Not a Creature Was Stirring(43)

She reached under her sweater and pulled out the small cardboard accordion folder she’d taken off her father’s desk. It looked perfectly innocent, there was nothing in it but a lot of newspaper clippings about charity balls and fund drives, but it felt like a snake in her hands.

She put it down on the bed.

Daddy was dead. Dead, dead, dead. And unlike the rest of them, she had never hated him, not even for a minute.

She picked the folder up again and shoved it between her mattress and her boxspring. It caught on something sharp she couldn’t see.

With any luck, it would be ripped to shreds.





FOUR


1


ON THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, Gregor Demarkian bought Father Tibor a very expensive lunch at a restaurant called Leitmotif in Liberty Square. The lunch was a kind of apology. Gregor hadn’t been at church on Christmas morning, and he hadn’t been at Lida Arkmanian’s in the afternoon. After all the trouble these people had gone to provide him with a real Christmas, he hadn’t been anywhere on Cavanaugh Street. Donna Moradanyan had been standing at her front windows when he left the building at six o’clock. His upstairs neighbor told Tibor and Lida he hadn’t been stuck on the Main Line overnight, and that he hadn’t—as yet—killed himself. For the rest of the day, the three of them worried. Gregor was a missing person. He could have been smoke.

Where he had gone, of course, was out to the cemetery where his mother and Elizabeth were buried. He’d done that every Christmas of his life since his mother had died, and for the last two since Elizabeth had died, and it seemed perfectly natural to him. It even seemed natural that he hadn’t visited Cavanaugh Street when he was in town. He bought flowers three or four days ahead of time and put them in the refrigerator. He knew from experience that the closer you got to Christmas, the fewer flowers there were to buy. By Christmas Eve, all the good ones had disappeared from the shops, leaving nothing but wilted poinsettias and poisonous mistletoe. His mother had always loved carnations. Elizabeth had always wanted roses. He was good and got them early.

At the cemetery, he made hollows in the snow next to the headstones and put the flowers in, knowing they would keep longer in the cold than they would have in the summer. Then he looked around and wondered why he bothered with this at all. Gregor knew most people considered cemeteries morbid, but it was an attitude he’d never understood. The places were so damn impersonal. All they said to him was the obvious—that we die, that we have always died, that we are always going to die. Mute testimony to the course of human destiny, a friend of his had called it—and been dead drunk at the time, if Gregor remembered correctly. Maybe you had to get dead drunk if you spent your life worrying about the course of human destiny.

Gregor had spent his worrying about Elizabeth, and his mother, and the few people who’d been either close to him or important to him because of his job. Cemeteries were blank places for him. He never felt less close to Elizabeth than when he was putting flowers on her grave. He never remembered his mother so badly as when he was staring at her name etched into the granite of her tombstone. Here were the two people who had been most central to his life, the two he heard and saw and smelled better than anyone living, and when he came out to play his conventional tribute to them he lost them completely.

After a while—it was two hours, let’s be honest here—he realized he was cold. He walked back to the cemetery gate and south along the sidewalk that hugged its outer wall. It was eight-thirty on Christmas morning. The sky was dark. The snow was going to start falling again any minute. The streets were deserted. He started to think he was going to have to make it back to Cavanaugh Street on foot.

Ten minutes later, he got smart and found a bus stop. Ten minutes after that, he got smarter and realized he couldn’t go back to Cavanaugh Street. He wasn’t half as depressed as they thought he was—although Cordelia Day Hannaford had thrown him; that was something he didn’t want to think about—but he wasn’t ready to spend the day with somebody else’s children. What he really wanted to do was to be by himself in his apartment. Barring that, he wanted to hole up in the main branch of the public library. His apartment was across the street from Lida Arkmanian’s town house and the library was closed.

He got off the bus in central Philadelphia and went looking for a newsstand. Eleven hours later—when he knew Lida’s family would have gone back to Bucks County and Radnor and Chestnut Hill—he found a cab and went back to Cavanaugh Street. He felt like a total, unregenerate fool. His insides were collapsing from the assault of gallons of bad coffee. His eyes hurt from hours of trying to read in the bad lights of a dozen second-rate diners. His head was so full of the Hannaford murder, he thought it was going to split open. If he hadn’t been depressed when he left his apartment in the morning, he was most surely depressed now.