Deadly Beloved(59)

ONE


1.


IT HADN’T BEEN A very big bomb. Gregor knew that as soon as he got through the double doors. The shattered table had looked horrible from a distance. It looked horrible close up. There were one or two people who looked more horrible still. Gregor saw a woman in a bright purple dress he was sure had to be dead. She had pieces of white fluff stuck to her and a pin that read I WEAR FAKE FUR. Gregor saw cuts and bruises everywhere, but not all that much blood. He scanned the faces he could see and came up blank. There was nobody there that he knew. Men and women began to get themselves up from the floor and shake themselves out. Someone was crying.

“Where is she?” someone demanded, grabbing on to his elbow and spinning him around. “Where—is—she?”

For a moment Gregor was certain the “she” referred to was Bennis Hannaford. That was the “she” he was looking for, and that he was beginning to feel increasingly uneasy that he hadn’t found. The man clutching his elbow was young Evan Walsh. Walsh looked almost as bad as he might have if he had been in the room at the time of the blast. There were tears running down his sooty face. He must have been the one who was crying, Gregor realized. His hair was a mess. One of the lenses in his glasses was cracked.

“She was right there,” he screamed, pointing at the devastation at the center of the room. “She was standing right next to the punch bowl when… when the whole thing blew up. She must be under all that wreckage—She—”

“No, she’s not,” Gregor said firmly. “She’d moved. I saw her. She was with my friend Bennis Hannaford, looking at one of the pictures on the wall right before the blast.”

“Then where is she?” Evan demanded shrilly. He looked ready to cry again.

Gregor felt another tug on his elbow and turned this time to find Julianne Corbett, looking terrified.

“What should we do?” she gasped. “Nobody knows what we should do. Was it an assassination attempt?”

Gregor didn’t know what it had been, except that it had probably been a pipe bomb—and that gave him ideas he didn’t want to bring up at the moment. He took Julianne by the shoulders.

“Call 911,” he demanded. “Get ambulances here. And the police. And the bomb squad.”

“The bomb squad?” Julianne paled.

“Do you mean to say you think there’s another one of those things in here?” Evan shrilled. “We have to get out of here. We have to find Karla. We have to get her out of here—”

“We’ll find Karla momentarily,” Gregor said. He hoped that they’d find Bennis Hannaford too. It was Bennis he was looking for. It was Bennis his mind was on even as he talked to Julianne and Evan, even as he gave instructions and advice. He pushed Julianne toward the doors again. “Go. Call 911. Do it now. There’s a woman over there I think is dead.”

“Dead,” Julianne said.

Gregor pushed her hard, and she finally went. Evan stayed. Gregor didn’t think the young man was going to move until he had his hand in Karla Parrish’s.

There were dozens of people who needed help, hundreds of things to do. Enough time had gone by now so that the people on the floor were stirring. The people who had been in the foyer were crowding around the open doors, straining their necks to look in on the chaos. Gregor saw that the tablecloth that had covered the now-shattered table was being eaten up by fire without ever having burst into flame. It was being consumed by a traveling glowing ember. Gregor went over to it, pulled the tablecloth off the wreckage, and began stepping on the glowing ember. It wouldn’t make any sense to find Bennis and then be unable to rescue her because they were both trapped in a fire.

The time to have rescued Bennis Hannaford was at least ten minutes gone. Gregor couldn’t stop himself from feeling guilty about it, in spite of the fact that he knew he couldn’t have done things any differently than he had.

“Mr. Demarkian.” Evan Walsh was tugging on his arm again.

Gregor pointed to an enormous blowup of two young girls in ragged, dirty dresses standing next to a bloody body on a dirt road.

“They were looking at that photograph, I think,” Gregor said. “At least, from where they were standing the last time I saw them, that seemed to be what they were doing. What’s underneath there?”

“Nothing,” Evan said a little wildly. “Nothing. A chair.”

Gregor had stamped out all of the ember that he could see. The floor was littered with people and debris. There was enough odd stuff under the photograph of the young girls to fill a garbage truck. There was even a person there, although it wasn’t Karla Parrish or Bennis. It was a man in a tweed sport coat, and he was crawling on his hands and knees toward the double doors.