Flowering Judas(49)

Howard got out of his own car. The man Charlene assumed was Gregor Demarkian got out after him. Charlene held her purse on her arm and over her stomach, like a shield.

“Howard,” she said.

“Charlene,” Howard said. He turned to his side and sort of gestured in that vague direction. “This is Gregor Demarkian, Charlene. I told you all about him. Mr. Demarkian, this is Charlene Morton, Chester’s mother.”

“How do you do?” Gregor Demarkian held out his hand.

Charlene had no intention of taking it. She took her pocketbook off her arm instead and reached inside it for the keys. She’d had a special key ring made for those keys only a few weeks after Chester was gone. It had his picture in it in a plastic bubble.

She stuck the keys into the trailer’s door and opened it. She didn’t know why she bothered with the key. The whole damn thing was made of tin. Anybody who wanted to could get in with a can opener.

She stood back and let Gregor Demarkian go through first, but she went in before Howard. The last thing she was going to do was get formal and polite with Howard Androcoelho. When she got up the steps she saw that Gregor Demakrian was drawing his finger across a thick layer of dust on top of the half-high divider that separated the so-called “entry” from the living room. She cleared her throat.

“I’ve kept the place on, just in case he came home,” she said. “I’m not a lunatic. I haven’t been cleaning it.”

“That’s a good thing,” Gregor Demarkian said. “It tells me the first thing I needed to know. Your son didn’t come back here when he came back.”

Charlene considered saying absolutely nothing. She didn’t like giving Howard anymore ammunition than she had to. She decided that it would not be a good idea, in this circumstance.

“He couldn’t have come back here without seeing me first,” she said. “After he disappeared, I had the locks changed. Lock, I suppose it is. I had it changed, anyway, just in case that woman had a copy. He’d have had to come to me for the key.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

“I suppose you think I’m a suffocating mother,” Charlene said. “I know the kind of thing Howard says about me. He’s been saying it since we were all in school together. But I had good reason, in this case. Chester was gone, and no one would listen to me.”

“There was no reason to listen to you,” Howard said. “You were going on and on about how Chester was dead and Darvelle had murdered him. Well, Chester wasn’t dead.”

“He’s dead now,” Charlene said.

“That’s not the same thing, is it?” Howard asked her.

Gregor Demarkian cleared his throat. “Did you see him when he came back?” he asked.

“No,” Charlene said. “He didn’t come to the house. I guess he didn’t come here, either. Maybe he went to see Darvelle.”

“She doesn’t still live in the same place,” Howard said. “How would he know where to go to find her?”

“Maybe they’ve been in touch all this time,” Charlene said. “Maybe this was one of her bright ideas. She’s got a lot of bright ideas.”

“What about you?” Gregor Demarkian said. “Were you in contact with him at all during the twelve years he was gone.”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Charlene said. “What do you take me for?”

“Do you have any idea where he might have been for twelve years?”

Charlene decided she was really beginning to hate this Gregor Demarkian. She hated the look on his face. It was the same look he had in all those television programs. It was supposed to be “thoughtful.”

“Howard here thinks he’s going to be able to blame all this on me,” Charlene said. “He’s got you out here to back up his fool idea that he can call this a suicide and get away with it. Chester couldn’t stand being on the run anymore and he couldn’t stand the idea of coming back to me, so he killed himself. Well, he didn’t kill himself. And I’m not going to let any of you say he did.”

Gregor Demarkian was walking up and down the length of the trailer, looking at things. There wasn’t much to see. The place was neat enough—Charlene had seen to that—but that thick layer of dust covered everything, half an inch thick at least and completely undisturbed. Charlene found herself wondering if the boys had really come in here and checked things out when she had asked them to. It didn’t look like it.

Gregor Demarkian stopped in the middle of the living room, looked at the ceiling, looked at the windows, and shook his head. “This is where he was, twelve years ago, the last time anybody saw him?”