by Jane Haddam
There was a bench right in front of the steps to the Armenian Christian Church. When they got to it, Father Tibor sat down and began petting Spot again. Tommy sat down, too. It was crazy in this cold, but Spot didn’t seem to mind, and from the bench Tommy could see his own house several blocks away. There was something odd about it. Tommy couldn’t put his finger on what.
“Tcha,” Father Tibor said finally. “You are going back up there? To the prison? To see Russ?”
“Eventually. And don’t ask me what I’m doing. My mom asks me what I’m doing. I can’t explain it. I mean, I know I can’t change what he did. And I know he’s never going to get out of prison. Part of me thinks maybe I can show him how wrong he is about everything that’s happening. And if I can do that—” Tommy threw his hands into the air. “I don’t know. I don’t know what that’s supposed to fix.”
“Do you know why I became a priest?”
“If you think you’re going to talk me into that—”
“Tcha,” Father Tibor said. “In one way, it was the same reason as the other men in my seminary class. We did it because the Soviet authorities didn’t want us to. We did it because we were Armenians and we wanted to remember that. But I couldn’t have chosen this life for only that reason.”
“So?”
Spot had been sitting quietly on the ground. Now he jumped up and put the front half of himself into Tommy’s lap. Tommy laughed.
“Listen,” Father Tibor said. “We wanted to remember we were Armenian and there was nothing wrong with that. But there was nothing right with it, either. Armenians are no different than anybody else. There are good things about us and bad things about us, and the worst thing about us is the same as the worst thing about everyone else. Do you know the joke, about the Catholics in heaven?”
“No.”
“There is a new arrival in heaven,” Father Tibor said, “and Saint Peter shows him around. Over there are the Methodists. Over here are the Muslims. Over in that other place are the Lutherans, and next to the Lutherans are the Jews. The new arrival sees a group of people behind a high wall and asks, ‘Who are they? What are they doing behind a wall?’ ‘Oh,’ Saint Peter says. ‘Those are the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones here.’”
Tommy laughed again.
“But it’s true of all of us,” Tibor went on. “We all think we’re the only ones here. But there is a place in one of the epistles of Saint Paul, where Paul is talking to a group gathered to hear him preach, and what he says is, ‘You are neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. You are all one in Christ Jesus. You are all sons of God.’”
“My mother would give you a four-hour lecture about sexism.”
“No,” Father Tibor said. “It is not sexism to put it that way. In the culture of the time, sons could inherit but daughters could not. Paul is saying that in Christ, there will be no such divisions. We will not be the only ones here. We will all inherit the kingdom of God. And when I heard that, I thought it was what I wanted to be a part of, what I wanted to see happen in the world. That we will all inherit. That we will all be part of each other.”
“I may not be as crazy as Russ is, Father, but I don’t think that’s the direction the world is heading in.”
“It is never the direction the world is headed in. It is only the direction the world should be heading in.”
“In the opposite direction of Russ.”
“Think of yourself as part of a tide,” Father Tibor said. “If enough people are going in the right direction, more and more people will be dragged along with them.”
Spot got down from Tommy’s lap and tried a similar maneuver on Father Tibor’s. Father Tibor scratched him behind the ears and stood up.
“You should go home. Your mother will be worried about where you’ve gone.”
“Yeah.”
Tommy stood up. He was looking down Cavanaugh Street at his own house again, the tall brownstone walls, the peaks and whorls of the roof facade. Spot pranced around his legs, happy to be out in the air, straining against the leash to get a better sniff at the feet of the few people who came by.
And then he saw it.
He really saw it.
The roof facade was glinting, and as he watched he saw a cascade of gold foil paper come down the house’s dull stone front.
“Tommy?” Father Tibor asked.
“I’ve got to go,” Tommy said. “I’ve got to go. That’s my mom.”
“Tommy.”
“She’s decorating the whole damned house.”
And that was true.
After two years of nothing, of barely tinseled twigs at Christmas and blank walls at Easter and all the lights out and the doors locked for Halloween, Tommy Moradanyan’s mother was doing her thing again. She was wrapping their entire house in gold foil paper. She was celebrating, and that meant she could now see something to celebrate.
