by Jane Haddam
“We didn’t have to have a cashier’s check when we bought this property. At least, we didn’t for the down payment. I gave him an ordinary check out of my checkbook when we decided on this house. I remember.”
“We had to have a cashier’s check later,” Henry said.
“Yes, we did.” Evelyn nodded. “We had to have it when we closed. But we didn’t close on that property this afternoon, Henry. We just put a deposit on it and promised to buy.”
“I don’t really see the point in this discussion, Evelyn. After all, it isn’t your money. It isn’t like you made it and brought it to the marriage. I made it. My books made it.”
“I know you made it.”
“If anything, you’ve made it more difficult for me to make it. You haven’t helped. Don’t you think this—this appearance problem of yours causes me a lot of stress? Don’t you think it costs me sales?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I know, Evelyn. I know. It’s my money. And unlike you, I don’t just want to sit where I am forever. I want to move up and out. I want to meet people I have something in common with. There are reasons why successful people stick together, Evelyn.”
“I don’t think Sarah and Kevin are successful. I don’t think they’d be hanging around with us if they were.”
“They might not be hanging around with you,” Henry said, “but they would be hanging around with me. You may not be doing anything with your life, but I’ve been on The New York Times best-seller list.”
The talking head was gone from the television screen. The soap opera was back. Evelyn suddenly had a distinct vision of Patsy MacLaren Willis pulling out of her driveway in the Volvo, the back of the station wagon packed with clothes on hangers.
“That’s funny,” she said.
Henry looked furious. “I don’t see anything funny in the situation we’re in. I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing here, but I’ve had this about as far as I can take it. I want a divorce, Evelyn.”
“All right,” Evelyn said calmly. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“About a divorce? You’re going to make me a deal about a divorce? How can you?”
“I can make a deal about not being a problem to you,” Evelyn said. “I can promise not to call you up at all hours of the night to make your life a living hell. I can promise not to follow your girlfriend all over town with a camera and a tape recorder.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Henry said. “And if I did, and you did any of those things, I’d have you put in jail.”
“I’ll give you a divorce if that deal of Sarah and Kevin Lockwood’s isn’t some kind of scam,” Evelyn said. “If they’re really and truly okay, I’ll just pack my bags and move into an apartment in Philly and that will be the last you ever hear of me. I’ll even go back to my mother. I absolutely promise.”
“Christ,” Henry said. “You’re worse than impossible. You’re ridiculous. I don’t have to listen to any of this.”
“If it is a scam, I’ll fight you all the way,” Evelyn continued. “I’ll hire lawyers. I’ll hire private investigators. I’ll do everything that can be done, and in Pennsylvania it’s a lot of everything, Henry. I’m tired of listening to you tell me how stupid and fat and lower-class I am. I’m tired of listening to you tell me how you know everything in the world it’s worthwhile to know.”
“I don’t have to listen to any of this,” Henry repeated. Then he gave Evelyn his best glowering stare, the one from which she always recoiled, and turned his back on her. Evelyn hadn’t recoiled, but she didn’t know if he had noticed that. His back was stiff and hard. His head was cocked at an odd little angle.
“I’m really sick to death of your attitude,” he said. “I’m really tired to death of your lower-middle-class pettiness. I’m getting out of here.”
“So go,” Evelyn said.
Henry went. He went more slowly than she could ever remember him going, but he went. He kept his back rigid and his head at that odd little angle. He seemed to be waiting for her to do something or say something she hadn’t done or said yet, but Evelyn didn’t know what it was.
As soon as he was gone, Evelyn stepped out onto her back patio and looked up at the afternoon sky. The sky was blue and cloudless and somehow threatening. The air was hot and heavy and thick with moisture. Fox Run Hill was much too quiet. From back there Evelyn couldn’t see anything or anyone of importance. The backyards for all the houses were carefully designed for privacy, so that a couple could screw stark naked next to the built-in charcoal grill and nobody would be able to tell. Somebody could scream and scream and scream out there and no one in the whole community would know it was happening.
