for most of them, it was the kiss of death. Their intelligence sucked away whatever looks they’d had to begin with. They ended up deformed, in a way gnarled. Thinking seemed to be a disease that grew unsightly knobs of flesh, like warts.

  Age was also a disease that grew unsightly knobs of flesh, but not warts. Belinda was far too careful of herself ever to get really fat—even during her three pregnancies, she had followed a Weight Watchers diet she had modified just for herself—but being careful was not quite the same thing as being disciplined, and the result was that she had become sort of … lumpy. The effect had not been helped by an early menopause, or by the fact that she truly hated any kind of vigorous physical exercise. By the time she was forty-two, she had stopped menstruating, and her waist had thickened so much she’d had to throw away all her old belts. Her calves had thickened, too, she had no idea why. She’d bought a StairMaster and used it only twice. The first time she had stopped after three minutes, because her ankles hurt. The second time, she had stopped after one. Then her hair had begun to thin, just as her mother’s had at the same age. In no time at all, she began to look predictably middle-aged.

  That, Belinda thought now, was when the trouble had started—or maybe the trouble had started a long time before that, but she’d been so busy with her own life, and so happy to be who and what she was, she had never noticed. It made her uneasy to think she might have been all wrong all the time, and she didn’t think it was possible. Obviously, something had changed, in the sixties, maybe, when everything changed, so that the girls she knew who went off to college didn’t join sororities when they got there, because that wasn’t cool anymore. She, herself, had only gone for two years to a junior college three towns away, to get an associate’s degree in Business Management. It was a glorified secretarial course, but it had accomplished the two things she’d wanted it to accomplish. She’d met a man to marry there, and she’d learned enough about typing and bookkeeping to make herself feel that she’d always be able to get a job if anything should ever happen to her marriage. That was in 1975, and she was sure nobody could blame her for not expecting the computer to come along and make everything she’d ever learned completely obsolete.

  “I should have done things differently,” she said to the air. Then she stared down at the phone she had just hung up and thought that Maris had done things differently, and it hadn’t done her any good. Belinda was a sincere believer in all things supernatural. She had a fevered relationship with God, but she also put her trust in other things: astrology, Tarot cards, palm reading, The Celestine Prophecy. Belinda knew the world to be a place full of dark, obscure, occult, and powerful forces, pushing mere human beings around at will. Only forces like that could account for the fact that things had worked out the way they had, that she was an aide in her own hometown library and divorced and living in an apartment the size of a matchbook, that Maris had been fired from three badly paid jobs in two years and would probably be living on the street if Betsy hadn’t hired her, that Betsy was living in a 6,000-square-foot house in the Connecticut suburbs and getting ready to marry a pop star. Other people might have seen the irony in it, or a lesson about life, but Belinda saw the hand of the devil himself.

  The library telephone was in the library office, which was a big loft room overlooking the main floor of books and periodicals. Belinda went to the balcony railing and found Laurel Haynes, the head librarian, busy with an elderly woman in a paunchy denim jumper and black cotton tights. Here was something else that was different, a piece of the same conspiracy. When Belinda was growing up in Hollman, the librarian was a local spinster with no better than a normal school education, whose qualifications were that she was unlikely ever to marry and very likely to be vigilant about keeping things like pornography and James Joyce out of the stacks. Now they had Laurel, who had a doctorate in library science and wrote long essays for literary magazines on the relationship between the writings of Aphra Behn and the emergent lesbian-feminist aesthetic consensus. Needless to say, she kept both Joyce and pornography in the stacks, and even put on special exhibits to celebrate Beat poets and Deconstructionism.

  Belinda went back to the table where the telephone was and sat down. If she stayed up here too long, Laurel might complain—but then, she might not. Laurel didn’t seem to notice what most of her staff was doing most of the time. As long as the work got done and done more or less on time, she didn’t lecture. Belinda picked up the receiver and dialed the number she knew better than any in t
he world. She had, after all, been dialing it for over forty years.

  “Country Crafts,” Emma’s voice said, picking up.

  “It’s Belinda,” Belinda said. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

  “Not at all. There hasn’t been a soul in here all day. What’s up with you? Aren’t you at work?”

  “I just talked to Maris.”

  “Ah. And?”

  “Well,” Belinda said, “it’s true. She is coming, at the end of May, and bringing her children. Betsy, I mean. Not Maris. Maris is coming too, though. That could be good.”

