“Was it gone earlier in the evening?”
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “I don’t know if James would know either. It’s not as if we looked at it every chance we got. It wasn’t even very noticeable. Not next to all the rest of this stuff.”
“Could you show me where it belonged?”
Caroline crossed her arms over her chest. “Show yourself. It belonged in the rack that’s empty at the moment. Next to that blowgun with the feathers on it.”
“I see.” Demarkian nodded. “How tall are you?”
“Five five,” Caroline said.
“Could you reach it—the dagger, of course—could you reach it without straining?”
“I never tried.”
“Will you try now?”
Caroline shrugged, came closer, and reached. She had to stand on tiptoe to touch the rack. She backed away.
“Five five,” Gregor said again. “You said you have a brother and a sister. Do they live nearby?”
“They live here,” Caroline said. “James has a room on the bedroom floor across from mine. Alyssa and her husband have the apartment at the top of the house.”
“Fine. Is your sister as tall as you are? Taller?”
“We’re about the same height.”
“And your brother?”
“James is very tall. Almost as tall as you are. The way Daddy was very tall.”
“Mmm,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Caroline backed up a little and sat down on the arm of one of the chairs. “You know,” she said, “if I were you, I wouldn’t bother too much about us. About James and Alyssa and me, I mean. We’re hardly the likely suspects in this case.”
“Oh?” Russell Donahue was polite. “Who is?”
“I should think your two best bets would be Candida DeWitt and that woman Daddy was seeing, that Hannah somebody. She came to the house this week, you know. On Tuesday or Wednesday. When I first saw her, I couldn’t understand what it was Daddy was doing with her. I understood later, of course.”
“Did you?” Gregor Demarkian asked. Really, Caroline thought. He ought to do something about himself. He ought to join an Overeaters Anonymous group. Food could be an addiction.
Caroline nodded. “Oh, yes. Usually, of course, Daddy was like all infantilized men. He liked girls better than he liked women, twenty-one-year-olds with IQs like golf scores and big china-blue eyes. Not to marry, of course. He was more sensible than that. But for fun. You know.”
“So you decided that your father was interested in marrying Hannah Krekorian,” Russell Donahue said.
“Not necessarily,” Caroline told him. “I suppose she had a great deal of money.”
“She was reasonably well off,” Gregor said dryly. “Is reasonably well off.”
“I assumed she had to be. Daddy is dead broke these days. After Jacqueline died, the book sales and the workshops dried up and there was his shopping addiction. He was absolutely out of control. Of course, he didn’t think he was. Addicts never do.”
“Right,” Russell Donahue said.
Caroline squelched a sudden desire to explain it all to him—how shopping addictions were just the same as addictions to alcohol or nicotine or heroin; how addicts are helpless to control their own behavior; how addictions start out bad and can only get worse unless the addict gets into recovery. It all made perfect sense if you understood the theory, but so many people didn’t want to understand the theory. About this one thing Caroline thought her father had been unquestionably right. The most serious disease in America today was not codependency. It was denial.
“The point I’m trying to make about this Hannah person,” Caroline said carefully, “is that she was a world-class codependent. A real enabler. Right down to the martyr complex.”
Gregor Demarkian looked blank. “Hannah Krekorian? With a martyr complex?”
“Of course. You could see it right away. It was in all that stuff she said about Mother Teresa.”
Russell Donahue looked confused. “I don’t understand. What does Mother Teresa have to do with any of this?”
“Mother Teresa is like a litmus test,” Caroline explained patiently. “If you want to know just how sick our society is, measure the extent to which we insist that that woman is a saint.”
“Oh,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Now, wait a minute.”
“But it’s true,” Caroline persisted. “Just look at what that woman is. If you can, I mean, because she really isn’t anything. Or anybody. She’s just a machine for meeting other people’s needs. She’s so full of shame and self-loathing, she doesn’t believe she has a right to take care of herself.”