by Jane Haddam
If Charlie had known what she was going to do next, he would have had a fit and a half. This was not the kind of thing Charlie approved of people doing.
But then, Fanny thought, Charlie had no right to complain if he wasn’t around for her to ask for his advice.
Fanny stepped out onto the road. It was impossible for anybody to go anywhere in Waldorf Pines without being watched by somebody, but Fanny found she really didn’t care. What was it that these people were supposed to do to her if they didn’t like the way she behaved? There were a lot of complicated things about the residential agreement, but she had never understood those.
She walked up Arthur Heydreich’s driveway to his front door and stared for a moment at the button for the bell. She had not thought out what she was going to say, and she didn’t know if she was going to say anything he wanted to hear, anyway. She looked around her at the leaves and the grass and the houses, everything just a little gray and dark, because it was autumn. She turned back to the door and pushed the button for the bell.
For a moment, there was no sound at all from inside the house, and Fanny felt stupid. Of course Arthur Heydreich wouldn’t answer his door. He wouldn’t want to see people. He probably felt persecuted. He had a right to.
Fanny considered going back home. She considered her shoes, which were canvas and looked drowned by the wet on the morning lawns. She looked up again and pressed the button again. This time, there were footsteps behind the door.
Fanny thought he’d call out from behind there and demand to know who it was. Instead, the door swung back and he was just there, his tie undone, his jacket off. If Fanny had expected to see prison pallor or the start of a nervous breakdown, she was disappointed. Arthur Heydreich looked the way Arthur Heydreich always looked. He looked sensible. He looked sane. He looked calm.
“Yes?” he said.
“Oh,” Fanny said. She really did not know what she was doing here. She did not know what to say.
Arthur Heydreich was standing in the doorway. He was waiting. He was polite. He did not seem to be restless or in a hurry.
“Oh,” Fanny said. “I’m sorry. I’m—I’m Fanny Bullman. I live up the street. I live, in the, well, they’re all mock Tudors around here, aren’t they? I live up the street. And I just wanted to say. I wanted to say—”
“Yes?” Arthur Heydreich said again.
Fanny looked away again. There really was no sensible way to do this. There was no sensible way to do anything at all.
“I just wanted to say,” she said, “that I think it was horrible. I think it was horrible the way the police treated you, and the press, when they didn’t really know what they were talking about and you hadn’t done anything at all. They didn’t even stop and think about what they were doing, about what kind of damage they could cause. They just jumped to conclusions and went ahead and did it. And I didn’t want you to think that everybody felt the same way. That we all thought you were guilty without thinking about it. I didn’t want you to think that everybody at Waldorf Pines—”
“You have the children,” Arthur Heydreich said. “The small ones. You take them out the back gate to the bus stop every morning.”
Fanny looked up. She felt more than a little flattered that he’d noticed. “That’s right,” she said. “A boy and a girl. They’re both in elementary school.”
“I see you walking them in the mornings,” Arthur said. “That must be hard to do. I think it’s why Martha and I never had any children. There are so many things you have to do for them. Maybe it wasn’t that. I don’t know. It’s hard to remember things now.”
“It would be hard for me to be in one of these big houses by myself,” Fanny said. “I think that’s why I came over. I didn’t like the idea of you being in there all by yourself. These places are so big, they echo.”
“They do echo,” Arthur said.
Fanny felt exposed where she was. There was a slight breeze. It was making her feel cold. She shoved her hands in her pockets and said,
“Well. I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t mean to bother you. You must be busy. I just thought I’d say it was terrible the way you were treated.”
“It was very nice of you to say.”
“I think people should be more careful about the things they say and do,” Fanny said. “Too many people just want a story because it’s exciting. It doesn’t have to be true. I don’t understand people sometimes. But I did always think you were—”
“What?”
“Very nice,” Fanny said firmly. Then she rushed. “I always thought you were a very nice person. I didn’t see any reason to change my mind just because somebody had accused you of something. And it didn’t make any sense to me that you would, you know, that you would kill—you were always so good to her, to Martha, I mean. I met her at meetings sometimes. I just didn’t see how you could be like that with her, day after day, and then—well, you know. I’m sorry. I really am intruding. I didn’t mean to do this. I just wanted you to know that, well, you know. Well—”
Fanny thought she ought to get out of there as quickly as she could. She ought to run all the way back to her own house.
She was just about to do it when Arthur Heydreich stepped back and pulled the door more widely open.
“Would you like to come in?” he said. “I’m trying to make some coffee.”
“Trying?”
“It used to be the maid who did it. She came in and did it every morning. She’s not here, now, of course. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I suppose she just disappeared when I went to jail.”
“A lot of them disappear when the police come around,” Fanny said. “That’s because they’re not, you know, legal.”
Arthur stood all the way back. Fanny could see the entire foyer.
“Come in,” he said again. “I really can make coffee if I think about it.”
Fanny did not know why they were talking about coffee, but she did know that she wanted to go into Arthur Heydreich’s house.
