Eventually, everything became known. Sometimes it became known quickly, and sometimes it became known only after a long time, but it wasn’t true that people could keep secrets. In the long run, everything you’d ever done would be on display for all the world to see.
3
It only took a good night’s sleep for Father Tibor Kasparian to realize there were drawbacks to staying in Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. He’d never been able to sleep well in hospitals, and he’d been dreading coming back to Ca-vanaugh Street as well. He hadn’t been sure how he’d react to the sight of Holy Trinity as a bombed-out mess. Then the people had just been too much. There had been too many of them at once, and too much food, and too much talk about things he knew nothing about, like this murder in Bryn Mawr. By the time Gregor had finally shown up, he’d been drooping. By the time he’d been left alone in the apartment for three minutes, he was on his way to bed. He noticed nothing, at the time, except that Bennis or somebody had put clean sheets on the bed and supplied it with enough quilts to manually thaw the polar ice caps. If he tossed and turned in his sleep, he didn’t notice it. If he called out in his dreams, there would have been nobody to hear him. Years ago, in Armenia, his Anna had complained that he talked constantly in his sleep, nonstop, but never about important things. He shouted instructions at cats. He worried out loud about the number of cans in the pantry, and they didn’t have a pantry. They had nothing. When he stayed with the faithful who wanted him to pray with them in their living rooms, they thought he was giving evidence of sanctity. If Tibor had been living in the West at the time, where such things were possible, he would have bought a tape recorder and run it while he slept. As it was, he had to take everybody’s word for it, and to remind himself that no matter what else he might be, he was not a saint.
The first problem with Bennis Hannaford’s apartment was in the bedroom, where the funerary urn containing her sister Anne Marie’s ashes still sat on top of the low dresser near the window. That in and of itself would not have bothered Tibor much, in spite of the fact that Anne Marie had not been the best of people, except that the urn and the dresser top beneath it had been deliberately left out of whatever cleaning had gone on in anticipation of his arrival. He knew the oversight was deliberate because the urn and the dresser it sat on didn’t have just a little dust. They had a monumental amount of dust, nearly half an inch of it, and it had been undisturbed for some time. It was as if Bennis had both wanted to do the right thing about Anne Marie and not wanted to do it at the same time. The urn was brass and had those big curving handles like sporting trophies had. The brass had never been polished that Ti-bor could tell. On the taller dresser on the other side of the room, there were family pictures in sterling-silver frames of Bennis and her brothers and sisters at her father’s house, Engine House, in Bryn Mawr. In none of them was Anne Marie included.
The second problem with Bennis Hannaford’s apartment was in the living room, where, Tibor noticed as soon as he got up, the only actually real furniture was the big wooden worktable with Bennis’s computer and papers and books on it, pushed up against the window looking out on Cavanaugh Street. The sofa and chairs and coffee table they had all been using the night before were gimcrack and upholstered in odd colors that didn’t match. Either Bennis had gone downtown in some haste and picked up whatever she could find that could be delivered immediately, or she had pulled these pieces out of other people’s houses. Tibor thought the latter was probably true. Bennis’s own furniture was upstairs in Gregor’s apartment. Gregor’s furniture—which she had pronounced not fit for drunk muskrats—was in storage. Tibor remembered all this from when Bennis and Gregor had decided to move in with each other. It wasn’t that anybody had told him, flat-out. They wouldn’t. It was just that everybody knew, and if you sat long enough in the Ararat or in old George Tekemanian’s apartment or at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store, you heard anything you needed to hear.
He got dressed and went to the kitchen, which did have furniture in it. Maybe Bennis liked Gregor’s kitchen furniture better than her own. He looked in the refrigerator, which was stocked for a long siege of bad weather. He could survive the blizzard of the century and its ensuing floods with what he had in there. He looked in the cabinets and found them overstuffed as well. Somebody had thoughtfully left him three big boxes of coffee bags, the kind you put in a cup and poured water over like you poured water over tea bags to make tea. Theoretically, it was impossible to make bad coffee with coffee bags. He didn’t take any out. He was depressed, not sick. Depression was not cured by having coffee alone in an otherwise empty kitchen.