Authors: Jane Haddam
“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.”
T
HE 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.
“Jesus,” John Jackman said.
Gregor pushed him out the front door onto the stoop—but the street was just as bad, really. They must have done it while he was out and around with John yesterday, he thought, and he just hadn’t noticed when he got back. Maybe it had been this way for weeks, and he just hadn’t noticed at all. The street was a mass of silver and gold and white. It was more decorated than Gregor had ever seen it decorated before, even for Christmas, and Christmas was Donna Moradanyan’s holy calling. There were at least three bows on every lamppost. If whatever department it was that was responsible for the lampposts ever decided to lower the boom on Donna Moradanyan, God only knew what would happen. The fronts of the town houses and the brownstones were all covered with bows too. Lida Arkmanian’s window had a huge display of candles in it, all white with electric flames, all dripping fake but glittery wax off their uneven tips. The candles made Gregor feel instantly better. He knew they hadn’t been there yesterday. He would have noticed them even if he had noticed nothing else.
“They must have been at it all night,” he told John Jackman. “They’re incredible.”
“It’s not Bennis who’s having the wedding,” John Jackman said. “You’re sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure of that. Who would marry Bennis?”
“Mick Jagger,” John Jackman said solemnly. “Harrison Ford. The next candidate for president for the Republican Party.”
“Bennis wouldn’t marry a Republican.”
“In this case she ought to, Gregor. He’s probably going to win.”
Weddings were bad enough. The last thing Gregor wanted was to get dragged into a discussion of party politics, Tibor’s favorite pastime. He’d had enough of politics during the elections. He was going to have more than enough of it during the next elections.
The gray metal garbage cans had been covered over with silver plastic bags and tied with silver and white bows. The concrete frames of the basement windows had been painted over with silver paint and dotted with tiny faux pearls. Down the street, at Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, it looked as if the façade had exploded in little, tiny oyster eggs. Gregor turned his eyes determinedly toward the Ararat, and got moving.
“Incredible,” John Jackman said when he finally caught up. “It really is incredible. You think there’s any way you can get me asked to this wedding?”
The Ararat was not as bad as the street was, but it was edging in that direction. When Gregor brought John Jackman in that morning, he found not only the bows on the little candles on all the tables, but bows on Linda Melajian as well. She was carrying a big pot of coffee across the main dining room with a white and silver bow in her hair, making the bow sway and shudder against her skull every time she moved her feet. Linda Melajian had very short hair. Gregor led John Jackman to the front booth with its cushioned benches and ignored his protests about how hard the thing was going to be to get into and out of. Of course it was hard to get into and out of. Gregor had problems with it every morning of his life. It was also the best booth in the restaurant, and the biggest, and they needed the room.
Gregor pushed aside a little candle with a bow and a little pot of silk flowers with ribbons all over it—silver and white, always silver and white—and began to spread the printouts across it.
“Come and talk to me,” he said to John.
John Jackman sat down. Linda Melajian brought over her pot of coffee, noticed that neither one of them had a cup, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. It was a good thing the food here was good, Gregor thought, because they certainly took their regular patrons for granted.
“So,” Gregor said. “Tell me about it.”
John Jackman took his attention off the door through which Linda Melajian had gone and applied himself to the printouts. “In the first place,” he said, “Julianne Corbett was telling the truth, at least as far as we can find out. A young American woman named Patricia MacLaren did die in New Delhi in 1969. The death certificate is on file with the authorities there.”