Flowering Judas(108)

She checked the clock at the side of the bed. Hours ago. It must have been hours ago since he left. It was nearly noon.

The phone stopped ringing. She picked it up and it started ringing again. She saw Graham’s picture in the little ID window. She made a face at it. Then she picked it up.

“Graham,” she said. “How are you? Aren’t you supposed to be at work? Isn’t this the middle of the workday?”

“I am at work,” Graham said. “I’m a goddamned lawyer. I can talk on the phone in the middle of the day if I want to.”

“You’re an associate in a big firm,” Penny said. “You know how hard it is to make partner. You can’t afford to let your bosses think that you’re taking care of personal business in the middle of the day.”

“And you’re damned near sixty years old. You can’t afford to sleep in your car.”

Penny’s mouth felt bad. She needed to get up and brush her teeth. Her vision was fuzzy, on and off. She needed her eyes to focus on a more consistent basis.

“I’m not sleeping in my car,” she said. “I’m sleeping in a perfectly wonderful bed, complete with quilts, and I’m sleeping in.”

“You’re sleeping in a room at the Howard Johnson that actually belongs to this Gregor Demarkian person,” Graham said. “You’re there because he found you sleeping in your car and he didn’t want to leave you there. Don’t try to put this on with me. He called me. And he called George.”

Penny sat forward and bent over her knees. “He doesn’t even know you exist. Where would he have gotten your number?”

“Off your phone. He said you left it in his room when you went to bed.”

“I never leave my phone anywhere.”

“Then maybe he lifted it.”

“It was right here next to the bed this morning. You woke me up with it.”

“Then maybe he lifted it and put it back. Would you stop this? What’s wrong with you? You were sleeping in your goddamned car. You could have frozen to death—”

“Well, I wasn’t sleeping there in the winter,” Penny said. “What do you take me for?”

“Winter will be coming around again,” Graham said, “and if you didn’t freeze to death, you could have been mugged. You could have been murdered. And don’t tell me nobody gets murdered in Mattatuck. There were two murders there just last night. It’s been all over CNN.”

“I wouldn’t have been sleeping in the car when winter came around again,” Penny said. “I’d have had enough for an apartment by then. It was just a temporary—”

“It’s going to be a lot more temporary than you know. We’re coming out there. We’re going to be there by tomorrow morning.”

“What?” Penny was now wide awake. “But you can’t do that. You’ve got work. And all those college loans. You can’t just—”

“The plane tickets are already bought. George will call you in a minute about what you’re going to do tonight. We’re getting all three of us rooms at that Holiday Inn of yours—”

“Howard Johnson.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’re getting them for tonight and you can go to bed in your room like a sane person. And you better be there and be ready for us when we get there, because when we say tomorrow morning, we mean it.”

“It depends on whether or not I have to teach,” Penny said. “I can’t just cancel a class—”

“You don’t teach at four o’clock in the morning. That’s when our plane gets in. And you don’t teach at six, which will probably be when we show up. And if we’re late in any way, you’d damned better be sure you’ve left a note telling us where you’ve gone, because if you don’t, we’re going to hunt you down and wring your neck.”

“But,” Penny said.

The phone was dead.

Penny swung her legs off the bed and sat there, holding her hair in her hands. The remote was right there on the night table. She picked it up and turned the television on. The first channel she got was some kind of cooking network. She flipped around a little and settled on one of the local stations. It was broadcasting a talk show where everybody was much too cheery, but it had a news feed running underneath.

The two dead bodies discovered at Stephenson Dam this morning have been identified as belonging to Althea Marie Michaelman, 52, and Michael Robert Katowski, 48.

The names meant absolutely nothing to her. She had no idea what was going on.

The phone rang again, and she picked it up again. The face in the window this time belonged to George. Penny sighed.