by Jane Haddam
“Thank you,” Gregor said.
He hung up. Then he took the pictures of Elizabeth over to his bureau and put them in the bottom drawer, in among the expensive presents people gave him that he never used. Silk handkerchiefs. Monogrammed socks. He shut the drawer.
Elizabeth would have appreciated the idea of monogrammed socks. She would have appreciated all of Cavanaugh Street, but she was not here to see it, and he was, and he had to get on with his life.
2
A LITTLE OVER AN hour later, Gregor was lying on the big black leather couch in Bennis Hannaford’s living room, his jacket thrown over the back of a chair on the other side of the room, his shoes in a little pile on the floor, his tie already a total mess. Bennis was moving back and forth between her bedroom and her bathroom, talking as she went. The whole apartment smelled of sachet and roses. The CD player was putting out Bach in a very low-key, unaggressive way. Gregor reminded himself every once in a while to be grateful for small favors, or for Bennis’s Philadelphia Main Line debutante upbringing, which in this case probably amounted to the same thing. Under the circumstances, he wouldn’t have been able to blame her if she had subjected him to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
“So,” Bennis said now. “What I don’t understand is, why did Ginny Marsh want to kill her baby?”
“For the same reason most of these women kill their babies,” Gregor said. “I don’t know if you realize it, but child murder of this kind is not entirely unheard of.”
“I watched the news about Susan Smith, Gregor. I thought she had a boyfriend and that was the point, to get rid of the children so that she could marry the boyfriend.”
“Actually, that’s up in the air in the Smith case,” Gregor said. “There was a case exactly like that out on the West Coast a while back. But that’s not the point, Bennis. It doesn’t matter if they have a boyfriend or if they don’t. They’re bored. They feel trapped. What’s trapping them is the child.”
“You wonder why they don’t just leave the child off at social services or something. Or put it in a basket and take it to a church. Tibor was telling me that that happened at Father Ryan’s church a couple of years ago. They took care of everything.”
“I don’t understand why people do half of what they do, Bennis. I just know that they do it. I thought it was going to be Ginny Marsh from the beginning. I told David that.”
“I know. Did she have a boyfriend somewhere that I haven’t heard about?”
“She was having an affair of a sort with Stephen Harrow, the Methodist minister. It mattered to him. It mattered to him a great deal. That’s what kept messing us up. The murders, the other murders besides the murder of the child, didn’t really make any sense. I didn’t realize until much later that they had been done by two different people for two different reasons. Stephen Harrow wanted to protect Ginny Marsh. And Ginny Marsh—”
“—wanted to be free? But Gregor, for God’s sake. What did Harrow think after he saw her kill her own child? How could he possibly go on protecting her after that?”
“I think he thought it was his own fault,” Gregor said. “I think he thought of her as this innocent little child, who was very easily led, and he had let her get involved in all this goddess worship nonsense. He had even helped her with it. And then, you see, it got out of hand, and she did something he was sure she didn’t want to do—later, I think, he thought she didn’t even remember doing it. So while she sat in jail, he made damned certain that nobody could expose her.”
“But she had done it on purpose,” Bennis said.
“Oh, yes. Very definitely. Ginny wanted a second chance. She wanted to be free of Bobby Marsh and free of Tiffany and free of Bellerton, North Carolina, and she took what she thought was the most direct route to get her there. And she’s no Susan Smith. This wasn’t an act of desperation committed under stress. She isn’t going to make a tearful last-minute confession. She isn’t going to stand in front of an army of television cameras and tell the world how she feels remorse. She doesn’t feel remorse, and she thinks she’s going to get away with it, now that Stephen Harrow is dead.”
“He was really in love with her, then,” Bennis said.
“He was married to a cold woman who had come to feel nothing but contempt for him,” Gregor told her. “He was living in a place as foreign to him as Qatar or Morocco would be to you or me. He was living under a great deal of stress, and she came along like a promise of deliverance. Under ordinary circumstances—back home on his own ground, with a marriage that was going reasonably well—I don’t think he would have looked at her twice.”
