“Did he,” Buck Monaghan said.
“Oh, it was the usual kind of thing,” Delores Martin said. “Yelling and screaming and threatening to sue everybody. Sue Connolly’s right, you know. You do have to wonder just who these people think they are. And what’s Ken worried about, really? That he’ll lose votes if Waldorf Pines is unhappy? There aren’t that many of them, and most of the residents of this town would be happy to see them unhappy. How’s Sue, Buck? Is she holding up in the middle of all this?”
“She’s fine,” Buck said. “It’s been a while, you know.”
“I know it’s been a while,” Delores said, “but it can’t be something you get over quick. Your own sister trying to commit suicide and you find her yourself, and it’s all over what? Some party being given by a girl none of us would have wanted to be seen dead with in our day. It’s terrible what’s happening to the world. It really is. And it’s only going to get worse.”
Gregor had no idea how this woman knew that things were only going to get worse, but he had an odd feeling that she did. He watched as she stared down at the little intercom box on her desk and frowned. Then she got up and went to the wooden door at the back and knocked. A voice came from inside. Delores Martin poked her head in.
“They’re here,” she said. “Buck and Larry and somebody I presume to be Mr. Demarkian. Don’t you think you’d better see them before your ulcer explodes?”
There was more from the voice behind the door. Delores turned to look at them.
“Go right in,” she said, flinging the door wide. “I told you he wouldn’t have anything more important on his plate. Forgive me if I’ve been rude, Mr. Demarkian, I’ve had a lot on my mind this morning. And I can’t say I’ve liked having it on my mind. I knew when they wanted to build that place that it was going to be a bad idea.”
A tall, reedy man suddenly rushed through the wooden door and out into the anteroom where they were all standing. He was loud in every way. Even his tie was loud. He was trying hard to look younger than he was. Gregor was sure his hair was dyed, although he couldn’t imagine anybody wanting hair that was that particular shade of jet black.
“Delores, for God’s sake,” he said. “You can’t just keep going on and on about it. And we couldn’t have done anything to stop them in the long run anyway. They’d have gone to court and gotten any ruling overturned. What was the planning and zoning commission supposed to say? It wasn’t wetlands. It wasn’t historic.”
“All he could see was the tax revenue,” Delores said, shaking her head. “Bunch of big houses, bunch of big real estate tax assessments, money, money, money. They don’t understand what kind of damage those places cause. Jen Connolly trying to commit suicide. At seventeen, imagine that.”
“Jen Connolly didn’t try to commit suicide just because Waldorf Pines got built in Pineville Station,” Ken said. “And it went up when she was something like two years old. You can’t blame everything on Waldorf Pines just because you don’t like them.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Delores said. “Go have your meeting. Go do something. I’m tired of talking myself hoarse.”
Ken held open his door and said, “Come right on in, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Ken Bairn.”
2
Ken Bairn’s office was, Gregor had to admit, not bad. It had high ceilings and a tall window that looked down on Main Street. Gregor could see the car he’d been driven up in sitting in the Pineville Station Police Department’s parking lot. He could also see across the empty space that was most of the town to what looked like a small complex of school buildings. He thought that they would have to be new, too, or close to it. Even as late as his parents’ generation, school buildings were built in the centers of small towns, where most of the students could walk to them.
Buck Monaghan noticed what he was looking at and nodded. “Those are the Pineville Station public schools,” he said. “One elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. Except they didn’t start out that way. They were built in the late Sixties, and nobody had ever heard of a middle school. Or at least, nobody around here had. We ended up having to do some renovations to make the new system work back around nineteen eighty.”
“It’s not that big a complex,” Gregor said. “Or is that an illusion created by the distance?”
“It’s no illusion,” Buck Monaghan said. “Last year’s high school graduating class was under a hundred and fifty. A lot of towns with schools that size go in on consolidated regionals. It makes sense, on a lot of levels. There’s more money to go around. You can buy more equipment, not strain so much with teacher salaries no matter what the state union s come up with, participate in elaborate class trips and field programs—”