  “You’d think she’d have come before this,” Emma said. “I mean, for God’s sake. Her mother wanders away from her nurse at least twice a week, and last Friday she went to the parking lot of the Grand Union and took off all her clothes. If she had any sense of family feeling, she’d have come right that minute. You’ve got to wonder what’s wrong with her.”

  “Have you thought of it?” Belinda asked. “About having her here? About what it would be like.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be like anything. I don’t intend to see her. Why would I? Would you?”

  “Laurel wants her to come and speak at the library. She says other libraries have writers in, but we never do because we don’t have the budget to pay their traveling expenses, and Betsy wouldn’t have to travel. She’d be right here.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Nobody would come,” Emma said finally. “We all remember her. We know what she really is. Nobody’s going to come to the library to listen to Betsy Wetsy lecture.”

  “We don’t all know what she’s like,” Belinda said stubbornly. “There are lots of new people in town. And people younger than us. And there’s been all that stuff. In the papers. Saying she killed Michael. And Maris says she’s writing something. About that night. That she heard more than she’s ever said and now she’s going to name names. It might be just about the outhouse. But it might not.”

  “Horseshit. Betsy spent that whole night locked in an outhouse stall. I should know. I locked it. And I helped nail it shut.”

  “I know that. And you know that. But not everybody knows it. And there have been all those newspaper stories. And other people might come because she was nominated for that prize that Laurel thinks is so important—”

  “The Pulitzer.”

  “Whatever it was. It could get to be a pretty big deal, is all I’m saying. And what if she wants to write about it. About us. About the—the—”

  “Murder?”

  “I don’t like to think of it as murder,” Belinda said. “Maybe it really wasn’t one. They never did catch any murderer.”

  Belinda felt the silence descend between them like a curtain. It always did, when they got on this subject. For a split second, she had one of those visions she could not repress: all of them standing in a semicircle around Michael’s body at the edge of the river. She was the one who had knelt down into the mud and put her hand in the dark puddle next to Michael’s head, so that when her cupped hand had come up to the air again it had been filled with blood. Then it had started to rain. She was wearing a halter top over cutoff jeans, their uniform for that summer, their declaration of independence from the prissy constraints of high school dress codes. The rain had come down so hard and so fast, she had been soaked through in an instant, and the blood had disappeared from her hand as if it had never been there at all. She had had the feeling, at the time, that she had been imagining the whole thing.

  There was the little matter of the fact that his throat had been slit straight across, Emma could have said—Belinda knew it was what she was thinking—but of course Emma didn’t say it. She never said it. Nobody did.

  “Well,” Belinda said. “I just wanted you to know. That it was for certain. Maris says she’s got her children in some private school that gets out at the end of May, and as soon as it does they’re all coming down here.”

  “Fine,” Emma said. “I hope she has a good time. I hope the town gets a little good publicity instead of the kind it’s been getting. I hope she doesn’t expect us all to fall all over her and tell her how wrong we were, because I for one don’t think we were wrong. God, she’s still a frump. Did you see that? In People magazine. She still wears T-shirts over turtlenecks, except they’re not turtlenecks anymore, they’re these crew-neck sack things—”

  “It’s not fair,” Belinda said virtuously.

  “Nothing is ever fair,” Emma said. “I’ve got to help a customer. I don’t know what we were thinking when we opened this place. Nobody ever shops in town anymore. They go out to Wal-Mart. I go out to Wal-Mart. We must have been on drugs.”

  “Okay,” Belinda said. She was sure she was supposed to say something else, but she wasn’t sure what, so she let it go. It’s not fair was all that was really stuck in her brain, and she had no idea how to expand on that, or how to interpret the strained undertone that always came into Emma’s voice when she said it.

  “Well,” she said instead. “I’d better let you go.”

  “Right,” Emma said. “Drop in after work. I’m going to be here all night. George’s gone over to Harrisburg to pick up some things.”

  “All right,” Belinda said. Then the phone began to buzz in her ear, and she felt an electric jolt of resentment go through her, as if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. Except, she thought, it wasn’t like that, because a light socket could kill you, and she wasn’t dead.

  Belinda hung up and went back to the railing to see what Laurel was doing now, but Laurel was still talking to the elderly woman, and the library was still mostly empty. Far too often lately, it felt to her as if nothing ever happened in Hollman at all.

