True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  I’m losing my mind, Bennis thought, and then people began streaming out into the waiting room from the tall archways that led to the trains. There were a lot of them—why were so many people coming to Philadelphia on this particular day?—and it wasn’t until they were almost all gone that she saw Christopher, still as tall and lean as a caricature, carrying a large leather grip in one hand and wearing his sports jacket open. That was all he had, a sports jacket, made of camel’s hair, with a sweater under it. The sweater was probably cashmere, but Bennis didn’t see how that was supposed to help. He was going to freeze to death.

  “Hey,” she said, when she came up next to him.

  He dropped his grip on the floor and gave her a hug. This was something he had picked up in California: hugs.

  “Hey to you,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you bring a coat?” she asked him. “It’s minus nine out there.”

  “We don’t have minus nine in Santa Barbara. Don’t worry about it. If I get too uncomfortable, I’ll buy something to wear. How’s Lida?”

  “At home. Cooking you something.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Are you going to stay over there this trip?”

  Christopher picked up his grip. “I think it’s the only sensible thing, don’t you? I mean, not only do I want to, but from what I gather your life is not exactly solitary any longer. Not that it was ever really solitary. You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. Are you going to go up there for the execution?”

  “No,” Christopher said. “That I definitely am not going to do. But Teddy is.”

  “You talked to him.”

  “He says your phone is unlisted. I didn’t give him the number. I figured you didn’t want me to. I talked to Bobby, too, by the way. He’s out of jail.”

  “And living on the Main Line,” Bennis said, turning so that they could start the long walk to the front doors and to find a cab. She could have brought her car, but she hadn’t. She’d been feeling far too distracted to drive. “Trust funds are forever,” she said. “You’ve got to wonder what Bobby was thinking. If he thinks. And no. I don’t want to talk to Teddy.”

  “I didn’t either, but I got stuck. He called the station. Look, what about you? Are you all right? We’ve had some news out west about this thing your boyfriend is involved in—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “Don’t call Gregor my boyfriend.”

  “Whatever. The thing is, I figure by now it doesn’t upset you when he gets caught up in this stuff, so I wasn’t worried about that. But I was worried about the other thing. About Anne Marie. Did you ever get to see her?”

  “No.” Bennis bit her lip. “Gregor saw her. He went up there yesterday.”

  “Without you?”

  “She didn’t ask for me,” Bennis said. “He got in touch with her lawyer to, you know, see if he could get her to talk to me, but in the end she only wanted to talk to him.”

  “Did he tell you what she said?”

  “No. But I have a feeling that it was really nasty. If it wasn’t nasty, he probably would have told me. If you see what I mean.”

  They were out on the street. Bennis had no idea how they had gotten there. In the however-long-it-was since she had been waiting at the station, it had gotten dark again. Why was it that this February it was almost always dark? Daytime was supposed to happen sometimes. She was sure it was. At the very least, there were supposed to be a couple of hours of sunlight in the morning. Maybe she slept through it. Maybe that was the explanation. She was getting a migraine.

  Christopher was getting a cab. It was as true in Philadelphia as it was anywhere else. A good-looking white man in expensive clothes could get cabs to appear out of thin air. One of them pulled up at the curb next to them, and Christopher leaned forward to open the door for her.

  “Cavanaugh Street,” he told the driver. “It’s—”

  “I know where it is,” the driver said.

  Bennis climbed in and slid as far over toward the opposite door as she could. The cab’s seats were torn and grimy. The window between the backseat and the front had had so much dirt ground into it for so long, it would never again be able to be clean. Christopher got in and closed the door beside him. His legs were so long they didn’t really fit in the back of the cab.

  “Anyway,” Bennis said.

  Christopher held out his hand and let Bennis put hers into it. It made her feel as if she were nine years old again, and her father was downstairs, screaming, threatening, promising death and destruction, if she didn’t immediately change everything about herself and apologize while she wasn’t doing it.

  “Do you think it’s inherited?” she asked. “Schizophrenia is inherited. Maybe this is, too. Psychopathy. Sociopathy. Whatever.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We certainly have a lot of them in this family, though, don’t you think? Not just Anne Marie. Bobby. And Teddy. Sometimes it seems to me that most of the normal ones are dead.”

  “I think that if you haven’t been drinking, you ought to start. You can’t do this to yourself, Bennis. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even your responsibility.”

  “I helped them catch her,” Bennis said. “That’s my fault.”

  “And what was the alternative? To leave her running around loose? She’d already killed three people, and the next on the list was you, and you must know that. Demarkian must have told you that. I mean, hell, you were there.”

  Bennis looked out her window. Stores were going by, their windows lit but empty-looking all the same. She was wearing a heavy wool jacket, but she was cold.

  “Gregor says that poisoners are particular kinds of people,” she said. “They’re—they’re psychologically different. People who murder with guns and knives tend to be angry. Either they’re angry right at the moment and they go off like bombs, or they’re really furious and have been for a long time and it gets obsessional. Gregor says that to kill with a gun or a knife in anger, you’re looking to avenge yourself or somebody else. Even if that’s not really real, it’s what you think you’re doing. Am I making any sense?”

