Glass Houses

PART ONE


THRONING STONES





ONE


1


Gregor Demarkian was too old to spend his time having anxiety about “relationships,” and he was more than too old to spend it trying to discover just how women think. At least that was what he had been telling himself these last few months since Bennis had been gone. It might have been different if he’d known where she had gone, or if she’d taken her things out of his apartment before she went. Instead, she’d disappeared without a trace, and every time he went to his closet her coal black, five-ply cashmere turtleneck tunic hit him smack in the face.

This morning, he was trying to figure out what to do about the other “relationship” he’d suddenly acquired, if you could call it a relationship at all. Here was a fine mess he’d gotten himself into. When he’d first asked Alison Standish to dinner, all he’d really had in mind was dinner. He was tired of eating alone. Now they’d had dinner a couple of dozen times. He still didn’t know what he felt about her. He still didn’t know what he felt about Bennis. And he could sense, every time he left Cavanaugh Street to take Alison to her favorite sushi place, that Alison was beginning to wonder why he never spent the night.

He stared at himself in the mirror over his bathroom sink and thought he ought to get out and to the Ararat before he started to go crazy. Either that or find something to work on. He’d had a few calls for his services in the last few weeks, but nothing big, and now he was chafing at the boredom. Women, work. In Gregor’s day, a man was supposed to have all that settled by the time he was thirty, and then it was just a matter of sticking with routine. Gregor liked routine. He liked predictability. He especially liked never having to wonder, even for a split second, what it was all supposed to mean.

“Krekor.” Tibor was out in the living room, pacing.

Gregor finished shaving and reached for the sweater he had left on the towel rack. Here was a dilemma he hadn’t expected to have the first time he asked Alison out. What was he supposed to think when he was ordering her a drink wearing something Bennis had bought him. This was a continuing problem, since Bennis had bought him half the things he owned.

“I will think you have fallen in,” Tibor said.

Gregor got the sweater over his head and headed down the small hall to the living room. There were a series of framed pen-and-ink drawings on one of the walls in that hall, each a different scene from a Civil War Era household. Bennis had bought them and put them up the second month they were seeing each other because she said that Gregor’s apartment looked like the accommodations in a lunatic asylum. That was hilarious. If anybody should know something about lunatic asylums, it should be Bennis.

He couldn’t keep going on like this. Even Tibor was beginning to think he was going round the bend. He came out into the living room and found Tibor looking down on Cavanaugh Street out of Gregor’s big picture window.

“Is something actually going on at this time of the morning?” Gregor asked. “I can’t believe you’re watching a mugging.”

“I’m watching the woman I told you about. Miss Lydgate.”

“She’s on the street?”

“On the way to the Ararat, yes. At least, that’s the way she’s going. Where else could she be going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know her. You’re the one who said she was odd. Interestingly enough, Donna said the same thing.”

“Why interestingly?”

“Because you and Donna don’t think the same things are strange most of the time, and neither of you usually thinks anything is strange at all. She must be some woman, this Miss Lydgate. Is she young?”

“In her fifties, I think,” Tibor said. “But a good fifties. Very trim and fit. But very aggressive as well, Krekor. I don’t like her. And I truly do not trust her.”

Gregor dropped into his one overstuffed armchair—Bennis had bought him that, too, or at least made him buy it, after she’d thrown out all his old furniture because she thought it was the kind of thing they used to outfit FBI interrogation rooms—and began to root around under the coffee table for his shoes. The coffee table had a small stack of books on it. The book on top was Gregor’s last foray into crime fiction: The Devil’s Right Hand, by J. D. Rhodes. The book just under it was Bennis’s own Zedalia in Winter.

He found the shoes and put them on. Tibor was still standing at the window. He was small and spare and tense, and he had never lost the look that made people spot him, at first sight, as “foreign.”

“I went to the Web site of this newspaper she writes for,” Tibor said. “I went to look at the archives for her other articles.”