“Even so,” Bennis said. “It seems like a small enough reason for killing a child. I don’t know why I think so, but I think there ought to be some really big reason for killing a child. Something catastrophic or apocalyptic or—something.”
“But there isn’t,” Gregor said gently.
Bennis came down the hall and into the living room, wearing a navy blue silk kimono wrapped tightly around her. She was so small, barely five foot four, barely a hundred pounds. Wrapped in navy blue silk she looked smaller still. She sat down on the arm of her big club chair and swung her feet.
“You know what Lida would say, and Hannah and the rest of them. It isn’t natural. It goes against the maternal instinct.”
“There isn’t any maternal instinct,” Gregor said firmly. “Mothers kill their children all the time. They sell them for the money to buy crack. They leave them in garbage cans. They abuse them terribly. And men do it, too, of course. But nobody ever said men had a paternal instinct.”
“What’s going to happen to her?” Bennis asked. “Is she going to get away with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you at least going to try to make sure she doesn’t?”
“Of course I’m going to try. I’m already trying. And I’m fairly sure—and Clayton Hall and the North Carolina state police are fairly sure—that we can put enough together to arrest her. The problem is in convicting her. She’s going to say that Stephen Harrow killed the child, and she’s going to be able to point to the two murders he did commit to make that look plausible. The law says beyond a reasonable doubt, Bennis. It’s a good rule, most of the time.”
“I know. But you hate to think of it not being such a good rule this time. I think it was the same in the Susan Smith case. You wanted horrible things to happen to her, really terrible things. You wanted Old Testament justice just this once.”
“If we arrest her, there will at least be the publicity,” Gregor pointed out. “There will be a lot of publicity for a long time, and that will put a crimp in the great escape she’s attempting to make. That might be a small consolation, but at least it’s some.”
“Not enough.”
“I didn’t say it was enough, Bennis. I was just trying to live in the real world without going nuts.”
There was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the long coffee table in front of the couch Gregor was sitting on. Bennis leaned forward and got a cigarette out and lit up.
“So,” she said. “On to the subject we’ve both been avoiding. Do you really want to wait until we get all the way out to dinner to tell me what’s on your mind?”
“I thought you already knew what was on my mind.”
“I know in general. I meant in detail.”
“It’s not really all that hard to explain. I can give it to you in a single word. Spain.”
“Spain.”
“I think we should go to Spain, you and me, alone. For about a month.”
“A month.”
“I would have suggested longer, but you always seem to have so much to do. I didn’t want to get in the way of one of your book deadlines or whatever.”
“I don’t have a book deadline anytime soon. It’s not that. It’s just—Gregor, what are you and I going to do alone in Spain for a month?”
“You must be joking.”
Bennis blew
a stream of smoke into the air. “Fine,” she said. “Just fine. But nobody could do that and nothing else for one solid month.”
“I was talking about sight-seeing,” Gregor said blandly.
“Like hell you were.”
”Maybe we could talk, Bennis. Maybe we could just sort of not be on Cavanaugh Street, not be around the people we know all the time, not have so much to take into consideration. Maybe we could go to Spain and just concentrate on one thing and one thing only for a while, and see just how far that takes us.”
“Is there a reason for Spain in particular? Why not California? Or Greece? Or the North Pole?”
“I went to California with Elizabeth once. We had a good time.”
“Not California, then.”
“I don’t have any associations with Spain, Bennis, and as far as I know, you don’t either. And I’ve been retired for years now, and I haven’t done anything but take busman’s holidays. I just want to get away someplace and sit on a beach and read silly books. Not murder mysteries.”
“Are you sure you want to do that with me?”
“Of course I am.”
Bennis’s cigarette was smoked almost down to the stub. There was an ashtray on the other end of the coffee table from the cigarette pack and the lighter. Bennis got up and put her stub out in it.
