'There is no good reason for people to be murdered.'
'Maybe not,' I said. 'But that's the slippery slope to abstraction. I'm just trying to find out what happened here.'
'Unfortunately,' Beth Ann said, 'we know what happened ... and I'm very much afraid that we'll never know why.'
We both sat looking at the ground we'd replowed. Beth Ann was wearing a yellow flowered dress with ruffled shoulder straps and a low, square-cut bodice, which framed the ebb and fall of her bosom very nicely as she breathed.
'Did Jared do a lot of fantasy searches on the school computers?' I said.
'Oh.' Beth Ann smiled. 'Surely not. They are carefully restricted.'
I nodded. Without doing anything, Beth Ann seemed to radiate sexual possibility. With Susan's absence, I was becoming steadily more preoccupied with sexual possibility, and neither Rita Fiore nor Beth Ann Blair was helping. I stood. Beth Ann said, 'You have my card.'
But what I seemed to hear was Would you like to come to my home in Lexington and have sex until the autumnal equinox?
'Yes,' I said. 'I have your card.'
Chapter 39
THERE WAS A FOR SALE sign in front of the Clark home when Pearl and I parked in front and I got out. A sprinkler was watering the front yard to the right of the front walk. I heard the vacuum cleaner going when I came up the front walk. It shut off after I rang the bell, and in a moment, Mrs. Clark came to the front door wearing sandals and jeans and a white tank top. Her hair was done, however, and her makeup was on.
'Mr. Spenser,' she said.
'I'm sorry to intrude again,' I said. 'But may we talk a little more?'
'Ned's not home,' she said.
'You'll be just fine,' I said. 'I just need to ask a little more about Jared.'
She didn't invite me in. But she didn't shut the door, either.
'Please leave him alone, Mr. Spenser,' she said. 'You can't help him. You can only make it worse. I've begged my mother to let it go. But she won't. She never does...'
She shook her head hopelessly.
'Mostly I'd just like to borrow Jared's computer for a few days,' I said.
'Jared didn't, doesn't, have a computer.'
'Has he ever?'
'No.'
'Isn't that unusual?'
'Jared was an unusual boy,' Mrs. Clark said.
'Did he ever talk about being bullied?'
'No.'
'Would he have told you?'
'I don't think he was being bullied,' she said. 'I would have known.'
I nodded. 'How?' I said.
'I'm his mother,' she said. 'I would have known.'
'And Wendell Grant?' I said. 'How did he end up hanging with Wendell Grant?'
'You asked me that before,' she said. 'Poor Jared had too few friends for any of us to be picky about those he did have.'
'So you did know Wendell?'
'No, but people, after ... after it happened ... they were saying, `How could you let Jared hang around with him' . . . I didn't know, and if I did. . .'
She shrugged.
'Do you know where he would have had access to a computer?' I said.
'School, town library, places like that, I suppose. But he wouldn't have used one. I don't think he even knew how.'
I was quiet. She was quiet. Somewhere next door or across the street, a dog barked. Sitting in the driver's seat of my car, Pearl barked back. Communication is a great thing. The sun shining through the languid sweep of the sprinkler made tiny rainbows in the spray.
'Please,' Mrs. Clark said. 'Leave him alone. Leave us alone. Jared won't even see us. We can't even live here anymore. We'll have to move and start over. Do you know, can you imagine ... ?'
I shook my head. Tears had welled up in her eyes.
