by Jane Haddam
“What what was?”
“What you saw,” Teddy said patiently. “The something strange.”
“Oh. That. Well, it wasn’t something I saw, exactly. It was something I didn’t see. Something that was in the study last night when we were all looking at—at Daddy’s body, and then it wasn’t in there today.”
“Maybe the police took it.”
“Maybe. But I don’t see why. It wasn’t anything personal.”
“You shouldn’t have been in the study today anyway. That Jackman person practically put a curse on the place to keep us out of there.”
“Well, he put a seal on it, and that’s all that matters.” She put her empty glass on the bar. “I’m going upstairs. Open my presents if you want. I can’t bear to see the horrors they’ve perpetrated on me this year.”
She swished through the doors to the foyer and slammed them behind her.
Teddy looked into his third box and found a pair of ear muffs, bright orange. He checked the tag and found, “From Anne Marie.”
3
Up on the second floor, Emma Hannaford walked into her bedroom, shut the door behind her, and locked it. Her mouth was as dry as sand. Her heart felt like a thin-skinned balloon being attacked by a sledgehammer. She kept telling herself to hurry, because Bennis was down in the kitchen and thought she’d just gone to the bathroom and would expect her back any minute. It was one of those internal lectures that had no practical effect whatsoever.
She reached under her sweater and pulled out the small cardboard accordion folder she’d taken off her father’s desk. It looked perfectly innocent, there was nothing in it but a lot of newspaper clippings about charity balls and fund drives, but it felt like a snake in her hands.
She put it down on the bed.
Daddy was dead. Dead, dead, dead. And unlike the rest of them, she had never hated him, not even for a minute.
She picked the folder up again and shoved it between her mattress and her boxspring. It caught on something sharp she couldn’t see.
With any luck, it would be ripped to shreds.
FOUR
1
ON THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Gregor Demarkian bought Father Tibor a very expensive lunch at a restaurant called Leitmotif in Liberty Square. The lunch was a kind of apology. Gregor hadn’t been at church on Christmas morning, and he hadn’t been at Lida Arkmanian’s in the afternoon. After all the trouble these people had gone to provide him with a real Christmas, he hadn’t been anywhere on Cavanaugh Street. Donna Moradanyan had been standing at her front windows when he left the building at six o’clock. His upstairs neighbor told Tibor and Lida he hadn’t been stuck on the Main Line overnight, and that he hadn’t—as yet—killed himself. For the rest of the day, the three of them worried. Gregor was a missing person. He could have been smoke.
Where he had gone, of course, was out to the cemetery where his mother and Elizabeth were buried. He’d done that every Christmas of his life since his mother had died, and for the last two since Elizabeth had died, and it seemed perfectly natural to him. It even seemed natural that he hadn’t visited Cavanaugh Street when he was in town. He bought flowers three or four days ahead of time and put them in the refrigerator. He knew from experience that the closer you got to Christmas, the fewer flowers there were to buy. By Christmas Eve, all the good ones had disappeared from the shops, leaving nothing but wilted poinsettias and poisonous mistletoe. His mother had always loved carnations. Elizabeth had always wanted roses. He was good and got them early.
At the cemetery, he made hollows in the snow next to the headstones and put the flowers in, knowing they would keep longer in the cold than they would have in the summer. Then he looked around and wondered why he bothered with this at all. Gregor knew most people considered cemeteries morbid, but it was an attitude he’d never understood. The places were so damn impersonal. All they said to him was the obvious—that we die, that we have always died, that we are always going to die. Mute testimony to the course of human destiny, a friend of his had called it—and been dead drunk at the time, if Gregor remembered correctly. Maybe you had to get dead drunk if you spent your life worrying about the course of human destiny.
Gregor had spent his worrying about Elizabeth, and his mother, and the few people who’d been either close to him or important to him because of his job. Cemeteries were blank places for him. He never felt less close to Elizabeth than when he was putting flowers on her grave. He never remembered his mother so badly as when he was staring at her name etched into the granite of her tombstone. Here were the two people who had been most central to his life, the two he heard and saw and smelled better than anyone living, and when he came out to play his conventional tribute to them he lost them completely.
