Fish taxidermy. Quilts. Used Books. Birdhouses. Gregor couldn’t use any of those, but Bennis liked hand-knit cotton sweaters and he hadn’t bought her anything for Christmas yet. What he ought to buy her was a critical review of the fantasy genre that rated Stephen Donaldson’s books several notches above her own, just to drive her as crazy as she had driven him with Curty Gentry’s take on the FBI, but he was better than that. He backed up until he was standing in front of the Cape Cod and looked at its window. The knitted reindeer were lumpy and creased. They didn’t give him a great deal of confidence. Still, you could never tell. And if everything was awful, it might not matter. What could something cost, being sold in a place like this?
Less than two minutes later, Gregor was standing in the Cape Cod’s front hall, knocking snow off his shoes onto a mat and answering his own question. There was an absolutely beautiful knitted sweater draped over the top of a dressmaker’s dummy in the corner of what seemed to be the only room on this floor. The sweater was a bright red with black-and-white reindeer leaping across it in rows. It was exquisitely done, and it had a sign under it that said $360. Next to that sign was another sign that said VISA AND MASTERCARD ACCEPTED. Gregor was relieved.
At the back of the room, a young woman with long brown hair was sitting at a long table, talking to another young woman whose hair was just as brown but very short, and enlivened by a broad streak of white that was startling because it was natural. The short-haired young woman had to be thirty-five at least, but she reminded Gregor so strongly of girls he had known in high school, he had to keep reminding himself of the fact. What the girl who was standing looked like was the captain of a field hockey team, all raw bones and awkwardness and tomboyish delicacy. It was a look Gregor had always found peculiarly attractive. The long-haired young woman was more traditionally feminine, but she seemed to Gregor the clone of hundreds of others, all relentlessly addicted to Indian prints.
The two young women had stopped talking when he came in. Now they stared at him politely, waiting for him to make a move. Gregor looked back at the red sweater, checked his pockets for his wallet and said, “I’d like to buy this.”
The short-haired young woman laughed. “My God, Maria. The man must be in love.”
Maria stood up and came around the table. “It’s not possible,” she said. “Gregor Demarkian is a great detective. Great detectives don’t fall in love.”
“I don’t believe it,” the short-haired woman said. “It didn’t say that in the article.”
“It didn’t have to.”
“I think if it were true, Peter would at least have mentioned it.”
“Peter mentioned him having a ‘constant companion,’ ” Maria said, “but I figured that was just his overworked girl Friday. You know what men are like. She probably makes him coffee, carries his books, runs his theories through the computer and gets a reputation as a bubblehead for her trouble.”
Gregor Demarkian smiled as best he could. “If you’re talking about Bennis Hannaford,” he said, “she’s never been anyone’s girl Friday in her life, she doesn’t carry anything and she blows up her own computer at least twice a month. She does make coffee, but I think that’s in self-defense.”
“You probably think you need some self-defense,” Maria said. “Have we been very bad? Have we thoroughly embarrassed you?”
“No, not really,” Gregor admitted. “When I saw that newspaper story, I resigned myself to the inevitable. I take it your name is Maria.”
“That’s right,” Maria said. “And this is Sharon. Sharon Morrissey.”
“How do you do,” Sharon Morrissey said.
“Do the two of you run this shop together?”
Maria was getting the sweater down from the dressmaker’s dummy, being careful to remove the pins one by one and straight out, so they wouldn’t snag on the cotton yarn.
“I run the store,” Maria said. “Sharon lives out on the Delaford Road and writes children’s books her housemate illustrates.”
“My housemate is named Susan Everman.”
“They came out here from New York together and went native.”
Maria stopped in her removal of the pins and looked back over her shoulder at Gregor. Sharon crossed her arms over her stomach and looked at Gregor, too. Gregor didn’t know whether to feel amused or exasperated. Obviously, this was the test they put people to—these broad hints that Sharon and her housemate were gay, these long seconds waiting for a reaction. What did they expect him to do? He made it a point never to have opinions about the consensual sexual behavior of other people—even Bennis—but even if he had been stuffed full of hostility to homosexuals, what could he possibly have done? Tibor would have sailed blissfully past the question, as if it hadn’t existed, and asked Sharon to see one of the books she wrote for children.