by Jane Haddam
“What happened after six months?”
“That depends on who you want to believe,” Howard said. “If you believe Charlene and Stew—that’s the father—Chester and Darvelle showed up at the Morton house one Sunday afternoon with Darvelle visibly pregnant, saying they were having a baby and they were going to get married. If you believe Darvelle, she’s never been pregnant and the only thing they went to the Morton house for was to tell the parents they were getting married, because Chester didn’t just want to spring it on them. They were going down to elope to Vegas. According to Darvelle.”
Gregor took a long sip of coffee. “This was your case? When there got to be a case? You were the detective who investigated it?”
“That’s right,” Howard said. “I was a detective then. My partner was Marianne Glew. Anyway, there wasn’t much of a case for weeks. Because there isn’t a case in cases like this, do you know what I mean?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“Chester and Darvelle go over to the Mortons’ house for whatever reason it was, take your pick. They leave. Chester drops Darvelle back at her place and goes home—that wasn’t the house then, it was a place over on the East side of town. He drops her home, he wanders around being normal for a while. Then he just disappears into thin air. Except, you know what missing persons are. Charlene tried to call him the next day and didn’t get an answer, and that’s when she started hounding the department about his being murdered and Darvelle murdering him. But there wasn’t any body. There wasn’t any anything, at that point.”
“So you made her wait—what? Three days? Two weeks? What’s the standard?”
“Two weeks,” Howard said. “When nobody had seen or heard from him in two weeks, we got a search warrant to look through his trailer. I thought we’d find the place emptied out and that would be the end of it. But we didn’t. There were all of Chester’s clothes and things, everything but his yellow backpack. Everything else was there. We talked to the teacher of the one course he was still taking. That’s Charlene’s other thing. She makes them all go to school. Anyway, the teacher, this Penny London woman, hadn’t heard from him. We asked Darvelle and she let us in to search her place without a fuss. Nothing there, either, except for a spare toothbrush and set of shaving things.”
“And that was it? It was that clean?”
“Not quite,” Howard said. “There was a little counter in the kitchen, and on the counter was a little snaking line of dried blood. And you don’t have to ask. We had it tested. It wasn’t Chester’s blood, and it wasn’t Darvelle’s. And a couple of years ago, with Charlene going nuts the way she was, we had it sent to DNA analysis. It’s not only not Chester’s, it’s not anybody in any way blood related to the Morton family or to Darvelle. But it’s human blood.”
“And what about Vegas? If they were going to elope, there might have been something—reservations, plane tickets—”
“We checked. There were no reservations and no plane tickets. Chester was gone. Just like that. Nobody knew where. But nobody thought he’d been murdered, either, no matter what Charlene said. We had no reason to think he was murdered.”
“Not even all the clothes and things left in the trailer?”
“No,” Howard said. “You must know how missing persons cases go. Stuff like that happens all the time. And we were right, weren’t we? Chester hadn’t been murdered. He was alive and out there somewhere. He just didn’t want to be found. Until now, I guess. I don’t know what happened to make him come back. He just did.”
“Did you check on the girl’s pregnancy?”
“No. Let’s face it. She didn’t have to give us confidential medical records if she didn’t want to, and there isn’t a court in the state of New York that would have given an order to have her tested. Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Maybe we’ll never know. I will say I never saw her sticking out so that it was obvious, and I used to see her around quite a lot. But that may be perception. I wasn’t looking for it. Charlene was.”
Gregor reached out to pick up the stack of photographs Howard Androcoelho had laid out on the table. He wanted to see them all, not just the two Howard had shown him to start. The photograph on top of the stack was of what looked like a very messy, incredibly tiny living room, its two pieces of furniture both oddly orange colored. Gregor wondered if the people who rented the trailers brought their own furniture, or if furniture was part of what they paid for.
“Gregor?” old George Tekemanian said, very softly, into Gregor’s ear.
Gregor looked up. Old George was standing right next to the table, swaying a little on his feet, the way he sometimes did these days when he stood up too long. It took Gregor another minute to realize that old George was no longer completely dead white. He was tinged with just a little blue.
“Gregor, I apologize,” old George said. “But I’m afraid I can’t help it.”
Then the old man collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
3
It was the same hospital Tibor was in when he got mugged—or was it Bennis? Gregor found it hard to remember the exact sequence of anything as they pushed through the corridors, trying to follow the gurney to wherever it was it was going in the bowels of the hospital. An ambulance had taken old George, thankfully not dead, still not conscious. Bennis, Gregor, and Tibor had taken a cab, and Bennis had spent the entire drive getting in touch with Martin and Angela. She got Angela first. Angela had one of those jobs the wives of successful men often had, where she worked part time and took care of the children part time, even though the children were now old enough to take care of themselves. Martin had the kind of job where putting in ninety hours a week was considered slacking off. It was in banking, or law, or something. Gregor couldn’t remember that, either.
At the hospital, they had to turn off their cell phones. For the first time, Gregor felt lost without the thing, cut off from the entire world. The hospital was oddly quiet. He had expected noise and things, bureaucrats, something. Instead, they were taken directly into the room where old George was hooked up to tubes and monitors and were asked to sit down.
