by Jane Haddam
“Gregor,” Bennis said suddenly. “I know what to do. I know how to make it so that the bats can’t get to us.”
3
Bennis did not make it so that the bats could not get to them. That would have been impossible without specialized clothing. What she did do was to rearrange the clothing they did have to give the bats the least possible access to bare skin. She pulled Gregor’s sleeves down over his hands and fastened the cuffs past his fingers. She took his sweater off and wound it around his head and the lower half of his face. Then she did the same for herself and called out to Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart to do the same for themselves. There was nothing she could do about the upper halves of their faces. They needed to see.
“Look at it this way,” Bennis said. “We’d have had to have found some way through here no matter what we decided to do about Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh. We have to get out to the roof to meet the helicopter.”
“I thought we decided that the helicopter wasn’t coming. I thought Geraldine Dart said it couldn’t land.”
“She did, but it doesn’t have to land, Gregor. It just has to hover. That way it can drop some medical people off and pick some of us up.”
Gregor thought of a helicopter hovering above this roof in this weather with a human being dangling from a rope, being hauled in or let out, and then he decided not to think of it. It made him sick to his stomach. He would think about it later.
“Come on,” he called. “Are you two ready?”
“We’re ready,” Geraldine Dart said.
“Ready,” Kelly echoed faintly.
Gregor started forward across the attic, very slowly, very carefully, trying not to disturb the bats. For a while, it worked. The bats were restless, but no more restless than they had been when Gregor first came to the attic door. They shrieked and shuddered and pulsed above his head. Some of them took off and flew in great swooping arcs among the rafters. None of them came close.
“Maybe we’re going to get away with this,” Bennis said.
“We’ve still got the ladder.”
The ladder was a disadvantage Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh would not have had. It would not have been pulled down when they arrived in the attic—or Gregor thought it wouldn’t have. If it had not been pulled down, it would not have been covered with bats. Gregor approached the ladder and then stopped. Bennis stopped behind him. Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart stopped beside her. The ladder was carpeted in bats. Every rung had two or three. Some rungs seemed to have ten or twelve crammed in together. They were all moving incessantly. The noise they emitted made Gregor’s skin crawl.
“Now what?” Geraldine Dart asked.
Gregor looked up through the open trapdoor. He expected to see black sky and feel the rain. Instead, he saw Hannah Graham smiling at him. She had the long iron instrument raised above her head. She was bracing herself on spread legs just beyond the lip of the trapdoor. It took a minute for all the elements to come together in Gregor’s mind, and by then it was almost too late.
“Look out!” he shouted, as Hannah brought the instrument crashing down above their heads, just inside the trapdoor, on the top rung of the ladder.
The bats exploded into life. Shrieking and cawing, they wheeled into the air and made angry circles among the rafters. Gregor hit the floor with his hands over his head. A bat swooped down and tore at the sweater he had wrapped around his head. Another scratched at his thin cotton shirt.
“My God,” Bennis said, on the floor next to him. “What are they doing?”
“They’re protecting their home,” Gregor said curtly. He looked up, hoping to catch sight of Hannah Graham again, hoping to find out what she was going to do next. What he saw instead was the ladder, almost empty. The bats on the ladder had been frightened off it by Hannah’s blow. Their absence was only temporary. Gregor didn’t have much time.
“Bennis,” he said. “When I tell you to go, go. Run up the ladder. Get onto the roof.”
“Just Bennis?” Kelly Pratt asked.
“All of you,” Gregor said.
The bats were still cawing and angry. Gregor braced himself on his knees in a running crouch and got ready. They were going to have to be fast.
If I get out of this without needing a rabies shot, Gregor promised the universe, I will stay home reading Perry Mason novels for the rest of my life. I will even go to church.
Gregor launched himself forward.
“Go!” he shouted.
He hit the ladder running and scrambled ungracefully all the way to the roof, refusing to listen to the shriek and swoop of angry bats swirling around his head, refusing to look back to see how the others were doing. When he got to the lip of the trapdoor he grabbed it in both hands and pulled himself upward. A bat attacked the sweater on top of his head and he shook it off. A second later, he was out of the attic and onto the roof.
It was not a good roof to stand on. Parts of it were steeply pitched, as Geraldine Dart had said, but only parts of it. It was not a typical New England A-line. Instead, the patch of roof just beyond the trapdoor was flat, but inches away it fell off into a slope, and inches after that it began to climb again. All around the edge of it there was a cast-iron rail. There was a cast-iron rail along the widow’s walk, too. The wind was strong enough to be a gale. The rain was like marble in heat.
Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh were both well away from the trapdoor now. The two were standing on a narrow catwalk on the side of the roof that looked out to Hunter’s Pier. They seemed to be at an impasse. Cavender Marsh had backed up as far as he could go. The old man was flat against the highest of the four square turrets that anchored the corners of the roof. His face was gray and his eyes were stiff with terror. One way or another, he was not going to get out of this alive.
Hannah Graham was at the very middle of the catwalk, standing still. The instrument was in her hands, but she was not swinging it. The wind and rain and hail were lashing against her body, but she didn’t seem to feel them.