After a while—it was two hours, let’s be honest here—he realized he was cold. He walked back to the cemetery gate and south along the sidewalk that hugged its outer wall. It was eight-thirty on Christmas morning. The sky was dark. The snow was going to start falling again any minute. The streets were deserted. He started to think he was going to have to make it back to Cavanaugh Street on foot.
Ten minutes later, he got smart and found a bus stop. Ten minutes after that, he got smarter and realized he couldn’t go back to Cavanaugh Street. He wasn’t half as depressed as they thought he was—although Cordelia Day Hannaford had thrown him; that was something he didn’t want to think about—but he wasn’t ready to spend the day with somebody else’s children. What he really wanted to do was to be by himself in his apartment. Barring that, he wanted to hole up in the main branch of the public library. His apartment was across the street from Lida Arkmanian’s town house and the library was closed.
He got off the bus in central Philadelphia and went looking for a newsstand. Eleven hours later—when he knew Lida’s family would have gone back to Bucks County and Radnor and Chestnut Hill—he found a cab and went back to Cavanaugh Street. He felt like a total, unregenerate fool. His insides were collapsing from the assault of gallons of bad coffee. His eyes hurt from hours of trying to read in the bad lights of a dozen second-rate diners. His head was so full of the Hannaford murder, he thought it was going to split open. If he hadn’t been depressed when he left his apartment in the morning, he was most surely depressed now.
For the most part, he was depressed because it had finally hit him that the Hannaford murder was a local sensation. At least. For all he knew, the news would hit the New York Post and the Boston Globe within hours, and go from there to network television. There would be no way to escape it. Leaving Engine House, he had cooled his annoyance at being told nothing about what had happened—beyond what he had been able to see for himself—by telling himself he was just going to walk away from it. He was going to go back to his apartment, involve himself in the not-so-mysterious disappearance of Donna Moradanyan’s boyfriend, and pretend the Hannafords had never existed. With the headline on the Philadelphia Star reading SOCIETY KILLER STRIKES BRYN MAWR, he had a feeling that wasn’t going to work.
He got out of the cab, overtipped the driver, let himself into his building, and climbed the stairs to his apartment. The building smelled of food. He wondered what Cordelia Hannaford had done with her day. Then he told himself he was crazy, and on his way to getting crazier. The whole damn thing bothered him. It was also none of his business. He had to let it go.
He was standing in the middle of his bedroom when the phone rang, and he picked it up, and it was Tibor. He was thinking about Robert Hannaford’s suitcase full of $100 bills and the very short list of uses it might have had.
Which was when he decided to invite Father Tibor to lunch.
There was an elegance to that solution Elizabeth would have appreciated.
2
There were at least five people in Leitmotif stoked to the gills on dope, including the headwaiter. Once, that would have upset Gregor endlessly. Now, he barely noticed it. He was much too interested in the reactions of one Father Tibor Kasparian. Tibor had lived long s
tretches of his life in the great capitals of Europe, but this was the first time he would ever eat in a restaurant where the bill came to more than the price of the cab fare home.
The idea of a restaurant away from Cavanaugh Street had been Tibor’s. He wanted to discuss Donna Moradanyan’s problem, and it was better to do that as far from the interested parties as possible. In this case, the interested parties included every woman over sixty in the neighborhood. They knew Donna was pregnant. They knew the father had abandoned her. They were on the warpath—against the boy. Gregor wondered how the younger woman felt. The older ones had never heard of “options,” and wouldn’t consider “just having the baby and keeping it” as a solution that made any sense. The younger ones all seemed to be in law school.
Tibor frowned at the headwaiter’s back all the way to their table, but paid no attention at all to the homosexual couple holding hands in the corner booth. He was wearing his newest, brightest, cleanest day robes for the occasion, marking himself as a priest, but when the headwaiter called him “Father” he frowned all the harder. Gregor decided not to say anything about what Tibor probably didn’t know. This was a heavily Roman Catholic city. The headwaiter thought Tibor was a monsignor.
