by Jane Haddam
Actually, he was just happy to see her. She took his mind off the fact that, the longer he looked at the pictures, the surer he was that Cordelia Day Hannaford was dying. She had an air he knew well, from all the years he had spent taking care of Elizabeth.
Gregor took the hammer and wreath out of Lida’s hand and positioned the holly on his door, so that it surrounded the bell. It looked nice there, nice enough to make him wish he’d spent some time decking out the place in the proper Christmas spirit. It shamed him to think he hadn’t even considered it. Elizabeth would have started making tinsel balls right after Halloween.
He looked up at Lida and gestured to the wreath. “Nail there,” he said. “If you’d brought bigger nails, we’d only have to use one.”
Lida was blushing. “I didn’t bring the nails for the wreath,” she said. “I didn’t even bring the wreath. I was just—I mean, I was up—I mean, it was—”
“Donna Moradanyan’s idea?”
Lida clucked. “She’s a nice child, Gregor. She’s very worried about you. Here she has the whole building decorated in satin ribbons and silver bells, and you don’t have any decorations to speak of. Not any decorations anyone can see. It’s not healthy, Gregor.”
“Nail there,” Gregor said again.
Lida put the nail through the cluster of lacquered leaves, and Gregor pounded at it with the overlarge hammer. Then she put another nail up, and he pounded on that, too. Pounding made him feel good. Besides, if this was Donna’s idea, Gregor felt an obligation. Lida was right. Donna was a nice child, with child as the operative word. She was twenty-one and a student at the Art Institute—the top floor apartment, just above Gregor’s own, having been bought for her by her father when she had the “crazy” idea of moving into Philadelphia to go to school—but in Gregor’s mind Donna was inevitably a “girl” and not a “woman.” She behaved like a girl. She had snow fights with eight year olds in the street. She rode a skateboard to her bus stop in the summer. She seemed sexually as innocent as an Amish virgin. Like a fairy-tale heroine, she had more trust in the benevolence of the universe than she had in the law of gravity. And she had decorated the whole house, or at least the side of it that faced Cavanaugh Street. The building looked like a gigantic Christmas present, wrapped in ribbons and tied with bows.
The last nail was in. Gregor stepped back, nodded at his handiwork, and said, “There. Now Donna Moradanyan won’t be disappointed.”
Lida stooped down and came back up again with a bowl. She must have left it on the floor while she fiddled with the wreath. Gregor hadn’t noticed it.
Lida plucked at the Saran Wrap stretched over the bowl’s top and said, “This is for you. That’s what I came to bring. It’s stuffed vine leaves. I see you all the time, eating at that Ararat restaurant—”
“They have very good food, Lida.”
“I’m sure they do. But they’re not home, Gregor. I thought you’d like something to eat at night. I know you eat at night. You did that even as a child. And I kept thinking of you coming back to this place, with nothing in the refrigerator but a bottle of diet soda, just like my niece Andrea, and I thought—well, you can guess what I thought.”
Gregor could guess. He’d given up eating at night during Elizabeth’s last illness, but he thought saying so would make the conversation awkward. He didn’t want that. He picked up the bowl and motioned Lida through his door, stepping back to give her room.
“Look at me,” he said. “Do I look like I’m starving?”
“You look like you could take off twenty pounds,” Lida said, “but that’s just heredity, Gregor. My sister’s second husband had it. Once he was in the hospital with gallbladder and sick for three months, and he didn’t lose an ounce.”
“Ummm,” Gregor said. He wouldn’t ask her why she thought someone could “have” heredity, the way they had a cold. Doing that would just set her off on one of her lectures, and Gregor had been listening to Lida’s lectures since they were both four years old. He motioned her into his apartment again.
“Don’t you want my vine leaves?” Lida asked him.
“Of course I want them. I just want you to stop worrying about me starving to death. I’m not starving to death.”
“You ought to be starving to death,” Lida said. Then she smiled a little and passed by him.
For the first time, Gregor was acutely aware that his apartment was not only bare, but eerie. A bad motel room would have had more personality. The foyer was the worst of it—no pictures on the walls, no occasional table for the mail, not even an umbrella stand. Fortunately, Lida seemed to have no interest in spending any time there. She passed through as fast as she could walk, right into the kitchen. Gregor’s relief was immense. The kitchen didn’t look so much like a place the Bureau would have raided in their search for a serial killer,
Of course, the kitchen wasn’t perfect, either. By the time Gregor got there, Lida was rinsing out a pair of coffee cups—but it was obvious, from the way the doors of the cabinets were firmly closed and the papers on the table had changed position, that she had been looking around. And finding him wanting. Now she was making new coffee, in the percolator instead of out of the jar, and scrubbing his cups as if they’d been caked with mud slime instead of just covered with dust. Gregor sat down at the table to watch her work.
“So,” he said, “you came up to see Donna Moradanyan.”
Lida stopped her scrubbing, stared into the bottom of the cup, and went back to scrubbing again. “Yes, I did. I come to see her every week. Her mother asked me to.”
“Her mother’s worried about her living in Philadelphia?”