“What does she think she’s doing?” Bennis asked Gregor.
“I think Cavender is going to die,” Geraldine Dart said tremulously. “I think she’s already killed him.”
Hannah Graham turned suddenly and stared at Geraldine Dart. A smile spread across her face. She had never looked more like a mobile skull. Her hair was thick with water. Her bright green sweater was covered with beads of hail.”
“I haven’t killed him yet,” she said. “But I’m going to kill him now. Just watch.”
If there was anything Gregor Demarkian could have done about it, he would have, but there wasn’t. They were both too far away from him over terrain that was much too treacherous. Hannah Graham had a catwalk to walk on, while Gregor would have had to climb up and down on the shingles of the roof.
Hannah Graham lifted the instrument high above her head. She swung it at the catwalk railing. The sound she made reminded Gregor of anvils. The railing shuddered but did not break, because it was made of cast iron too. Cavender Marsh shrunk farther back against the wall of the turret, but there was nowhere farther back that he could go. Hannah Graham walked toward him, still grinning.
“Gregor, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “Can’t you do something?”
“No,” Gregor told her. “And neither can you.”
The wind rose into a stiff hard gust and blew at their backs, making Bennis stumble forward. The rain began to fall more heavily, pelting against them with drops like needles. Hannah Graham didn’t seem to notice any of it.
“Here I come,” she said.
Cavender Marsh seemed about to cry out. He never got a chance. Hannah was close. She raised the instrument over her shoulder and swung out, like a batter hitting a baseball. Cavender Marsh did not retreat in time. Hannah hit the left side of her father’s head with the full center of the round blob at the instrument’s end. Cavender Marsh grabbed the wounded place on his face and staggered sideways. Hannah Graham hit him again, in the body this time, smashing
into his gut.
“There he goes,” Kelly Pratt said.
Cavender Marsh had been spinning slowly on the catwalk. Now Hannah gave him one more smash to the midsection and he pitched sideways, tumbling over the catwalk railing and onto the roof itself. His body slid down the shingles, dislodging two. It hit the gutter, hesitated for a moment, and then broke through. The next thing they knew, Cavender Marsh’s body was in space, falling toward the sea.
“I told you I’d kill him,” Hannah Graham said.
Gregor knew what was going to happen next. It was the only thing that could happen. He looked for a way to get onto the catwalk, but couldn’t see one. Obviously, it had been meant for decoration, not for use. A widow’s walk, some people called it. Hannah was walking back to the middle of it now, swinging the instrument in her hands. When she got to the place she had been when they first emerged onto the roof and saw her, she stopped.
“Here it goes,” she said, drawing her arm back and pitching the instrument as far out to sea as she could. It went farther than Gregor would have imagined it could, making an arc like a rocket in flight, disappearing into the clouds and rain.
“Here I go next,” Hannah Graham said.
“Gregor, for God’s sake, what’s she going to do? Can’t you stop her?” Bennis clutched Gregor’s arm.
Gregor could have pointed out that Bennis had asked this question before, and that his answer now would have to be the same, but he didn’t. With her back to them and her arms stretched out, she looked like a Druid celebrating ancient rites in a storm. Her wet hair could have been made of molten lead.
“Go now,” Hannah shouted suddenly, at the top of her lungs.
She drew backward and then launched herself forward, pushing against the catwalk as if it were a diving board. She did not hit the shingles or the gutter as she went down. She went right out into the air and fell, screaming, straight into the sea.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Kelly Pratt muttered.
Geraldine Dart turned her back to the rest of them and got violently and definitively ill.
4
Five minutes later, when they were all soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone and holding out on the roof only because they were more afraid of the bats than they were of the storm, they heard the sound of chopper blades in the distance, and looked up to see that the damn thing was right above their heads. The wind had been too high and blowing in the wrong direction for them to have heard it earlier. It was not an army helicopter, but a coast guard one—exactly the kind of detail, Gregor thought, that Bennis always did get wrong. It was, however, a serious vehicle, the kind with two propellers, one on each end. It had medical insignia as well as U.S. Coast Guard insignia painted on its sides.
“We’ve got to remind them to go down and get Lydia and Mathilda and Richard,” Bennis said unnecessarily.
“What are we going to be able to tell them about Hannah and Cavender?” Geraldine asked.
Hannah and Cavender were the least of it. Gregor knew that. There were two corpses down in that house, and a third body that might be a corpse by now and might not. They were going to have to explain all of those before they got around to the denouement, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Gregor knew what he would be thinking, if he were the law enforcement officer charged with the investigation of this case. He’d be thinking that the six people who were still alive and well in this house had a lot of talking to do.
A door in the side of the chopper opened. A man in rain gear and thick boots came swinging out, attached to a thick cord line. He blew around in the wind. The cord lowered him very slowly. Gregor and Bennis and Kelly and Geraldine stepped back to give him room to land.
The man was good at his work, and experienced. The wind was bad. Gregor expected him to fall at least once. Instead, he landed without difficulty, unhooked the cord, and looked around at the four people watching him.