The headwaiter seated them, made a lot of cooing noises in bad French, and disappeared. He was replaced by an ordinary waiter, who passed out a pair of oversize menus and disappeared, too. Then the wine steward came up, and Gregor ordered a bottle of chardonnay, mostly for the hell of it. He had the impression that Tibor didn’t drink much.
Leitmotif was one of those restaurants that had been meticulously coordinated. The linen tablecloths were pink. The linen napkins were pink. The mirrors that lined three of the four walls were tinted with pink. Even the Christmas tree was pink. Tibor checked this all out very carefully, then stared for a moment at the gigantic fern hanging from a ceramic planter above his head, as if he were afraid it was going to fall on him. Then he shook his head.
“That waiter,” he said. Gregor knew he meant the headwaiter. “That waiter is another one. I can’t understand it. Sometimes I think people are very, very stupid.”
“People are often very, very stupid,” Gregor said.
Tibor waved this away. “You say that like that because you’ve spent so much of your life dealing with criminals. And criminals are the stupidest people alive. Thank the good Lord God. But Gregor, I spend my life with normal people. And I’m telling you, they’re often stupider than the criminals.”
“Are you back on Donna Moradanyan already?”
“No, no,” Tibor said. “That wasn’t stupid. That was only natural.”
“Right.”
“A young girl in love and using a little bad judgment, that is an understandable thing. If the mother keeps her head, there doesn’t need to be a tragedy. But drugs, Gregor. Anybody with any sense can see what happens with drugs. What do these people think they’re doing?”
“Maybe they don’t think.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tibor said. “Thinking is more natural to human beings than sex.”
Fortunately, at that moment the wine steward came back with the chardonnay. Gregor didn’t know what he would have done with that last comment—or with a discussion about drugs, either. It got a little complicated, trying to explain that he had ended up investigating serial murders because he hadn’t wanted to end up investigating drugs. Most Americans seemed to think the Great Drug War was the most exciting, most noble, most glorious crusade the Republic had ever engaged in. Witness all the time they spent watching movies about it, reading novels about it, even setting up educational programs to combat it. Maybe only law enforcement officers realized how truly boring it all was. To Gregor’s mind, a thirty-year-old lawyer getting himself hooked on cocaine wasn’t “not thinking.” He was brain dead.
The wine steward wanted to go through the whole elaborate ritual of smelling and tasting. Gregor let him do it, to buy time, even though he had the distinct feeling that neither one of them knew what he was doing. When the charade had been played out to its inevitable conclusion—polite murmurs of appreciation all around—the wine steward filled both glasses on the table halfway up and left.
Gregor picked up the bottle and topped Tibor off. “So,” he said, “Donna Moradanyan.”
“Donna Moradanyan,” Tibor agreed.
“Do you mind if I tell you something? I haven’t talked to Donna yet, and the situation may be very different after I do, but at the moment, I’m very confused about this.”
Tibor was surprised. “Confused? What’s there to be confused about? The girl’s pregnant.”
“Yes, Tibor, I know.”
“And the boy ran,” Tibor said. “Panic. Is that unusual, in your experience?”
“Not at all. It isn’t Donna and her boy I’m thinking of. It’s Cavanaugh Street.”
Tibor had already finished half his wine. Now he finished the other half and reached for the bottle. “Are you going to give me one of those lectures like Lida’s daughter does? About time warps? Because if you are—”
“No, no,” Gregor smiled. “Look. When I was with the Bureau, I had a young woman working under me, as a technician. This is the mid-sixties. She was a very smart woman, and there wasn’t much chance of promotion for women in those days, so she quit and went to graduate school. She got a doctorate in sociology and wrote a book. Which I read. I wouldn’t have read it, but I knew her—”
“I know how that is,” Tibor said. “I always read books when I’ve met the people who wrote them. Sometimes this means I read very bad books.”
