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Hearts of Sand

By:Jane Haddam

PART ONE

I have never gotten used to the Western notion that women have souls.

—Nikos Kazantzakis





ONE

1

On the day that Bennis found the cat, it rained.

It rained in a way Gregor Demarkian hadn’t experienced for years—not only heavily but wildly, with thunder that rattled the stained glass windows on the main staircase landing and lightning that cracked across the sky like something out of the old Boris Karloff Frankenstein movie. It was only six o’clock in the morning, and it felt like the middle of the night.

It also felt, as Gregor thought of it, impossible. It wasn’t the weather that was the problem, but the house. What he agreed to all those months ago, when Bennis had wanted to buy the place, was that they would buy it and fix it up. Then, when it had been renovated, they would move in and put their own knocked-together apartments up for sale. The apartments were just up Cavanaugh Street, and Gregor felt nostalgic for them every waking moment of his life.

Part of the problem, he thought, as he stopped on the landing to listen to the rain, was that the house had not really been renovated. It was in the process of being renovated. All the upstairs halls had wood floors that felt oddly sandy when you walked on them. According to Bennis, this was because they had been “stripped,” which was something you did to them before you put shiny stuff on them and called them done. All the bathrooms but one had tiles missing from their walls and floors and fixtures that might or might not be fixed. The kitchen ceiling was mostly gone. The living room looked like the back office of a carpet and tile store, where all the samples were kept in a jumble in case anybody needed them right away.

He came down the rest of the stairs and into the front hall. There were little stacks of material swatches lined up against the moldings near the front door and a bigger stack of Bennis’s papier-mâché models for her last Zed and Zedalia book lying under the staircase newel. None of this debris was new, but for some reason it felt oddly more intrusive here than it had back at the apartment.

It was a very large house, owned for decades by an elderly woman who had had neither the resources nor the interest in keeping it up. Everything was wrong with the place. They had had to replace the furnace with something brand new. What was left of the old one wasn’t even salvagable. They had had to rip out all the old wiring and put in new. It was a miracle that old Sophie Mgrdchian hadn’t burned to death in her sleep. It was after they’d replaced the wiring that Bennis decided it was time to move in.

“I’ll be right there where I can stay on top of things,” she’d said.

Gregor thought that the reality was that they were right here where things could stay on top of them.

He went into the kitchen and opened the small, square “mini fridge” Bennis had bought to do for them until all the new appliances were delivered. The new appliances could not be delivered. The appliances could not be delivered until the kitchen was renovated. The kitchen would not be renovated until it was thoroughly gutted and then refloored. They also needed to find a new stamped tin ceiling and restore it over their heads.

Gregor sometimes had the feeling that a war zone would be less logistically problematic than this place.

He got out a small carton of cream and put it on the round table they used for everything. There were no kitchen counters left. He took a coffee bag out of a box on the table. He found his clean cup in the drainer next to the sink. The sink didn’t look entirely bad. It was porcelain, and very old. It had stains and nicks all across its surface. Still, it looked like a sink.

He got the plug-in kettle from the same round table where he’d found almost everything else. He popped the lid open and held it under the high, curved faucet that reminded him of his elementary school. He turned on the cold water tap and watched as the entire fixture started to shake. A second later, the cap at the top between the two knobs flew off, followed by a geyser of water that reached up almost as high as the twenty-foot ceiling.

Gregor turned the water off and stared at the faucet. The metal cap had fallen to a clanking halt in another part of the room.

“I forgot to tell you,” Bennis said from behind him. “We’re having some plumbing done. The guy was here yesterday. Anyway, you have to hold the cap when you turn on the water or it, you know, does that.”

“This was something we had done yesterday?”

“You were out doing whatever. Talking to the people at the Philadelphia FBI office? Something like that.”

“Something like that.”

“I should have told you,” she said again. “I thought this would be a perfect time to do it. You know what I mean. You’re going off tomorrow. You’ll be away a week, you almost always are. Or longer. I thought it would be a good time to get some of the serious work done.”