Bleeding Hearts(125)

Gregor pulled the V apart as far as it would go and pointed to the sharp-edged flat center arc.

“That’s what everybody mistook for the handle of the dagger,” Gregor explained. “The fit wasn’t exact when matched up against the cross-sections, but cross-sections are often not exact. You see the difference though.” He leaned over and tapped the drawings on the coffee table. “The dagger had a curved handle that went to either side of its point. These drawings show something with a flat-edged arc to only one side of the point.” He laid the anchor point of the compass on top of the point on the drawing and stood back. They were as exact a match as a cross-section taken from human flesh could ever get.

“Jesus Christ,” James Hazzard said.

And then Caroline Hazzard started to laugh.

“It was Daddy’s idea, you know, that dagger. He walked in and saw Jacqueline on the floor and he knew exactly what I’d done. He didn’t care. We thought a lot alike, Daddy and me. Our relationship was very symbiotic. He didn’t start therapy early enough though. He had a tendency to panic.”

“Caroline,” Fred Scherrer said, “I don’t think you ought to go on like this.”

“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Caroline said. “It isn’t going to matter much one way or the other. I’ve been in therapy for years. I’m not going to get convicted of anything. Maybe I’ll just say Daddy came into my room and screwed me every chance he got when I was eight. That ought to take care of everything, shouldn’t it, Fred? It would even be true on a metaphorical level, and not just when I was eight.”

“Caroline, for God’s sake,” Alyssa said.

“I really think you’re all getting far too worked up about all of this,” Caroline said. “It’s all going to turn out just fine, and you know it. And as far as I’m concerned, Daddy deserved to be dead.”

The real question, Gregor thought, was not whether Paul Hazzard deserved to be dead, but whether he deserved to have had Caroline kill him—but that might be a little complicated for this crowd.

Gregor felt better about stepping back and letting Russell Donahue and Bob Cheswicki do what they did best.





Epilogue


Valentine’s Day on Cavanaugh Street With All That Implies…





1


TOMMY MORADANYAN WENT TO play group on Thursdays, and because of that Donna Moradanyan had the time between eight-fifteen and eleven-thirty to get things done. This was less expansive than it seemed. What Donna wanted to get done almost always involved climbing ladders and hammering things outside other people’s bedroom windows. Looking at the decoration of Cavanaugh Street from a purely aesthetic point of view, it was positively peculiar how so many of the best places to hang red net hearts and pink cupids were directly under the noses of people who liked to sleep late, especially since so few people on Cavanaugh Street did sleep late. Still, it had to be done and it had to be done now. Decorating the street was the only thing keeping Donna Moradanyan sane through Valentine’s Day.

“It was absolutely crazy,” she’d told Bennis Hannaford the night before. “I’d been going crazy for weeks, so depressed I could hardly even eat, and you know what that means around here, and then the phone rings and I pick it up and there he is. Just like that.”

“Did he sound the same?” Bennis asked.

“He always sounds the same. He probably sounded the same when he was five years old. Sometimes I think he is five years old.”

“What did he want?”

Donna shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? Even he doesn’t know. He wanted to talk. One thing about Peter Bennis. He surely can talk.”

“You could always hang up on him.”

“I always want to hang up on him,” Donna said. “I always stop myself. He’s Tommy’s father, after all.”

“The contribution of one sperm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that familial designation.”

“You’ll have to translate that for me later,” Donna told Bennis. “Anyway, the thing is, Tommy’s been down for weeks because Peter’s not around to pay attention to him. I don’t think it’s Peter in particular—it can’t be; they don’t know each other—but Tommy’s at the stage when he wants a father around to love him and there isn’t one. So I’ve been thinking maybe I made a mistake, maybe I should have insisted on Peter’s marrying me when I had the chance—”

“Raspberries.”

“I know, I know. I came to the same conclusion. I mean, there he was on the phone and he’s a grown man and he’s practically thirty by now and what’s he talking about? Baseball cards. He’s started collecting baseball cards.”