“Well, this wasn’t a very bad book. It was a little dry, but it was her dissertation. I’d guess that was normal. It was a book about community responses to illegitimate pregnancies. Maybe it was ‘cultural’ responses. Whatever. According to this woman, it’s the pregnant girl who gets ostracized, not the boy. And now I have a lot of old women telling me they want to—”
“Ah,” Tibor said.
“You can’t just say ‘ah,’ Tibor. You have to elaborate.”
Tibor nodded slowly. “Were you born here? In the United States?”
“In the United States, in Philadelphia, and about half a block from here. There used to be a hospital in this neighborhood called Philadelphia Lying-in.”
“You had no sisters?”
“I had one brother. Much older. He died fighting at Anjou.”
“That explains it, then,” Tibor said. “The trouble with you, Gregor, is that you’re a middle-class man. A middle-class American man.”
“By the criteria you’re using, Lida Arkmanian is a middle-class American woman.”
“Mothers keep daughters closer to them than they keep sons,” Tibor said. “Or they used to. The women of Lida’s generation on Cavanaugh Street were brought up by peasant women. The very old women there are peasant women.”
“So?”
“So, peasants don’t have the same sort of attitude to these things the middle and upper classes have. The initial reaction of these women to a pregnant and unmarried daughter will be negative, of course, but after the anger is out they’ll get very practical. It’s the practical that matters. Would you say Donna Moradanyan was a nice girl?”
“She’s a very nice girl.”
“Yes,” Tibor said, “nice, and not very bright. No—drive? Ambition is what I mean. She’s respectful of older people. She comes to church. She doesn’t swear. She likes going to school, but she doesn’t really know what she’s doing there, and she doesn’t really care. If she didn’t think people would laugh at her—people like Lida’s daughter Karen—she’d probably tell you what she wants to do with her life is be a wife and mother.”
“And Cavanaugh Street likes that,” Gregor said.
“Well, Cavanaugh Street likes Karen Arkmanian, too. Brilliant. Ambitious. Successful. That’s fine. What wouldn’t be fine would be a lot of men. Do you think Donna Moradanyan has known a lot of men?”
“I still can’t get used to the
fact that she’s known one.”
“Exactly. So here we have a very nice Armenian-American girl, a sweet girl, a vulnerable girl, a girl who is twenty-one but still a child. Karen Arkmanian is the same age. You’d never call her a girl. Do you see what I mean?”
“Maybe.”
“Of course you do,” Tibor said. “The old women on Cavanaugh Street admire Karen Arkmanian. They’re proud of her. They don’t understand her. But Donna Moradanyan. Here she is, what you would call old-fashioned, and one morning she wakes up with a very old-fashioned problem. And the boy ran away, Gregor. There is that.”
“Meaning that by running away he makes himself the villain?”
“Exactly. But right now what we have here is practicality. When a peasant girl gets pregnant, her mother makes sure she also gets married. That solves everything. Then, soon, there is a grandchild, and everybody’s happy.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Gregor said drily.
Tibor wagged his finger. “Now, now. You are talking like an American. Use your imagination, Gregor.”
Gregor used his hands, to pick up the wine bottle and refill both their glasses. The wine was nearly gone. They were both getting pleasantly tipsy in the middle of the afternoon. Gregor put the bottle back in its bucket—chardonnay was a room-temperature wine, but at Leitmotif it came in a bucket anyway—and watched Tibor light a Marlboro cigarette. In deference to American prejudices about smoking, he’d left his Egyptian specials at home.
“Have you talked to Donna Moradanyan about this?” he asked Tibor. “Does she want this boy of hers found?”
Tibor sighed. “I have talked to Donna Moradanyan, yes. She doesn’t want her mother to know-—but her mother already knows, because Lida Arkmanian told her.”
“Lida Arkmanian would,” Gregor said.
“Also, she does not want to have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption. Both of which are very good decisions, because to have decided the other way in either case would have made her mother crazy. And Donna is very close to her mother. Do you see what I mean?”
