Deadly Beloved(23)
The woman who wanted the all-day parking ticket, the man thought to himself as he continued climbing up the ramp. Then he heard something like a pained grinding of gears and stepped instinctively back. The stepping-back probably saved his life. A second later there was a scream and a blast. The garage was suddenly so hot, it was like being in a blast furnace. Smoke and fire shot up out of the Volvo and side to side too, hitting the cars on either side of it, starting a chain reaction in a small Toyota that had come in only half an hour before. Smoke and fire was rising up into the concrete. Metal was everywhere, and glass, and what felt like melted rubber still hot enough to burn flesh.
The man began to back down the ramp. Then he turned and started to run. He ran right out of the garage and onto the street. The sidewalks were full of people at a dead stop. Black smoke was billowing out of the garage’s third level. Windows were broken on cars half a block away.
“Fire department, fire department,” the man started shouting, but no one was listening to him.
They were all standing stock-still in the street, so that when the second large blast came—the biggest one, ripping through cars on either side of the Volvo like a buzz saw through balsa wood and shooting bits of debris into the air like lethal snow—three people had their eardrums shattered and four got bits of powdered glass in their eyes.
PART ONE
A Marriage Made in Heaven or Someplace
ONE
1.
FROM THE MOMENT THAT Gregor Demarkian had first heard about Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, he had wanted to be happy about it. After all, he kept asking himself, what could there possibly be not to be happy about? In all the years Gregor had known her, the one thing she had really needed was a good husband. She was only twenty-two years old and on her own with a small child. The small child’s father had disappeared into the mists of studied irresponsibility as soon as he had heard of the impending arrival of the small child. The man she was marrying was a blessing too: Russell Donahue, once a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department, somebody they all knew. Donna was even going to go on living on Cavanaugh Street. Howard Kashinian was fixing up another dilapidated stone house on the northern edge of the neighborhood. Donna’s parents were giving her the down payment for a wedding present. Russ was just as happy to live there as anywhere else—happier, in fact, since the neighborhood was safe and he liked most of the people in it.
“Donna can even go on decorating everything,” Lida Arkmanian had said, explaining the whole thing to Gregor one afternoon just before Christmas. “It will be like nothing has really changed at all, except that Donna will have Russell and Tommy will have a father.”
“It’s just like Howard Kashinian to ask for a down payment from Donna of all people,” Father Tibor Kasparian had said about a week later. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Howard. I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about Howard.”
Gregor Demarkian had known Howard Kashinian all his life. He knew there was nothing to be done about the man—but Howard Kashinian wasn’t the problem, and thinking about him wasn’t going to solve anything. Week after week went by. Winter turned into spring. Donna wrapped the four-story brownstone they all lived in in red and silver foil for Valentine’s Day and in green and yellow ribbons for Mother’s Day. She wrapped all the streetlamp poles in bright red bolts of satin cloth and strung balloons between them for her son Tommy’s birthday. Sometimes Gregor would hear her, pacing back and forth in the apartment above his head, her step light and oddly rhythmic. Sometimes he’d see her out his big front living room window, skateboarding along the sidewalk with her hair flying while Lida or Hannah Krekorian kept Tommy sitting safely on a stoop. Once Gregor had gone downstairs to Bennis Hannaford’s place, to see if she would feed him coffee and cheer him up, but it hadn’t worked. Bennis was Donna’s best friend on Cavanaugh Street, maybe the best friend Donna had in the world, in spite of the fact that Bennis was nearly forty instead of just past twenty and nothing like Donna in background at all. Her apartment was full of bits and pieces of Donna’s wedding, strewn about like dust among the debris of her real life: big maps of make-believe places called Zed and Zedalia; papier-mâché models of dragons and trolls. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf built into the wall in Bennis’s foyer, filled with editions of the books she had written herself. The Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia had a unicorn on the cover and a dragon with a curling tail. Zedalia in Winter had a lady in a conical hat and a lot of veils, riding on a horse. The latest one, Zedalia Triumphant, had a plain red background and nothing else at all. Bennis was on the New York Times best-seller list. As far as her publisher was concerned, she was now making enough money to be considered a Serious Writer, and Serious Writers did not have the covers of their books cluttered up with garish four-color pictures of rogue trolls.