Bleeding Hearts

by Jane Haddam

  “I know you don’t want to go anywhere,” she said.

  “Can you at least tell me why you want me to go somewhere? You don’t seem very happy about the decision.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then what?”

  Lida shook her head. “I can’t help it. It’s all wrong, that’s all. It just doesn’t fit.”

  “What doesn’t fit?”

  “Us.”

  “Why?”

  Lida shook her head again. “Christopher, be reasonable. I’m fifty-eight years old. You’re—You’re—”

  “Less than forty.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lida, for God’s sake, so what? I don’t care. Why do you? We get along together. In bed and out. We more than get along together, for Christ’s sake. What difference does it make how old we both are?”

  Lida looked away. “I live here, Christopher. I live on Cavanaugh Street. Maybe what we’re doing would look unexceptional in San Francisco or New York, but on Cavanaugh Street it will be laughable.”

  “Everybody knows already. No one is laughing.”

  “Christopher, why can’t you be reasonable? I can’t—face people anymore. I can’t stand being so conspicuous. And I am being conspicuous, Christopher, we both are. A hundred roses. A hundred balloons at least—”

  “A hundred and forty-four. It was easier to order a gross.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m sorry if they were the wrong thing to do,” Christopher said. “I was only trying to make you happy.”

  “You did make me happy,” Lida told him. “You do. I wish I could straighten it all out in my own mind. I have liked having you here.”

  “I’ve liked being here.”

  “Sometimes I think I haven’t slept in months and months and months,” Lida said, “but it hasn’t been that long. I’m just so disoriented.”

  “If you’re really going to make me go, I’d better go.”

  Lida got up and went to look out the big window that fronted Cavanaugh Street. It was warmer today than it had been for a while. Donna Moradanyan was up on her own roof, doing something with what looked like a complicated mirror. Bennis Hannaford was walking back from the Ararat alone, dressed in jeans and turtleneck and sweater and no coat. What was it about the Hannafords that they never could stand to wear coats? Lida thought Gregor must still be at the Ararat with Father Tibor or old George. Lida thought she was lying to herself. It wasn’t what people on Cavanaugh Street would think that bothered her. This might look like the old neighborhood, but it really wasn’t anymore. The people had changed. The world had changed. The problem was that she hadn’t changed, at least not enough.

  Years ago, she had been married. Married happily, she had thought. Had she been lying to herself then too? Just three weeks ago she had thought she was happy where she was, as she was. Now she knew that wasn’t true. What was happening to her? And why was it happening to her now?

  “Lida?”

  “Christopher,” she said. “Listen to me. Are you going to take that new job?”

  “The job? Yes, I’m going to take it. I thought we already agreed on that.”

  “If you take the job, you will have more time off in a week or two, won’t you?”

  “I’ll have a couple of weeks off at the beginning of March. Is this supposed to be going someplace?”

  “Yes,” Lida said. “I think so. Did you know I have a house in Boca Raton, in Florida?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I do. I do. I have this house and I go there every year at the beginning of March. Usually I invite someone to go with me, Donna Moradanyan or Hannah or someone. So far this year I have invited no one.”

  “Are you inviting me?”

  Lida turned around to look at him. She loved looking at him. That was the truth. She loved the long lankiness of him, the casual lines, the intelligence in his face. She wrapped her arms around her body and sighed.

  “Christopher, it’s as if we got into a sports car together a couple of weeks ago and we turned the speed up to two hundred miles an hour and we never stopped. I have to think. I haven’t been able to think.”

  “All right.”

  “All right.”

  “I could be there, at my house, by the second of March. If you were there on the third, I could pick you up at the airport. I wouldn’t have to invite Donna Moradanyan or Hannah or anyone at all.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m making you angry,” Lida said. “I knew I was going to make you angry. I don’t understand these things, Christopher. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Christopher said.

  Then he walked over to the window where she was standing and put his arms around her. For a moment it made Lida feel as if this whole scene had been a mistake. Christopher would not walk out the front door. The two of them would go straight upstairs again. Everything would be back at the beginning. But instead of kissing her on the lips he kissed the side of her neck and rocked her back and forth a little.

  “You can pick me up at the airport,” he said, “but I want you to understand one thing right up front.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Women are enough to make any sane man nuts.”

  4

  A FEW HOURS LATER, when Christopher was back at Bennis’s apartment and Gregor Demarkian was doing his best not to read the story about himself in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Donna Moradanyan came down from the roof and let herself through the window to the fourth-floor landing. She was just snaking her head into the warm when a tall figure came up the stairs. He looked startled to see her and Donna felt embarrassed to be seen. She pulled herself all the way inside and shut the window behind her.

  “Hello,” she said. “Excuse me. I was up on the roof.”

  “Was that safe?” Russell Donahue looked doubtful.

  “It’s safe enough, I guess,” Donna said. “I do it all the time. Do you want to come in for a minute? Were you looking for me?”

