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Living Witness(23)

By:Jane Haddam


She looked up at him, checked out the robe, and wrinkled her nose. “John Jackman called,” she said. “He said he had an odd sort of favor to ask you.”





3




Later, Gregor would think that everything would have been all right if he had only been faster—faster in picking up what Bennis was saying; faster in doing something about it; faster in getting himself out the door. Instead, he stood for a long moment in the doorway to the kitchen watching the light on Bennis’s hair. Bennis had truly remarkable hair, as thick as Gregor could ever remember seeing on anybody, and black, and oddly floaty, as if it were a cloud around her head. He’d never paid all that much attention to Bennis’s appearance, except when they’d first met, and in that case she’d been a suspect in something, so he had to. But once he had gotten to know her, he had come to think of what she looked like as what she looked like, just that—not particularly attractive or unattractive, not particularly common or unusual. She was Bennis, and the things that were most important about her were on the inside. That included the things he had come to love, and the things he considered sufficient grounds for a plea of justifiable homicide.

This morning, all the things on the inside were being washed away by the way the sunlight backlit her hair from the kitchen window, and the way her green eyes shined. Ridiculously high intelligence, killer education, rich-girl Main Line upbringing, mass of neuroses from all of the above—all of these things were less striking to Gregor Demarkian than those green eyes. It was the sort of thing he wouldn’t have said out loud to anybody, even Tibor. He knew better.

Bennis was sitting with her legs folded under her on a kitchen chair. Her head was tilted. She had a very odd look on her face. “Are you all right?” she said. “Didn’t you get enough sleep? I deliberately didn’t wake you.”

“I’m fine,” Gregor said.

“Well, I don’t know if you heard me, but John called. He sounded very worked up about something. He said he’d left word with what’s-her-name that you’re to be shown right in any time you show up. It’s about the monkey trial.”

“What?”

Bennis sighed. “The monkey trial,” she said, moving papers around on the table. All the papers had to do with planning the wedding. Gregor knew that. There was a part of him that was deeply and truly frightened of the plans for the wedding. “Even I know about the monkey trial, Gregor. Place a little north of here called Snow Hill got themselves one of those stealth school boards—”

“What?”

“Stealth school boards,” Bennis said patiently. “You know, they run on one issue but what they’re really interested in is getting creationism into the science curriculum. This place got one of those, and they put a policy in place last summer that—I’m not sure what it did, exactly. Put ‘intelligent design’ in the curriculum, or something like that. I haven’t been following it all that much, except in the last couple of weeks, because of Annie-Vic. I told you about Annie-Vic, Gregor. I told you about her right in this kitchen. Are you sure you’re all right?”

There was coffee on the stove. This would be Bennis’s coffee, not Tibor’s, so it would be drinkable. Bennis always made coffee for him, even if she was drinking tea. Gregor headed for the stove and got a coffee mug out of the cabinet on his way.

“Maybe I’m not awake,” he said. “Who’s Annie-Vic?”

“Ann-Victoria Hadley, Vassar class of ’thirty-seven. I did tell you about her, Gregor. She’s a kind of force of nature. She’s over ninety, but she still delivers meals on wheels. Probably to people who are younger than she is. She sued the AAVC about a year and a half ago—”

“The AAVC?”

“The college alumnae association,” Bennis said. Now she sounded more than patient. She sounded as if she were talking to a child. “They run trips, you know, for alumnae. They were running one to Mongolia to see a total eclipse of the sun, and they refused to let her sign on to it, because they said she wasn’t in good enough physical shape. Anyway, she said her physical shape was fine and they were just indulging in age discrimination, and she sued them. She won, too. Wrote a big picture article about it for the Vassar Quarterly. There was one picture with her arms around a couple of yaks.”

The coffee was good, and it was having the kind of effect it was supposed to have. Gregor did remember something of a conversation about an old lady with yaks. Bennis’s face was still as close to perfect as he had ever seen a woman’s face be, and she still didn’t have crow’s feet. That had to be genetic. She was forty-something.