Deadly Beloved(48)

“It doesn’t matter what you said,” Bennis Hannaford told him.

Russ rubbed the palms of his hands in front of his face.

Bennis saw Gregor and Tibor, walked over to their booth, and threw herself down on one of the cushions.

“Well,” she said. “It finally happened. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks, and now it’s finally happened.”

“What’s happened?” Gregor demanded. “What are you talking about?”

Bennis took her pack of Benson and Hedges out of the pocket of her skirt, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. The front booth was the only place in the Ararat where customers were allowed to smoke. Linda Melajian’s mother hated smoke, and she thought that if Bennis was made uncomfortable enough, she would stop smoking altogether. Linda Melajian’s mother did not know Bennis Hannaford as well as she should have.

Bennis took another drag, released another stream of smoke, and sighed.

“Gregor,” she said, “if Donna Moradanyan ever actually ends up at the altar, it’s going to be a miracle. Trust me. It’s going to be a very big miracle.”

Gregor—who had lived with the preparations for Donna’s wedding for so long now that he sometimes found himself thinking it had already happened—felt as if he’d fallen down the rabbit hole.





SIX


1.


THE NEWS ABOUT THE woman they called Mrs. Patricia Willis had been everywhere for so long, the news about the arrival of Karla Parrish had been wiped out of public consciousness. Julianne Corbett knew, because she had been watching. She had been watching the story about Mrs. Willis intently. It isn’t every day that one of your constituents kills her husband and blows up her car in a municipal parking garage. The story was beginning to take on that eerie timeless quality of an urban legend. There was also the practical factor. Nobody got into the United States Congress on talent, experience, or good intentions. It took money, and that meant campaign contributions. Tiffany Shattuck had found Mrs. Willis’s name on the contributors’ list the night the explosion happened—and called Julianne about it, at four o’clock in the morning, as if it had been late-breaking word of a presidential assassination.

“She gave us a lot of money,” Tiffany had informed Julianne as solemnly as she could when she had had no sleep and far too much beer. “Over and over again. She was a very solid supporter of your campaign.”

Julianne might have been angry, but she had been restless and agitated and unable to sleep, and when the phone rang she had been sitting up in bed going through all one hundred and twenty-four stations on her cable-ready TV, looking for something to watch that made some sense. American Movie Classics was showing Take Care of My Little Girl, a just-after-World-War-II social-conscience film where Jeanne Crain learns the evils of the sorority system from an ex-G.I. who has come to her campus on the G.I. bill. At least four stations were showing infomercials about exercise equipment. (Who bought exercise equipment at four o’clock in the morning?) The rest of the offerings all seemed to be religious. Julianne didn’t really mind Mother Angelica, but at four A.M. all the offerings on the Eternal Word Television Network were in Italian. She had been about to hunt through her night table for her crossword puzzle books when Tiffany had started heavy breathing in her ear.

“What if somebody finds out?” Tiffany demanded. “I mean, this is the biggest scandal since I don’t know what. The biggest scandal ever in the state of Pennsylvania, I bet.”

Maybe that was true. Julianne didn’t know much about scandals in the state of Pennsylvania. They hadn’t been on the menu when she was going to elementary school. What had been on the menu, as far as she could remember it, was what would now be called sexual harassment. It was as clear to her now as it had been at the time—the day Bobby Brenderbader had copped a feel at the drinking fountain; the day John Valland had snapped her bra strap in class while Mrs. Magdussen was explaining the virtue of the union   side in the Civil War. Julianne shook it all out of her head and brought herself back to the present. A middle-aged balding man whose belt was just a little too tight was going on and on about how Christ led him to understand the importance of complex carbohydrates.

“She couldn’t have been a really huge contributor,” Julianne said reasonably. “I would have heard about it.”

“You did hear about it,” Tiffany persisted. “She was on the November list. You must remember.”

“I don’t remember. Tiffany, for God’s sake, there were two hundred people on that list.”