by Jane Haddam
“She will take the dog to a park and let it run around,” Father Tibor said. “She will take it to obedience school, too, I hope. It is a wonderful dog, really, but it is very active.”
“Come on,” Gregor said. “I’ll let you into my place and you can stay there if Grace isn’t home yet.”
They went into the building and past old George Tekemanian’s door. Old George was out on the Main Line with his nephew for the duration of the very bad cold, although why Martin and Angela thought the apartment on Cavanaugh Street wouldn’t be properly heated was beyond Gregor’s understanding. They went upstairs past Bennis’s apartment, where Tibor had stayed for the months the church and his own apartment were being rebuilt after the bombing. They went up to Gregor’s floor and let themselves in. Tibor leaned his head back and tried calling out “Grace” in his loudest voice, but his loudest voice wasn’t worth much. When the new church was built, they had convinced him to get a microphone set up so that people could hear him when he sang the liturgy, and it had been a great relief for everybody concerned.
“Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said. “She’s not home yet. There’s no music coming out of there at all. She can’t sleep without music.”
“On the CD player,” Tibor said.
Tibor went down the short front foyer hall into the living room, and Gregor followed him. The apartment looked the way it always looked, except that it had been empty the second before they’d walked in, and empty for hours before that. Really, it felt as if it had been empty for months before that, although he knew it hadn’t been that long that Bennis had been on her book tour. Emptiness was more than the absence of people. Or something like that. He shrugged off his coat and threw it over the back of the couch. He wasn’t at his best when he was trying to be profound.
“I’m going to change,” he told Tibor. “Go into the kitchen and make yourself a cup of coffee. I bought those coffee bags Bennis suggested a few months ago. They at least mean that we don’t have to drink what we percolate, and that’s something.”
“I’ll make for both of us, Krekor, no? And there’s food?”
“There’s a refrigerator full of food,” Gregor said. “Lida and Hannah and the rest of them think I’m starving to death now that Bennis is away, which is funny as hell, if you think about it. You couldn’t get Bennis to cook if you threatened her with death. Be right back.”
“Take your time, Krekor.”
Gregor went down the long hall to his bedroom, closed the door, and sat on his bed. He could see the answering machine from where he was sitting, and there was no question at all that the green light on it was blinking. He took off his jacket and tie and tossed them toward the chair. He missed. He got up, picked them up, and put them over the chair’s back. He sat down again. His hands felt cold. His face felt cold. His brain felt frozen in place. He was not a man who found relationships with women easy. He could not keep his distance or look at sex as a game for players who knew when to hit and run. He had been in love exactly twice in his life, and in both those cases it seemed to him that the woman he loved had disappeared from existence exactly when he needed and wanted her the most. But the green light on the answering machine was blinking, and that meant somebody had left him a message.
“It’s going to turn out to be John Jackman,” he said, to the air. Then he reached out to the night table and pushed the play button.
“Mr. Demarkian?” a woman’s voice said, the wrong woman’s voice. “This is Alison Standish. I’m at 555–4295. That’s home. I’m sorry. I’m a little addled here. I just wanted to say thank you for everything, and especially for the heads-up about Dr. Tyler. It’s made all the difference in the world. Thank you again.”
The machine went dead. Gregor stared at it. A woman’s voice, but the wrong woman’s voice, or just the wrong voice. He wondered where Bennis was now, and what reason she had for not calling. He had her schedule someplace. Women didn’t make any sense to him, and they never had.
He could hear Tibor on the other side of the apartment, banging around coffee mugs and the big teakettle. He needed to get a sweater on and get up and out of here and have something to eat. He needed to think, but this was the kind of thing he wasn’t good at thinking about.
Bennis’s schedule wasn’t “someplace.” It was on the night table next to the answering machine. He picked it up and looked at it. There was the date, and the hotel in Salt Lake City, and the time the signing started at a bookstore whose name he’d never heard before. All he had to do was call.
He picked up the phone, put it in his lap, and put the schedule down next to him on the bed. Then he picked up the receiver and dialed 555–4295.