  “Well,” Russell Donahue said. “Yes. I mean, yes. I was looking for you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Donna had not bothered to lock her apartment door. She never bothered to lock her door except at night, when she went to sleep, and she did it then because of all the scare stories Gregor Demarkian told about sneak thieves and serial killers. She let Russell in to her foyer and then went around to lead him into the living room. Her kitchen was full of scraps and glue and masking tape and she didn’t want him to see the mess in there. Russell walked across the living room and looked out the window. He put his hands behind his back and seemed embarrassed.

  “Well,” he said. “The thing is, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Of course. Do you mean about the case? Is there something about the case that hasn’t been cleared up?”

  “No, no. The case is finished. That’s the point. Now that the case is over, there’s no conflict of interest.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no conflict of interest if I come and visit you,” Russell Donahue said desperately, “and if, you know, if I take you out or something, and of course Tommy too, I didn’t mean to leave Tommy out of it, I really like Tommy, and I don’t have a whole load of free time what with work and I’m going to law school but—the thing is—I mean—would you mind if I came to visit?”

  Donna Moradanyan was finding it very hard to breathe. “No,” she said softly. “No, I wouldn’t mind.”

  “You wouldn’t? Oh. Good. Good. That’s wonderful.”

  “It is?”

  “I’m very impressed by you,” Russell Donahue said earnestly. He was still looking out onto the street. Donna was looking at her shoes.

  “I don’t see what there is to be impressed with,” she said. “My life always feels to me like complete chaos.”

  “It’s Tommy,” Russell Donahue said. “He’s a really great kid. And all that drawing you were showing me the othe
r day.”

  “Oh,” Donna Moradanyan said.

  “So maybe this coming Wednesday we could take Tommy out to see the machine museum. You know the one I mean? They’ve got all these machines and buttons the kid can push to make them work and they whir around and make a lot of noise. I thought Tommy would really like that.”

  “He would,” Donna said. “He’d love it.”

  “Great,” Russell Donahue said. Finally, he turned around. “Well, I’ve got to go into work. I’ll see you on Wednesday. Around two o’clock?”

  “That’s good,” Donna said. “Two o’clock.”

  “Great,” Russell Donahue said again. He went back out into the foyer and looked around. He seemed considerably less nervous than he had been when he walked in. Donna didn’t know if she was less nervous or not. She opened the door for him. “Well,” he said. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday,” Donna repeated.

  “Great,” Russell Donahue said for the third time.

  He went out the door and onto the landing. The door closed behind him but Donna could hear his feet on the stairs, the clatter of shoes, the sound of a hum. She stepped back and stared at the closed door, and then she did something she hadn’t done since she was ten.

  She put her hands behind her back.

  And crossed her fingers.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries

  Prologue

  “America is a place where everybody is supposed to get a second chance.”

  —Housewife,

  USA Today

  1

  IT WAS NINE O’CLOCK on the night of Monday, December 6, and all across the New Haven Green the bums were getting ready for the weather. It was bad weather to have to get ready for. All last week, the new weatherman on WTNH had been predicting a serious winter storm. Now the storm was here, piled up in black clouds that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, hidden in the dark of a moonless night. There were little needles of rain turning to ice coming down everywhere. The three tall Protestant churches that always seemed to be just empty in the daytime had begun to look haunted. Over in the Old College at Yale, all the freshmen with rooms that faced into the quadrangle had their lamps on. On the steps of the old New Haven Library building, a bag lady searched through a bright red Saks Fifth Avenue tote to find a scarf to wrap around her mouth and nose. It was that kind of cold. The bums were in trouble. The ones who had newspapers could pretend they had some kind of protection. The ones who didn’t drank a little harder, if they could afford it, and got themselves a little more dead.

  For Frannie Jay, standing on the corner of Church and Chapel streets with her duffel bag at her feet, the scene was like something out of a science fiction movie Stanley Kubrick might have been making about her life. Stanley Kubrick was dead, but Frannie knew what she meant. She had been born and brought up in New Haven. She had gone to high school at Saint Mary’s out on Orange Street. She had spent every afternoon of her teenage life in a booth at Clark’s Dairy, arguing the existence of God and the merits of affirmative action with a girl who eventually went on to become a nun. Frannie’s mother had said something, the last time they talked, about Saint Mary’s being closed and New Haven being changed—but Frannie hadn’t expected anything like this. Her mother was always talking about how things had changed. She lived out in West Haven now, in a triple-decker house with her sister, Frannie’s Aunt Irene, and neither one of them went for a walk on their own, even just down the block to the candy store.

  The wind was picking up. The rain-turning-to-ice was getting harder. Frannie nudged her duffel bag with the toes of her lace-up boots and stuck her bare hands into the pockets of her pea coat. She was a tall young woman, thin but strong, and she was getting nervous. Her pale blond hair was folded into one long braid and wrapped into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Her ears were cold. This scene was eerie and she didn’t like it. Macy’s and Malley’s both seemed to be closed, and one of them—Frannie was never sure which was which—was boarded up. The little arcade mall that now stood across the street from the Green near the old bus stop looked vacant. There was dirt and garbage everywhere, on the sidewalks, in the gutters. There were almost no cars on the road. What had happened to this place? Every once in a while, somebody seemed to be whispering in her ear. Frannie. could hear the music of words in her ears and the heat of breath on her neck. Somebody was dancing just out of sight behind her. Someone was creeping up to her while she strained her eyes to see farther up the road. It was dark and getting darker. Frannie wanted to grab her duffel bag and run.

