by Jane Haddam
She got up to get more coffee from the coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, and that was when she saw him. He was thinking that he hadn’t used that coffeemaker since she’d been gone because it was the complicated one, and he didn’t know how. He was suddenly enormously relieved that he had never brought Alison back to this apartment.
She stopped in midstep and stood back. “Well,” she said, “look who’s home.”
“Is Gregor there?” Donna asked. “Why doesn’t he say something? Why doesn’t he come in here?”
These were both good questions. Gregor made his legs move. “I just got here,” he said. “I’ve just hung up my coat.”
He was not looking at Bennis, but he was very aware that Bennis was looking at him. He walked into the kitchen and found Donna as big as a house and looking as if she was going to demand to go to the hospital at any moment, sitting at the little table in the nook. This was an illusion. It was at least five or six weeks until she was due. He thought he ought to do something about Bennis. He ought to kiss her on the cheek or shake her hand or something.
Of course, Bennis wasn’t doing anything either. She was just standing in the middle of the floor with her coffee mug in one hand. And she was staring at him, Gregor reminded himself. She really was doing that.
“Well,” Gregor said.
“Do you want me to get you some coffee?” Bennis said. “You haven’t used the percolator in living memory, as far as I can tell. It was all cleaned out and dry when I got here.”
“Coffee would be nice,” Gregor said. Then he made his legs move again. He went to the breakfast table and sat down across from Donna. “I’ve been making do with coffee bags,” he said. He thought he sounded like a zombie. He knew he didn’t sound like a play by Noel Coward or Bernard Shaw, where no matter how uncomfortable the situation everybody would be witty and bubbling with double entendres.
Bennis opened the cabinet above the percolator and got out another mug.
“So,” Donna said, sounding so bright she could have lit up a room, “Bennis and I have been talking—about her vacation.”
“Is that what you’ve been on?” Gregor asked. “A vacation?”
“Sort of,” Bennis said.
“She saw Liz and Jimmy in Montego Bay,” Donna said. “And she went to Italy for a while. I’d like to go to Italy. Russ and I talk about it a lot, but he’s always so busy. And now I can’t even get on a plane safely. You’d think they’d have figured a way around that by now, wouldn’t you? I mean, a way for pregnant women to get on a plane safely.”
Bennis filled both of the coffee mugs with coffee. She came to the breakfast table and put them both down. Then she went back to the other side of the kitchen and got milk out of the refrigerator.
“Don’t bother with the milk,” Gregor said. “It’s gone bad.”
“It’s gone bad and you haven’t thrown it out?” Bennis said.
“I was getting around to it.”
Bennis took the top off the milk, smelled the opening, and winced. Then she poured the milk down the sink. It would have gone in one long stream, but there were lumps in it. Gregor thought he remembered the sell-by date being a week and a half ago at least.
“So,” Bennis said, running tap water into the milk bottle so that she could recycle it, “I’ve been reading about you. You got to meet the great Jig Tyler.”
“He’s a son of a bitch,” Gregor said. “I think it’s required of people with IQs above two hundred.”
“He’s got two Nobel Prizes,” Bennis said. “There aren’t many people who have managed that, and most of the ones who have have minor seconds, like the Peace Prize. I’m impressed.”
“He’s on another case now,” Donna said. Her brightness was now so desperate, Gregor could practically see it carrying a sign that said “WILL WORK FOR FOOD.” “Russ brought him in on it. This really addled old man has been arrested as the Plate Glass Killer, and he confessed; so of course the police think he really did it, but Russ doesn’t. Lots of people make false confessions, did you know that? I didn’t. I can’t imagine why anybody would ever do that ever, but Russ says they do, all the time.”
Bennis put a cup down in front of Gregor on the table. Then she took a seat herself. This was an exercise in triangulation, Gregor thought. Then he wished Tibor was here, too, or maybe half of Cavanaugh Street. Maybe they could hold a party with the whole neighborhood and have appetizers on trays from a caterer and too much wine. That wouldn’t work. The women would be insulted. They’d want to know why he’d hired a caterer instead of just asking them to help.
“There’s no food in the refrigerator,” Bennis said. “There isn’t even anything Lida or Hannah brought over for you. Are you on some kind of diet?”
“I’m never on a diet,” Gregor said.
“Gregor doesn’t need to be on a diet,” Donna said. “I mean, really. I know you fuss all the time about his health, but he isn’t even really overweight. I mean, it’s just his build. He’s broad in the shoulders like all the men around here are. It’s some kind of Armenian trait.”
“I’ve been reading about the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennis said. “It sounds like an interesting case. Maybe John Jackman will win his election and become mayor and appoint you to be commissioner of police.”
“I don’t want to be commissioner of police,” Gregor said, “especially not if John is mayor.”
“Isn’t it odd the way nobody ever pays attention to local politics?” Donna said. “I mean, of course, some people do, but most people don’t; and that really doesn’t make any sense. Local politics matter a lot more than national politics do, at least to most of us. It matters to everybody’s day-to-day lives. But they won’t come out for the election, and they will come out to vote for president. Does that make sense to you?”
