Somebody Else's Music by Jane Haddam Page A

We’ll send it to her mother’s house and see what she answers.”
    â€œAll right,” Lisa said.
    â€œFine,” Nancy said.
    Lisa hesitated, as if she were not sure if their conversation was over, and Nancy nearly bit her head off—what could the confusion possibly be? Then she went out and left the door open behind her, but Nancy didn’t mind. She could use the air. She seemed to be having some kind of mild hot flash, and with it that odd feeling of uneasiness that made her think she had forgotten to do something very important, something that was going to change her entire life, or maybe had changed it already. At the very core of her, there was something that wished she could avoid this whole thing, just forget about it, just go on doing what she
did every day as if Betsy had not come back to town at all, or as if she had, but hadn’t been anybody Nancy needed to pay attention to.
    She picked up her phone and accessed her private line. The light would go on on Lisa’s phone as well as her own, but Lisa would never pick up to listen in.
    If they didn’t ask her to speak at the high school, the papers would pick up on that, too, but it would be the good papers this time, or the entertainment press, which everybody read, instead of things like the Enquirer that sensible people dismissed out of hand. Then there really would be a lot of publicity—there might even be another interview on 60 Minutes —and in the end she would be lumped in with the rest of them, with Maris and Belinda and Emma and Peggy, just the way she was lumped in with them in the minds of half the people in town. Damn , she thought. Chris, for God’s sake, pick up .
    Then she looked at the back of her hands, and for a moment she thought she saw blood on them again, just like Lady Macbeth.
    6
    The trouble with Nancy Quayde, Chris Inglerod Barr thought, snapping off the powder-blue McGrath cell phone her husband had given her for Christmas—the problem with Nancy was that she took things too seriously, as if everything that happened were part of a vast plot, and the plot existed only to determine whether or not Nancy Quayde would get what she wanted out of life. Chris had always known exactly what she wanted out of life, and as she looked around her big custom-fitted kitchen, with the Jenn-Air grill in the long center island and the breakfast nook that bumped out into a peninsula of windows to keep it chastely separate from the vaulted-ceilinged family room beyond, she thought she had it. Sometimes, on days when she was home alone, she walked through this house room
by room just to experience it. She’d been planning it for a long time, longer than anybody knew. Daniel, her husband, thought that her mania for it had begun when he was doing his residency, but that was only when she had started to tell him about it, and when she had started drawing floor plans and room sketches on a spiral-bound pad of thick white paper she’d bought at a pharmacy on her way home from work. The truth was, she’d been thinking about it all the way back in high school. That was why she had been so careful to be nice enough—not quite nice, that could have ruined her—to the boys with pimples and badly fitting jeans who sat in the front of the room in chemistry and biology, getting straight As. She knew that they talked about her when she was out of the room: of all “that crowd,” Chris Inglerod was “the nice one.” Every year, her yearbook had more signatures in it than anybody else’s, and she signed more yearbooks than anybody else did, too. Shy, plain girls who only seemed to blossom in home ec, frightened math whizzes who had somehow reached the tenth grade at the age of nine, people she’d grown up with all her life and still didn’t know the names of, all of them counted her as their friend, or something close to it, and in spite of the rude things she had heard from