Quoth the Raven(16)

In practice, standing at the check-out counter in Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store while young Mary Ohanian rang up package after package of honey cakes, what Gregor felt was a sense of impending doom. It was a state of mind so melodramatic, it made him uncomfortable all by itself. Surely there was nothing doomlike about Ohanian’s. There was a handkerchief ghost hanging from the back of the cash register, but it had a sheepish grin on its cloth face, as if it was embarrassed to be a spook. There was a jack-o’-lantern on the counter, but it was smiling sappily, a harbinger of gushing sentimentality, not of violence and death. It was the same with all the decorations the Ohanians—and everybody else on Cavanaugh Street—had put up. The skeletons looked ashamed to be naked. The witches had the faces of fairy godmothers. The bats were so cuddly cute they might as well have been puppies. There was a vast array of Halloween gear for sale in card shops and drugstores across America, some of it so realistically bloody and meticulously evil it made Gregor, a twenty-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cringe. The people of Cavanaugh Street had chosen only those things that could have fit just as comfortably in a Christmas display.

On her side of the counter, Mary Ohanian was counting up the honey cakes for the second time, a frown crease wrinkled into her forehead, the tip of a front tooth biting into her bottom lip. Mary was a small girl, not yet sixteen and not particularly pretty, but compactly built and congenially pleasant. Gregor had gone all through grammar and high school with her father, her mother, and all three of her uncles.

“When Miss Hannaford called, she said you were to get two dozen of these, Mr. Demarkian. You only have twenty-two.”

“I know. That’s all there were on the shelf.”

“We’ve got some more in the back. I’ll get them. I don’t think you ought to give Miss Hannaford anything less than she was asking for.”

“More would be all right?”

“For Miss Hannaford?” Mary smiled slightly. “Yes, I think more would be all right. Let me get the other two, anyway. It won’t take me a minute.”

Mary disappeared through the curtain into the back, and Gregor found himself biting back a smile. “Miss Hannaford” was Bennis Day Hannaford, a woman he had met during the conduct of the case he still thought of as his first extracurricular murder. Through a complicated series of made friendships and personal dislocations, she had started to spend a lot of time on Cavanaugh Street, and now spent almost all her time here. To the people who knew her well, she was just Bennis, Bennis the Menace as Father Tibor Kasparian sometimes put it, a young woman with enormous energy, monumental enthusiasm, outrageous generosity, and a limitless capacity for work—but a crazy person, definitely, whose safety had to be guarded as carefully as an idiot child’s. To the people who did not know her, and especially to adolescent girls like Mary Ohanian, Bennis was a kind of goddess: not only WASP and Protestant, but rich, beautiful, and connected to every famous old money name on the Philadelphia Main Line. Gregor sometimes wondered what people like Mary Ohanian would think if they knew that Bennis woke up every morning of her life, looked in her mirror, and told herself she was getting fat.

Mary Ohanian emerged from the back with two more packages of honey cakes in her hand and put them on the counter.

“There,” she said. “I think you have everything. I wrote it all down.”

“So did Bennis,” Gregor said, holding up the list she had sent him out with. “Bennis thinks I’d forget to tie my shoelaces if somebody didn’t remind me.”

“Well,” Mary said seriously, “maybe you would, Mr. Demarkian. You do get a little—um—distracted.”

“I never get that distracted.”

“My father says that when you and he were in high school you came in one day with no shoes on at all. And it was February. He said you were studying for some kind of test and you forgot.”

It was true. It had been his senior year, in those days before SATs and routinely rationalized college admissions procedures, and he had been working overtime to get an A in Latin. Without that A in Latin, he had been absolutely sure the University of Pennsylvania would not have him.

Maybe it wasn’t only Bennis whose safety had to be guarded as carefully as an idiot child’s.

Mary Ohanian had put his honey cakes in a bag, along with the other things Bennis had sent him out to get: three big round loaves of bread; four jars of apple preserves; six small bottles of ground spices; two lemons; a thick brick of halvah. She had used a separate bag for the non-Armenian food, as if she were taking pains to incarnate a not-very-subtle cultural difference. In that bag were Lay’s potato chips, Cheese Waffles, barbecue-flavored Pringles, pizza-flavored Combos, Chicken-in-a-Bisket crackers, and God only knew what else. Gregor wondered what it was Bennis thought they needed all this stuff for. Back in his apartment, where she was doing the last of the packing up before they left for Independence College, there were already seven oversize picnic baskets stuffed with food.