“Stella Vardanian barely speaks a word of English.”
“She says it in Armenian, Gregor, but trust me. I can understand.”
The bathroom was big and elegant, but not silly. Gregor dried himself off and got on the clean boxer shorts and T-shirt he had brought in with him. Then he looked at his hair in the mirror as if there were something he could do about it. Bennis was probably right. In spite of the fact that she was a complete Anglo, the kind who could trace her ancestors back to England for four hundred years, she probably did know enough Armenian by now to get the reference to cows and milk. Gregor just barely believed that old women still talked about cows and milk, or that virginity was still an issue, for anybody, anywhere. Especially for him. He was, after all, fifty-six. Bennis had to be close to forty. What did Stella Vardanian think they’d been doing with their lives up to the point where they’d met each other, or at least up to the point where Bennis had met him?
He went out of the bathroom into the room itself. The suitcase was still on the bed. The laptop was set up on the desk. The laptop’s screen showed the home page for Box Hill Confections. Gregor didn’t remember plugging the laptop into the Internet connection or bringing up Box Hill, but he’d been distracted. He still was. He sat down at the desk and looked for a minute through Box Hill’s pages: chocolates, confections, wedding and event favors. There was nothing to tell him whether or not the company made chocolate yaprak sarma as a matter of course, but he did find pictures of all kinds of truffles and crèmes, and he thought Bennis and Donna had probably come close to passing out cold from ecstasy. This was just what they needed, a specialty gourmet chocolate place that treated cacao content like the Holy Grail.
He collapsed the Box Hill page and called up Google instead. Then he typed in “Arrow Normand” and waited to see what would happen.
He should have known better. The first page took forever to load, and then it announced that there were a total of 329,224,544 results. Gregor had a feeling that this was actually an understatement. He looked at the results on the first page. They were mostly about the murder of Mark Anderman, and Arrow Normand’s address. That made sense. Results would be sorted by starting with the most recent, and this was the most recent thing that had happened to Arrow Normand. It was not, however, what Gregor wanted to know about right now.
He thought about it for a minute, and tried “Arrow Nor-mand” and “Hugh Hefner Suite.” This was better. The page that came up declared that there were only 12,224,488 results. He looked through the ones on the first page and decided to try CNN first. He got five short paragraphs announcing that “it had been reported” that Arrow Normand and her friends had spent a “wild weekend” in the “very expensive Hugh Hefner Suite” at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, along with five or six photographs of Arrow Normand with various people, or in the vicinity of various people. He recognized Marcey Mandret from the hospital, and both of the people he had just seen in the restaurant downstairs, although the man was in the background and fuzzy. This was not helping. Gregor hit the Back button and looked through the rest of the results on the page.
The one he wanted was almost at the end. It was from something called SarahSurveysSociety, which seemed to be some kind of blog. The headline was: “Has Arrow Normand Lost Her Mind?”
For half a minute, but no longer, Gregor wished he’d already met Arrow Normand. Stewart could give all the lectures he wanted about how incredibly stupid the woman was, but Stewart thought everybody was stupid. Gregor dismissed the qualm and concentrated on the blog entry, which was immensely long for that kind of thing, and illustrated. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand at parties, and the beach. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand in shorts and halter tops, in bikinis, in ball gowns. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand happy, and sad, and wasted, and crying, and angry. He even saw one picture of Arrow Normand trying to fill her own gas tank.
In the beginning, the pictures bothered him, and he couldn’t put his finger on why. Then it hit him. Arrow Normand was not beautiful. She wasn’t even especially pretty. She didn’t have that thing that some actresses and models have, where their looks are not conventionally attractive but are at least compelling. Arrow Normand looked like every high school cheerleader from the small towns of the Midwest, “cute” in that way high school girls are because they’re very young, but also “cute” in that way that disappears as soon as they get older. And Arrow Normand’s “cute” was definitely disappearing. He could see it in the progression of the pictures. The older she got, the pudgier she got. She never got pudgy enough to be fat, but she no longer had clear physical definition, and her face had gone almost completely slack. There was no significant bone structure to hold it together. Even her hair got flatter and more colorless the closer to the present the pictures were taken. What was worse, she looked out of place. When she appeared in pictures next to other “celebrities”—and next to Kendra Rhode especially—she looked like that very same small-town ex-cheerleader, getting her picture taken with her favorite star. She did not look like a star herself, or like anybody who could ever be a star.