Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Lucinda was in the front parlor—the living room, she called it, and Annie tried to call it that too. The curtains were pulled back to let in what little sun there was. The glass of the windowpanes shone, newly polished. Lucinda had been working. She had taken all the books off the shelf so that she could dust.

  “Well,” Annie said.

  “Did you just get up?” Lucinda asked her.

  Annie came into the living room and sat down on the couch. It was an exceptionally long couch, big enough to fit half-a-dozen people. She remembered thinking, when she bought it, that Adelphos House would have crowds of young women on the premises all the time. They would need some place to sit.

  “You left the paper on the table,” Annie said. “You had it open to Ryall’s column.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “Ryall’s column?”

  “The paper.”

  “I read the front page,” Annie said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  Lucinda had finished dusting the shelves. She put her dust cloth and the Pledge on the floor and began to pick up books and put them back. “I didn’t see any point,” she said. “You can’t do anything about it. It wouldn’t have changed anything if I’d made you get up even earlier than usual and you ended up even more tired than usual when tonight came. And I didn’t want to leave it, right there, where you’d just sort of walk in on it, without warning. It wouldn’t seem right, somehow.”

  Annie wanted to say that she had walked in on it without warning. Whatever else could she have done when she wasn’t expecting what she eventually saw? She looked over her shoulder at the street. It was empty. The three houses that faced this one directly had all lost all the glass from their windows. One of them leaned, slightly, backwards.

  “I didn’t actually read the front page,” Annie said. “I read the headline. Then things got blurry. Did you read it all?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Do you want to tell me what it said?”

  Lucinda stopped working. “What do you think it said? She was killed.”

  “Shot? The way Tony was shot?”

  “With a rifle, yes. Or police believe with a rifle. Like that. You know they’re never very specific in the paper.”

  “When?”

  Lucinda blinked. “Last night.”

  “No,” Annie said. “What time last night?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. Six, I think. Or the police arrived at the scene at six. Or something like that. Why is the time important? Are you worried about being a suspect?”

  “No.” This was true. There was no reason for anybody to suspect her of anything. She had none of the usual motives. She would inherit nothing because Tony had died. She most certainly would inherit nothing because Charlotte had. She hadn’t spent enough time with her brother or her sister-in-law in recent years to hate them. She turned her face away from the street. Lucinda had gone back to putting books back on shells.

  “There’s a lot in the article about domestic terrorism,” Lucinda said. “And there’s a sidebar on the inside page, all about acts of violence by domestic terrorist groups. About this murder of an FBI agent out in Indiana or somewhere. Some group that called itself a posse.”

  “The Posse Comitatus,” Annie said. “It’s this obscure provision in a law. I remember them, vaguely.”

  “I don’t.”

  “They were another one of those groups,” Annie said. “The United Nations is evil. Any day now, it’s going to take over the U.S. and we’ll all be part of a One World Government. The world is secretly run by a cabal of the Vatican, the Freemasons, the British monarchy, and the Kremlin. Like that man who’s been sending us that newsletter every once in a while.”

  “Michael Harridan.”

  “Whoever.” Annie still had the coffee cup in her hand. It was nearly empty. She had forgotten all about it. She put it down on the coffee table. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think the police are going to buy that explanation anymore, the domestic terrorist one. Why would domestic terrorists want to kill Charlotte?”

  “Because she raised money for the UN?”

  “Lame,” Annie said. “That’s not the way those people think. They’d choose something about the government, or somebody like Tony, somebody with influence.”

  “There’s that priest who was here the night it all happened,” Lucinda said. “His church was bombed. Doesn’t that sound like domestic terrorism?”

  “It sounds like religious bigotry and violence, but I don’t know if it sounds like domestic terrorism. He had some little church on a side street. Why would a domestic terrorist bother to blow it up?”

  “Because he thought it was part of this One World Government?”

  “It’s more likely some half-educated idiot who’s never heard of the Eastern churches and thinks they’re practicing witchcraft on Cavanaugh Street. And there’s no reason to think the incidents are connected, just because they happened on the same night. There must have been a dozen acts of violence in Philadelphia and on the Main Line that night.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t be connected,” Lucinda said. “Or maybe I’ve just seen too many crime shows. On crime shows, they would have been connected.”

  “Maybe they would have been.”

  Lucinda started taking things off one of the side tables. It was, Annie thought, what she did when she was nervous.

  “The thing is … ,” Annie said.

  “What?” Lucinda said.

  “Nothing.” Annie got up. She took the coffee cup off the coffee table. The bottom of the cup was muddy where some of the instant crystal had failed to dissolve. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to go for a walk.”

  “It’s freezing out there.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll wear a coat. I won’t be cold. Why do you think it got cold so early this year?”

  “Global warming,” Lucinda said.

  Annie only half-heard her. She went down the hall to the kitchen and put the cup in the sink. She got her coat off the peg near the back door and put it on. She went back to the front of the house and out the front door. She did not stop in the living room again. She did not listen to hear if Lucinda was cleaning.

