“I’ve been asking myself the same question all morning. And do you know what? I don’t think so. Oh, it’s true enough that I’d rather it didn’t turn out that Hannah had committed this murder. My life would be a lot more pleasant in a hundred ways if somebody else turns out to have done it. But it’s more than that. This thing doesn’t—fit somehow. It doesn’t work. I can’t make it come straight in my mind.”
“It comes straight in my mind,” Bob said. “Let me be honest with you, Gregor. Last night we didn’t arrest Mrs. Krekorian because we had some details we wanted to get straight before we made an accusation. This morning the only reason we haven’t arrested her is because she’s a friend of yours. And I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to extend the courtesy.”
“I don’t blame you,” Gregor said. He thought about it. “Can we go do some looking? The both of us together, I mean, or me and Russell Donahue.”
“It would have to be Donahue. I’ve got a full plate here and I’m not supposed to be involved in this investigation anyway. Do you have something in particular you want to do?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I want to go out to Paul Hazzard’s house.”
“Just go out to his house?”
“Well, I’m willing to talk to anybody who might be there, but that’s not really the point. I want to see that wall of weapons. I want to stand in the living room and really look at it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Bob Cheswicki shrugged. “Russ is going to have to go out there anyway. He might as well go out there this morning with you. Let me get hold of him.”
“Thank you.”
Bob Cheswicki unearthed his phone from a pile of papers and began to dial. “Gregor, do you know what you’re doing? Have you got the least idea of what you’re trying on?”
“No,” Gregor said. “But I know I’m doing the right thing.”
That was true too.
Gregor felt thoroughly optimistic for the first time since he’d heard Hannah Krekorian start screaming.
Four
1
NUMBER 232 IN The Handbook of Daily Meditations for Codependents said it very clearly: You are in control of your own availability. Caroline knew it hadn’t been written to mean what she was making it mean at the moment. It meant you didn’t have to be emotionally there for anybody you didn’t want to be there for. It also meant that your time was your own. Nobody had the right to determine what you were going to do with it but you. That last part could be used to cover this, but not quite. Caroline didn’t really know what the writer of Daily Meditations would have made of this situation, or what Melody Beattie, John Bradshaw, or her father would have made of it either. Her father had been through something very similar to this when Jacqueline died. It had had no effect on his philosophy as far as Caroline could tell. The recovery movement wasn’t really prepared to take on institutional obligations like murder investigations and military draft laws and the requirement of all citizens to pay their income taxes. The recovery movement was much more comfortable with private and familial abuse. That way they could say over and over again that you were responsible to nobody but yourself. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make any sense.
Actually, to Caroline it did make sense. It was just a question of widening the vision a little. You were responsible to nobody and for nobody but yourself. You were in control of your own availability. It was the mark of a ravaged and codependent society that laws had been put in place to force you to behave otherwise.
This situation, as Caroline called it to herself, was the sight of Gregor Demarkian and a nondescript, vaguely black-Irish young man in an off-the-rack suit coming up the front walk. Caroline had seen them getting out of their cab when she looked up from her work just a few seconds before. Caroline was working at home, in the first floor living room of the town house she shared with her brother and sister (and until last night had shared with her father) because she knew from experience that her office was going to be impossible today. It didn’t matter that it was Saturday. Half the people who would normally be at home in bed would come out just to see her. There she was, daughter of the dead man, orphaned by a couple of murders. The people who didn’t come would call, and to their number would be added all the reporters who had managed to get a hold on this story and who wouldn’t want to let it go. One or two journalists might easily get a book contract out of it. Caroline had a lot of work to do. She had a series of demonstrations in Boston next week. She had the next six months of shows to present in outline before the station’s programming board next month. She had a show to tape this coming Tuesday night. If she had loved her father, she would have dropped it all, to do her grief work. She expected to be overwhelmed with rage at any moment, furious at him for abandoning her by dying. In the meantime, she had to draw illustrations for a set of cardboard panels giving step-by-step instructions for how to build a gazebo.