Gregor didn’t think Donna was making sense even to herself at the moment, but he didn’t like to say so. Bennis had a spoon. Gregor didn’t know what for. She always took her coffee black.
“Oh,” Donna said, “listen. I’d better go. Linda’s been looking after Tommy all afternoon, and she needs a break. And you two probably have a lot to talk about. I mean, I know that Russ and I always have a lot to talk about when he’s been away on a business trip. And I really hate it, too. It gets so lonely. I’ll just, you know, get along home for now and see if there’s been any sign of Russ.”
“I’ll get—” Gregor started.
“No, no,” Donna brushed him away. She had hauled herself to her feet. She was finding it hard to move. “I’m fine,” she said desperately. “Really fine. I’m just going to run over now and see that everything is all right. I’m so glad you’re back, Bennis, really, and I’m sure Gregor is too. Everybody at the Ararat missed you.”
“You’re absolutely sure you don’t need any help,” Bennis said.
“Absolutely,” Donna said. She had managed to get herself to her feet and was on her way to the door. “I’m just fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you tomorrow. At breakfast. If you have breakfast. If you aren’t jet-lagged. You know what I mean.”
Donna was still talking when she made it to the foyer and the front door, still talking as she went out into the hall. Then the door closed, and the apartment was unnaturally, irrevocably silent.
Bennis and Gregor looked at each other across the breakfast table. Then both of them sighed at once.
3
It was, Gregor was sure, the single most uncomfortable moment of his life. In one way or the other, all his moments with Bennis were uncomfortable, but this was—there was no word for what this was. He would have had an easier time dealing with a situation where his own mother found a condom in his wallet. Bennis was on one side of the table. He was on the other side. The coffee tasted wrong.
“Well,” he said.
Bennis looked at the ceiling. “It was true,” she said, “what I told Donna. If you overheard it, I really wasn’t doing anything.”
Gregor could have denied that he’d heard
her talking to Donna, but he didn’t see the point. “You were doing one thing, you were not being here,” he said.
“True enough.”
“And you don’t think that requires an explanation?”
“It’s just that I don’t have an explanation,” she said. “I just wanted not to be here.”
“Away from me.”
“Not really. Or not principally, which might be the better point.”
“You wanted to be away from Donna, and Lida, and Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor said.
“Not really,” Bennis said again. She wasn’t looking at the ceiling again. She was looking at her hands. “In the beginning I thought it was because I wanted to go back to smoking. And I couldn’t do that here. I couldn’t do that with you. You’d already made that clear.”
“Did you go back to smoking?”
“No. I tried a cigarette once in Florence, and I gagged on it. So I didn’t do that again.”
“But you still stayed away. Or was that at the end, last week or something like that?”
“No, it was at the beginning,” Bennis said. “I don’t know. It just turned out that I didn’t want it.”
“What did you want? What do you want? Do you honestly think that you wouldn’t have been able to tell me that you wanted to go off by yourself for a while—”
“But I did tell you.”
“I mean really tell me,” Gregor said. “Give me some idea of where you were. Drop a postcard every once in a while. Call. Something.”
“I did call, once,” Bennis said. “I called your cell phone.”
“I must have had it off.”
“No,” Bennis said. “You had it on. I called and you picked up, and then I felt struck stone dumb and I just didn’t say anything. I did try not to be a heavy breather.”
Gregor stood up. He had to stand up, or he was going to break the table. The coffeemaker was still sitting on the counter, shooting little jets of coffee into its glass bubble. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?” he said. “You take off for months, for nearly a year. You don’t tell anybody where you’re going or why. You don’t contact anybody in all the time you’re away. You disappear like the victim in a kidnaping case. And when you come back and I ask you why you went, you say you don’t know except that maybe you wanted a cigarette, except that it turns out that wasn’t what you wanted either. And you found that out in the first week or so, but you still didn’t come back.”
“I didn’t finish my book either, if it’s any consolation,” Bennis said. “I never miss deadlines, but I just couldn’t finish it. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even started it. Maybe I’m past the point of caring about Zed and Zedalia. Did you ever wonder why I started all the names with the letter Z? I keep telling myself I must have had a reason at the time, but I can’t remember one. I don’t seem to have reasons for anything lately.”
Gregor had the coffeepot in his hand. He didn’t need coffee. His cup was sitting on the table, mostly full. He put the coffeepot down again. He was sweating. She should have been the one who was sweating, but instead it was him.
“You have to understand,” he said, so carefully he felt as if he were emitting separate syllables protectively surrounded by air, “just how insane this all sounds. Or how insane it sounds to me. I don’t know. Maybe you’ve done this before, with other people, at other times in your life—”
“No, I haven’t,” Bennis said. “I’ve left people behind in my life before, but I’ve never gone away and come back.”
“I’m saying I’m not being unreasonable to think you should have talked to me about it before you went,” Gregor said. “Or if you really couldn’t have done that, then you should have sent those postcards, just so that I knew where you were and that you were at least thinking about coming back.”