  It was truly cold out, freezing, bitter, harsh. It was the worst she could ever remember it being, ever, no matter how far back in her memory she searched. She had reached that stage in her life when her entire childhood seemed to have existed only in summer. She wished she could see some signs of summer now.

  Eventually, everything became known. Sometimes it became known quickly, and sometimes it became known only after a long time, but it wasn’t true that people could keep secrets. In the long run, everything you’d ever done would be on display for all the world to see.

  3

  It only took a good night’s sleep for Father Tibor Kasparian to realize there were drawbacks to staying in Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. He’d never been able to sleep well in hospitals, and he’d been dreading coming back to Ca-vanaugh Street as well. He hadn’t been sure how he’d react to the sight of Holy Trinity as a bombed-out mess. Then the people had just been too much. There had been too many of them at once, and too much food, and too much talk about things he knew nothing about, like this murder in Bryn Mawr. By the time Gregor had finally shown up, he’d been drooping. By the time he’d been left alone in the apartment for three minutes, he was on his way to bed. He noticed nothing, at the time, except that Bennis or somebody had put clean sheets on the bed and supplied it with enough quilts to manually thaw the polar ice caps. If he tossed and turned in his sleep, he didn’t notice it. If he called out in his dreams, there would have been nobody to hear him. Years ago, in Armenia, his Anna had complained that he talked constantly in his sleep, nonstop, but never about important things. He shouted instructions at cats. He worried out loud about the number of cans in the pantry, and they didn’t have a pantry. They had nothing. When he stayed with the faithful who wanted him to pray with them in their liv
ing rooms, they thought he was giving evidence of sanctity. If Tibor had been living in the West at the time, where such things were possible, he would have bought a tape recorder and run it while he slept. As it was, he had to take everybody’s word for it, and to remind himself that no matter what else he might be, he was not a saint.

  The first problem with Bennis Hannaford’s apartment was in the bedroom, where the funerary urn containing her sister Anne Marie’s ashes still sat on top of the low dresser near the window. That in and of itself would not have bothered Tibor much, in spite of the fact that Anne Marie had not been the best of people, except that the urn and the dresser top beneath it had been deliberately left out of whatever cleaning had gone on in anticipation of his arrival. He knew the oversight was deliberate because the urn and the dresser it sat on didn’t have just a little dust. They had a monumental amount of dust, nearly half an inch of it, and it had been undisturbed for some time. It was as if Bennis had both wanted to do the right thing about Anne Marie and not wanted to do it at the same time. The urn was brass and had those big curving handles like sporting trophies had. The brass had never been polished that Ti-bor could tell. On the taller dresser on the other side of the room, there were family pictures in sterling-silver frames of Bennis and her brothers and sisters at her father’s house, Engine House, in Bryn Mawr. In none of them was Anne Marie included.

  The second problem with Bennis Hannaford’s apartment was in the living room, where, Tibor noticed as soon as he got up, the only actually real furniture was the big wooden worktable with Bennis’s computer and papers and books on it, pushed up against the window looking out on Cavanaugh Street. The sofa and chairs and coffee table they had all been using the night before were gimcrack and upholstered in odd colors that didn’t match. Either Bennis had gone downtown in some haste and picked up whatever she could find that could be delivered immediately, or she had pulled these pieces out of other people’s houses. Tibor thought the latter was probably true. Bennis’s own furniture was upstairs in Gregor’s apartment. Gregor’s furniture—which she had pronounced not fit for drunk muskrats—was in storage. Tibor remembered all this from when Bennis and Gregor had decided to move in with each other. It wasn’t that anybody had told him, flat-out. They wouldn’t. It was just that everybody knew, and if you sat long enough in the Ararat or in old George Tekemanian’s apartment or at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, you heard anything you needed to hear.

  He got dressed and went to the kitchen, which did have furniture in it. Maybe Bennis liked Gregor’s kitchen furniture better than her own. He looked in the refrigerator, which was stocked for a long siege of bad weather. He could survive the blizzard of the century and its ensuing floods with what he had in there. He looked in the cabinets and found them overstuffed as well. Somebody had thoughtfully left him three big boxes of coffee bags, the kind you put in a cup and poured water over like you poured water over tea bags to make tea. Theoretically, it was impossible to make bad coffee with coffee bags. He didn’t take any out. He was depressed, not sick. Depression was not cured by having coffee alone in an otherwise empty kitchen.

  He went out to the foyer, got his coat, and went downstairs. He knocked on old George’s apartment just in case, but he wasn’t expecting to have much luck. It was nearly seven-thirty. Old George and everybody else would be at the Ararat already. He went out into the street and looked up and down. Howard Kashinian’s youngest daughter, having been expelled from her fourth college in three years, was standing with a boy next to the Ararat’s front windows. If she didn’t watch it, the neighborhood would have her married, pregnant, and well on her way to grandmotherhood before lunch.

