What her father didn’t understand was that the things she wanted were not optional. They were like oxygen. They were the only way it would be possible for her to survive.
Chapter Eight
1
Gregor Demarkian did not think of himself as old in any absolute sense. He thought of himself as older—older than Tommy Moradanyan Donahue, for instance, who had more energy than Gregor ever remembered having, and older than Bennis, as a matter of principle. He even thought of himself as “old-fashioned,” by which he meant that he respected education and patience more than brilliance and speed. “Old” was a word for people who were failing, and not even all of them. Elizabeth, struck down by cancer when she was only forty-three, had never been old. She had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong genes, in a world where education and patience had yet to find the answers to the questions she needed to ask. Old George Teke-manian was failing from sense to sense and year to year, but somehow he managed to live in the present. Maybe that was the def nition he wanted. Maybe “old” was a word for people who lived in the past, and Gregor Demarkian had never allowed himself to live in the past.
He had allowed himself to think about the past, often, and it was the past that slapped him in the face as Clara Walsh’s car pulled up to the curb next to the small, neat form of a woman who seemed to be waiting for them. For a moment, he thought she was someone he had known in some other part of his life. There were a lot of those people scattered across the landscape: witnesses in investigations so old he had to look at his notes to remember what the crime was; victims and the family members of victims; peripheral characters whose backgrounds had to be checked and rechecked, just in case, because not to check was to risk disaster. Clara Walsh seemed to be taking forever to get the car parked. The wind was rising all around them, and the street on which they sat looked like the stage set for a movie about New England. There was too much white clapboard, everywhere. The Oscartown Inn had a big, deep porch with tall columns all around it. Up at the end of the street, Gregor could see what he thought was the start of a town green, with a big gazebo for band concerts. He turned his attention back to the woman at the curb. The more he thought of it, the more he was sure that this woman was none of those things. It wasn’t the woman herself he recognized. It was the—it was the aura she seemed to carry around her.
Gregor brushed away the very accurate image he had of the glee Bennis and Donna would display if they ever found out he’d even considered the word “aura,” and tried to give his full attention to the woman on the curb. She was middle aged, middle height, middle weight, not striking in any way at all, except that she was. Gregor thought again about those people you just had to look at whenever they were in the room, the “people who glowed in the dark,” as somebody in his childhood used to say. This woman was one of those, and like so many of them, there was nothing objective he could find to explain it. She had dark hair going to gray that she had pushed up under a navy blue snow hat. She was wearing one of those quilted down coats that made anybody who wore one look like a mushroom in heat. The coat was navy blue, like the hat. Her hands were stuffed into the pockets of it.
Clara Walsh had finished her seesaw parking maneuver. “Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s the woman I was telling you about. Linda Beecham. The woman who owns the Home News.” Then she saw the look on Gregor’s face and coughed a little. “Linda is a little disconcerting,” she said. “In person, if you know what I mean.”
Gregor did not know what she meant, but he was willing to wait and see. He had been a little worried that he would find a circus when he arrived. He’d been on high-profile cases before, and cases that involved celebrities, and those tended to bring with them all kinds of crazy media attention. Still, there was nobody on the curb but Linda Beecham, and although there were media vans along the street, nobody seemed to be in them. If Gregor hadn’t already seen this story a hundred million times on CNN and Fox, he’d have wondered if Clara Walsh had managed to keep a lid on it. That would have made Clara Walsh not just a genius, but something on the order of the Angel of Everything.
“I wish she had more expression in her face,” Clara Walsh said suddenly. “I really do. It’s the eeriest thing. It’s like a machine that’s talking to you. Or a corpse. It’s as if one day when nobody was looking, she had all the emotion drained out of her.”
Clara bumped the car one more time, as if she were docking a boat instead of parking, or as if she had no trust at all in her ability to line up at the curb. Then she turned the engine off. Gregor looked back at Linda Beecham and thought that he had it, finally, the thing that compelled him to look at her, the thing that would compel everybody to look at her. Then he wondered if she had been one of the people who glow in the dark before whatever had happened to her to cause her to go blank like this. Maybe she had been, or maybe she hadn’t been. It didn’t matter. Blank people always made the people around them want to look at them.