“You can be out of there in a day and you wouldn’t have to do a thing,” John had said, only an hour ago, for what had to be the fortieth time. “You’ll like Chicago. You’ll be close. We can visit. At least you’ll be away from all that craziness with the movie people.”
“I can send somebody to pack,” Robbie had said, not ten minutes later, and also for the fortieth time. “You’ve got no idea what’s going on out there. It could be a serial killer. It could be a stalker. You had two of those women in your house.”
Annabeth had wanted to say that she had also had Stewart Gordon in her house, but she had a feeling that that would be something she would find hard to explain. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that she and her sons had always had an unspoken agreement. It was so unspoken, she had never really agreed to it. It was odd the way it happened between parents and children, and maybe between parents and grown children most of all.
“You become an icon,” she said to the air while pretending to talk to Creamsicle. “You become a picture in a book. You have no movement.”
She heard the tap at the back door—she was standing in the kitchen waiting to hear it; she wasn’t an idiot—and went to let Stewart in from what looked like the beginning of another windstorm. She’d forgotten how much she hated the cold when she’d decided to come up here. She’d always hated the cold. Even as a child, she had liked snow only when she could look at it from the safety of inside. She had hated it when her mother had bundled her up and shoved her out the door, with the admonition that she needed to “play in the fresh air.”
“I’ve always hated the fresh air,” she said to Stewart as she watched him stamp snow off his boots in her tiny mud-room. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that about myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever told myself that about myself.”
Stewart took off his navy watch cap and his scarf and threw them both over the hook next to the door. “Are you all right? You sound flustered. You haven’t been bothered by the vermin, have you?”
“No,” Annabeth said. “There were some people taking pictures of the house before, but they didn’t come to the door, and I can’t stop them from taking pictures of the house. No, it’s just my children. They’re being—something.”
“Protective.” Stewart had his peacoat off. Annabeth found herself marveling at how incredibly careful he was to stay true to type. “If it was my gray-haired old mother in the middle of a murder investigation, I’d want to get her out of here too.”
“Remind me to dye my hair as soon as I can buy some L’Oréal at the drugstore.”
“I was being figurative,” Stewart said. He came through into the kitchen and let Creamsicle jump down onto his shoulders. Creamsicle liked him, although it might be mostly that he had his own cat and probably smelled like it. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. His face was flushed and shiny under the thin layer of stubble that seemed to have sprouted from everywhere. It was a little disconcerting. Annabeth was used to seeing him as hairless as a baby.
“So,” Stewart said, “as I said on the phone, I’ve got Gregor Demarkian here, and Marcey’s had another of her half-fake overdoses. And that’s where things stand. Not much, I suppose, but better than we were.”
“And you’re glad to have Gregor Demarkian here.”
“I am. Mostly I am because I know he won’t jump to conclusions. He won’t decide that Arrow must have killed Mark Anderman somehow, because she was there, or seems to have been, or—you know the thing. The thing the police do.”
“The police don’t seem to be doing much of anything,” Annabeth said. “And I thought you liked the district attorney, or the public prosecutor, or whatever she’s called.”
“Clara Walsh. I do like her. She’s a smart woman. But with official authorities, the temptation is always there. Go for the easy target. And God only knows Arrow is an easy target. The girl stupefies me. I can’t figure out how she got into the position she’s in. She’s got nothing at all in the usual way of qualifications for it, and considering how low the qualifications are, that’s really saying something.”
“Go into the living room and I’ll make some tea,” Annabeth said.
“I can make us tea,” Stewart said. “You do too much work. You don’t know how to relax.”
“Go sit somewhere,” Annabeth said.
Stewart got up and headed for the living room, a big lumbering figure with a bald head and a spine far too straight for the twenty-first century. Annabeth picked up the kettle to be sure it was full—which it was, which wasn’t surprising, since she’d filled it as soon as he’d called to say he was coming—and reached for the tea canisters on the shelf. Stewart liked Darjeeling better than Earl Grey. He never put anything in his tea, not even sugar.