by Jane Haddam
“Tcha,” Father Tibor said, after a while.
But that was it. Just “tcha.”
It took a little over a block before Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I’m not a child,” he said finally. “No matter what the pack of you think, I’m not a child.”
“You are fourteen,” Father Tibor said.
“Which is not a child,” Tommy said again. “It’s old enough to think. It’s old enough to need to know.”
“You could always think,” Father Tibor said. “Even as an infant, you could think. Sometimes you could think too well for your own good. Or your mother’s.”
“I know Mom is—I mean, I know this is—”
“Did you hitchhike because you didn’t have the money for the bus?”
“I had the money for the bus one way. I used it to take the bus home. I thought that made more sense. It was more important to get back on time. I started off early enough in the morning to give myself a lot of leeway getting there.”
Father Tibor nodded. “And you have faked identification?”
“Uh—I did a license.”
“And this license says you are how old?”
“Eighteen.”
Father Tibor nearly stopped dead on the sidewalk. “They believed that? At the prison? That you are eighteen?”
Tommy flushed. “I was a little worried about that, too, but it wasn’t any problem. They barely even looked at it. I think it could have said I was a penguin and they wouldn’t have noticed.”
“The next time you decide to go up there,” Father Tibor said, “you will come to me, and I will give you money for the bus fares. You will not hitchhike.”
“It really wasn’t a problem—”
“It is not safe. I am not your mother. I understand this, a little. I talk to him, too.”
“I don’t have your advantages. I can’t claim to be his priest and get a designated hour every week.”
“That was Krekor. But yes, I know.”
“And I wanted to see him. Face-to-face. I wanted to look at him. All that stuff happened and Mom packed us up and took us off and it was like one minute he was there and the next minute he’d just vanished. She wouldn’t even let us see the news. I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t any news. He pled guilty. There wasn’t any trial.”
“There was some news.”
“Father Tibor, he was the only father I ever really had. And I thought I knew him.”
“We all thought we knew him. Your mother says he was very tense there, at the end, in the last eight months or so. I think back and I cannot remember.”
“I can’t either. I think back and it all seems normal to me. Maybe he was treating me a little more like an adult, if you know what I mean, but there’s nothing odd in that. Does it matter that I think that woman he killed deserved to be dead?”
“I think it matters that you think anybody deserves to be dead.”
“But what she did. Taking money to give kids longer sentences in juvenile hall so the for-profit-prison people could make money off them. Okay, I’ve never really figured out how that worked. But I have the gist of it. Right? That was very bad.”
“Yes,” Tibor said. “That was very bad.”
“But then in a way it doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, “because he didn’t kill her because she was doing it. He didn’t kill her to stop her from doing it. He was part of it, too. Sometimes I sit around and think about it and I get feeling crazy.”
“You must remember that there were other things besides the woman. He tried to kill Krekor, too.”
“Does he talk to you about all this crazy stuff he thinks? About how everything is falling apart and there’s going to be a civil war and blood in the streets and if you don’t have money you’re going to die or be worse than dead and Mom is the perfect target and—it went on and on. I was there for twenty minutes and he never stopped.”
Father Tibor nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“Do you believe any of that stuff?”
“I believe he believes it.”
“Do you think he’s insane?”
“No,” Father Tibor said definitely. “No. You must not do that. It is a very American thing to do, and I care very much for American things, but in this case it is wrong. To say he is insane is to say he did not know what he was doing, that he did not have control of himself. It is saying he is something less than a human being. But that is not true. He is as human as everybody else.”
“Even if he did the things he did because he thought the world was about to end and he was trying to get enough money to— I don’t know. Build us a bunker? Build us an entire private army? Did he even know where he thought all that was going?”
“Probably not,” Father Tibor said.
“I don’t know if I want to go up again,” Tommy said. “It was depressing. And scary. It was like something out of a science fiction movie. One of the dystopian ones. And he was—different.”
“Yes,” Father Tibor said.
They were right at the intersection where, to get to Cavanaugh Street, they would have to turn left. They had left the Spanish neighborhood behind them by a couple of blocks. They were in a small area of shop fronts, all of which had those metal security barriers over their plate-glass windows. It was not as depressing as the prison had been, but Tommy thought it was pretty depressing.
Somewhere in the not-too-distant distance there was a squeal of brakes. Tommy looked into the weather and could just see the pinpoint glare of a pair of headlights.
“I hope that’s a police car,” he said. “They catch anybody out here in this, they’ll have fits.”
“The sanders should be out by now,” Tibor said.
The vehicle wasn’t a sander. A sander was a truck. This thing sounded like an ordinary car. Tommy adjusted his backpack on his shoulders. He was exhausted.
“I suppose I ought to go home and face Mom,” he said. “I’m going to have to do it eventually.”
“I will walk you to your front door. I will watch as you go inside. I will call and tell her you are coming in the door.”
“I don’t know where you think I’d go in the middle of all this, Father. I haven’t even seen a diner open.”