  You’re getting spooked, Frannie told herself severely, picking up her duffel bag all the same. There was the sound of a car coming in from somewhere. When Frannie finally caught sight of it, it was the wrong shape and the wrong color and going in the wrong direction.

  A car came by that she did recognize, a silver-gray Mercedes sedan. A boy stuck his head out of the front passenger-seat window as it passed and screamed at her. “Great tits,” he yelled, making Frannie rock back and forth on her heels, but the car didn’t slow up or stop. In a moment, it was gone. Frannie was sure the boy couldn’t have seen her breasts, not under the pea coat and the sweater and the turtleneck she was wearing. Frannie was sure, but she buttoned the top button of her coat anyway, and wound her scarf more tightly around her throat.

  I don’t know enough about New Haven any more to know if I’m safe or not, Frannie thought. That’s the problem. When Frannie was growing up here, New Haven was almost a country place. There was a slum, but nobody ever went there. There was crime, but it was the kind of crime that held very little interest for the media. Once, when Frannie was small, there was a corruption scandal in city government. Once, when she was in high school, a boy killed his girlfriend and left her body near the tracks behind the New Haven Railroad station. It all happened to people she didn’t know, who had nothing to do with her. Frannie and her mother lived in a big old Victorian house on Prospect Street. Frannie went back and forth across town on city buses, always in a crowd of girls in Saint Mary’s uniforms, always dreaming what she would do when she finally Got Out. Getting Out was the only real ambition of Frannie’s adolescent life, and now, back on the corner of Church and Chapel, she couldn’t even say whether she had ever achieved it.

  There were car sounds in the distance again, coming from the right direction this time, Frannie was sure of it. She turned to look up the road, toward Yale. The streetlights seemed too dim to her, straining to shine through filthy glass globes. Something like rain was coming down on her head and stinging her ears. She was colder than she could ever remember being before in her life.

  That’s what comes of spending twenty years in California, Frannie told herself, and then she saw it, the little blue station wagon, stopped for a light two blocks up. Frannie readjusted her duffel bag on her shoulders and leaned out into the road. The lights changed and the little blue station wagon came toward her, moving very slowly. The station wagon’s headlights looked like they were straining to shine through filthy glass globes, too. Maybe it was something in the air. Maybe, instead of being the place to come for good libraries and good museums and interesting theater, New Haven was now the place to come to collect free-floating dirt.

  As the little blue station wagon reached Frannie’s corner, it pulled into the curb and rolled to a stop. Frannie took a deep breath. There was a man in the car, blonder than she was and very young and muscular. He could be the man she was waiting for, or he could be some jerk looking for a little action. Frannie had run into jerks looking for action before.

  The driver’s side window came sliding down. The young man stuck his head out into the cold and asked, “Frances Jakumbowski? Is that you? Frances—”

  “Frannie Jay,” Frannie said. “I don’t use the Jakumbowski. Nobody can spell it.”

  “Right,” the young blond man said.

  He fiddled with something inside the car, and Fra
nnie heard a sharp click. It took her a moment to realize that the car’s doors were now unlocked. Back in California, a woman Frannie worked for had an entire apartment rigged up like that. Push a button near the front door, and every door and window in the place locked up. Frannie got a more comfortable grip on her duffel bag and went around to the car’s passenger side, out into the street. There were no other cars coming anyway. Frannie opened the back door on the passenger side and threw her duffel bag in. Then she opened the front door on that side and got in herself. At the last minute, she realized that the front door had letters painted on it in gold, nearly impossible to see in this bad light.

  “The Fountain of Youth Work-Out,” the gold letters on the door read. Then, when Frannie was safely inside, she found more gold letters on the dashboard. These were printed on a plaque that had been fixed to the glove compartment door. They said, “Bring Your Body to the Fountain of Youth.” Frannie closed her eyes.

  “It’s weird out here,” Frannie told the blond man, as the car pulled out into the street again. “Doesn’t New Haven celebrate Christmas anymore?”

  “Of course New Haven celebrates Christmas,” the blond man said. “It’s weeks before Christmas.”

  “Every other town in America has had its Christmas decorations up since the day after Thanksgiving. Why aren’t there any Christmas decorations here?”

  “There are Christmas decorations here. You just didn’t notice them.”

  Frannie peered through the windshield. There were no Christmas decorations that she could see. There were no people, either.

  “It’s so deserted here,” she said. “When I was growing up, New Haven was always full of people. Even at night. Especially this close to Christmas.”

  “When you were growing up here, there probably wasn’t this much crime. I come from Massachusetts myself. I hate this place. I want to go out to California, but there never seems to be a place. Not with Fountain of Youth. Maybe I should just take off.”

  “Maybe you should.”