SIX
1
The mayor was a man named Kenneth Bairn, and Gregor knew from the moment he saw him that Ken would insist on being called “Ken,” and glory in the idea that he was a “hands-on boss.” Gregor had had a number of hands-on bosses in the course of his life. He’d even liked some of them. He’d found all of them irritating. From the look of him, Gregor thought he was going to find Ken both irritating and insufferable. It always surprised the hell out of him, the way so many insufferable people, women as well as men, managed to get elected to things. The basic requirements of democracy should have worked against it.
Ken’s office was in the only other substantial building in the middle of town, and the only other one made of brick. Unlike the Pineville Station Police Department building, it was not in any way new. Gregor thought it had probably gone up just after the Civil War. It had that odd architectural confusion that was part of the second Greek Revival. The generation of the founders had known the Greeks and Romans the way they knew the small and struggling states from which they had come. Many of them were “learned” only to the extent that they’d been able to piece out such learning on their own. Most of the others had had the kind of old-fashioned formal education that ignored the practicalities of everyday life for drilling in Greek and Latin. The generation that came up out of the Civil War was different. They acquired their learning self-consciously, as the badge of a kind of person they wanted the world to think them to be. They were unsure of what it meant. They wore it like a suit of clothes that didn’t fit. That was how you got buildings like this one, stolid red brick with immense three-story white marble columned façades that imitated the façade of the Parthenon but looked like … Gregor wasn’t sure what.
The building with the mayor’s office in it also held what few municipal offices there were—the local tax collector; the probate judge; the land records office. Gregor walked across the street to it with both Buck Monaghan and Larry Farmer in attendance. They went up the wide
front steps—more white marble, faring badly in the Pennsylvania weather—and through the tall doors into a foyer that was actually cramped and small and that led to a corridor that was even more cramped and smaller. Gregor could see the tax collector’s office, which was closest to him in the corridor. It had a window and a well where you could slide your payments through. The window had bulletproof glass.
“Interesting,” Gregor said, looking at that.
Then he saw a young woman dragging some kind of equipment down toward them. It looked like a lectern taller than she was.
“That’s for you,” Buck Monaghan said. “We’re going to hold a press conference after we meet with the mayor. It’s set for ten thirty, I think. I hope you don’t mind speaking at it.”
“You’re not opposed to press conferences,” Larry Farmer asked. “Are you?”
Gregor promised that he was not opposed to press conferences, and left off any mention of just how much he disliked them. He understood their usefulness for the towns he worked for, even if he thought they were counterproductive to the investigations themselves. There was a small, narrow staircase to the side of the foyer. They went up that.
“Sorry about the lack of an elevator,” Buck Monaghan said. “It’s an old building.”
“I don’t mind the stairs,” Gregor said. “I was just thinking, though, that Pineville Station is in reality what the town who called me in last only pretended to be.”
“And that’s what, exactly?” Buck Monaghan said.
“Small,” Gregor said.
Larry Farmer was huffing and puffing and wheezing behind them. “I read all about that case,” he said. “You’ve got to wonder at some people, don’t you think? They think they can get away with anything.”
Gregor didn’t respond to that one, mostly because he had no idea how to do that. It seemed to be just one of those things Larry Farmer said without really intending it to mean anything. Or maybe he intended it to mean everything. It was hard to judge.
The corridor at the top of the stairs was filthy, as if nobody had bothered to wash down the floors in a decade and a half. The walls were painted two-toned yellow and green, but it was a dull mustard yellow and a washed-out olive green, so that the whole space looked as if somebody had poured a thin film of mud over it and then let the mud dry. It was an unpleasant space to walk through. Gregor couldn’t imagine people working here.
They went to the end of that corridor to a tall wooden door, and then through that door into the outer office of the mayor. It wasn’t much of an outer office, but at least it was clean, and very brightly lit. The middle-aged woman at the desk was clean and neat, too, and just plain enough to remind Gregor of the secretaries in Forties movies where the businessman was having his staff chosen by his wife.
The middle-aged woman had a little laminated nameplate on her desk. It said DELORES MARTIN. She looked up as the three of them walked in and then looked over her shoulder to a door at the back. That door had a nameplate screwed into it that said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR.
“I’m sure there isn’t going to be any problem with your going right in,” Delores Martin said. “I’ll buzz just to make sure. But it isn’t as if he doesn’t have anything on his mind this morning. Horace Wingard called.”
“Did he,” Buck Monaghan said.
“Oh, it was the usual kind of thing,” Delores Martin said. “Yelling and screaming and threatening to sue everybody. Sue Connolly’s right, you know. You do have to wonder just who these people think they are. And what’s Ken worried about, really? That he’ll lose votes if Waldorf Pines is unhappy? There aren’t that many of them, and most of the residents of this town would be happy to see them unhappy. How’s Sue, Buck? Is she holding up in the middle of all this?”
“She’s fine,” Buck said. “It’s been a while, you know.”
