28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  He let himself inside and looked around. He checked the living room and the dining room and the hall closets. He looked into the kitchen. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, and there were no bodies lying anywhere, bloodied and half dead. Of course, there might be a body upstairs, but Gregor had a better idea.

  He stopped in the kitchen and sat down in one of the chairs near the overloaded table. He took out his cell phone and punched in the speed-dial number for the Ararat. It was old Mrs. Melajian who answered the phone. She was too frail to wait tables these days, and much too frail to cook, but she oversaw the kitchen and answered the phone.

  “I will go look,” she said when Gregor asked her if Bennis was there.

  Gregor waited, looking at his briefcase as it lay on the table. Bennis had bought him that briefcase one year—he couldn’t remember whether it was Christmas or his birthday. He often had a difficult time remembering things about what he had done with Bennis, and when. He found it odd, because he had no trouble at all remembering those things about his life with Elizabeth. Sometimes the differences made him uncomfortable, as if he was still committed to his first wife and hadn’t completely come over to his second.

  Of course, he could also remember a lot of what it had been like when Elizabeth was dying, and he had never even once forgotten she was dead.

  Old Mrs. Melajian picked up the phone on her end and coughed into it. “Bennis is here, Krekor,” she said. “She’s here with Donna. I was born at the wrong time. I tell my daughter that every day.”

  Gregor had no idea what this meant.

  “I will tell her you are coming,” old Mrs. Melajian said. “If you are coming. If you are not coming—”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Then he put down the phone and went out to the hall for his Windbreaker. He didn’t have to dress up and look professional in the Ararat. Everybody there knew him already. They liked to sound impressed about him to people outside the neighborhood, but they would never be impressed about him to his face.

  He got the Windbreaker zipped and went back to the kitchen. He looked at the briefcase lying on the table. He considered taking it with him, to show Bennis the pictures. Bennis had been a debutante herself once. There were things she knew that other people didn’t.

  On the other hand, Bennis would be coming back to the house before the afternoon was over. There was no need to drag the briefcase to the Ararat now.

  He left the briefcase where it was and headed out.

  3

  Ten minutes later, soaking wet from an angry cloudburst, Gregor was easing into the front booth next to Bennis and across from Donna Moradanyan Donahue. They both looked dry. They both looked impossibly depressed.

  Gregor looked at his Windbreaker hanging from the coat tree. It was dripping thick drops of water on the floor.

  “So,” he said.

  Bennis and Donna had coffee. They didn’t seem to be drinking much of it.

  “So,” Bennis said. “We took the cat to the vet.”

  “I bought a cat carrier,” Donna said. “Cats hate to ride in cars. You have to be very careful. And we didn’t know about this one.”

  “It could have had rabies,” Bennis said. “But the doctor doesn’t think so. There are tests, you know, and he’s going to run them, but he says he doesn’t look like it. The cat doesn’t look like it. It’s a male cat.”

  “We thought we’d name it George,” Donna said.

  “Assuming we can name it anything,” Bennis said. “It’s in really bad shape.”

  “Half starved,” Donna agreed, “if not all the way starved. And it’s got fleas and all kinds of things like that. And it just looked so pitiful.”

  “And this is what the two of you are so depressed about?” he asked. “A cat? I didn’t think either of you liked cats.”

  “We don’t hate them,” Bennis said. “And it’s like I told you before, it was just such a—he was just so wretched. I don’t know. People shouldn’t do things like that. I mean, you’ve got a responsibility.”

  “What did people do?” Gregor asked, mystified. “Who has a responsibility.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Donna said. “Cats and dogs and other domesticated animals. We made them the way they are. We have a responsibility.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said as Linda Melajian’s older sister came rushing up to him with a pot of coffee. He tried to remember her name and couldn’t. She turned his coffee cup right side up in the saucer and started pouring. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Do you need a menu?” the Melajian girl asked. “The lunch menu is pretty much like the dinner menu.”

  “Bring me some yaprak sarma in broth,” Gregor said. He looked from Bennis to Donna. “Who domesticated them? And who has a responsibility for them?”

  Bennis let out a long sigh. “Okay,” she said. “It’s really simple. Human beings took some animals and bred them deliberately to be good at living with human beings. Or for being good for being food for human beings. Cows in the wild wouldn’t be that stupid, but there aren’t any cows in the wild anymore, because we bred cows and now they’re dumb and live on farms so that they can become hamburger.”

  “And sheep,” Donna said.

  “And cats and dogs,” Bennis said firmly. “They’re not really equipped to go back to the wild and fend for themselves. We’ve bred those traits out of them. So we’re responsible, you see, to make sure they’re taken care of, because we’re what made them unfit to fend for themselves to begin with.”

  “Except that Father Tibor doesn’t completely agree with us,” Donna said. “He says what we’re suggesting is collective guilt, and guilt can never be legitimately collective. Guilt is always individual.”

  “We got a lecture on good and evil and guilt and innocence and tribalism and I don’t know what else,” Bennis said.

  Donna nodded. “He even quoted Kant in German.”

