“Yes,” Gregor said.
“It really was awful to look at it,” Bennis said. “It was so small, and so miserable, and it was shaking, and it was scared to death, and nothing we did seemed to make things all right. And then we got to the vet’s and it really went crazy. It didn’t like the vet at all, and it liked the vet even less when the work started, and then we had to leave it overnight.”
“It’s going to be longer than that,” Donna said. “I think it’s something like four days before they’re sure it isn’t sick, and it could be sick a lot of ways. Even if it doesn’t have rabies, it could have feline leukemia, and I don’t know what else. And that was what was getting to both of us, don’t you see? The mother cat and the other cats out there under the porch dead because somebody abandoned them somewhere.”
“Tibor said the mother cat could have wandered away and gotten lost,” Bennis said, “but that’s no excuse, is it? They’ve got chips they put in animals these days so that you can be sure to find them, and if you can’t afford something like that, you can always afford a collar and a little tag with information on it. I mean, really, Gregor. It’s just ridiculous.”
“He quoted Aristotle in Greek,” Donna said. “And then he quoted Jackie Collins and Stephen King. I didn’t know what it was about by the time he was finished.”
Linda Melajian herself popped up at the table, carrying an enormous bowl of yaprak sarma. She put it down in front of Gregor and then handed him a soup spoon.
“I hope you can cheer these two up,” she said. “They’ve been driving me crazy for an hour.”
THREE
1
On the last Saturday morning in June, one week after Chapin Waring was murdered, Hope Matlock woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. She had been lying more or less asleep on the pullout couch in her living room. The mattress in the pullout was thin and full of sharp pricks where the metal springs had begun to poke through the covering.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
Finally, the answering machine whirred on. Hope heard her own voice asking whomever to leave a message. Then there was a pause, and a chirpy little female voice said,
“Steve? This is Dr. Martinson’s office. We’re just calling to remind you that your appointment is at nine tomorrow morning, and it’s important that you not be late. This kind of thing is manageable if we catch it in time, but it can get tricky. We’ll see you in the morning.”
The answering machine clicked off.
Hope lay still. She was not Steve. There was no Dr. Martinson anywhere in Alwych. Doctors’ offices did not leave chatty little messages about dire medical problems.
Hope sat up on the couch bed and swung her legs off the side of it. She never slept upstairs anymore. It was too hard to make the climb.
She stood up and braced herself against the side table. The side table wallowed.
The genius of using a doctor’s office for the calls was that the urge to call back and explain that this was a wrong number was almost irresistible. You didn’t want somebody to miss a doctor’s appointment.
Hope was fairly sure there was a law against this kind of thing. Bill collectors in the state of Connecticut were supposed to announce who they were and that they were attempting to collect a debt.
Hope walked through the back of the house, through the dining room, into the kitchen. She let herself into the big bathroom next to the pantry and the back door. She washed up and looked very carefully at herself in the mirror. She looked terrible.
She went back to the kitchen. The newspapers were spread across the peeling surface of the laminated wood table. Most of them had stories about chapin Waring’s murder, complete with big inside spreads about the case all those years ago. There were pictures of Martin’s car smashed up against that tree out on Wykeham Swamp Road. There were pictures of Chapin herself and the rest of them the year before in their Harvest Ball getups. There were even pictures of Chapin standing at the graveside at Martin’s funeral.
Martin. None of them had ever called him Martin. They had always called him Marty.
Some of the newspapers were more recent, and these contained stories about Gregor Demarkian. Hope had heard of Gregor Demarkian. God only knew she watched enough television. He was on all those truTV shows. American Justice. City Confidential.
She looked over the papers again. There would probably be another paper waiting on her front walk.
Hope went back into the foyer. There was sun coming in through the window next to the door.
One of the pictures in the newspapers in the kitchen was of Chapin Waring on the floor of her family’s old house on Beach Drive. You could see the knife sticking up out of one shoulder.