“I know it’s been a while,” Delores said, “but it can’t be something you get over quick. Your own sister trying to commit suicide and you find her yourself, and it’s all over what? Some party being given by a girl none of us would have wanted to be seen dead with in our day. It’s terrible what’s happening to the world. It really is. And it’s only going to get worse.”
Gregor had no idea how this woman knew that things were only going to get worse, but he had an odd feeling that she did. He watched as she stared down at the little intercom box on her desk and frowned. Then she got up and went to the wooden door at the back and knocked. A voice came from inside. Delores Martin poked her head in.
“They’re here,” she said. “Buck and Larry and somebody I presume to be Mr. Demarkian. Don’t you think you’d better see them before your ulcer explodes?”
There was more from the voice behind the door. Delores turned to look at them.
“Go right in,” she said, flinging the door wide. “I told you he wouldn’t have anything more important on his plate. Forgive me if I’ve been rude, Mr. Demarkian, I’ve had a lot on my mind this morning. And I can’t say I’ve liked having it on my mind. I knew when they wanted to build that place that it was going to be a bad idea.”
A tall, reedy man suddenly rushed through the wooden door and out into the anteroom where they were all standing. He was loud in every way. Even his tie was loud. He was trying hard to look younger than he was. Gregor was sure his hair was dyed, although he couldn’t imagine anybody wanting hair that was that particular shade of jet black.
“Delores, for God’s sake,” he said. “You can’t just keep going on and on about it. And we couldn’t have done anything to stop them in the long run anyway. They’d have gone to court and gotten any ruling overturned. What was the planning and zoning commission supposed to say? It wasn’t wetlands. It wasn’t historic.”
“All he could see was the tax revenue,” Delores said, shaking her head. “Bunch of big houses, bunch of big real estate tax assessments, money, money, money. They don’t understand what kind of damage those places cause. Jen Connolly trying to commit suicide. At seventeen, imagine that.”
“Jen Connolly didn’t try to commit suicide just because Waldorf Pines got built in Pineville Station,” Ken said. “And it went up when she was something like two years old. You can’t blame everything on Waldorf Pines just because you don’t like them.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Delores said. “Go have your meeting. Go do something. I’m tired of talking myself hoarse.”
Ken held open his door and said, “Come right on in, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Ken Bairn.”
2
Ken Bairn’s office was, Gregor had to admit, not bad. It had high ceilings and a tall window that looked down on Main Street. Gregor could see the car he’d been driven up in sitting in the Pineville Station Police Department’s parking lot. He could also see across the empty space that was most of the town to what looked like a small complex of school buildings. He thought that they would have to be new, too, or close to it. Even as late as his parents’ generation, school buildings were built in the centers of small towns, where most of the students could walk to them.
Buck Monaghan noticed what he was looking at and nodded. “Those are the Pineville Station public schools,” he said. “One elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. Except they didn’t start out that way. They were built in the late Sixties, and nobody had ever heard of a middle school. Or at least, nobody around here had. We ended up having to do some renovations to make the new system work back around nineteen eighty.”
“It’s not that big a complex,” Gregor said. “Or is that an illusion created by the distance?”
“It’s no illusion,” Buck Monaghan said. “Last year’s high school graduating class was under a hundred and fifty. A lot of towns with schools that size go in on consolidated regionals. It makes sense, on a lot of levels. There’s more money to go around. You can buy more equipment, not strain so much with teacher salaries no matter what the state unions come up with, participate in elaborate class trips and field programs—”
“Pineville Stat
ion has what every parent wants in an education for their child,” Ken Bairn said. “It has a school system where every teacher knows every student. It has small classes where every student gets individual attention.”
“Ken can talk such a good game, you’d even think we’d planned it all this way,” Buck said. “But it was inertia, really. We’d always had public schools right in town. We went on having public schools right in town. Even when the town started shrinking. And we have been shrinking. There’s not much to do here if you’re ambitious.”
“Pineville Station has the perfect mix of friendly small-town values and access to upscale shopping and entertainment,” Ken said.
“He means it’s not that far from here on the interstate to the King of Prussia Mall,” Ken said. “It’s also the reason why people like Delores and Sue Connolly are opposed to Waldorf Pines and all it stands for. If it can be said to stand for anything. Well, maybe I just mean all it brings with it. If your high school class numbers only a hundred and forty-five students, and one of them gives a party and invites everybody but maybe fifteen of you, then it’s suddenly a big deal in a way it would not have been if your school was bigger.”
“Crap,” Ken Bairn said. “You are not going to get me to believe that little Jen Connolly tried to kill herself because she didn’t get invited to a party. I’ve known that girl all her life. She’s not that much of an idiot.”
“It would have been different if what was coming into town was really rich people,” Buck said. “Really rich people send their children to private schools. They live their lives as far out of the limelight as they can get them. They settle in. They keep to themselves. They try to avoid their taxes. They don’t get in anybody’s way as long as nobody gets in theirs. With these people, though—let’s just say they make a point of getting in everybody’s way as much as possible, and their children have absolutely taken over the school.”
