A Great Day for the Deadly(55)

“I’m never upset about Ann-Harriet,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t waste my time.”

The Don’t Walk light had turned to Walk, but Gregor wasn’t paying any attention to it. The names he had just heard seemed to be still floating in the air. Ann-Harriet. Don. Miriam. The woman and the young man were heading up Londonderry Street away from him. As he watched, they turned to jaywalk across the middle of the block. He caught a better look at the woman then. She was tall and spare and old—in her sixties and looking it. So this was the famous Miriam Bailey, and that was her famous Josh. They weren’t the way Gregor had expected them, somehow. Maybe it was just that Gregor had known a number of old women who married much younger men, and those women had always been desperate, striving, insecure types. Miriam Bailey had been angry, not desperate, and she had been secure enough to be wearing her own face. Then there had been the last of the things she’d said—“I’m never upset about Ann-Harriet. I wouldn’t waste my time.” Ann-Harriet, Gregor assumed, was Josh Malley’s fancy piece, as Scholastica had put it. If Miriam Bailey knew her name, she probably at least suspected the woman’s connection to her husband. And yet, hearing the words he’d heard, Gregor had believed them absolutely. Miriam Bailey was never upset about Ann-Harriet. She wouldn’t waste her time.

Queer, Gregor thought. Almost as queer as what they were actually talking about, which had sounded very much like an attempt on Miriam Bailey’s life. This time, when the light changed to Walk, Gregor obeyed. He crossed the street with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his head bent against the wind, working it out. The wind in Maryville was pernicious. It seemed to come at you from every direction.

The St. Mary’s Inn had a revolving glass door framed in bronze. Gregor pushed his way through it, walked up to the ornately carved antique registration desk and rang the hand bell positioned to the left of the lined guest book. Then he told himself that he would go upstairs, unpack, and lie down for a while. He’d even leave instructions that he was not to be disturbed. It would be time enough to get back to Pete Donovan when he’d had a little chance to rest.

Rest, however, was something he was not destined to get. He rang the bell a second time because no one had appeared to help him. As soon as he had, a door behind the registration desk opened and a small plump woman with a head of frizzy gray hair hurried out. She headed toward him with the determined hostility of someone who was about to deliver a lecture on the evils of impatience, stopped halfway to him, and let her jaw drop open. A second later, she was squealing in a high, sharp wail that was exactly like a pig’s.

“Oh, my goodness,” she was saying. “Oh, my goodness. Heavens to Betsy. I can’t believe this. It’s Gregor Demarkian himself.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, alarmed. “It is—”

“And I just hung up on her. I just can’t believe it.”

“You just hung up on who?”

“On your agent, of course,” the woman said. “She had to be your agent. She was definitely a woman, and she kept insisting that her name was Dennis!”





Five


[1]


IN TOWNS LIKE MARYVILLE there are two systems of communication—official and unofficial—and the unofficial one is often the most efficient. When Pete Donovan’s force was calling Don Bollander’s family and Don Bollander’s boss, someone else—no one was ever able to pinpoint who—was calling someone else, who in turn was calling someone else, who in turn was having a bridge party. By three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone in town knew that Don Bollander’s body had been found at the Motherhouse in a utility room sink. Half the town had their theories about who had done it and how. The other half were holding out for the kind of crazed serial killer that had made other places famous. It was almost as if they thought a Son of Sam or a Hillside Strangler would do the town’s image good, at least after he was caught. Glinda Daniels didn’t know what they thought. She had started getting the calls at just around noon. She had started getting the walk-ins fifteen minutes later. Now she didn’t know what to do with herself. If she barricaded herself in her office, the phone rang. If she stood out at the check-out desk, people walked up to her and expected her to gossip. She didn’t know what to do. The only safe spot in the library was in the stacks over near that door, and she certainly didn’t want to go there.

She was standing on a stepladder, rearranging a display of children’s classics on the broad-based revolving wooden pyramid Miriam Bailey had given to the library on the fifth anniversary of its new building, when Sam walked in. He was wearing his big shaggy coat, as always, and attracting attention to himself, as always, and getting waylaid by old ladies, as always. One of them had him in her grip as soon as he came through the door, but she was very short and he was able to wave to Glinda over her head. Glinda waved back and started down the ladder. The ladder was close up against the shelving for children’s science books, and Shelley and Cory must have been on the other side. Glinda hadn’t noticed them because she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t see them now, but she could hear them whispering.