  “Some, yes. I just don’t know what this is getting to.”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “he said people who used poison were different. They weren’t angry like that. They felt,” Bennis drummed her fingers against her knee. “It was like the gun and the knife murderers were angry in the explosive sense. Something in particular happened and they got mad. But poisoners were—resentful, rather than angry. That’s the word. They believed that life should have been better for them, and it wasn’t, so they believed they had the right to make it better by any means necessary. I’m getting this hopelessly messed up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “It sounds like Anne Marie, don’t you think? I don’t mean that our father was fair when he set his sons up with trust funds and didn’t do the same for his daughters, but you and Emma and Myra never thought you had to kill to make up for it.”

  “He also said that nobody ever really committed murder for religion,” Bennis said. “No, I know what you’re going to say. I said it, too. But he meant this kind of murder. Anne Marie’s kind of murder. And the ones he’s investigating now. So I’ve been thinking about it, you know. I’ve been thinking about his case, because I guess it stops me from thinking about Anne Marie. And something occurred to me.”

  “What?”

  “Well, that there’s only one person I can think of, of all the people he’s told me about, that would fit the description. And it seems stupid to think so, because, you know, I don’t know most of those people. I’ve never met them. But in this case there only seems to be one, but nothing he’s said has given me any indication that he suspects that person. And I was wondering, you know, if some people have some kind of cosmic purpose, if they’re fated—”

  “Bennis?”

  “Oh, hear me out, for once.”

  “You’re an agnostic and a skeptic. Yo
u don’t believe in fate,” Christopher said.

  “I believe that I don’t want her to die,” Bennis said. “Anne Marie, I mean. I don’t want them to execute her. I don’t want them to execute anybody, but I especially don’t want them to execute her, because she’s my sister, and I don’t care if she’s a psychopath. Does that make any sense?”

  “It makes about as much sense as anything else you’ve ever said. And we’re at Cavanaugh Street. Let’s get out of the cab.”

  “Right,” Bennis said.

  Cavanaugh Street looked ready for Valentine’s Day. Donna’s house was decorated to death. Even Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had its front door wrapped in ribbons and bows. The cab had stopped on the curb outside her own apartment. Across the street, Lida’s house was lit up in every window.

  Bennis got out onto the sidewalk and let Christopher pay for the cab. When he was out, too, she crossed the street to Lida’s side and waited for him to come after her.

  “I don’t want her to die,” she said, and then she buried her head in his chest the way she had once wished she was able to do with their father. It was, she thought, crazy the way that had turned out. Engine House, where they had all grown up, and their mother, and their father, and each day crazier than the last. Now she thought that she was going to freeze here on Cavanaugh Street. She would turn absolutely solid, and when she did they could put her body up on display in a public park.

  “I don’t want her to die,” she said again.

  Christopher put his hand on her head and stroked her hair.

  3

  It was the anticlimax that bothered Dan Burdock, the feeling that he had been wound up and raised up and pumped full of excitement, only to have it end at … nothing. For more than a day now, he had been primed and ready, so tense with knowing what was about to happen that he had sometimes found it hard to breathe. For a single short hour out on the street, he had nearly been flying. The cold had meant nothing to him. His feet hadn’t seemed to touch the ground. He wondered now what it was that he had expected. Maybe he had thought that the exorcism would be real, that Roy really had the devil harbored in his soul and this rite would bring it out, into the open, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork. That said something he didn’t much like about how he really felt about the Roman Catholic Church—and, for that matter, how he felt about Roy. Aaron would say that he had a secret attraction, but Dan knew it wasn’t true. Aaron thought everybody had a secret attraction to everybody else, or at least that all homosexuals did, and that all men were probably homosexuals. Dan knew something about the fascination with disgust. Looking at Roy was like looking at a body on an autopsy table, or those pictures of the body parts in Jeffrey Dahmer’s freezer that had shown up in one of the tabloids the week after Dahmer’s trial. Sometimes you had to look at those things and make yourself feel them, just to make yourself believe that they were real.

  Now he looked out over the choir balcony onto the body of the church, just as he had on the night before Scott Boardman’s funeral, and found himself thinking the same kinds of thoughts. Granite and marble were difficult to maintain, and expensive, but they were worth it. They made this place a house of God in the only way that had ever made sense to him. The high ceilings, the soaring arches, the delicate carved latticework, the stained glass—Roy was wrong, and so were all those low-church Protestants, who thought you could only approach God through poverty of mind and body. Poverty of mind and body was epidemic in this world. If you were going to approach God, you had to approach him through majesty.

