Flowering Judas(26)

“He had a hip replacement about five years ago,” Tibor said.

“Really? And you’re used to seeing him aware and alert? There weren’t any problems with dementia, or anything like that?”

“No,” Bennis said.

Gregor shot her a look. She shot him one back.

“I’m not going to shut up,” she said. “I’m really sick of it, the way so many people are around old people. They’re old, for God’s sake. They’re not a different species. Phyllis A. Whitney was actually writing a book a year right into her nineties, did you know that?”

“Who’s Phyllis A. Whitney?” Gregor asked.

Tibor started to answer, but Bennis was on a roll.

“It was the same with my grandmother,” she said. “That’s my mother’s mother. She was a hateful old bat, but her mind was perfectly fine. Then she was down in Palm Beach and there was a hurricane and she wouldn’t evacuate, and the hospital down there tried to say that that proved she was incompetent and should be in a nursing home whether she wanted to be there or not—and for what? For doing what she’d done in every hurricane for forty years? She wouldn’t evacuate when she was thirty. It had nothing to do with her being addled, and—”

“I don’t think anybody is trying to force the old gentleman here into a nursing home,” the doctor said. “I’m just trying to understand what the benchmark is, what normal would be for him. If his mind was as clear as you say, then anything less than that would be a symptom. If he was usually a little vague, say, or forgetful—well, then if he got vague and forgetful here, it wouldn’t be a symptom. It would just be himself.”

“His mind is fine,” somebody else said.

They looked up to see Martin Tekemanian standing in the open curtains, looking like a mess. Gregor thought he was on the verge of tears.

“His mind is fine,” Martin said again. “It’s better than mine, most of the time. And his memory is phenomenal. And we’ve been asking him to come and live with us for years, and he just wouldn’t.”





THREE

1

For Kenny Morton, the worst thing about the time since his brother Chester’s body had been found—hanging up there, on their mother’s billboard—had not been the questions, or the publicity, or even the bad temper everybody had been in at home. God only knew there were questions. Where had Chester been over twelve years? Why had he ended up hanging himself? Kenny was sure Chester had hanged himself. Kenny had gone right out to the billboard the day after the body was discovered, just to see for himself. There was no way somebody could have climbed up there, even from behind, and thrown the dead weight of a body over the top, or hanged it from the top, or however it was supposed to have been done. And if Chester had been alive and conscious before he got up there, then it really couldn’t have been done. Chester would have struggled. Why would Chester go away somewhere, and then come back, and then hang himself out there on the highway where everybody could see him?

The other questions all had to do with the backpack, which had been found on the same night, buried in the ground over where they were putting up the new tech building. Kenny thought it was odd the way the backpack always seemed to come as an afterthought. The backpack was almost as strange as Chester. It was the only thing that had gone missing at the same time Chester did. Now it was back, and Kenny was pretty sure it hadn’t been buried up on that piece of land all this time. He and his friends had ridden their bikes out there all the time when they were younger, and they’d been all over those woods. They weren’t all that much in the way of woods. If the backpack had been up there all that time, Kenny was sure somebody would have found it.

No, it wasn’t the questions that bothered Kenny. The questions felt natural. What bothered Kenny was that nobody at home was asking them, and their mother was pacing up and down, back and forth, from one end of the house to the other, pacing and pacing, wearing the look of a person who was about to blow her brains out with fever.

“They’re going to try and cover it up,” she kept saying, whenever she said anything. It wasn’t often. “They’re going to get that man in here to say it was a suicide, and they think that will put an end to it. But nothing is going to put an end to it. I’m not going to let it.”

Then she would walk away again. Kenny didn’t think she was getting any sleep. His father was getting very little. Kenny would find him sleeping on the couch when he came in at night.

“Just in case she passes out,” he would tell Kenny, and then he wouldn’t tell Kenny anymore.