“The doctor will be with you in a moment,” the nurse said.
Then she disappeared. Gregor didn’t like modern nurse’s uniforms. He much preferred the old-fashioned white ones that were always dresses. He also preferred the caps with their little black ribbons. His brain was making absolutely no sense at all.
Bennis was standing over old George’s bed. “It’s really odd,” she said. “He doesn’t look bad. He looks better than he did this morning.”
“I didn’t even see you come into the Ararat,” Gregor said.
“I told you Donna and I were having breakfast. He looked blue in the Ararat. Now he just looks like he’s sleeping.”
“We need to get Martin and Angela here,” Gregor said. “We need to get Martin. He’s got old George’s health proxy. What does he do in that job of his? Is he going to be able to leave in the middle of the day?”
“I’ve gotten in touch with Martin and Angela,” Bennis said, “and I gave Martin’s number to the nurse. She’ll give it to the doctor. They’ll be able to get in touch with him if they need to. I’m just hoping they need to.”
“Why?” Gregor said.
“Because if they don’t,” Bennis said, “there’s no hope.”
Tibor was sitting in a small folding chair in the corner. He looked up at them and shook his head.
“It’s two weeks from Friday,” he said.
“What?” Bennis and Gregor asked, almost simultaneously.
“His birthday,” Tibor said. He looked as bad as Gregor had ever seen him look, and Gregor had seen him in the hospital, and after the church was bombed and he was left homeless. “It’s his birthday, two weeks from Friday. He’s going to be a hundred years old.”
Old George moved on the bed. They all turned to look at him. They all made jokes about how old he was, and still living by himself, in his own apartment. Everybody on the s
treet made those jokes. For the first time, Gregor thought old George actually looked one hundred.
The curtain to the cubicle rustled and they looked up to see a doctor walk in, or somebody they assumed was a doctor. He was wearing the regulation white coat. He was carrying a clipboard.
“Is there a Mr.—Mr. Demarkian here?” he asked.
“That’s me,” Gregor said.
“Ah. Thank you. I’ve talked to Mr.—ah, Mr. Tek—”
“Tekemanian,” Bennis said.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry. I’m new in this area. What kind of ethnicity is that?”
“Armenian,” Tibor said.
The doctor nodded. “Well, at any rate, I’ve talked to the gentleman’s nephew? Grand nephew? Another Mr., uh, Mr. Teke—Tekemanian, who has the health proxy. He says I can talk to Mr. Demarkian. In the meantime, he’s on his way. Are you the Mr. Demarkian who’s in the papers all the time?”
“Something like that,” Gregor said.
“Well,” the doctor said. “We’re going to take the old gentleman for some tests. He’s had what I think, looking at the information I have, and looking at him the way he is now, is probably going to turn out to be a small heart attack. But even a small heart attack is serious, no matter who you are, and especially if you’re elderly.” He looked at his clipboard. “The gentleman is, uh, what? Ninety-something.”
“Ninety-nine,” Bennis said. “He’s got a birthday in a couple of weeks. He’ll be one hundred.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Can you tell me something about the circumstances? I mean, I assume he lives in a nursing home—”
“He lives in his own apartment,” Gregor said, “on the ground floor of a townhouse building on Cavanaugh Street. The same building where we live, Bennis and I.”
“I live at the rectory,” Tibor put in politely.
“He lives by himself, but he has somebody who comes in every day to help him out and check on him and clean. And we look in. He didn’t look well this morning, but he was well enough to walk two-and-a-half blocks to the restaurant where we all have breakfast every morning. He has breakfast there every morning.”
“Really?” the doctor said. “That’s remarkable. Even people whose minds are still sharp at that age usually have bone issues. He didn’t have any bone issues?”
“He had a hip replacement about five years ago,” Tibor said.
“Really? And you’re used to seeing him aware and alert? There weren’t any problems with dementia, or anything like that?”
“No,” Bennis said.
Gregor shot her a look. She shot him one back.
“I’m not going to shut up,” she said. “I’m really sick of it, the way so many people are around old people. They’re old, for God’s sake. They’re not a different species. Phyllis A. Whitney was actually writing a book a year right into her nineties, did you know that?”
“Who’s Phyllis A. Whitney?” Gregor asked.
Tibor started to answer, but Bennis was on a roll.
“It was the same with my grandmother,” she said. “That’s my mother’s mother. She was a hateful old bat, but her mind was perfectly fine. Then she was down in Palm Beach and there was a hurricane and she wouldn’t evacuate, and the hospital down there tried to say that that proved she was incompetent and should be in a nursing home whether she wanted to be there or not—and for what? For doing what she’d done in every hurricane for forty years? She wouldn’t evacuate when she was thirty. It had nothing to do with her being addled, and—”
“I don’t think anybody is trying to force the old gentleman here into a nursing home,” the doctor said. “I’m just trying to understand what the benchmark is, what normal would be for him. If his mind was as clear as you say, then anything less than that would be a symptom. If he was usually a little vague, say, or forgetful—well, then if he got vague and forgetful here, it wouldn’t be a symptom. It would just be himself.”
