Bleeding Hearts(130)

“That’s good,” Donna said. “Two o’clock.”

“Great,” Russell Donahue said again. He went back out into the foyer and looked around. He seemed considerably less nervous than he had been when he walked in. Donna didn’t know if she was less nervous or not. She opened the door for him. “Well,” he said. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Wednesday,” Donna repeated.

“Great,” Russell Donahue said for the third time.

He went out the door and onto the landing. The door closed behind him but Donna could hear his feet on the stairs, the clatter of shoes, the sound of a hum. She stepped back and stared at the closed door, and then she did something she hadn’t done since she was ten.

She put her hands behind her back.

And crossed her fingers.





Turn the page to continue reading from the Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries





Prologue


    “America is a place where everybody is supposed to get a second chance.”

    —Housewife,

    USA Today





1


IT WAS NINE O’CLOCK on the night of Monday, December 6, and all across the New Haven Green the bums were getting ready for the weather. It was bad weather to have to get ready for. All last week, the new weatherman on WTNH had been predicting a serious winter storm. Now the storm was here, piled up in black clouds that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, hidden in the dark of a moonless night. There were little needles of rain turning to ice coming down everywhere. The three tall Protestant churches that always seemed to be just empty in the daytime had begun to look haunted. Over in the Old College at Yale, all the freshmen with rooms that faced into the quadrangle had their lamps on. On the steps of the old New Haven Library building, a bag lady searched through a bright red Saks Fifth Avenue tote to find a scarf to wrap around her mouth and nose. It was that kind of cold. The bums were in trouble. The ones who had newspapers could pretend they had some kind of protection. The ones who didn’t drank a little harder, if they could afford it, and got themselves a little more dead.

For Frannie Jay, standing on the corner of Church and Chapel streets with her duffel bag at her feet, the scene was like something out of a science fiction movie Stanley Kubrick might have been making about her life. Stanley Kubrick was dead, but Frannie knew what she meant. She had been born and brought up in New Haven. She had gone to high school at Saint Mary’s out on Orange Street. She had spent every afternoon of her teenage life in a booth at Clark’s Dairy, arguing the existence of God and the merits of affirmative action with a girl who eventually went on to become a nun. Frannie’s mother had said something, the last time they talked, about Saint Mary’s being closed and New Haven being changed—but Frannie hadn’t expected anything like this. Her mother was always talking about how things had changed. She lived out in West Haven now, in a triple-decker house with her sister, Frannie’s Aunt Irene, and neither one of them went for a walk on their own, even just down the block to the candy store.

The wind was picking up. The rain-turning-to-ice was getting harder. Frannie nudged her duffel bag with the toes of her lace-up boots and stuck her bare hands into the pockets of her pea coat. She was a tall young woman, thin but strong, and she was getting nervous. Her pale blond hair was folded into one long braid and wrapped into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Her ears were cold. This scene was eerie and she didn’t like it. Macy’s and Malley’s both seemed to be closed, and one of them—Frannie was never sure which was which—was boarded up. The little arcade mall that now stood across the street from the Green near the old bus stop looked vacant. There was dirt and garbage everywhere, on the sidewalks, in the gutters. There were almost no cars on the road. What had happened to this place? Every once in a while, somebody seemed to be whispering in her ear. Frannie. could hear the music of words in her ears and the heat of breath on her neck. Somebody was dancing just out of sight behind her. Someone was creeping up to her while she strained her eyes to see farther up the road. It was dark and getting darker. Frannie wanted to grab her duffel bag and run.

You’re getting spooked, Frannie told herself severely, picking up her duffel bag all the same. There was the sound of a car coming in from somewhere. When Frannie finally caught sight of it, it was the wrong shape and the wrong color and going in the wrong direction.

A car came by that she did recognize, a silver-gray Mercedes sedan. A boy stuck his head out of the front passenger-seat window as it passed and screamed at her. “Great tits,” he yelled, making Frannie rock back and forth on her heels, but the car didn’t slow up or stop. In a moment, it was gone. Frannie was sure the boy couldn’t have seen her breasts, not under the pea coat and the sweater and the turtleneck she was wearing. Frannie was sure, but she buttoned the top button of her coat anyway, and wound her scarf more tightly around her throat.