“How do you do, sir,” he said to Gregor, holding his hand out. Maybe, Gregor thought, I look like I have more authority here than I really do. “I’m Petty Officer Robert Moreby. We were advised of a medical emergency here.”
“He’s downstairs,” Geraldine Dart said. “We couldn’t move him.”
“To get to him you have to go through bats,” Kelly Pratt offered. “The attic is lousy with them.”
Petty Officer Robert Moreby took all this in. Then he got his squawk box off his belt and spoke into it.
“Doctor will be down in a minute,” he told them, when he’d finished. “You people can go on up if you want to.”
“How are you going to get through the bats?” Bennis demanded.
“Rubber weather suits,” Petty Officer Moreby said. “I was wearing one when I got hit with half a bucket of flying glass during Hurricane Andrew. If that didn’t get through it, bats won’t.”
Gregor considered this. “Do you have any of these suits lying around that I could borrow?”
“Yes, sir,” Moreby said. “But you don’t have to do that. We can take care of everything from here on out. We’d just as soon you got into the chopper and let us take you to safety.”
Gregor looked up. Another man was coming down at them out of the sky. The chopper and the man were bouncing around in the wind like hollow plastic balls in a blow tank.
“That’s all right,” Gregor told Petty Officer Moreby. “First you’d have to get me into the chopper, and if you ask me, I’ve had a bad enough day already.”
EPILOGUE
Leaving It Up To Geraldo
1
THE HEADLINE IN THE Philadelphia Inquirer Monday morning was the worst Gregor Demarkian had ever seen. Standing in front of the stack of them in the rest stop in northern New Jersey, Gregor thought about buying all of them and shredding them in the parking lot. “TRAPPED BY A STORM,” the enormous letters read, and then, underneath them: “Philadelphia’s Own Armenian-American Hercule Poirot Captures a Killer on a Storm-Bound Island.” Obviously, nothing serious had happened to the economy over the weekend. Saddam Hussein hadn’t had a cold. Bill and Hillary had spent the last few days reading paperbacks and doing crossword puzzles. The Philadelphia Inquirer was usually a serious newspaper, and one Gregor liked. It was just when it came to Gregor Demarkian that the Inquirer seemed to go off its nut.
Out in the parking lot, Bennis was putting the top down on the tangerine orange Mercedes. Gregor could see her through the rest stop’s plate-glass windows, walking around to the back of the car to make sure everything was secure. There was wind in her black hair and bright sunshine everywhere. It was one of those days in October that makes it possible to call fall “perfect.” In the distance, the leaves on all the trees had turned from yellow to gold and brilliant red. Even the parking lot seemed to be full of color.
Gregor paid for one copy of the Inquirer (there was a large black-and-white picture on the front page of Gregor talking to two policemen; the caption said they were “consulting,” but Gregor knew he was being read the riot act) and headed for the parking lot himself. It was colder than it looked. It was hard to understand how Bennis could walk around the way she did in nothing but a turtleneck and a J. Crew cotton sweater. Gregor walked over to the car and threw the copy of the Inquirer inside.
“It’s getting worse all the time. The papers were much better about it yesterday.”
“I don’t want to talk about the papers.” Bennis finished whatever she was doing with the canvas top and came around the side to get in behind the wheel. “I want to talk about Lydia Acken.”
Gregor got in, too. He had to take the Inquirer off his seat to do it.
“I don’t see why you want to talk about Lydia Acken. I have nothing to say about Lydia Acken.”
“You didn’t get her phone number,” Bennis said.
“I know I didn’t get her phone number.”
“Well, does that make sense, Gregor? I mean, you find a woman you’re attracted to, and she’s attracted to you back, and you don’t get her phone number.”
“Believe it or not, Bennis, unlike you, the rest of us have other things on our minds more than occasionally.”
“I wasn’t saying you had to go to bed with her, Gregor. I was only saying you ought to call her.”
“We weren’t attracted to each other in that way.”
“You were groping each other under the dining room table.”
“Where did you get such an idea? Where could you possibly get such an idea? I don’t grope.”
“You ought to.”
“If you go on driving the way you’ve been driving on the Garden State Parkway, Bennis, you’ll get us both arrested.”
Bennis bounced the tangerine orange two-seater Mercedes down the ramp, looked both ways to make sure the road was as clear of traffic as it had been all morning, and then stepped on the gas.
2
THEY WERE WELL OUT and away in the New Jersey sunlight before Bennis slowed down again, bored with the kind of attention she had to pay to her driving to keep up her speed. Gregor privately thought that Bennis only went really fast when either he or Father Tibor Kasparian was in the car. She wanted both of them to know how hazardous it was for them to assume she would drive them places just because neither one of them knew how to handle an automobile. Father Tibor didn’t even have a license. Gregor had one that he kept current, but Bennis was always saying that it wasn’t worth its little laminated shield. Gregor Demarkian behind the wheel of a car was not a pretty sight.
Bennis slipped a Joni Mitchell tape into the tape deck and turned the volume up so that she could hear the music over the roar of the wind.