“She writes books,” Stewart said. “I told you about her. Father Tibor has heard of her. Everybody has heard of her. She’s writing a book now, when she’s not being invaded by drunken twits and finding firearms in her sofa. Here, sit down. Take the thing out and show him.”
Gregor was still standing at the door. With Stewart, everything went by quickly. Gregor closed the door to the corridor and came back into the center of the large room.
Stewart had practically pushed Annabeth Falmer into the wing chair, and now she was sitting in it with her feet flat on the floor and a large tote bag in her lap. She looked confused.
“How do you do,” Gregor said, holding out his hand. “I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
“How do you do,” Annabeth Falmer said. “I’ve seen you on television. And Stewart has, you know, told me a lot about you.”
“About you in the army,” Stewart said. “Those are the best stories about you, whether you know it or not. There he was, from one of the greatest cities in the world, with no more of a clue than the most mold-besotted hayseed. And they put him in intelligence. Intelligence.”
Annabeth put the tote bag on the floor and shrugged out of her coat, which was not the standard quilted thing Gregor had gotten used to seeing since he’d come off the ferry, but a good black wool that must once have been expensive and that seemed to have gotten only more so with age. She picked the tote bag up and looked inside it.
“Well,” she said.
“Yes,” Stewart said. “You have to tell him. There isn’t anybody else to tell, and he’d be the best person anyway.”
Gregor gave a glance at the computer screen, still full of images of Arrow Normand, and came around to sit down on the edge of the bed. It was always awkward talking to people in hotel rooms, especially women.
Annabeth reached into the tote bag and came out with a big, see-through, self-closing plastic bag, the kind used to put things away in freezers. Gregor stared at it for a moment without realizing what he was seeing. Maybe it was because he was used to seeing those bags hauled out so that somebody could feed him, but for a split second he thought he was looking at an enormous pork chop that had been burned into an unyielding solid hunk. Then his brain adjusted to the situation he was in, and he saw it was a gun.
“Ah,” he said.
“I wish you’d stop saying ‘ah,’ ” Stewart said. “This is serious. Annabeth found this in her couch, the same couch she put Arrow Normand to sleep on the night we found the body. And we thought it might be the gun used in the killing, but maybe not. Why would it be in Annabeth’s house?”
“We did try to be careful,” Annabeth said. “I mean, I did, and then later Stewart did. Neither one of us touched it with our hands. We used a handkerchief to pick it up.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. Let’s think. This is at your house? Have you owned it long?”
“Oh,” Annabeth said. “No. No. I’ve only been there since the end of the summer. It was to write a book, you see, and the boys found me this place, and I don’t know what kind of deal they got, but it was fully furnished and I could bring Creamsicle—”
“The cat,” Stewart said helpfully. “It’s a little orange cat.”
“I’d guessed that,” Gregor said. “So, it came fully furnished. That means the couch where you found the gun was there before you got there?”
“Yes. Yes, it was,” Annabeth said.
“And was this the first time you’d gone rooting around in it?” Gregor asked.
Annabeth looked confused for a moment, then brightened. “Oh, no. I clean as a hobby, or something. I’ve pulled the cushions several times and vacuumed out underneath them. If you don’t do that, couches get really foul. I’ve taken the whole thing apart several times before this.”
“And that’s what you were doing this time, taking the couch apart to clean it?” Gregor asked.
“Not really,” Annabeth said. “I sat down on it, which I don’t usually do, but I was setting up to give Stewart some tea when he came and I was arranging some things on the coffee table, and I sat down to do it, and I sat down on something hard. So I went looking, and that was what I found. It was just there. Between the cushions and a little underneath.”
“And it’s not yours?”
“Of course it’s not hers,” Stewart said.
“No it isn’t,” Annabeth said, “although you should hear my sons on the phone these days. They want me to get one. They both live in suburbs, you see, and there are burglaries. But this is Margaret’s Harbor. Nothing ever happens on Margaret’s Harbor.”