Feast of Murder(37)
“No,” Gregor said.
“I didn’t think I was. But you really can’t blame me, can you, Mr. Demarkian? I don’t even know what you’re here for.”
“I’m here to get away from my apartment,” Bennis said firmly. “Where are these cabins you’ve been talking about? And where’s the bathroom? I’ve had a long ride out from Philadelphia and I feel like grunge.”
“I wasn’t trying to get you to implicate your entire family in a spy ring,” Gregor said. “As far as I know, there isn’t any spy ring. There isn’t any murder, either. I was just mildly curious about the people I was going to be traveling with.”
Tony Baird stopped before a door, turned the knob, and looked in. “Here it is,” he said. “And there isn’t any bathroom. This is a replica. If you want to use the john you have to,” he shot Bennis a look and grinned, “you’ve been on sailboats. You must know what to do.”
“For ten days?”
“Whose cabin is this?” Gregor said, sticking his head through the door and looking at the two berths, deep coffin-shaped things that had been built into the wall with thin foam mattresses at the bottom of them. The berths looked short, the way this whole deck felt. Gregor was well over six feet, and the average height of the full-grown Puritan male had been five four. The difference showed. Maybe this was the cabin that was supposed to belong to Bennis and his own would be something different, built to accommodate someone of his size and bulk.
Bennis Hannaford cleared her throat. “Gregor,” she said, “I think this is it.”
“What do you mean, this is it?”
“This is our cabin,” Bennis said. “Both of ours. You know. Together.”
“Together,” Gregor repeated.
“I’ll leave you two to get settled in,” Tony Baird said. “I’ll have your luggage brought up. I hope you didn’t bring too much. Sheila’s already got practically all the storage space on the boat stuffed with clothes. There’s breakfast being laid out on the upper deck right this minute. Normally we eat in the mess, but Dad thought you’d all like to be standing there watching when we got tugged out to sea. That ought to be at nine thirty, fog permitting. Everybody else is here except Uncle Calvin and he’s on his way. We shouldn’t get held up. Anything else you want to know?”
“Together,” Gregor repeated in stupefaction.
Tony Baird didn’t notice. He looked around the cabin one last time—there wasn’t much to look at; it was tiny and low-ceilinged and cramped—and then withdrew into the hall, ducking his head as he went. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, but Tony had to be close to six two himself. On this deck he kept himself always carefully stooped, so he didn’t bump his head.
Gregor was keeping himself carefully stooped, too. It was giving him a sharp stabbing pain in the side of his neck.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “We come all the way from Cavanaugh Street to get away from being match made to each other for a little while and they give us a cabin together?”
“It’s worse than that,” Bennis said, “look at the bunks.”
“What about the bunks?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, Gregor, but I couldn’t get into the top one. The space between the side of it and the ceiling is too narrow. I’d scrape my skin into shreds if I tried. That means we’ve only got one operative bunk.”
“One operative bunk,” Gregor repeated.
“Don’t get upset,” Bennis said. “We’ll work something out.”
Gregor didn’t know if they were going to work something out or not. He didn’t know what they could work out. He only wanted to get off this deck and up into the air, where he could stand upright.
He started to stomp back down the hall to the narrow staircase, forgot where he was and what he was doing, and smacked his head on a beam.
Five
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been to a family reunion of his own. His father had died when he was very young. His one, much older brother had been killed in France at the end of World War II. His mother and his single maiden aunt had moved in together soon after Gregor had gone into the army and stayed together until his aunt had decided to visit distant relatives in Alexandria. His aunt had died in Egypt. His mother had died six months later at home. From that time to this, except for Elizabeth, Gregor had been alone. Thinking back on it and on all its peripheral oddnesses—strange to think that he’d been drafted right out of college, in peacetime, and thought nothing of it—Gregor would have said he had the best sort of deal. He was close to what family he had and enjoyed visiting with them. He was spared the hosts of great-aunts-by-marriage and third-cousins-twice-removed that plagued so many of the people he’d grown up with. Of course, he knew happy extended families. Lida’s was one. It had enough people in it to qualify for a small country and they all got along beautifully. They were definitely the exception. In Gregor’s experience, large and extended families were usually involved in war games if not in actual war—and that became truer the larger and more extended and richer the family got. When the family got so large and so extended and so rich it began to include people who were not really family at all, there was almost always trouble. The longtime business partner, the best friend from the old days at Alpha Chi Alpha, the family doctor who had assisted at the births of every family member now over the age of forty-five: these people were buffers or lightning rods, drawing out all the nastiness and attracting it to themselves. As soon as Gregor had seen the guest list for this excursion, he had had his suspicions. As soon as he had heard Tony Baird assuring him that most of the people on this boat got on very well together, he had been convinced. He thought back to the cases he’d had—the Hannaford case in particular, with Bennis and her parents and her six brothers and sisters all stuffed together in a house that would have been too small to contain them if it were the palace at Versailles—and almost decided to go straight back home.