“His mind is fine,” somebody else said.
They looked up to see Martin Tekemanian standing in the open curtains, looking like a mess. Gregor thought he was on the verge of tears.
“His mind is fine,” Martin said again. “It’s better than mine, most of the time. And his memory is phenomenal. And we’ve been asking him to come and live with us for years, and he just wouldn’t.”
THREE
1
For Kenny Morton, the worst thing about the time since his brother Chester’s body had been found—hanging up there, on their mother’s billboard—had not been the questions, or the publicity, or even the bad temper everybody had been in at home. God only knew there were questions. Where had Chester been over twelve years? Why had he ended up hanging himself? Kenny was sure Chester had hanged himself. Kenny had gone right out to the billboard the day after the body was discovered, just to see for himself. There was no way somebody could have climbed up there, even from behind, and thrown the dead weight of a body over the top, or hanged it from the top, or however it was supposed to have been done. And if Chester had been alive and conscious before he got up there, then it really couldn’t have been done. Chester would have struggled. Why would Chester go away somewhere, and then come back, and then hang himself out there on the highway where everybody could see him?
The other questions all had to do with the backpack, which had been found on the same night, buried in the ground over where they were putting up the new tech building. Kenny thought it was odd the way the backpack always seemed to come as an afterthought. The backpack was almost as strange as Chester. It was the only thing that had gone missing at the same time Chester did. Now it was back, and Kenny was pretty sure it hadn’t been buried up on that piece of land all this time. He and his friends had ridden their bikes out there all the time when they were younger, and they’d been all over those woods. They weren’t all that much in the way of woods. If the backpack had been up there all that time, Kenny was sure somebody would have found it.
No, it wasn’t the questions that bothered Kenny. The questions felt natural. What bothered Kenny was that nobody at home was asking them, and their mother was pacing up and down, back and forth, from one end of the house to the other, pacing and pacing, wearing the look of a person who was about to blow her brains out with fever.
“They’re going to try and cover it up,” she kept saying, whenever she said anything. It wasn’t often. “They’re going to get that man in here to say it was a suicide, and they think that will put an end to it. But nothing is going to put an end to it. I’m not going to let it.”
Then she would walk away again. Kenny didn’t think she was getting any sleep. His father was getting very little. Kenny would find him sleeping on the couch when he came in at night.
“Just in case she passes out,” he would tell Kenny, and then he wouldn’t tell Kenny anymore.
Kenny didn’t think it was natural.
Now he pulled his car into the Frasier Hall parking lot and turned the engine off. If there was anything good that had come of the last couple of weeks, it was definitely that this situation had turned him into a much more conscientious student. School was the only place he could go with a completely clear conscience, and the only place he could say he’d been without everybody at home being ready to kill him.
He got his books off the passenger seat and got out of the car. It was a good car, a BMW, and even if it was old, it ran well. He’d bought it to resell about a year ago, and then he hadn’t been able to let it go.
He locked up carefully when he got out, and as he did he saw two girls coming up the long walk that led to the building itself. There was a pretty one and an odd one. He was sure they were both in his English class. The odd one was very odd, but he liked the look of the pretty one. There was something—comforting—about her face.
Comforting was the wrong word.
“Hey,” he said.
The girls stopped. They both looked exhausted, and the odd one looked like she was about to burst out of her c
lothes. They all seemed to be made of Spandex.
“You’re in Dr. London’s English class, aren’t you?” he said. It sounded to him like he was trying too hard. Maybe it was just that he wasn’t used to the sound of his own voice. He’d been trying really hard not to say anything his mother could hear.
“That’s right,” the odd one said. “Not that I would be if it wasn’t for Haydee here. I mean, for God’s sake, it took four years to get out of high school, and now we’re here. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I’m Kenny,” Kenny said.
“I’m Desiree,” the odd one said. “This is Haydee. We’ve been walking for an hour. I’m about to fall the fuck down—”
“Desiree,” Haydee said.
“I’m not supposed to cuss anymore,” Desiree said. “That’s her idea. Dr. London doesn’t cuss, so I’m not supposed to cuss anymore.”
“Why have you been walking for an hour?” Kenny said.
Haydee took a deep breath. “We don’t have a car, and there isn’t a bus that’s convenient. So we walk here.”
“Walk here from where?”
“From Thomaston Avenue,” Haydee said.
It took Kenny a minute to put it together. “From the trailer park there? You live in the trailer park? And you walk all the way here? That has to be five miles. What do you do when class gets out?”
“We walk back,” Desiree said.
Haydee blushed. “I’m saving up for a car. I mean, I almost do have enough, for a used one, you know. But I want to be careful. I mean—”
“You walk back in the dark?” Kenny said.
“I know,” Desiree said. “We’re going to get mugged. Or murdered. Oh, wait. I mean, I’m sorry, you know, I didn’t mean—”
Kenny sighed. They knew who he was. He should have expected that. On the other hand, neither of them had brought it up, so maybe that was a good sign.
“We’re not really going to get mugged,” Haydee said. “If you ask me, it’s more dangerous at the park than it is here. And it’s good for us, walking. It keeps the weight off.”
