Something in her head stopped, again, and she tried to focus. She found it impossible. She did focus sometimes, but it was always involuntary. Since she’d been like this, she hadn’t been able to make herself sit still and zero in on any particular thing, on purpose. And yet there was something. Something about the dining room table. Something about Gregor Demarkian in this room.
“I suppose you’re right,” Lisa was saying. “All the papers I looked at were financial. I don’t think there was much of anything about evolution and Intelligent Design. Or maybe I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I’m being fairly useless here. Maybe you can ask Cameron. He might have noticed more.”
The dining room table, Annie-Vic thought, but it was useless.
She was drifting off to sleep.
SEVEN
1
Gregor Demarkian did not like to think he was avoiding Dale Vardan, but he was avoiding Dale Vardan, and as he stepped out of Eddie Block’s police car in front of the Snow Hill Public School Complex. He looked around for a moment, not knowing what in particular he expected to see. It was a school complex like hundreds of others across the United States. There hadn’t been one like it in Philadelphia when Gregor was growing up, and there wasn’t one there now, but that was only because Philadelphia was a city and its students rode public transportation. In suburbs and small towns there was the question of what to do about school busses, and also how to make sure there was enough land for athletic fields. The athletic fields here seemed to be off to the back, covered with snow, marked only by their goal posts and score boards. Beyond even those, all the way at the back, the semi-stalled construction of the new school building rose up out of the hills, a skeleton of ice and steel.
Eddie Block didn’t bother to lock up, which Gregor thought was a very bold move. If Gregor had been a seventeen-year-old boy, bored to Hell in trigonometry, the chance to take a police car on a joy ride with the sirens wailing would have been far too tempting to give up.
Of course, if Gregor had done something like that, when he was seventeen, the worst that would have happened to him was a fine and a lecture from a judge, or—if this was his third or fourth offense—maybe a night in jail, just to “scare some sense into him.” These days, any kid who tried it would probably actually be sent to jail, and kept there for a year or two.
“It doesn’t make sense, what we do about incarceration these days,” Gregor said.
Eddie Block looked surprised. “Excuse me?” he said. “It’s not a jail, it’s the school. I mean, it felt like jail when I was here, you know, but it isn’t really. I know that now. I’ve seen real jails.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He made a gesture toward the door, and Eddie started to lead him inside.
It really didn’t make sense, what they did about incarceration these days. It was as if the whole country was in a rut. There was never any more than one answer to any question, and often only one answer to several questions. He suddenly wondered what would happen to Mallory Cornish, Judy Cornish’s oldest daughter. Somebody had told him this morning that she had pushed another girl yesterday and the other girl had injured her knee and been forced to take a few days off school.
“But her mother had just been murdered,” Gregor said. Then, realizing he had said it out loud, he looked to see if Eddie Block had heard him.
Eddie was standing in the big front doorway with a tall, thin, no-nonsense-looking woman in late middle age.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, waving Gregor over. “This is Miss Marbledale.”
Gregor was impressed. Most school administrators these days would have put several layers of people between them and any kind of visitor. There would at least have been a secretary to come out and lead them to the office. Gregor walked over to the door and noticed that Miss Marbledale wasn’t wearing a coat. He looked inside and saw one of those vast open foyers that had been one of the defining characteristics of school architecture for several years in the early 1980s.
“Mr. Demarkian,” Miss Marbledale said, holding out her hand. “I’m so glad to see you here. Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of coffee. The wind is awful here.”
The wind was awful. Gregor had been so distracted, he hadn’t noticed it. Miss Marbledale held open the door and waited for him to walk through. He went into the foyer and looked at the big display case that lined one wall. There was some kind of exhibit up at the moment, but he couldn’t puzzle out what it was supposed to be about.
“We turn the display case over to student groups every now and again,” Miss Marbledale said. “They do all sorts of things. This is where I’m supposed to be enthusiastic about their learning, but mostly I’m just grateful none of them have done anything drastic as of yet. We used to have the sports trophies in there, but eventually, I just couldn’t stand it. So I had them moved to the gym. Will you come with me, please?”