  The first order of business was to look at Holy Trinity Church, in daylight, the way it was now. He went down the street, across the intersection, to the middle of the next block. From here, with the width of the street and the far sidewalk between him and it, it looked strangely hopeful. In spite of the pictures he had seen of it in the papers, and once on the news, he had somehow expected to find it completely a pile of rubble. He crossed the street and went up the stone steps to what had once been the door. The door was gone, and so was most of the vestibule beyond it, although he could tell where it had been from the variations in the floor. He stepped through into the sacristy. This close to the street, there was no roof. Farther down, there was, but he thought it might be dangerous. Roofs were not meant to hang in free suspension over floors. He sat down in the last pew at the back in the set just next to the center aisle. The pews were beautifully carved wood, given by Howard and Sheila Kashinian when the church had been renovated in 1985. They were covered with dust and debris and they had been rained on more than once. They were not going to survive. He got up and went down the center aisle toward the altar. It was still standing, although the wall of icons that had once stood in front of it mostly was not. That didn’t bother him so much. That was one of the things that should have been changed decades ago, because it was in the Greek churches that the altar was shielded by an iconostasis. In Armenian ones, there was supposed to be a curtain. Tibor suspected that the priests who had come before him had felt as he did. The iconostasis was a beautiful thing. They hadn’t wanted to destroy it.

  When we rebuild the church, we’ll rebuild it to Armenian specifications, he told himself. He couldn’t reach the altar. There was just too much in the way. He wondered what had happened to the icons. It was too much to hope for that somebody had taken them down and preserved them. Even if they weren’t proper to shield the altar in an Armenian church, they could be given away, to a Greek church or a museum. They could be reframed to hang in the reception area of the new church when it was built.

  He went back down the center aisle to where the vestibule had been. Nothing he was doing felt entirely real. He might have been an actor, so caught up in his role he’d ceased to notice the audience just beyond the lights. He went down the front steps to the sidewalk. Then he went around to the side. He didn’t have to go very far into the narrow side alley to get the eerie feeling that he’d been transported back in time. Nothing here looked changed, or damaged, or in danger of falling over at the first rude jolt. He had to remind himself to be careful. The blast had done “structural damage” to the entire building, and the wall that lined this alleyway and his own small apartment at the back were part of the building. Still, when he got into the courtyard and looked around, everything looked exactly as it had. The little carriage light next to his front door was still burning, just the way he’d left it when he’d gone to Adelphos House on that night. He got his keys out of his pants pocket and went up to the front door. He unlocked and stuck his head inside. Everything was normal here too, and there was another light burning. That was the table lamp next to the big couch in his living room. He left that one lit day and night because he didn’t like to be entirely in the dark.

  He propped the door open, just in case the building started to collapse and he had to run for it. He went in through the little foyer and the living room to the kitchen. The chief change was in the books, which were mostly gone. Usually, this apartment had books stacked everywhere, floor to ceiling against all the walls, on all the furniture, even in the bathroom. He wondered where Bennis and Donna and the others had put the boxes they’d packed the books away in. He left the kitchen and went down the little hall on the left to his bedroom. The hallway was twice as wide without books stacked against the walls on either side. It was easier to navigate, but he didn’t like the effect.

  He was in the bedroom, making a small pile of pictures and letters, when Bennis came in. He knew it was Bennis because he could hear her muttering under her breath as she walked. He sat back on his heels and waited. Next to him on the floor, with nothing stacked on top of it, because he would never stack anything on top of it, was the largest and clearest photograph he had left of his wife.

  Bennis came up to the door of the bedroom and said, “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know the building is unsa
fe? The roof could collapse on you and you could get killed.”

  “The roof didn’t collapse on you,” Tibor said. “You didn’t get killed.”

  “We were being careful.”

  “I’m being careful too,” Tibor said. He waved his hand at the pile on the floor. “There were some things I wanted to get. There is no point telling me that you could have gotten them for me. I wouldn’t have been able to explain what to look for. And you don’t read Armenian. Not very many people do, here.”

  “So what’s that?” Bennis said. “That’s your wife, isn’t it?”

  “My wife, yes, Anna. Close to the time when we were first married. She wanted to come to America much more than I did. I didn’t really want to come. I wanted to live in a free Armenia. But Anna wanted to come to America even if Armenia became free.”

  “She died, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Tibor looked down at the picture. “She was shot trying to run away when we were raided celebrating the liturgy. We were not allowed to celebrate the liturgy except in government-approved churches. The clergy in those churches were all spies. Nobody respected them. We would celebrate the liturgy in places where it was not licit, in people’s houses, in basements. We took liberties so that people could worship God and not be spied on, and then one day we were given away, and that was that. When Anna died, she was already out of the house, running down the street, running away. The other two people who died were right there in the room, backed against the wall together. When they reported it in the press later, they said we were armed and had explosives. But they did not report it much. It was only another incident.”