If I were going to kill my husband, that’s how I’d do it, Evelyn thought. I’d bring him out here and leave him lying next to the hydrangea bushes. I’d bury him in the compost heap. I’d leave him for the lawn service. Except that I wouldn’t kill my husband. It wouldn’t make any sense.
Evelyn went back into the house. She stepped out of her own front door and looked down the curving road at the Tudor where Patsy and Steve had lived. She thought of that Volvo backing down the drive and then gliding down the road, Patsy with her hand stuck out a window, waving at Molly Bracken. She thought of herself sitting in Patsy’s breakfast room one morning, looking at a picture in a sterling silver Tiffany frame.
“Those are the people who mattered most to me,” Patsy had said at the time, and then gone on to whatever it was she had had to say that was more important than that.
Evelyn gave a last long look at the mock-Tudor and then went back into her own house.
It was funny, she thought again. It really was. But it didn’t seem as if it could mean anything.
Evelyn went back into the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea. She could hear Henry rattling around upstairs. He expected her to come up and try to placate him, but she didn’t want to.
Funny, funny, funny, she thought to herself again, and then: I wonder if it means anything.
Evelyn did not wonder if her marriage to Henry meant anything, because she knew it didn’t mean a thing.
2.
For Evan Walsh, the news of the explosion in Liza Verity’s apartment meant everything and nothing. He noticed it on the television when the news bulletin came on, but he was in one of those periods where he was counting every breath Karla took, so he didn’t notice it with his whole mind and attention. Pipe bomb in central Philly, he thought, and then he bent more closely down over Karla’s chest and watched it rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, perfectly rhythmic, perfectly serene. If there hadn’t been any of those tubes and wires, if this had been any other kind of room but a hospital room, anyone who didn’t know better would have thought that Karla was just ordinarily asleep. She looked no different from sleeping princesses anywhere. Evan walked around her bed and checked her covers. He put his hand on her newly short hair and stroked against the stubble. He wished for things that made no sense: that they had not cut her hair; that they had let him buy her something nice and frilly to wear instead of this plain cotton hospital gown that looked to him like a shroud. Karla would not have seen herself as the frilly sleepwear type, but Evan could see her in lace and latticework. He could see her in satin as well as flannel.
Karla was breathing, breathing, breathing. That was all. Evan went out of the room and down the hall to the nurses’ station. There were all these stories in the newspapers about the overcrowding in Philadelphia’s hospitals, but this ward seemed to be nearly empty. There was nobody standing at the counter at the nurses’ station. Evan went around the back and looked through the window in the door to the office. Shelley Marie and Clare were sitting in there, looking at magazines and watching television. Evan knocked.
Shelley Marie looked up, nodded, and came to the door to let him in. It was against all kinds of regulations, but Evan was a known figure on the ward by then. Except for one real dragon of a head nurse, they all tried to take care of him.
Shelley Marie opened up and shooed him inside. When he was in, she shut and locked the door again.
“There’s been another bombing,” she said, her tone half hushed and half excited. “Clare and I have been watching a news story about it. This time the victim was a nurse.”
“It was a nurse from a different hospital,” Clare said. “She wasn’t anybody we knew.”
“I’d at least met her,” Shelley Marie said. “At one of those all-city in-service things or something. Anyway, she’s familiar. She’s another friend of Congresswoman Corbett’s too.”
“One of the newscasters is saying it looks like some kind of political plot,” Clare said. “You know, a string of assassinations. Although why anybody would want to get to Julianne Corbett that way is beyond me. I mean, she’s not that kind of politician.”
“She’s not even one way or the other about abortion in particular,” Shelley Marie said.
“Maybe it’s something else altogether,” Clare said. “They’ve got that Gregor Demarkian working on it. He was on television not two seconds ago. Isn’t he a specialist in serial killers?”