There was another squeal, closer now. They both turned in the direction of the noise. The headlights got bigger. Then they got bigger still, and the vehicle was finally close enough—about a block and a half away—to be recognizable in the storm. It was a big black van, one of the ones without any windows in the sides, and it was picking up speed.
“What the hell does that idiot think he’s doing?” Tommy said.
“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.
The engine revved and the van shot forward. Suddenly it was right next to them. It was fishtailing wildly, its rear end swinging back and forth. Tommy grabbed Father Tibor by the chest and pushed him back against the walls of the stores behind them. Didn’t vans like that usually have four-wheel drive? But even four-wheel drive didn’t work on ice. Russ had taught him that.
Russ had taught him practically everything he knew.
The squealing was almost as loud as a siren now. Then the driver seemed to get a clue and began to turn into the skid. The turn was a wide circle. There wasn’t space for it. The van came around and the driver hit the brakes. It didn’t help. The van came around again and then suddenly the side of it hit the streetlamp on the corner. The noise was metallic and enormous. The van’s back doors popped. They hung there in the air for a moment, flapping.
Then the van righted itself. The engine revved again. The van aimed straight ahead and shot off past them.
And as it went, an oversized black garbage bag came flying out of its interior and landed on the street.
And then it was over. The street was empty except for the garbage bag. The ice storm was bad. There was nobody to be seen anywhere. Tommy moved back out onto the middle of the sidewalk and stopped.
The garbage bag was not empty. There was something inside it,
lumpy and unpleasantly familiar.
“Tommy,” Father Tibor said, grabbing his arm.
Tommy hadn’t noticed that Tibor had moved back onto the sidewalk, too. Tommy shook off the arm trying to hold him back.
“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.
Tommy went out into the middle of the street.
He knew that there was a human body in that bag before he got anywhere near it.
What he didn’t know until he got right on top of it was that it was alive.
PART ONE
ONE
1
Gregor Demarkian took Pickles out for a walk the long way around, starting at his own house and going all the way up Cavanaugh Street and then back again. The ice storm was over but still a problem. The sidewalk was slick. The utility poles all looked like they were frosted. Pickles was not enamored of this bit of exercise. Gregor was surprised she was willing to get her business done at all.
What Gregor wanted was to take a look at Donna Moradanyan’s house, the same house where Tommy Moradanyan and his sister lived, the same house where they had all lived together with Russ Donahue. He had no idea what he expected to see. There was a time when any house Donna Moradanyan lived was a spectacle for the neighborhood and beyond. She liked decorating for holidays, and her idea of decorating was to wrap entire buildings in lights or colored tinfoil or shiny paper or whatever else occurred to her to carry out a theme. Sometimes she wrapped her own house this way. Sometimes she went on to another building or two on the street. One Groundhog Day she had decked out the Ararat Restaurant with plastic grass and flowers and added a mechanical groundhog that sprang up to celebrate spring. On Valentine’s Day she had covered Gregor’s own house in wriggling cupids with red and white hearts on the tips of their arrows. Stories and pictures appeared on the local news stations. People came from as far away as Bucks County and the Main Line to see what she was going to do next.
This morning the house was dark, with nothing to cover it but its own red brick. There had been no decorating since Russ had gone to prison. In some ways, there had been no Donna since Russ had gone to prison. She went about her day the way she always had. Her children were well dressed and well fed. Tommy got halfway decent grades in school. Charlotte was the star of her ballet class. Donna herself had taken a job as an editor at a small local newsmagazine. Gregor had heard she did well there. Even so, it was like Gertrude Stein said—there was no there there. The Donna Moradanyan of today was a competent, organized woman. She just wasn’t really Donna Moradanyan.
Pickles decided to do her business right in front of Donna’s house, which Gregor thought was a statement of some kind, he didn’t know about what. Gregor used the pooper-scooper and cleaned up after the dog. He half expected Tommy to come barreling out to talk to him. There had to be a lot left to say after the mess of the night before. There was always the chance that Gregor, with his contacts, might have heard something about what it all meant. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t, but Tommy didn’t come out anyway.
Gregor gave a last look at the brick facade and started back toward his own house. He got as spooky as Donna sometimes these days. He didn’t know what to do about it. Things just seemed … wrong, somehow. He couldn’t put them right.
He let himself into his front foyer and heard sounds from the kitchen. A moment later, Javier came running out, and Pickles snapped against the leash hard enough to break free. Javier was talking a mile a minute in Spanish. Pickles was licking his face and scattering wet drops of melting ice everywhere.
Bennis came out, too. “Hey,” she said. “The Melajian boys were just here. We have breakfast.”
“The Ararat delivered breakfast?”
“Just this once for the special circumstances,” Bennis said. “I talked to Linda about it a couple of days ago. I thought it would be a bit much to take Javier to the Ararat first day out, so she put together a few things for us to have here.”
“Did she send eggs?”
“Scrambled only. She said sunny-side up doesn’t travel well. There’s sort of a lot of it.”
Javier and Pickles had disappeared into the kitchen. Gregor followed Bennis back there and saw Javier sitting at the table in front of a plate piled up with pancakes, waffles, hash browns, sausages, and toast. Next to him, Pickles was being presented with a small plate of pancakes with butter and syrup.
