Act of Darkness(17)

“Never mind what I sound like. Stay out of trouble. And if you have to call Tibor and Lida and George and Donna and all the rest of them, use your head and call on an outside phone. No matter what you have to do to get to one. And no matter what point in the middle of the night you’re supposed to call.”

Bennis bit her lip, and looked away. “I think I’ll go back to work again,” she said. “I’m not getting anything done.”

It was true that she wasn’t getting anything done, but it was also true that she didn’t want him to get a look at her face. Gregor went back to looking out the window, so that Bennis would have a chance to relax. Soon, he thought, their relationship was going to have to change. It didn’t have to be a big change—no matter what Lida Arkmanian thought, he didn’t want to take the child to bed; he didn’t want to take any woman to bed, and if he someday changed his mind the object of his affections was going to be someone like Lida herself, a woman of his own generation. It was just that he and Bennis had, through no fault of their own, gotten locked into roles that didn’t fit them well. He didn’t like playing the stolid, pragmatic, disapproving father figure. She, he was sure, didn’t like playing the madcap heiress sidekick. It was just that, with everything they knew about each other and everything they had been through together, they were finding it impossible to be themselves in each other’s company.

Outside his window, Queens had dissolved into a small town made up entirely of tiny ranch houses on quarter-acre plots, dozens and dozens of them arranged in rows like broken waves frozen in their march to a seashore. The sun, even at eight o’clock in the morning, was high and hot and bright. The highway ramp swung above a little cluster of commercial buildings and Gregor read the digital sign outside a bank: 78°.

Someday, he knew, he was going to have to come to terms with it all: Bennis, and Elizabeth, and politicians, and his ambivalence about Carl Bettinger, his old “friend” from the FBI who had pulled him into Stephen Fox’s problem. Gregor was the kind of man who tried not to analyze his life, and because of that he was also the kind of man who woke up on inconvenient mornings to find he had a lot to analyze. He wondered what Bennis would think, if he told her that. Father Tibor would simply say, “Of course.”

He looked back at Bennis and found she had abandoned her manuscript once again. This time, she was putting everything she had into the examination of a catalog of children’s clothes.

The catalog had been issued by Laura Ashley, and Gregor was willing to bet there wasn’t a bib in it for less than $100.





[2]


Ten minutes later, just as a raft of clouds drifted across the sun and turned the landscape dark, Gregor Demarkian fell asleep. He had his head thrown back against the seat, his legs crossed neatly ankle-to-knee, and his hands folded in his lap. Looking at him, Bennis wondered for the thousandth time how men could wear wool even in the summer.

Bennis shifted her manuscript again from her lap to the seat, then put her head back and closed her eyes. It was all well and good to pretend she was having a hard time working because the copyeditor was an idiot. The copyeditor was an idiot, but she could have been the reincarnation of Maxwell Perkins and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Bennis was distracted, that was the problem, and she didn’t think even finding a dead body in her bedroom closet would do much to drag her attention away from all the things she had left back in Philadelphia.

What she had left was formidable: one of her brothers was about to go on trial for insider trading and securities fraud, one of her sisters was about to go on trial for murder, and her mother was dying. She hadn’t told Gregor that—hadn’t told anyone, in fact, just how bad Cordelia Day Hannaford had become—but it was true. There was another month, maybe six weeks, to go. Then Cordelia would be dead and the house would belong to Yale University and the life she had known would disappear. It was odd, considering how terrible that life had been, that she was so afraid to see it go.

Bennis jerked her head forward, opened her eyes, and grabbed for her purse. Usually, she tucked her cigarettes away in an inside zippered compartment, to make them harder to get at and (theoretically) slow down the rate of her smoking. The last time she’d had one, though, she’d simply dumped the pack and her lighter down on top of everything else, which included her wallet, her makeup, and her totally untouched three-year-old Filofax.

She got a cigarette out of the pack, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke into the air. The problem with being neurotically unsure of yourself, she knew, was that it tended to make you desperate, and being desperate tended to lead to periods when your life was best left unexamined. She had weathered one of those periods during the dark cold autumn of the year her second novel, Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia, had appeared in the bookstores. Maybe success was more than she could take at that point, especially because the success in question seemed so bizarrely disproportionate to the work she had done to get it. She always said she wrote fantasy novels because she didn’t want to deal with reality, but there was more to it than that. Way back then, fantasy novels had seemed to be eminently safe. There were best-selling mystery novelists. There were best-selling horror novelists. There were even best-selling literary novelists. Those people got their pictures in magazines and their names in gossip columns and all kinds of weird and importunate mail. Some of them even got rich. Fantasy novelists, on the other hand, were the priests and priestesses of a small, obscure, and incomprehensible cult. They hadn’t a hope in hell of breaking out into the mainstream.