Somebody Else's Music by Jane Haddam Page B

Belinda and Emma, Chris had always known it would pay off. It had paid off. She’d met Daniel at Penn State instead of in high school biology—and she’d thought he was after Nancy, at first, because it was Nancy he’d spent all his time with at the first big mixer they’d gone to at Zeta Beta Tau—but they had come back to Hollman to live, and she had been able to present him with a patient list, on a platter, made up of all those people she had known forever who wanted to go on knowing her now. Sometimes, these days, she would catch sight of her reflection in the plate-glass windows of the little grocery store across the street from the Sycamore, this perfect woman in a golf skirt and pastel polo shirt, this vision in a three-quarter-length black cashmere coat and high-heeled boots, and be so happy she was barely able to breathe. She even kept clippings,
from the Hollman Home News . It only came out once a week—if you wanted a real newspaper, you had to buy the one published in Kennanburg—but it had the news she loved most in it, and it had her picture almost every week: chairwoman of the Heart Fund Drive; organizer of the Friends of the Library lecture series; secretary of the Center School PTA; parent-adviser to the Hollman High School varsity and junior varsity cheerleading squads. Underneath all the pretentious nonsense, Chris Inglerod was a ferociously competent woman. If she’d been born ten years later than she had been, she would have picked up a good MBA as a matter of course. Having been born when she was, and where she was, she had ended up as Mrs. Dr. Barr, and that suited her as perfectly as anything ever would. She had told her mother, when she was small, that she would have a maid when she grew up, and she did. She had promised herself, in those days when all her friends cared about was having exactly the right kind of Bass Weejuns, that she would someday buy all her clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue and Peck and Peck, and the only compromise she’d had to make was to change Peck and Peck for Talbot’s, because Peck and Peck had gone out of business when she was barely out of college. If there were drawbacks to her situation—if she sometimes lay in bed in the dark with Daniel hunched and pumping over her, counting the seconds before she could start her ritual moaning to signal to him that he could safely finish, wondering how other women managed to do this night after night without throwing up—in the clear light of day, looking at the Volvo station wagon in the driveway and the Royal Doulton china stacked behind the glass doors in the butler’s pantry, they seemed too minor to really worry about.
    Now she tapped her fingernails against the back of the phone—short fingernails, colored with an almost transparent polish, to distinguish her from her husband’s receptionist and the cashiers at the supermarket with their curving, three-inch, glitter-painted spikes—and decided there was nothing to do about it, she would have to call
Dan. She made a face at the air, because she truly hated calling Dan, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he’d be impatient about her for worrying about high school. Chris swiveled around and looked at the clock on the wall. It was just after one, which meant that Dan would be taking his lunch hour, which he did by locking himself in a back room at the office and eating tuna-fish sandwiches while listening to the Grateful Dead cranked up so high it would split open a normal person’s skull. That meant he would have the ear phones on, and that meant that Chris would have to go through the receptionist, even when she used the private line, because Dan listening to the Grateful Dead was Dan dead to the world. Chris didn’t understand the attraction. She had gone to a Grateful Dead concert at Penn State with a boy she had had her doubts about, and the band had looked to her like the kind of men you see