“I’d better get dressed,” she said. “It’s getting late. Are you going to be all right in here?”
“I’m always all right in here. If I get hungry, I can raid your refrigerator.”
“Help yourself. Gregor?”
“What?”
“I bought a new dress.”
“Don’t tell me what it cost,” Gregor said. “If there’s one thing I have to thank God about in this relationship, it’s that you make your own money.”
3
IN BENNIS’S LIVING ROOM, there were no pictures except the original paintings for the covers of her first three books. She kept the only two photographs she had—one of her mother in full riding habit standing next to a horse; one of her brother Christopher and her sister Emma standing together in the wind on one of the balconies of the Eiffel Tower—on that same built-in bookshelf in her bedroom where Gregor had kept the pictures of Elizabeth in his. The difference was that Bennis had many more people in her family, living and dead, but didn’t feel the need to build shrines to any one of them. Bennis was good at leaving and staying gone, in a way that Gregor didn’t think he ever could be. Upstairs, his apartment was spare and clean and stripped, as if he had only moved into it the day before yesterday. For most of the time he had lived on Cavanaugh Street, his real life had been somewhere else—back in Washington, D.C. Bennis’s real life had been here, with forays into unknown venues only for adventure. Her rooms were crowded with bits and pieces of the things that really mattered to her: a bookcase with nothing in it but copies of the books she had written, in every conceivable edition, in every conceivable language; big papier-mâché models of the landscapes of her fantasy series, painted in bright greens and deep golds and aggressive Day-Glo orange; a pink plastic unicorn little Tommy Moradanyan had brought her back from a trip to Florida. It wasn’t that there had been no pain in Bennis’s life—if anything, Gregor reminded himself, there had been too much—but that she seemed to be able to get past it. Or maybe she didn’t. That would be an interesting thing to find out during a month alone in Spain—just how much of Bennis’s life he hadn’t been paying attention to all these years.
He heard the bedroom door click open and the sound of high heels on the hardwood floor of the hall.
“Are you ready?” he asked her. “It’s getting to the point where we ought to get out of here if we’re going to be on time.”
“I’m just putting on an earring.”
Bennis always put on her earrings blind, instead of in front of a mirror. She had pierced ears, and she would poke at them with the sharp end of the post, making Gregor wince. He looked up just as she entered the room. Then he sat up and stared. She was wearing a black, calf-length dress with a wide skirt made out of lace and a tightly fitted bodice made out of satin, but that sort of thing didn’t begin to describe it. It was what it didn’t have that was important. It didn’t have anything over the shoulders. It didn’t have any back at all.
“How does that thing stay up?” Gregor asked her.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” she told him.
“How do you stay up in it?”
Bennis gave him a look meant to shut him up. Her earring had finally decided to go into its hole. She snapped the clasp shut and then picked up a black lace shawl from the table near the window. Gregor had noticed it before, but hadn’t thought of it as anything important. Bennis always had clothes lying around on furniture.
Gregor got to his feet. “I think you’re wrong,” he told her. “I think it would be perfectly possible to spend an entire month in Spain doing nothing but, uh—”
“I wouldn’t try joking around like that, Gregor,” Bennis said. “Someday, somebody might decide to take you up on it.”
Then she walked away from him into the foyer, opened her front door, and went out.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Mysteries
PROLOGUE
Walking Down the Aisle to the Funeral March
1.
THERE WAS A FOG in Fox Run Hill that morning, a thick roll of gray and black floating just an inch above the ground, like the mad scientist’s dream mist in some ancient horror movie. Patsy MacLaren Willis moved through it much too quickly. There were stones on the driveway that she couldn’t see. There were ruts in the gutters where she didn’t expect them. It was just on the edge of dawn and still very cold, in spite of its being almost summer. Patsy felt foolish and uncomfortable in her short-sleeved, thin silk blouse. Foolish and uncomfortable, she thought, dumping a load of clothes on hangers into the rear of the dull black Volvo station wagon she had parked halfway down the drive. That was the way Patsy had always felt in Fox Run Hill all the time she had lived there, more than twenty years. It was as if God had touched His finger to her forehead one morning and said, “No matter what you do with your life, you will always be out of step, out of touch, out of place.”
