Gregor thought John Jackman was right, but he thought Dan Exter was right too. There was something about Molly Bracken that did not quite fit at Fox Run Hill. Gregor believed that in spite of the fact that he had never met any of its other inhabitants, except for the joggers who always seemed to jog especially slowly when the police were in the community. Walk the walk and talk the talk, that was how the slang went. Molly Bracken didn’t. Every time she opened her mouth, Gregor expected to see gum.
He tried to explain this to Father Tibor Kasparian when Tibor came by at the end of the afternoon, but he only sounded like a snob doing it.
“I wish you could see this place,” he told Tibor. “It’s odd. Strange. Like a neighborhood of haunted houses from a 1950s movie.”
“I thought you said this Fox Run Hill was well kept.” Tibor was rummaging through Gregor’s refrigerator. There wasn’t much of anything in Gregor’s refrigerator, but there was always the hope that Lida or Hannah or one of the other women had left something there. Tibor found a carton of cherry yogurt so old it was growing mold, and threw it out. “I thought you said that this was one of those places where they had groundskeepers and staff and all that kind of person.”
“It is.”
“Then it doesn’t sound to me like haunted houses, Krekor. Haunted houses don’t have caretakers.”
Actually, Gregor thought, some haunted houses did have caretakers—wasn’t Manderley supposed to have had one, even after it burned? That was beside the point.
“It’s just that the houses are so big,” he told Tibor. “Not as big as the house Bennis grew up in, not like that—”
“That was like an institution.” Tibor sniffed. “That could have been a school. I think this Yale University Bennis’s father left it to sold it to some people to make a school.”
“Yes, exactly. These aren’t that big. But they seem emptier. You look at them, I look at them, and imagine big hollow wooden shells, with nothing inside them.”
“You don’t usually get poetic, Krekor.”
“I’m not getting poetic. I don’t like this place. In fact, I hate this place.”
“Because the buildings seem so big and empty?”
“Because everything seems so big and empty,” Gregor said. “The houses, the grounds, the people, everything. I have to talk to more of them on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen so far, they’re just not really there. I keep imagining Mrs. Willis being like the women I’ve met so far at Fox Run Hill, and then the idea that she shot her husband and then blew up her car seems impossible.”
“But she did it. People are people, Krekor. Nothing is impossible.”
“Granted. But the women I’ve met so far in that place don’t have the emotional energy to kick their dogs.”
Tibor left to lead his Bible study group. Gregor went back to looking through reports and making lists: things to check into; people to interview; places to see, as a last resort. Finally he did something he hadn’t needed to do since he was an agent in training. He got all the pieces of paper together and wrote a biography of Patricia MacLaren Willis. Actually, this was something he had been taught to do with the victim, usually the victim of a kidnapping. Gregor had worked kidnapping details for years before he had found his niche as director of the Behavioral Science Department. Unit, he reminded himself now. Since he had left the Bureau, they had decided to stop calling their subdivisions departments and to start calling them units. Gregor didn’t know why, but he suspected it was the budget. If you didn’t spend all the budget Congress gave you, Congress decided you didn’t need so much money and reduced your appropriation. It was therefore death for any director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to save any cash. If he got to the end of the year with money on his hands, he had to find a way to spend what he had. Christmas bonuses and that sort of thing were mostly out. The public had caught on to that one, and they didn’t like it. Having to order an entire new set of letterhead stationery, with new terms and new names and all the rest of it, was really beautiful, because nobody would question why the FBI needed paper. Of course they needed paper. They needed a lot of paper. Gregor Demarkian was a Franklin Delano Roosevelt liberal and probably always would be. He believed in Social Security and minimum wages and the federal safety net. Sometimes, though, he thought he could understand why there were so many people out there who thought government didn’t work.
By the time Bennis came in at a quarter to six, Gregor was hunched over his computer printouts, writing rapidly on a long sheet of yellow lined legal paper with a pencil so dull his handwriting looked as if it were growing moss. Bennis leaned on his shoulder, looked at his writing, and then shook him.