  3

  No matter what Belinda thought, Emma Kenyon Bligh did not go silent every time anyone brought up The Incident, except in the sense that she was struck dumb by boredom, which was not what Belinda meant. Unlike the others, Emma had never really been able to think of The Incident as significant. Yes, Michael Houseman had died, but a lot of people they’d gone to school with had died over the years, some of them even younger than Michael had been. Carolanne Verelli, for instance, had died of leukemia when they were all only eight, and Mitch Wazinski and Tom Kolchek had killed themselves junior year, trying to drive the complete length of Clapboard Ridge at 105 miles an hour in a Volkswagen bug. Emma found something morbid about this constant picking at an incident that had been finished years ago—decades ago, by now. It didn’t seem to her to matter that they had been out in the same park on the same night, boarding Betsy up in that damned outhouse with those silly little snakes. It was the kind of thing you did in those days. Every school class had a target. It was just the way the world worked. Looked at rationally, from a perspective without sentimentality, it was more the target’s fault than anybody else’s, and Emma had been very careful to make sure neither of her own daughters was in any danger. What she would have done if one or the other of them had been like Betsy, with that queer turn of mind and the need to be carrying a book around every place she went, she didn’t know. At any rate, it hadn’t come up. Both her girls had been models of sanity and popularity. Both of them had been cheerleaders, and Tiffany had been both a prom princess and the student council president her senior year. Now they were safely out of the house and settled with husbands, not too far away. They had both gone to UP-Johnstown. They had both gotten degrees in education. They had both quit work for three years after their first children were born. All in all, it had turned out very well, and Emma had not had to worry for a moment that one of them would suddenly develop a desire to move to California or go to medical school. She hesitated to admit it—people always took it the wrong way—but she had been far more worried that the girls would be too intellectual than she had that they would be too ugly. You could always get ugly fixed with plastic surgery.

  She looked down at the pile of things on the counter that she had stacked neatly to place into a brown paper bag, and realized she h
ad been paying no attention to her customer the entire time she had been ringing up. The customer was not anybody she knew, but she wasn’t a tourist, either. Tourists bought yarn dolls on polished wood stands or handmade wooden spinning wheels that could really spin if they ever wanted to learn how to use them. This woman had bought supplies: thirty yards of yarn; six packets of multicolored pipe cleaners; a wire wreath frame; a bag of cotton flannel scraps that could be stitched together to make the shell of a quilt or a comforter cover. Emma looked up at her and smiled, uncertainly. Her lined elderly face did not smile back.

  “It should come to sixteen dollars and forty-six cents, with tax,” the woman said.

  Emma took the woman’s twenty-dollar bill and started to make change. What gave her pause, what really made her silent when she and Belinda had these conversations, was the fact that she knew something Belinda did not know, and that she had not been able to explain no matter how often she had tried. Unlike Belinda, she had actually seen Betsy once since they all graduated from high school. Maris had gone away to Vassar and come back every summer for vacation, but Betsy had never come back, and Maris had never had that much to say about her.

  “She’s Betsy Wetsy,” Maris would tell them when they asked. “She has practically no friends. She’s not important. She sinks into the woodwork. She isn’t an academic star. The college is probably sorry they ever took her.”

  From Maris’s reports, Emma had expected Betsy to go on looking the same, a little frumpy, a little heavy without being heavy enough to be called fat, her hair hanging limp and her clothes always mismatched and one or two sizes too big. It had occurred to her, once or twice, in high school, that Betsy just didn’t care about the way she looked—but that had seemed so fantastic, she had never been able to maintain the thought for more than a minute and a half. She, like most girls, spent at least an hour a day making sure she looked the way she was supposed to look. She slept every night on rollers the size of beer cans so that her hair would curl up at the ends in exactly the right way at exactly the right place, and if she couldn’t find the knee socks that matched the Bobbie Brooks skirt and sweater set she had intended to wear to school, she found something else to put on. Shoes were Bass Weejuns. Pocketbooks were hard leather shoulder bags in British tan that could only be had at Elsa-Edna’s right in the middle of town. Betsy’s father had been the richest man in the entire county, a lawyer with a state-wide reputation, but Nancy Quayde had seen it with her own eyes that Betsy bought her school clothes off the rack at Bradlee’s bargain store.