The clothes on hangers were her own: navy blue linen dresses from Ann Taylor with round necklines and no collars; Liz Claiborne dress pants with pleats across the front or panels under the waists; Donna Karan wrap skirts with matching cropped jackets. The clothes went with the Volvo in some odd way Patsy couldn’t define. The clothes and the Volvo went with the house too—a mock-Tudor seven thousand square feet big, set on a lot of exactly one and three-quarter acres. Fox Run Hill, Patsy thought irritably, looking up at all the other houses facing her winding street. An elegant Victorian reproduction. A massive French Provincial with a curlicue roof and stone quoins. A redbrick Federalist with too many windows. The only thing she couldn’t see from here was the fence that surrounded it all, that made Fox Run Hill what it really was. The fence was made of wrought iron and topped with electrified barbed wire. It was supposed to keep them safe. It was also supposed to remain invisible. Years ago—when the fence had just been put up, and the first foundations for the first houses had just been dug on the little circle of lots near the front gate—someone had planted a thick stand of evergreen trees along the line the fence made against the outside world. Now those trees were thick with needles and very tall, blocking out all concrete evidence of the existence of real life.
Patsy checked through the clothes again—dresses, slacks, blouses, skirts, underwear of pink satin in lightly scented bags—and then walked back up the drive and into the garage. She poked against the pins in her salt-and-pepper hair and felt fat wet strands fall against her neck. She shifted the waistband of her skirt against her skin and ended up feeling lumpy and grotesque. Three days before, she had celebrated her forty-eighth birthday with a small dinner party at the Fox Run Hill Country Club. Her husband, Stephen Willis, had reserved the window corner
for her. She had been able to look out over the waterfall while she cut her cake. She had been able to look out over the candles at the people she had been closest to in this place. It should have been the perfect moment, the culmination of something important and valuable, the recognition of an achievement and a promise. Instead, the night had been ugly and flat and full of tension, like every other night Patsy could remember—but it was a tension only she had recognized. If she had tried to tell the others about it, they wouldn’t have known what she meant.
Nobody here has ever known what I meant, Patsy thought as she came up out of the garage into the mudroom. She kicked off her sandals and left them lying, tumbled together, under the built-in bench along the south wall. She padded across the fieldstone floor in her bare feet and went up the wooden stairs into the kitchen. The house was cavernous. It should have had a dozen children in it, and a dozen servants too. Instead, there was just Stephen and herself, having their dinners on trays in front of the masonry fireplace in the thirty-by-thirty-foot family room, making love in a tangle of sheets in a master bedroom so outsized, the bed in it had had to be custom-made, and all the linens had to be special-ordered from Bloomingdale’s. Patsy stopped at one of the two kitchen sinks and got herself a glass of water. Her throat felt scratchy and hard, as if she had just eaten razor blades. I hate this house, she thought. Anybody would hate this house. It was not only too large. It was fake. Even the portraits of ancestors that lined the paneled wall in the gallery were fake. Stephen had bought them at an auction at Sotheby’s, the leftover pieces of somebody else’s unremembered life.
“I paid only a thousand for the lot,” he’d told Patsy when he’d brought them home from New York. “They’re just what we’ve always needed in this place.”
Patsy put her used glass into the sink. That was the difference between them, of course. Stephen did like the house. He liked everything about it, just the way he liked everything about Fox Run Hill, and the country club, and his job at Delacord & Tweed in Philadelphia. Last month he had bought himself a bright red Ferrari Testarosa. This month he had been talking about taking a vacation in the Caribbean, of renting an entire villa on Montego Bay and keeping it for the three long months of the summer.
