“Interesting,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Ken Bairn looked like he was going to lunge for Buck Monaghan’s neck. He was stopped by the sudden, flustered entrance of Delores Martin.
“Will the lot of you get out there and hold a press conference?” she demanded. “They’ve been there for ten minutes and they’re out for blood.”
PART II
ONE
1
It was the doorbell that got Gregor Demarkian out of bed the next morning, and he had to admit that the doorbell was not his favorite thing to hear even when he was fully awake and dressed. He got up to answer it because he couldn’t be sure it didn’t represent an emergency. There were cell phones these days, of course, and there was the land line, with the phone on the night table right next to his head, but he couldn’t trust the people of Cavanaugh Street to think like that. He couldn’t even trust them to call 911. There was something visceral about responding to an emergency by rushing across a cold night street in your pajamas and your robe.
He looked across the bed, at Bennis sleeping as if she’d never had anything to worry about in her life. He’d never understood how Bennis could sleep like that, considering all that she had had to worry about, but then, he’d never understood Bennis. She was, in her way, the anti-Elizabeth. She came from a world so remote from any he had ever known that she might as well have been a Martian.
He gave a little thought to Bennis as a Martian, and then sat up. He grabbed his robe from the chair. He stood up and put it on. Whoever was ringing the bell certainly acted as if it was an emergency. The bell rang and rang and rang in a staccato of small bursts. Then it went silent for a second. Then the ringing started again.
Gregor went out into the hall and down the hall to the foyer. He was surprised Grace from upstairs hadn’t come out to find out what was going on. He’d have come out to find out what was going on, even if only to have the chance of killing whoever was causing it.
He got to his front door and tried looking through the peephole. Peepholes were never of any use. All you saw was distortions. He pulled the door open and looked at Lida Arkmanian, fully dressed in three-inch heels and that chinchilla coat, holding a stack of three large baking pans. The three large baking pans were each covered with aluminum foil, and they each had something in them.
“You brought food,” Gregor said. “It’s, what—before five o’clock in the morning?”
“It’s four thirty,” Lida said, brushing past him with her baking pans. “I’ve been up all night. We’re all worried about you, Gregor.”
“I wish you’d worry about me dying of lack of sleep,” Gregor said.
He closed the door behind her and didn’t bother to lock up. It was too early in the morning and it wouldn’t serve much of a purpose anyway. Lida was already marching through the living room on the way to the kitchen. Gregor followed her.
In the kitchen, Lida had put the baking pans down on the kitchen table next to Gregor’s stacks of folders about the Waldorf Pines case. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Then she shook her head.
“It’s impossible,” she said, shaking her head. “I love Bennis very much, Gregor, you know that, and we were all very happy when you two found each other and very relieved when you actually got married, but how is it possible that a woman of her age doesn’t know how to cook? Anything? What is this supposed to be?”
Gregor peered at it. “It’s yogurt,” he said. “It’s Dannon fruit-on-the-bottom cherry yogurt. It’s her favorite kind. She eats those for lunch.”
“These and what else?”
“I don’t think there’s an anything else. I think she just eats one of those. I don’t keep track, Lida. I’m not walking around writing down everything Bennis eats every day.”
“Maybe she is? Maybe she has one of those eating disorders? I’ve read about those, Gregor. These people, they have little notebooks, and every time they eat anything they write it down in the notebook with the calories, and then they make themselves throw it up.”
“If Bennis had bulimia, I think I’d notice,” Gregor said. “She doesn’t throw anything up. What are we doing here at four thirty in the morning talking about Bennis’s eating habits? You know she doesn’t have an eating disorder. You see her eat at the Ararat all the time.”
Lida put the yogurt back in the refrigerator. Yogurt was practically all there was in the refrigerator. There was also a small carton of cream, which Gregor liked in his coffee, and the leftover takeout from some Indian restaurant they’d gone to in Wayne.