And One to Die On(18)

“The fuss you have to go through to get waiters to go off their menus,” she said as she sat down across from Gregor, “is enough to make me want to take to alcohol at dawn. Good morning, Gregor. How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m in a perfectly lousy mood. How did you expect me to be?”

“I wasn’t venturing to guess.”

Bennis got out her cigarettes and lit one up. “I used to live in Boston,” she said, almost dreamily. “I used to own an apartment here and go out with a member of the Boston city government. I did that for years. I don’t know how I stood it.”

“Now, now.”

“I hate Boston, Gregor. I hate it.”

Gregor shook his head. “If you ask me, it wasn’t Boston you had the trouble with. It was Cambridge.”

Bennis made a face, and the waiter arrived with a pitcher of orange juice.





2


Actually, Gregor knew exactly what was bothering Bennis, and he knew it had nothing whatever to do with Boston. The trouble had started back on Cavanaugh Street, when Bennis had decided that going up to Maine to accommodate her family was not a good enough reason to put extensive mileage on her tangerine orange two-seater Mercedes convertible. That was when she had decided to accept the invitation of a woman named Darcy Bentley to do a reading of her work and a signing at the Cambridge Full Fantasy Bookstore.

“It was the combination that should have tipped me off,” Bennis said later, after it was all over, while she was lying across the bed in her hotel room smoking her first cigarette in three months. “It was that adjective full. A full fantasy bookstore in a regular small town would have been all right. A regular fantasy bookstore in a college town would have been all right. A full fantasy bookstore in a college town is asking for trouble.”

What seemed to be trouble, from the beginning, was Darcy Bentley, who reacted to her first sight of Bennis Hannaford as if she had just been granted a face-to-face audience with God. Gregor had seen it happen before, in airports and restaurants, when the real fanatics among Bennis’s six million or so regular readers bumped into their idol on the way to the ladies’ room. Darcy Bentley was something beyond a fanatic, however. She was a slight young woman with frowsy brown hair and a frowsy white face, made only marginally interesting by a pair of very large, very dark eyes. As soon as she saw Bennis she held out her hand and gushed, “Oh. You came in disguise. I was so hoping you’d read to us in your Zedalian ceremonial robes.”

“The problem with people like Darcy Bentley,” Bennis told Gregor later, adding a tall glass of Drambuie on the rocks to her cigarette in an effort to calm herself down, “is that they don’t have to take anything else seriously, so they take this seriously instead. Except they take it seriously in the wrong way. I mean, there is no Zedalia. I made it up.”

“How do you know Darcy Bentley doesn’t have anything else serious to worry about?” Gregor asked her.

Bennis shrugged. “That little flower-print hippie dress of hers came from Jennifer House. I’ll bet it cost three hundred dollars.”

In the store, Gregor didn’t notice Darcy Bentley’s clothes, only her face, which seemed to have taken on an odd glow. Bennis Hannaford had arrived, and Darcy Bentley was like a moon, taking its warmth from the sun.

“Oh, we’re so excited to have you here,” Darcy Bentley kept saying, over and over again. “You have no idea. We’ve been hoping for something like this for years.”

Somewhere in the middle of these effusions, the door to the store swung open and another woman came in. She was shorter and fatter and older than Darcy, but her height and weight and age were beside the point. What struck Gregor was her outfit, which had gone beyond the bizarre and entered the realm of the flagrantly eccentric. On her head the fat woman wore a tall conical cap of embroidered jade green satin. From its point, two dark green satin ribbons fluttered down, as if she were a maypole. Her dress was embroidered jade green satin, too. If you could call it a dress. It fell to her feet and hung like a judge’s robes or a graduation gown. It was her footwear that impressed Gregor the most, though. Each of her embroidered jade green slippers had a cluster of jingle bells on the toe. The jingle bells jingled when she walked.

“Oh, Natalia,” Darcy crowed, as soon as she saw this woman come in. “I’m glad you’re the first one here. This is Bennis Hannaford.”

“How do you do.” Instead of holding her hand out to be shaken, Natalia dropped to one knee and kissed the hem of Bennis’s tweed skirt. Bennis nearly jumped out of her skin. Natalia struggled to her feet. “I see you’ve come in disguise,” she said. “That may have been a very wise thing. I seemed to attract some of the most peculiar reactions on the bus coming over here today.”