“He used to be a specialist in serial killers,” Shelley Marie said. “When he was with the FBI. He’s retired now.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s retired to me,” Clare said. “He’s all over the place. So maybe this is a case of a serial killer.”
“Killing a series of what?” Shelley Marie asked. “I thought serial killers killed young women with long brown hair parted in the middle. Or old ladies who carry canvas shopping bags.”
“They do,” Clare said. “Maybe this one kills middle-aged women who—who what?”
“Middle-aged women who have gotten dumpy,” Shelley Marie said positively. “They were all dumpy. The woman with the animal rights movement who died when Evan’s friend got hurt. And this nurse they keep showing pictures of. And this Patricia Willis—”
“But she isn’t dead,” Evan put in. “She’s the one everybody thinks is doing it. Isn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” Shelley Marie said.
Clare sighed. “They say she blew up her own car, but I can’t see it. I mean, every other time one of these bombs has gone off, somebody’s been dead, haven’t they? So it doesn’t make any sense that that car just blew up and nobody died. Maybe she was in it but she got blown so much to pieces, they never found the body.”
“Don’t be silly,” Shelley Marie said. “That can’t happen. You know that can’t happen. You see the messes they bring in here sometimes, and they always know they’ve got a body.”
“Car wrecks,” Clare said solemnly.
There was a coffeemaker on the corner of the desk, one of those drip-through electrical ones with the glass coffeepot that rested on a kind of hot plate. Evan poured himself a cup of coffee and looked at the television set. The news bulletin was long gone. Two middle-aged white people were wrapped in each other’s arms instead, whispering things to each other about how they really shouldn’t. Unlike the middle-aged women dead so far from bombs, these two were not heavy or out of shape. They were, however, very saggy. Their skin wrinkled and stretched and folded and shook when they pretended to passion.
Evan used one of the little plastic containers of non-dairy creamer the nurses kept in a basket next to the coffee machine—it was incredible how terrible their eating habits were; with all the health propaganda that got spewed out in a hospital, you’d think they would know better—and sat down in the one empty chair. The chair swiveled underneath him and made him feel dizzy.
“Well,” he said.
Shelley Marie held up her magazine, a copy of Glamour with an article in it called “How to Keep Your Wedding from Ruining Your Honeymoon.” It was incredible to Evan how stereotypically everyone behaved. According to the best minds on the faculty at Vassar, all that moon-June-spoon business went out of style years before, as soon as women began raising their authentic voices against the oppressive assumptions of consumer capitalism.
“She’s breathing very well,” Evan said stiffly.
Clare patted him gently on the knee. “She is breathing very well,” she said, “and if it’s any consolation, she seems to be doing much better than most people who end up in her condition. I heard one of the doctors say just the other day that there isn’t a single sign of brain damage yet, and that probably means there won’t be any. And that’s very good news.”
“A lot of people who end up in comas for a long time are really disabled when they come out,” Shelley Marie said. “But Miss Parrish seems just to have been knocked out in a particularly unlucky way. I mean, she doesn’t seem to be out for any structural reason or whatever.”
“Ms.,” Clare said. “I think she likes to be called Ms.”
“I just wish it weren’t so uncertain,” Evan said. “I wish we could say, well, in two weeks or four weeks or six months, something would happen. Anything would happen.”
“Well,” Clare said, “we can’t say that.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to all those stories about people who are in comas for years and years and don’t come out until their children have children,” Shelley Marie said. “In cases like this, it almost never happens like that.”
“And you’re doing the best possible thing you can do,” Clare said. “You’re staying with her. You’re talking to her. The theory is now that she can probably hear most of what you have to say. It keeps her mind from atrophying.”
“Minds don’t really atrophy,” Shelley Marie said. “That’s a myth, like alligators in the sewers.”
“I was just trying to tell him to keep it up,” Clare said. “He should go on talking to her the way he does, and visiting her. It’s good for her. It’s probably good for him too.”
“I know it is. But her mind won’t atrophy. It isn’t a muscle or that kind of thing.”