“Oh, no,” Bennis said. She grabbed the small plate and put it on the floor. Pickles followed it. “No dogs at the table,” Bennis told Javier. Then she leaned over and told Pickles the same thing.
“Of course, I don’t know what Tibor does,” she said, “and I’ve got a suspicion that pancakes aren’t what you really want to feed dogs, but we’ll work it out. He’s going to bring over some of her things later. Do you mind Pickles staying a few days?”
Gregor sat down at an empty place and started going through the plastic containers of—everything. “Of course not. She seems to be acting like a therapy dog. I hope Tibor doesn’t mind.”
“I don’t think he minds. I don’t know if he’s making much sense this morning, though. You’re making a lot more sense than I expected you to.”
“All I did was go down and check things out. I probably didn’t even need to. It isn’t like they got arrested. They were just witnesses. They talked to the uniforms. They talked to the detectives headquarters sent out, or maybe the precinct. I don’t even know. They gave their information and we all came home. It was just a weird incident.”
“You were the one who said it was an attempted murder.”
“I can’t think of what else it would be,” Gregor said. “But the woman was alive when she was taken away in the ambulance, I’m just glad Javier wasn’t there.”
“I’m just sorry Tommy was,” Bennis said. She looked toward Javier. Gregor noticed that the boy had started in on the fruit jams. There were five or six different kinds. He was using all of them.
Bennis had tea and a plate with a piece of melon on it. She sat down herself, saw Javier was struggling to reach the big tub of hash browns, and pulled it closer to him. Javier said gracias and went at it.
“Lida called. She and Hannah are coming over sometime today. They baked cookies. Father Tibor is sleeping in. I suppose Tommy is sleeping in, too.”
“Did you talk to Donna?”
“Sort of. And the weather is awful, so I was thinking we’d just stay in today. Javier and me, I meant. You can do what you want.”
“Is there somewhere you wanted to go?”
Bennis shrugged. “There are things that need to be done. Clothes, for instance. I have all his school uniforms, that was easy, but I don’t have that much in the way of stuff for him to wear otherwise. I didn’t want to go out and pick up a bunch of things I liked and just stick him with them. Even children have their own tastes. I don’t know what he wants in colors, or if he likes jeans or khakis, or any of that sort of thing. And he needs a backpack. I can get that off the Internet at L.L.Bean, but then there’s that color thing again, and there are different kinds. There are a lot of things to think about.”
Gregor looked over at Javier. Pickles was in his lap, and chomping down on something. Bennis got up, took the dog, and put it back down on the floor.
“No dogs at the table,” she said to Javier, very emphatically this time. Then she sat down again. “I’ve got my suspicions about the language thing,” she said. “I think it’s like the first time I was by myself in Paris.”
“He speaks Spanish,” Gregor pointed out.
“I know. But I was in Paris on my own for the first time, and I was getting kind of frantic, because I didn’t speak the language and I kept seeing myself starving to death in the street because I couldn’t figure out how to order any food and the French are really such jackasses about pretending they don’t know what you’re trying to say. And then I was in this bakery, patisserie, you know, and I was trying to buy some pastry, and it suddenly hit me. I wanted to buy pastry, and the girl behind the counter wanted t
o sell me pastry, and given those circumstances, we’d find a way.”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
“I think Javier’s ability to understand what I’m talking about sort of waxes and wanes with how motivated he is to get the message.”
“Ah.”
Somewhere out in the foyer, the landline rang. Bennis stood up.
“I’ll get it. And I was thinking just last week that we ought to get rid of the landline because we never use it anymore.”
“It’ll probably be a robocall. You can hang up.”
Bennis left the room. Gregor turned his attention to Javier. Pickles was back in his lap, but she wasn’t chomping on anything this time, so Gregor let it go.
Javier stroked the dog’s head.
“You don’t know it yet,” Gregor told him, “but you’re about to be surrounded by a bunch of Armenian ladies who were born to be grandmothers. They’re going to be all over you. You’re going to have cookies.”
“Oreo,” Javier said, almost solemnly.
Gregor laughed. “Those, too. But there are going to be cookies they make themselves. In big batches, bigger than you can get at any grocery store.”
“Chips Ahoy!” Javier said. “Fig Newtons!”
Gregor laughed again. “We’ve got Girl Scouts around here,” he said. “We’ll get you some of those, too.”
“Mallomars.”
Just then, Bennis came back, looking puzzled.
“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s John Jackman.”
2
Over the years Gregor Demarkian had known him, John Henry Newman Jackman had become the most famous politician in Pennsylvania. He had started as a detective of homicide in Bryn Mawr, a position that had made him joke that racial stereotypes didn’t work in Bryn Mawr, because the only black man in the suburb was on the side of law and order. He had moved from there to become head of homicide in Philadelphia, and then police commissioner in Philadelphia, and then mayor. Until Barack Obama came along, Gregor had been sure he had been looking to become America’s first black president. At the moment, he was having to settle for a seat in the United States Senate and more interviews on CNN than most people could handle without losing their minds.
