He started up the stairs, and stopped. He turned around, walked back through the foyer, and went out the front door. Standing on the low stoop there at the top of three shallow steps, he could just see the front sidewalk-lined edge of the place where Holy Trinity Church still was, sort of, almost. The yellow warning bands were still up, and probably would be for months, even after reconstruction started. He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and wished he didn’t feel so hollow. The world had done very odd things to itself in the years since he’d been a child on this street. The big picture was bad enough: wars and police actions and terrorism. It was the small picture he truly hated. The whole country was descending into reflexive madness. When had people stopped knowing that witches who did magic were just pretend? When had superstition and book burning become respectable hobbies for small-town mayors who wanted to make the world safe from Halloween and Harry Potter? When had these people—he looked down at the slip of paper he still held crumpled in his hand—when had this sort of blatantly hysterical irrationality found a following large enough to impinge on the everyday world?
He stopped trying to get a look at Holy Trinity, turned around, and went back into the building. Grace’s harpsichord was as loud as he’d ever heard it. Maybe she had her door open, waiting to hear Tibor or Bennis or Gregor himself come home. Gregor went up the stairs passing by the door of old George Tekemanian’s ground-floor apartment. Usually, he liked visiting with old George. Today, even if George had been there, Gregor had nothing to say.
FOUR
1
No one had to tell Charlotte Deacon Ross how to behave. Even her mother, who had been widely considered to be the last of the old-line Main Line grande dames, had been in awe of her. The key to civilization was self-control and personal responsibility, Charlotte always thought, and then she went about doing what mattered immeasurably not only to herself but to the small world she lived in. It was a world that had not changed in many generations, although the people in it had washed in and out much faster recently than they had when Charlotte was a girl. There was still a tight little world of people who owned and ran the banks, people who owned and ran the major law firms, people who owned and ran the largest corporations—or at least sat on their boards; nobody wanted to be exposed, legally, the way a chief operating officer was in this age of regulation. There was still that solid phalanx of people whom the public never saw, deliberately obscure for their own protection. They still all knew each other and sent their children to the same half-dozen prep schools and the same half-dozen universities, and—contrary to public opinion—those things still mattered. They still lived in ways that most ordinary people would find odd and alienating. Charlotte could always tell, when one of her girls brought friends home for the weekend, which were the ones who would last and which were the ones who would not. The ones who would not kept looking for a television set, as if somehow a house was incomplete without it. There was a television set in Charlotte’s house, but it was in the big common room in the servants’ wing.
Now she sat in the big wing chair in the morning room, her embroidery in her lap, and looked out at a late afternoon as grey and depressing as the one on the day Tony died—on the day he was murdered, she amended, because part of taking responsibility was calling things what they really were. The word had no resonance in her mind. Murdered murdered murdered, she thought, and she might as well have been saying kumquat. She kept waiting to feel something besides cold and clearheaded and calm. If she had had a tape of the scene as it had happened, she would have watched it: Tony standing so close to her; Tony’s body jerking backwards; Tony’s face exploding. It had been nothing at all what she had been led to expect from her favorite detective writer—in fact, the only detective writer she read—P.D. James. She might have seen something similar if she’d gone to certain kinds of movies, but she didn’t. The few movies she saw were Italian or French, and usually had to do with the deaths of marriages. That was a concept Charlotte didn’t understand. Marriages did not die, in her opinion, unless they had been improperly made to begin with. Marriages were not about happiness, or compatibility, or sex. It fascinated her to watch people, even fictional people, who seemed to think that getting divorced was like giving back a boy’s fraternity ring, something trivial that you did because your emotions were shallow, or because you were bored and wanted to do something else for a while.
The oddest thing about what had happened when Tony died was the blood. There had been so very much blood. It had come spurting out of his face as if his head were a grapefruit and somebody was squeezing it. There was blood on the slate that lined the edge of the drive. There was blood on the hedges that made a buffer between the slate and the house. Then Tony had turned and taken a step toward her and there was blood on her dress, running down the front of it in rivulets.