  “So you see,” Bennis said, “the one thing we didn’t figure out was whether he’d be willing to take the cat if it turned out to be all right. Or, you know, take it later, after I’d fed it and stuff for a while so that it was stronger. He was stronger. Did we tell you we’re going to name it George?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “It really was awful to look at it,” Bennis said. “It was so small, and so miserable, and it was shaking, and it was scared to death, and nothing we did seemed to make things all right. And then we got to the vet’s and it really went crazy. It didn’t like the vet at all, and it liked the vet even less when the work started, and then we had to leave it overnight.”

  “It’s going to be longer than that,” Donna said. “I think it’s something like four days before they’re sure it isn’t sick, and it could be sick a lot of ways. Even if it doesn’t have rabies, it could have feline leukemia, and I don’t know what else. And that was what was getting to both of us, don’t you see? The mother cat and the other cats out there under the porch dead because somebody abandoned them somewhere.”

  “Tibor said the mother cat could have wandered away and gotten lost,” Bennis said, “but that’s no excuse, is it? They’ve got chips they put in animals these days so that you can be sure to find them, and if you can’t afford something like that, you can always afford a collar and a little tag with information on it. I mean, really, Gregor. It’s just ridiculous.”

  “He quoted Aristotle in Greek,” Donna said. “And then he quoted Jackie Collins and Stephen King. I didn’t know what it was about by the time he was finished.”

  Linda Melajian herself popped up at the table, carrying an enormous bowl of yaprak sarma. She put it down in front of Gregor and then handed him a soup spoon.

  “I hope you can cheer these two up,” she said. “They’ve been driving me crazy for an hour.”

  THREE

  1

  On the last Saturday morning in June, one week after Chapin Waring was murdered, Hope Matlock woke up to the sound
of the phone ringing. She had been lying more or less asleep on the pullout couch in her living room. The mattress in the pullout was thin and full of sharp pricks where the metal springs had begun to poke through the covering.

  The phone rang and rang and rang.

  Finally, the answering machine whirred on. Hope heard her own voice asking whomever to leave a message. Then there was a pause, and a chirpy little female voice said,

  “Steve? This is Dr. Martinson’s office. We’re just calling to remind you that your appointment is at nine tomorrow morning, and it’s important that you not be late. This kind of thing is manageable if we catch it in time, but it can get tricky. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  The answering machine clicked off.

  Hope lay still. She was not Steve. There was no Dr. Martinson anywhere in Alwych. Doctors’ offices did not leave chatty little messages about dire medical problems.

  Hope sat up on the couch bed and swung her legs off the side of it. She never slept upstairs anymore. It was too hard to make the climb.

  She stood up and braced herself against the side table. The side table wallowed.

  The genius of using a doctor’s office for the calls was that the urge to call back and explain that this was a wrong number was almost irresistible. You didn’t want somebody to miss a doctor’s appointment.

  Hope was fairly sure there was a law against this kind of thing. Bill collectors in the state of Connecticut were supposed to announce who they were and that they were attempting to collect a debt.

  Hope walked through the back of the house, through the dining room, into the kitchen. She let herself into the big bathroom next to the pantry and the back door. She washed up and looked very carefully at herself in the mirror. She looked terrible.

  She went back to the kitchen. The newspapers were spread across the peeling surface of the laminated wood table. Most of them had stories about chapin Waring’s murder, complete with big inside spreads about the case all those years ago. There were pictures of Martin’s car smashed up against that tree out on Wykeham Swamp Road. There were pictures of Chapin herself and the rest of them the year before in their Harvest Ball getups. There were even pictures of Chapin standing at the graveside at Martin’s funeral.

  Martin. None of them had ever called him Martin. They had always called him Marty.

  Some of the newspapers were more recent, and these contained stories about Gregor Demarkian. Hope had heard of Gregor Demarkian. God only knew she watched enough television. He was on all those truTV shows. American Justice. City Confidential.

  She looked over the papers again. There would probably be another paper waiting on her front walk.

  Hope went back into the foyer. There was sun coming in through the window next to the door.

  One of the pictures in the newspapers in the kitchen was of Chapin Waring on the floor of her family’s old house on Beach Drive. You could see the knife sticking up out of one shoulder.

  Hope stopped at the telephone. There was a stout boxy stool near the television stand. She sat down. She picked up the metal flip address book. She pushed the little level to W. She hesitated between “home” and “cell” and finally picked cell. This was an emergency.

  Kyle Westervan’s voice came on the line sounding both angry and hungover. She cleared her throat a little.

  “Kyle?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “I haven’t been stalking you,” Hope said. “I haven’t called at all.”

  “But you were going to,” Kyle said. “I knew you were going to. Why can’t you leave it the hell alone?”

  Hope hesitated. “That isn’t what I was calling about,” she said.

  “Really?” Kyle said. “Because it’s what everybody else has been calling about. I’ve had Virginia up my ass like some gay man’s chipmunk. And she’s not even supposed to be talking to me.”

  “Yes,” Hope said. “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had. About your offer. If it’s still open.”

  “What?”