Tommy figured he’d better get over there and help.
AFTERWORD
Matthew DeAndrea
This was a lot harder to write than I thought it was going to be.
In July of last year my mother, Orania Papazoglou, who you probably know better under the pen name Jane Haddam, died. I started writing this afterword a little bit before she passed away, sitting in the hospital after the doctors told us she wasn’t going to wake up and it was only a matter of time. Because one of the things she made me promise, in that time when she was sick but we all thought the time she had left was still measured in years, was that this book would eventually get published. I promised her a lot of things in that time. I’ve been able to follow up on almost all of them. Most of them I wasn’t taking too seriously, you know? Because Mom had been known to fret, and she had at least another year.
Except of course, she didn’t.
Mom was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer about one year before she died. She spent that year undergoing various forms of treatment, from hormone pills to injections to chemotherapy. For a while even, a lot of it was working. She complained about the constant pink, which she described as “the worst part of having breast cancer.” She taught another semester. And, of course, she wrote one last Gregor. The one she’d been talking about writing for years. It was suggested to me that I should describe this book as a gift to the fans. And it is certainly that. Mom had no intention of leaving everyone hanging, especially after Fighting Chance ended with questions left unanswered.
But more than anything Mom was somebody who bulled through. Well before the cancer Mom had faced (and she’d yell at me for the cliché here) her fair share of tragedy, starting when she was young, going through the death of my father (William L. DeAndrea, also a mystery writer) and raising us alone and right into the disease itself. She’d yell, she’d complain, she’d argue, and she could get inventive with the colorful language as only someone who writes for a living can, but she’d get to the other side. Often she wouldn’t believe she could do it herself, and be almost confused at the far end.
She got us through an awful lot that way, more than she should have had to. So this book really is a gift. A gift to all of you, for reading and loving her work over the years—or for picking it up to give it a try, if this is the first time you’ve touched a Gregor Demarkian novel. A gift to me and my brother, because she always wanted to pass these stories down to us in time. And finally, corny as it may sound, a gift to herself. Just like the last semester she taught. Bulling through one last time, to prove she could. Even though Mom being Mom, she started bulling not really sure she would bull to the end.
And Mom being Mom, of course, she did.
I’ve used the first person a lot in this, because I’m the one sitting here typing, but I’ve got my brother hanging over my shoulder. We’re both writing this, really. And as to what we’re getting at, well, I guess it’s that we hope you enjoy the book. And that Mom was one hell of a lady. And that when you’re done with it maybe hand a copy to your mother, or someone els
e you care about, or at least give them a call. Because the world is a funny place, and you don’t always have another year.
Matthew and Gregory DeAndrea
THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS
BY JANE HADDAM
Not a Creature Was Stirring
Precious Blood
Act of Darkness
Quoth the Raven
A Great Day for the Deadly
A Feast of Murder
A Stillness in Bethlehem
Murder Superior
Dear Old Dead
Festival of Deaths
Bleeding Hearts
Fountain of Death
And One to Die On
Baptism in Blood
Deadly Beloved
Skeleton Key
True Believers
Somebody Else’s Music
Conspiracy Theory
The Headmaster’s Wife
Hardscrabble Road
Glass Houses
Cheating at Solitaire
Living Witness
Wanting Sheila Dead
Flowering Judas
Blood in the Water
Hearts of Sand
Fighting Chance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JANE HADDAM was the fiction pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, the author of more than thirty novels, most featuring Gregor Demarkian. The widow of mystery writer William DeAndrea, she died in 2019 shortly after finishing this work. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part Two
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Part Three
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Epilogue
Afterword
The Gregor Demarkian Books by Jane Haddam
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
ONE OF OUR OWN.
Copyright © 2020 by the Estate of Orania Papazoglou.
All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway,
New York, NY 10271.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover photographs: apartment building © Ildiko Neer / Trevillion Images; paper texture © Photo Boutique/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-77049-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-77050-9 (e-book)
eISBN 9781250770509
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: 2020