“But I wasn’t,” Bennis said. “I suppose I must have been on some unconscious level because I left so many things here, but I wasn’t intending to—when I went.”
“I see,” Gregor said.
“I just couldn’t stay away,” Bennis said. “And if that’s not a good enough explanation for you, I don’t know what would be because I don’t have an explanation. I left, and I came back because I had to come back; and now I’m here to stay, one way or another. In your apartment or mine. Or both. Except that if it’s going to be your apartment, then I need this relationship to change just a little. I really need it.”
“So you did go because there was something wrong,” Gregor said, “something wrong between us.”
“No,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong between us. That was the problem.”
Gregor took a deep breath. He was still standing. He didn’t think he could make his knees bend to sit down. She was the one who should be hyperventilating. Why was he the one who was actually doing it?
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You not only took off and didn’t make contact for nearly a year, but you did it because there was nothing wrong with this relationship. Everything was fine. Everything was great. Everything was coming up roses. And that made you feel that you had to spend months reading Dante in Florence.”
“You heard a lot of that conversation,” Bennis said.
“I should have had you wired. Maybe I would have heard enough of it so that you’d start making sense.”
“I really can’t explain it to you, Gregor. It would sound stupid. It even sounds stupid when I try to explain it to myself.”
“You can’t do this to people,” Gregor said. “You can’t walk out on a relationship you’ve had for years—”
“But I didn’t walk out,” Bennis said quickly. “I was careful not to do that. I said I’d be back.”
“You can’t just walk out on a relationship you’ve had for years, and then come back and say you did it because everything was okay and now you’re back. There are people involved in this, Bennis, and not just me. People have obligations to each other. Friendships mean obligations. Relationships mean obligations. There are rules to this game. You have to know that.”
“I do know that,” Bennis said. “It’s just that I’m me. And things get complicated with me. That really is all. I just needed, I don’t know how to explain it, I needed to get this feeling to go away—”
“What feeling?”
“This feeling that the world was going to end any minute,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong, so I was always waiting for something to go wrong because something always does. It always has. We’d have a day together and things would be perfect, we’d be easy and at home with each other, you wouldn’t annoy me even a little bit, I’d be happy. And all the time the back of my mind would be on full alert, watching for whatever it was that was going to happen to ruin everything. And it never happened. And I couldn’t stand the suspense anymore. So I went away.”
“And that feeling’s gone? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Oh, no,” Bennis said. “It’s not gone at all. Except now, you know, there’s this part, so maybe something will be wrong because I made it wrong by going away. No, the thing is, I finally figured it out. I know what we have to do—to make it go away.”
Somewhere in the house there was a noise. Somebody had come in the front door, into the vestibule. Either Grace was home or somebody had a key. There were footsteps on the stairs, running. They were too heavy to belong to Grace.
“Bennis,” Gregor said, “if you try to tell me that we have to burn chicken entrails in an alley, or go to a counselor, I will personally take your head off.”
“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that,” Bennis said. “We have to get married.”
“What?” Gregor said.
There was a long moment when the world seemed to be silent, but it wasn’t really. There were those footsteps, and they had stopped on the landing right outside Gregor’s door. He was still searching for words—hell, he was still searching for a way around the shock—when the pounding on his door started and Russ Donahue was shouting. “Gregor. Gregor. O
pen up. Rob Benedetti called, and it’s an emergency.”
SEVEN
1
It was ten o’clock, and Elizabeth Woodville thought she would never get through the one more hour she would have to in order to feel she had the right to allow herself to go to bed. Margaret was somewhere in the house, muttering to herself and humming to herself in turn. Elizabeth could make out the song but not the muttering, but she understood the muttering better. Margaret would have her boxes out, all those keepsakes and odds and ends she kept of a childhood and adolescence Elizabeth had never been able to see as anything more than regrettable. She’d lay out the engraved invitations from the holiday subscription dances, the pressed flowers she’d kept from the cor-sages she’d been given for balls and college proms, the little favors she’d picked up at dinners during her season—and then what? That was what Elizabeth wanted to know. What good did it do to look over and over these things? Why would anybody in her right mind keep them? It was as if Margaret’s life had stopped dead on her wedding day, never to be started up again. Why she wanted to hum “Istanbul” while she was thinking about that, Elizabeth would never know.
What Elizabeth was thinking about was guilt. There was a lot of guilt in the world, deserved and undeserved. She understood why Henry’s lawyer wanted to be sure Henry was not sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Or crimes, plural, in this instance. Elizabeth had been thinking for hours now about Henry and the Plate Glass Killings. She had asked herself, honestly, whether she could imagine Henry as a serial killer, and the simple fact was that she could. Henry put on a good front about being an alcoholic and a bum, but that was not what was true about him. Margaret believed it because Margaret wanted to. It gave her an explanation for Henry’s behavior that she could live with. People outside believed it because they had no reason not to. They didn’t know Henry in any way that made any difference, and there were a lot of alcoholic bums in the world.