  “I know I said no before, but circumstances have changed.”

  “Circumstances have changed,” Kyle said. “For Christ’s sake. Yes, of course circumstances have changed. That asshole is arriving any day now, and the place has been crawling with feds ever since Chapin’s body hit the floor. Chapin was always a pain in the ass. She was a pain in the ass from the day she was born.”

  “I thought you said that whatever this is hasn’t got anything to do with Chapin.”

  “It hasn’t got anything to do with Chapin.”

  “Well, then.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. When Kyle’s voice came back, it didn’t have the flippant nastiness Hope had come to think of as “normal.” It was low and hard and very serious.

  “Listen,” he said. “Forget about it. Forget we ever talked about it. You never knew what it was about anyway.”

  Hope took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “You mean the offer has been withdrawn.”

  “The offer has to be withdrawn,” Kyle said. “Like you said, the circumstances have changed.”

  “Then it was about Chapin Waring,” Hope said.

  “No,” Kyle said. “It wasn’t, but everything is about Chapin Waring now.”

  The phone went dead in her ear. Hope hung up at her end.

  She got up off the stool and headed back to the kitchen. She didn’t have a lot in the refrigerator, but she had some, and she needed to eat.

  She was going through the dining room when she felt her heart begin to squeeze. It wasn’t bad this time. She’d get to her pills in the kitchen and that would take care of it.

  She got to the kitchen and stopped. The newspapers were still spread out on the kitchen table. Chapin Waring’s face still stared up at the ceiling from almost every page.

  The squeezing in her heart stopped. Her lungs filled with air. It wasn’t her heart, or her weight. It was the fear.

  And now that the fear was gone, she felt just fine.

  2

  From the beginning, Caroline Waring Holder had been convinced that she could make everything come right if she could only get herself to concentrate.

  “If you’re going to have a funeral for her out there, I’m not coming,” Caroline’s sister Cordelia had said before Chapin’s body was even cold.

  Cordelia was in Chicago, and she called herself Dr. Cordelia Frame. If she had any connection to the infamous Chapin Waring, nobody had to know about it.

  “It’s not like I’m going to be able to get out from under this completely,” she said. “They’ll figure out who I am sooner rather than later. That doesn’t mean I have to make it any easier for them.”

  Caroline wanted to scream. “It’s not like I asked her here. It’s not like I wanted her here. The two of you have seen more of her than I have over the last thirty years.”

  “I haven’t seen anything of her,” Cordelia said stiffly, “and if you tell anybody I have, I’ll sue you for slander.”

  “I’ve worked very hard myself,” Caroline had said. “I hate it when you act like you’re the only person in the world who has anything to lose.”

  “Well, playing fifties housewifey in the Connecticut suburbs isn’t exactly in the same league as making a name for yourself in medicine.”

  “The first I heard of it was when I went to a meeting that night, and Lisa Freedman and Deirdre Nash kept going on and on about how they’d seen her all over town. By then she must have been lying dead in the house on Beach Drive.”

  “We’ve been very careful to make sure it’s well kept up. You can’t fault us for that,” Cordelia said.

  Caroline could fault her sisters for a lot of things, and she did not exclude the fate of the house on Beach Drive.

  “You two should have sold it,” she said.

  “It was what Mother wanted,” Cordelia said. “We wouldn’t have kept it
otherwise.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m not coming to a funeral,” Cordelia said. “I don’t care what you do with her body. I’m glad she’s dead. Maybe the FBI will take the taps off my phones.”

  Caroline had wanted to say that she wasn’t going to hold any funeral, and that Cordelia had no proof that the FBI had ever tapped her phones. But Cordelia had hung up, and Caroline was left sitting at her own kitchen table, looking down at nails she had bitten to the quick.

  Her other sister had called last week.

  “Don’t listen to Cor,” Charlotte had said. “Of course we’ll have to bury her. It will make a bigger stink in the press if we don’t. And of course we’ll have to do something to keep the funeral from turning into an absolute zoo.”

  “We can’t have her cremated at the moment,” Caroline had said, “and we can’t have her buried, because the medical examiner’s office still has the body. There has to be an autopsy, and if the two of you think I’m arranging and running a funeral neither of you have any intention of showing up to attend, you’re both crazy.”

  “Of course I’ll attend,” Charlotte said. “Why wouldn’t I attend?”

  “According to Cordelia, attending would ruin her life.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said. “You’ve got to arrange the funeral. You’re the one that’s there.”

  “Come back here and arrange it yourself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Just get it done and we’ll come out and support you.”

  “I’m not going to arrange the funeral,” Caroline said again.

  By then Charlotte, too, was off the line, and Caroline was back at that same kitchen table, looking at the double ovens and the granite countertops, wanting to scream.

  This morning she didn’t so much want to scream as want to melt. The phone had been busy the entire seven or eight days, and none of the messages had been what Caroline would call “supportive.” Most of them were from the women she knew from the organizations she participated in. The women from the League of Women Voters, the PTA and the Enrichment committee, the Food Pantry in Bridgeport and the Literacy Volunteers of America in Norwalk.