One of Evan’s professors at college was always saying that the mind was a muscle, but he wasn’t a professor of anatomy, so maybe it didn’t count. Evan put his half-filled coffee cup down on the desk. He didn’t want any more of it. He hated the taste of nondairy creamer. He hated the sight of the bride on the first page of the Glamour magazine article.
“I’d better get back to Karla,” he said. “Maybe it’s my mind that’s in danger of atrophying.”
“I’ll bring you something to eat when dinner comes around,” Shelley Marie said.
Evan let himself out of the nurses’ station office. He walked past four empty rooms and one with a heart patient in it before he came to Karla’s door. The policeman who had been put there to guard her in the hours after the explosion was gone now. Evan went in and sat down in the chair next to her bed.
Later, he would wonder how long it had taken him before he began to realize that everything had changed. It was hot in the room in spite of the air conditioners. He was looking at the windows that looked out on the grimness of this Philadelphia neighborhood, wondering if they could be opened at all, just to let in a little air. Then he began to feel a little strange and he looked down into Karla’s face.
And her eyes were open.
Her eyes were wide open.
They weren’t staring.
They weren’t dead.
They were simply open, and while he watched, they blinked.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Shh,” Karla told him, her voice so hoarse it was a croak, and barely audible. “Don’t tell anyone.”
THREE
1.
THE PRINTOUTS ARRIVED BY messenger at 6:45 A.M. John Jackman arrived at 7:02, just as Gregor was about to leave his apartment to go to the Ararat. The brownstone was already a mess of noise and confusion. With the wedding now no further away than Sunday, Gregor no longer had Donna’s decorations to trip over. He now had the actual preparations for the actual wedding to trip over. Donna Moradanyan’s mother had come in from the Main Line God only knew when. Gregor was only sure that she was there when the printouts arrived; she was standing on the
fourth floor landing, calling out directions in a voice that was half Katharine Hepburn and half Willard Scott. Bolts of cloth and bits of netting were everywhere. As John Jackman stood on Gregor’s doorstep ringing his bell, a long ribbon of ice green floated down out of nowhere onto his head. Moments later Bennis Hannaford rushed downstairs, grabbed it off him, and rushed back upstairs again.
“Good morning, Bennis,” Jackman said.
Bennis didn’t even look at him. “I don’t have time to argue with you now,” she said. “The flower girl lost all the trim off her dress at the dry cleaner’s.”
Gregor wanted to ask what the flower girl’s dress was doing at the dry cleaner’s when the flower girl shouldn’t even have worn it yet, but instead he shifted his stack of computer printouts from one arm to the other and said, “Your material came. Are we going to breakfast?”
“What’s going on up there?” Jackman backed into a stairwell so that he could look up. There was a big bolt of white lace draped over the banister. Donna Moradanyan’s mother was talking through pins.
“The Jordan almonds,” she was saying. “Somebody has to remember the Jordan almonds.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said. “They’re going to kill somebody.”
Gregor stepped onto the landing himself and closed his front door behind him. “Ararat,” he said firmly. “Work. If you get caught up in the kind of thing that goes on around here, you’ll never get anything done at all. Let’s move.”
“You can’t have had much of a chance to look over the material.” John Jackman was looking back up the stairwell again. Gregor wondered if Bennis was standing there. “Don’t you want to study it for a while?”
“If it comes to conclusions I haven’t reached, I can study it for a while. You can tell me that at breakfast. Let’s go.”
“Gregor—”
Gregor took him by the arm and started to tug him downstairs. The sound of female voices was high and harsh and unmistakable in the air above them. Suddenly, the whole brownstone seemed female. Men got married too. Why were weddings a female thing? Gregor dragged John Jackman downstairs, past Bennis’s apartment on the second floor and into the lobby next to old George Tekemanian’s door. Bennis’s door had one of those big white and gold bows on it and old George Tekemanian’s had a bouquet of silk flowers that looked like they were growing little pieces of glitter on their stems.