  Dan looked down at his hands and saw that he was holding one of his tubes of soft mints and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. He put it in his pants pocket without taking one, then went out the door and down the stone steps to the hall beside the church. When he got to the first floor, he stopped and opened the arched door into the church proper. There were a lot of people in there now, because the march and the exorcism had worked them up, and they didn’t want to leave. Dan saw Chickie George and Mary McAllister, sitting in a pew in the back and looking over something they had laid down on the seat between them. There had been rumors all day that Mary was going to enter the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace at the end of the college term. Maybe she had brochures or something to show Chickie. Did convents put out brochures? Dan had no idea. He looked around the church a little longer and found Aaron and Marc, sitting with two men who were unfamiliar to him. Maybe that would be the best man and the man of honor, if that’s what they were going to call it, when the wedding finally happened. Dan knew that the wedding would finally happen, even if the bishop had apoplexy and the papers screamed for weeks. That was what he was doing here. That was why he had been sent here, and no matter how hard he had tried to be prudent over the years, he had always known it. Now he only wanted to make sure that the church would survive no matter what he did—the church was a small “c,” not the one with the large “C”; St. Stephen’s, not the Anglican Communion.

  He drew his head out of the doorway and closed the door as quickly as he could against the air lock. He went down the hall and then out the door there to the foyer. The foyer was full of people, too, but they were either people he didn’t know well or didn’t know at all. He went out the front doors onto the street and found that far less was happening there. The homeless people were coming into St. Anselm’s. Mary McAllister would have work to do in a little while. Dan saw an old woman with her brown paper shopping bags on a wheeled rack that she pulled behind her, like one of those luggage carts people had in airports. He wondered how she’d managed to get together the money to get it.

  He was just coming out of St. Stephen’s front gate and onto the public sidewalk itself when the police cars began arriving farther down the street, and the ambulance came around the corner and stopped there, too. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that the traffic must be for Roy or one of Roy’s people, before he realized that the vehicles were much too close. It wasn’t Roy’s church they were stopping at, but one of the ordinary town houses on the street. They weren’t making all that much fuss, either. None of them had sirens blaring, and except for the fact that one of the police cars was pulsing its red-and-blue top lights, they might have been ordinary cars arriving for an ordinary party. Then an ordinary car did arrive, and Dan recognized Gregor Demarkian being helped out of it. He walked down the block until he was directly across the street from the action. The police had left the town house’s front door open, but looking inside it, Dan couldn’t see anything but a coat tree and a small framed picture whose content he was too far away to make out.

  People went in and out, in and out. Dan looked up the street and saw that the door to Roy’s church was open and that Roy himself had come out, alone, to check out the situation. Dan didn’t think he’d ever seen Roy alone anywhere near the town house. The “church” seemed to have something going on every minute of every day and night. Dan walked up the sidewalk until he was standing directly across the street from Roy, and waved.

  “The view is better from over here,” he said, loudly enough so that he knew he had been heard.

  Roy looked at him for a moment, and then at the police cars and the ambulance. Then he crossed the road in the middle of the block. If this were an ironic movie, something Swedish or Italian, a car would have come out of nowhere and run him down.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Roy asked, when he was safely on the sidewalk.

  “I don’t even know whose house it is,” Dan said. “There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of an emergency, though. No sirens. No hurry. Gregor Demarkian is here.”

  “Is he? That’s Edith Lawton’s house. Edith Lawton the atheist.”

  “You mean like John Paul, the Pope? I didn’t know atheist was a job description.”

  “In her case it is. She writes for atheist magazines.”

  “Roy—”

  “Give me some credit, for God’s sake. I mean atheist magazines, magazines about atheism.
She writes for them. She also sleeps with her lawyer.”

  “What?”

  “You ought to get out more, Dan. You don’t know anything about anything.”

  It was true. He really didn’t know anything about anything. He looked at the town house again and saw that a man was being taken out on a stretcher and put into the back of the ambulance, but no sirens went on, and for some reason he couldn’t pinpoint, he didn’t think the man was seriously hurt.

  “I wonder if that’s the husband or the lawyer,” Roy said. “Did I mention that? She sleeps with her lawyer, but she’s also got a husband.”

  “Are they separated?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed. But maybe I’m a little out-of-date. These days, the family comes in all kinds of new and interesting forms. Maybe the three of them felt they were all married to each other.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It would be convenient to think that they were coming to arrest Edith Lawton for the murders, wouldn’t it? It would be convenient if they’d arrest somebody for those murders. This whole thing is getting entirely too complicated. What did you expect me to do during that farce you engineered this afternoon? Fall on my knees and embrace the Church of Rome?”

  “I didn’t engineer it. It was the Cardinal Archbishop’s idea. If it hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have come.”

  “True enough.”

  “I expected you to lose your temper,” Dan said.

  Roy laughed. “I never lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper in thirty years. I’m a block of ice. Take a look. They’re bringing her out.”

  Dan looked. A woman was coming out the front door with her arms in handcuffs. She was a prettyish but obviously middle-aged woman, and she had tears streaming down her face. Maybe she was sobbing. There was just enough noise so that Dan couldn’t tell. Dan saw Gregor Demarkian come out the front door, talk to the woman for a moment, and then start down the street in the direction of the churches again. Dan watched him go for a little while and then turned his attention back to the woman.