“Oh, she’s not worried about Cavanaugh Street.” The cup was as clean as it was going to get—cleaner. Lida put it down on the table and picked up the other one. “It’s the rest of Philadelphia that bothers Marie. And the Art Institute. It bothers me, too. It’s not like it used to be, Gregor.”
“No place is.”
“Do you remember the dances they used to have, at the church, when we were children? Teenagers, they call them now. In those days, the grandmothers sat in the chairs against the wall and if you talked to a boy your parents knew about it before you got home.”
And you hated it, Gregor thought. They had more than hated it. They had spent their high-school lives envying the hell out of their Anglo Saxon classmates, who seemed to live in a world where nobody knew anybody. And everybody necked.
Lida put the fresh coffee and the new clean cup down on the table, and then, as an afterthought, got the milk and sugar. Then she sat down in the seat directly across from him and stared at her spoon.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are. After all these years.”
“It hasn’t been that many years, Lida.”
“I think it’s been forever,” Lida said. She watched him put milk and sugar into his coffee, frowning a little, as if she wanted to give him the same lecture Elizabeth had been so fond of. Then she turned her head away and said, in an oddly abrupt tone, “You think I don’t remember. How awful it was. That feeling that we were different, not so shiny and bright as all the rest of them. And you going off to college, nervous all the time, because in those days they were always looking for excuses not to give scholarships to ‘minority groups.’ Oh, I remember. It was terrible. It just wasn’t as terrible as this.”
“This?”
“Things have changed, Gregor. Oh, I know. Things have changed everywhere. But this isn’t everywhere. This is here. This is home. I think we—the older people, you know—I think we thought that if we stayed here, if we didn’t move out to the Main Line or Bucks County or someplace else that really belonged to them, that it would be all right. That we could go on being us. But it didn’t work.”
Gregor threw up his hands. “What do you want? To speak Armenian at home and gain fifty pounds with every baby? To be so afraid of doctors you go to church instead of to the hospital when you’re ill, no matter what the priest tells you? Or maybe you want old Karpa
kian instead of Father Tibor?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Gregor. I’m not senile. I just—I just want the world to make sense.”
If Gregor hadn’t been thinking the same thing himself, less than half an hour before, he would have smiled. There it was, the one thing everybody wanted, and the one thing nobody got. He felt suddenly sorry for her. She’d lived a life that made the unpleasant truth easy to avoid—and now she must have run into something that made it so clear, she couldn’t get around it.
Gregor got up and started to search his cabinets for a plate to put the vine leaves on. It would be polite to offer her something, and he had nothing else. Not even cookies.
“So,” he said, when he came back to the table, “is that what this visit is all about? You want me to help you make the world make sense?”
“Don’t be silly,” Lida said. “I came because—I came because Father Tibor said something, in passing you understand, the other day. You’re going into business as a private detective?”
“Of course I’m not,” Gregor said, surprised. “Whatever gave him that idea?”
“I don’t know,” Lida said.
“It would be a mess,” Gregor said. “I’d need a license. I could probably get one, but then what would I do? I don’t have any interest in adultery and I couldn’t care less about insurance fraud.”
Lida looked at her hands. “What about missing persons? Would you need to get one of these detective licenses to find a missing person?”
“I suppose anyone could go looking for a missing person, if they didn’t charge for it.” Gregor was curious. “Who have you got missing? I can’t believe your son-in-law would have taken off on that beautiful child of his—”
“No, no.” Lida hesitated, then seemed to make up her mind. She reached into the pocket of her coat without the card in it and came up with a small photograph. “Here,” she said. “This is the boy. This is the one I want to find.”
“Nice-looking boy,” Gregor said. He was, too—clean, well dressed, even featured, young. He was not, however, particularly memorable. The photograph had been taken in a studio someplace. It showed a young man with a taste for crewneck sweaters and button-down shirts, posed against a hazy blue background as bland as his clothes.
“Not the sort of young man to stick out in a crowd,” Gregor said.
“No,” Lida said. “But he stuck out, Gregor. Believe me. At least once, he stuck out much too far.”
“Good lord,” Gregor said. “You’re making a dirty joke.”
“I’m making a dirty pun.” She took the photograph out of his hand and made a face at it, fierce, like an old woman chasing a raccoon away from her root cellar. “This,” she said, “is the nice Armenian boy who came from Boston and got Donna Moradanyan pregnant and just disappeared into thin air.”
FIVE
1
IT WAS AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK, full dark, when old Robert Hannaford finally backed his wheelchair away from the niche in the south wall of his study and gave up. In the niche, a black marble bust of Aristotle gleamed with polish and indifference, its base just a little out of true. Just a little. In the old days—no more than a year ago—he had been able to lift that bust straight into the air over his head, never mind the fact that it had to weigh at least forty pounds. Even six months ago he’d been able to get it out and hold it steadily in the air, arms straight to the front of him, for a good five minutes. He was an old man, and a cripple, but he worked at himself. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were massive and solid. From the back, he almost looked young.
From the front, he looked seventy-six, which he was. He drummed impatiently on the arm of his chair. And then, because that hurt, he stopped. His hands were going. The skin on them was slack, and the thickness at the joints was arthritis. Sometimes he woke in the night with pain so bad it reminded him of his accident, all those years ago, when every bone in his body seemed to have been powdered and the powder ground into his nerves.
