“Umm. Has Hannah been acting oddly lately? Has she been different in any way?”
“Different? I haven’t noticed anything different, Krekor.”
“What about little things,” Gregor asked. “Like, say, makeup. Has she been wearing more makeup than usual?”
“Krekor, what are you talking about? You know Hannah. You see her every day. If she had been wearing more makeup than usual, you would have noticed it yourself.”
“Maybe. It’s just that, upstairs in her room just now, I noticed she had a lot of it. A lot of it. Much more than Bennis has.”
“Krekor, for goodness’ sake. Of course Hannah has more makeup than Bennis has. Bennis doesn’t need any and she’s under forty.”
“I think the theory is, the more you look like a model on the cover of a J. Crew catalogue, the more clothes you wear but the less makeup,” Christopher said, “where, on the other hand, if you’re a rather stodgy-looking middle-aged lady, you wear—”
“Stop it,” Lida said.
“I’d better go talk to Hannah,” Gregor said. “What about the two of you? Have you been asked to hang around here?”
“I just gave my statement to a police officer,” Lida said. “I was finished just a minute or two before you came down. I was talking about going home.”
“I was going to walk her there,” Christopher said. “To keep the muggers at bay.”
“We do not have muggers on Cavanaugh Street.”
“We might someday,” Gregor said. “I think Christopher is being eminently sensible.”
“Thank you,” Christopher said solemnly.
Gregor retreated. He liked Bennis’s brother Christopher. He always had, even at the beginning, all those years ago, when he’d had reason to be very suspicious. The problem was that Christopher always seemed to be talking on two or three levels at once, like those books by James Joyce that Gregor had been forced to read in English class at the University of Pennsylvania.
He went into the kitchen. Helen Tevorakian was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Bob Cheswicki already had her someplace quiet, where they could talk without being interrupted. Donna Moradanyan was standing at the far end of the room, near the stove. She was talking quietly to Russell Donahue, who looked more uncomfortable than ever.
Hannah Krekorian sat at her kitchen table, her face set and emotionless, her hands folded on the tabletop in front of her. She had a cup of coffee that looked as if it hadn’t been touched. It looked cold too. Gregor pulled out one of the other chairs and sat down as close to her as he could without actually touching her.
“Hannah?” he asked gently.
Hannah stirred slightly. “Krekor,” she said. “I have been waiting for you to come. I was sure that you would come.”
“Well, I came. I’m here. Why don’t I ask Donna to get you a fresh cup of coffee? That one looks cold.”
“They put rum in it,” Hannah said. “That’s why I didn’t drink it. I didn’t want to be drunk.”
“A little rum right now won’t make you drunk,” Gregor told her. “You’re in shock, you know. A little rum might actually be good for you.”
“They took that woman into the study. That DeWitt woman. They took her there and now she’s telling them that I killed Paul.”
“Did you kill Paul, Hannah?”
“No.”
“Did Candida DeWitt?”
“I don’t think so.” Hannah blinked, confused. “It was too quiet, you see. I thought he must have gone away. So I came out of the bathroom and there he was and that thing was on the floor next to him, lying there in the blood, and I just walked to it and I—I just picked it up. And it was cold, Krekor, it was so cold, with the window open and the door too, and the breeze coming through like that and I thought he must have opened the window, he must have been hot, and then I started screaming and I couldn’t stop. She wasn’t in the doorway then. She didn’t come in until afterward.”
“Afterward what?”
“After I started screaming,” Hannah said simply.
Gregor got up. “Let me get you that coffee,” he said. “Let me get you that rum too. You’re going to go home with Helen Tevorakian tonight. Did you know that?”
“I thought the police were going to arrest me and I would spend the night in jail.”
“Nobody’s going to arrest you.”
“I should have realized from the beginning,” Hannah said. “I should have known. What is it they say on the public service announcements for senior citizens? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”