“It would be better if we could figure out what happened.”
2
Gregor hailed a cab and the driver was adamant about how much it would cost to get him to Cavanaugh Street. But Gregor could afford it and a bus ride would be bumpy and uncomfortable. Once the cab took off, he opened his briefcase and looked at the material in it briefly. There was a little manila envelope full of pictures, and he took that out to look through them. Most of the pictures were close to useless, grainy old-time surveillance photographs that had been taken from above the crowd and were therefore only minimally useful. Gregor thought the actual moving surveillance tapes had to be better, or he couldn’t see how anybody could have recognized Chapin Waring, or anybody else. As it was, some of the pictures looked odd—in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. He wondered if that was what Patrick had meant about there being something wrong with the photographs of the second robber.
There were also other pictures in the envelope, pictures of Chapin Waring and Martin Veer from their senior year high school yearbook, pictures of them at what notes on the backs indicated was Chapin Waring’s coming-out party, pictures of them with a group of other kids their own age at some beach somewhere. What wasn’t from their high school yearbook seemed to have come from newspapers. The Alwych Town Times had produced a lot of them.
Gregor gave some of his attention to the other kids in the photographs. They were almost always the same other kids. Hope Matlock. Kyle Westervan. Tim Brand. Virginia Brand. On one of the photographs, Patrick had circled the picture of Virginia Brand and written: VB Westervan, USHR.
Gregor was about to go looking for what that meant when the neighborhood around him began to look more familiar. He pushed the papers back into his briefcase and locked it up. They passed his old building, which looked as if nobody lived there anymore. With three of the five floors now unoccupied, Gregor wasn’t surprised.
They passed the church, which also looked unoccupied, but that wasn’t unusual for a midweek afternoon. They passed the Ararat, which looked very occupied indeed. All the lights were on. Linda Melajian and one of her sisters were rushing back and forth between the tables. The tables were packed. Everybody on Cavanaugh Street seemed to have decided that a stormy day was a good day to get out of the house and have a little lunch.
Gregor had the cab take him to his own front door. The place looked almost as deserted as everything else did, except that there was a dim light shining in the front window. Either Bennis was home, or she had left a light shining for him, as if he were in danger of being lost at sea.
Gregor got out of the cab and paid the driver. The rain fell down on the back of his neck in drips and drops that made his skin crawl more than just a little. He ran up the front steps, tried the doorknob, and found that it was open.
It never failed. He could never get the people of Cavanaugh Street to understand that the fact that Cavanaugh Street felt safe did not mean that Cavanaugh Street was actually safe.
He let himself inside and looked around. He checked the living room and the dining room and the hall closets. He looked into the kitchen. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, and there were no bodies lying anywhere, bloodied and half dead. Of course, there might be a body upstairs, but Gregor had a better idea.
He stopped in the kitchen and sat down in one of the chairs near the overloaded table. He took out his cell phone and punched in the speed-dial number for the Ararat. It was old Mrs. Melajian who answered the phone. She was too frail to wait tables these days, and much too frail to cook, but she oversaw the kitchen and answered the phone.
“I will go look,” she said when Gregor asked her if Bennis was there.
Gregor waited, looking at his briefcase as it lay on the table. Bennis had bought him that briefcase one year—he couldn’t remember whether it was Christmas or his birthday. He often had a difficult time remembering things about what he had done with Bennis, and when. He found it odd, because he had no trouble at all remembering those things about his life with Elizabeth. Sometimes the differences made him uncomfortable, as if he was still committed to his first wife and hadn’t completely come over to his second.
Of course, he could also remember a lot of what it had been like when Elizabeth was dying, and he had never even once forgotten she was dead.
Old Mrs. Melajian picked up the phone on her end and coughed into it. “Bennis is here, Krekor,” she said. “She’s here with Donna. I was born at the wrong time. I tell my daughter that every day.”
Gregor had no idea what this meant.
“I will tell her you are coming,” old Mrs. Melajian said. “If you are coming. If you are not coming—”