A lot of things had been reminding him of the accident, lately. Weak or not—and he refused to think of himself as weak, or sick, or old; once you got started in that direction, your life came apart—there was nothing wrong with his mind. Too many things had been odd at Engine House in the last few weeks. It wasn’t Myra inviting the rest of them up for Christmas. He could have accepted that as a gesture to Cordelia, and put up with it—as far as he ever put up with anything. His children were a pack of idiots, and dangerous idiots as well. From the time of the accident, he had known that one or the other of them would always be trying to kill him. But Cordelia loved them, and Cordelia loved Christmas. And Christmas, as far as his wife was concerned, was a family holiday. Robert put his trust in truism: his children weren’t suicidal. They didn’t want to kill themselves, only him. And he’d made sure they knew what precautions he’d taken and just how hard it would be to get out of this house if they did anything stupid. This time.
He wheeled himself to the window and looked out at the drive, clear and wet even though the snow was coming down in sheets. Little things, that was the problem. A pen that moved itself to the living room. A cup of coffee that went from the top of the desk to the top of the mantel. The kind of thing that might be the result of his own forgetfulness, if he were a forgetful man. He wasn’t. Once, he’d had an eidetic memory. That had gone—his own father had warned him it would—but he had been left with much better recall than most people started out with. He could no longer flip through a book he had never seen before and then recite it, word perfect. He could tell anyone who wanted to know exactly what he’d done with his day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, inconsequential act by inconsequential act.
A letter that went from the “finished” pile to the “unfinished” one. A sweater left lying on the love seat in front of the fire transposed to the wing chair near the door. Little things.
He leaned back, grabbed the buzzer he had left on the occasional table near his private bar, and jabbed at the button. He was bored, and when he got bored he got angry. He punched the button four or five times, then looked at the red numbers on the digital clock on his desk. If it took Anne Marie at least five minutes to get here, he’d have a perfect excuse to rip into her. What with having to come from the other end of the house, it often took her a good deal more than five minutes. Fat stupid cunt.
This round, it took her no time at all. Robert had barely checked the exact time—5:17:06—when he heard footsteps in the hall. The door swung open, moving on hinges so well oiled they couldn’t be heard at all, and Anne Marie was there. Fat stupid cunt, Robert thought again. Trussed up like a Town and Country centerpiece in cashmere and tweeds. Vulgarized by one of those crude tin brooches Cordelia had made as a child. The woman was becoming grotesque. She looked gelatinous.
She was also used to his complaints. She shut the door behind her and said, “Are you all right? You sounded frantic.”
“Of course I’m all right. Where’s that man? It’s after five o’clock.”
Anne Marie sighed. “Morgan was supposed to pick him up at five o’clock, Daddy. It’s only twenty past. You can’t get up here from Philadelphia in twenty minutes.”
“When he gets here, I want you to bring him straight to me. I have something I want to talk to him about before dinner.”
Anne Marie nodded, looking bored—which she probably was. She was not only a fat stupid cunt, but a singularly uncurious one.
“Is that all?” she asked him. “If it is, I’m going to get some work done in the kitchen. We do have a guest for dinner.”
Robert rubbed his face, trying the line of the dent where Marshall had nicked him that morning. “How’s your mother?” he asked. “She hasn’t been down to see me once today.”
“She’s been tired,” Anne Marie said. “She’s taken at least two naps. She knows she’s going to want to stay up later than usual tonight. I think she just wants to be in good shape.”
“Will she be in good shape?”
&nbs
p; “She’s better than she’s been in weeks.”
Robert flicked this away, using his hands, as if ideas were physical entities. What Cordelia had been “for weeks” was in a state of collapse. What Anne Marie had just said could mean anything. “What about the rest of them?” he asked. “Have they been in to see her?”
“Haven’t they told you? You’ve had almost every one of them in here for one thing or another today.”
“I didn’t ask you what they told me. I asked you what you know.”
Anne Marie hesitated. “Most of them have,” she said finally. “Emma and Bennis—”
“I didn’t tell you to get most of them to see her. I told you to get all of them. Jesus God, Anne Marie, what do you want? Emma having hysterics at the dinner table when Cordelia drops a glass?”
“Emma has seen her,” Anne Marie said. “She and Bennis went up together right after lunch. And Myra’s been in, and Bobby. It’s Teddy and Chris I can’t seem to find.”
“What do you mean, can’t seem to find?”
“What does it sound like I mean, Daddy? They’ve disappeared someplace. I haven’t had a call from Baylor at the gate, so I suppose they’re still on the property, but I don’t know where. They were down for lunch and then they were gone.”
“Have you looked for them?”
“Of course I’ve looked for them. I went to both their rooms and I checked all the common rooms and I even went out to the garage, about half an hour ago, just in case.”
“What in the name of hell would they be doing down in the garage?”
“I have no idea,” Anne Marie said. “It was just somewhere I hadn’t looked.”
“Assholes,” Robert Hannaford said. “What time’s your mother due to come downstairs?”
