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Hardscrabble Road

By:Jane Haddam

PART ONE


Monday, February 10

High 3F, Low –14F

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

—JORGE LUIS BORGES

The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie about the greatest things.

—UMBERTO ECO





ONE



1


There were times when Gregor Demarkian forgot where he was, not in space—it was impossible to forget you were on Cavanaugh Street when you were on it—but in time, so that he turned over in bed and expected to see Elizabeth sleeping next to him, or opened the top drawer of his dresser to look for the laminated ID card he’d carried his last five years in the FBI. He would have felt better about it if it had only happened to him when he was asleep, or just waking. He knew enough about dreams to have lost all tendency to feel guilty about the content of them. He had been thinking about Elizabeth a lot lately, and about the FBI, although he had to admit that he was more than happy to be retired, given the way things were going at the moment. He had come to the Bureau when it was still run by J. Edgar Hoover, a psychopath with sexual problems and a driving obsession to redefine normality for the rest of the universe. He had quietly celebrated on the evening of Hoover’s funeral, because he’d known that only death would exorcise that man from the Bureau’s soul. Then he’d had his own life to worry about, and his own problems, and now he was here, no longer concerned with serial killers or office politics. He could not imagine what he would have done if he had been one of the people responsible for ignoring the evidence that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. He could not imagine a Bureau culture where so few people had been fired in the event. He had no idea what he was doing thinking about 9/11 now, so long after the fact, but for some reason it had been on his mind for weeks.

The truth is, he thought, I’ve got too much time to myself. It was true. There had been nothing in the way of a consulting job coming through the door for some time now. Since he made a point of never going out to solicit them, that meant there had been nothing in the way of crime to think about for some time now, either. Watching true crime on Court TV and A&E didn’t quite make it. Then there was the problem of the apartments, plural. The new church was finished, or as finished as any church ever got, what with committees to worry about carpets and pews and better glass for the windows, and Tibor had moved back into an apartment of his own, with a new little courtyard and a new set of hyacinth bushes, behind it. Bennis was on tour, the first one she’d agreed to in five years. On an intellectual level, Gregor knew that this was a professional necessity. Authors didn’t go out on tours just for the hell of it, since they were apparently very confused and confusing things. Wires got crossed, bookstores didn’t get their copies of the books on time, hotels had the wrong reservations, airplane tickets turned out to be for the wrong days to the wrong places. On an emotional level, he was—he didn’t know what. It would have helped if he had understood what was going on in his relationship with Bennis these days, but Bennis was not like Elizabeth. If Elizabeth was mad at you, she shouted at you until you surrendered. If she was happy with you, she did little things around the house for you and made your favorite foods for dinner several times during the week. Beyond that Elizabeth did not get too complicated, at least when it came to their marriage. There was mad and happy and sexy on at least a few nights a month. That was it, until the cancer got her, and things got very complicated indeed. But dying was complicated, Gregor thought. You couldn’t blame a woman for becoming complex and hard to unravel when she was dying.

Bennis was complicated as a matter of principle. She was complicated about her morning coffee. She was complicated about her shoes, none of which she liked, except for the clogs, which didn’t go with anything. Most of all, she was complicated about their relationship to each other, which had none of the clean obviousness of what Gregor was used to in something “settled.” Maybe it was just that Bennis did not consider them settled, while Gregor did. Gregor had tried to fix that by asking her to marry him, but she’d gotten complicated about that, too, and now she was off in the Midwest somewhere, signing copies of a book called Summer of Zedalia, Winter of Zed. Gregor had tried to read one of her books while she was away, but he couldn’t do it. They were filled with fairies and trolls and elves and unicorns, and in spite of the fact that they were very well written—even he could tell they were very well written—he couldn’t get into them. They were of different generations. Maybe that was where all the complications came from. At any rate, his generation wanted realism, not fantasy. His generation didn’t believe in ghosts or angels or the supernatural. His generation wanted the solidity that came from the laws of nature rather than the laws of Nature’s God. He wanted to chalk it up to the fact that his generation had fought a war, but Bennis’s generation had fought one too. They’d just gone about it oddly.