Skeleton Key(111)

Gregor let the phone ring twelve times, and then fourteen, and then twenty. He asked himself if he was being sensible here—even if Tibor was there, if he were that involved in a book he would never hear the phone anyway—when the phone was finally picked up.

“Yes?” Tibor said.

Gregor relaxed immediately. It had gotten to the point where Armenian accents always made him relax completely.

“Tibor,” he said.

“Ah,” Tibor said. “Krekor. It is you. It is good that you have called.”

“Is Bennis there with you?”

“No, Krekor. I don’t even think she could be in Philadelphia yet. It hasn’t been that long. And she wouldn’t be here. She is going to her doctor’s.”

“Which doctor?”

Tibor appeared to think about this for a moment. “Not the lady doctor. The other one.”

“Gerald Harrison.”

“Yes, that one.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Krekor. But she had me call him for her. To tell him she was coming. And she said to tell him it was an emergency.”

Gregor took a deep breath. “How could it have been an emergency?” he asked reasonably. “She drove down to Philadelphia, didn’t she? She took her car.”

“Yes, Krekor, she is driving.”

“Then she must be well enough to drive. What kind of an emergency could there be that would make it necessary to see her doctor—when? When do you figure she’ll get to Philadelphia?”

“Around seven o’clock, Krekor. Yes, I know. It’s crazy. I can’t make it out. But that was what she wanted. I am surprised she didn’t tell you.”

“I was out”

“You were investigating a murder, Krekor, yes. I understand that. But I think you’d better come home as soon as you can. Because Bennis does not panic for no reason. So I think it possible that this is serious.”

Gregor ran his hands through his hair. Serious. Yes, he could see that it might be serious. There was always the chance that a health problem could be serious. Even a little health problem that you didn’t think much about at all.

Suddenly, he couldn’t stop thinking about Bennis’s cough.





Four



1


Somebody—Mallory, probably—had put a jack-o’-lantern on the top of the steps that led to the front door, and lit a candle in it. Sally Martindale parked the car halfway up the drive and sat looking at the light. There were lights on in the house, too, in the keeping room and beyond. The car was making that rattling noise that said it was almost out of gas. Sally Martindale was out of money. She thought she should have kept some of it to get home on, considering how much she had started with, but in the end she hadn’t been able to stop trying. That was what mattered, trying. She had always believed that. It just seemed, sometimes, as if trying didn’t work for her. She tried and tried, and everything came apart.

This was the way the house looked best, in the almost dark, with the lights on. You couldn’t see anything at all of the fact that she hadn’t had enough money to keep it up in the last year or two. The paint peeling on the northern side didn’t show up in the dark. Neither did the sag in the railing on the little porch that led to the side door. Even the windows might as well have been washed. When she and Frank had still been together, she had had people in to take care of what needed to be taken care of: Ray’s Remodeling to repair sags and rebuilt porches; Proe’s Lawn Service to do the grass and the shrubbery and the gutters; Martin and Sheedy to paint inside as well as out. Now she didn’t even have the lawn service. Mallory had gone to Sears and bought a lawn mower. She shaved the grass short once a week when she had a little time away from her classes.

I’m going to go to jail, Sally thought and then she rubbed the palms of her hands over her face, over and over again, as if she were trying to rub out a makeup stain. Her head hurt. Her body felt drained of blood. She had cried off and on on the drive home—cried bitterly and without shame, since no one was able to hear her—but now she was just tired, and beyond caring. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was herself at Mallory’s age, standing at the mailbox of her parents’ plain asphalt driveway, opening the letter that told her she had been accepted at Smith. She could see the houses that surrounded her, ordinary little Cape Cod houses with plastic awnings over the windows and plastic flower boxes attached beneath them. She could hear Didi McConneky and Linda Giametti laughing in that high-pitched way they had when they were talking about boys. She was, she had thought then, on a long and exciting journey out—out of a life in little houses like these, out of too many pregnancies too early, out of following soap operas instead of the exhibition season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had had a vision of herself, grown up and on her own, and in the end it had been a vision about money. Later, at the end of her second year at Smith, she had gone to Linda Giametti’s wedding, and that had been about money, too—money spent on a wedding dress and a reception that was as much as some people used for the down payment on a house, money charged to credit cards and taken out in loans, money thrown away on a spectacle that lasted only a few hours on a single day. She had felt as if she had a secret that no one else could share. She knew what really mattered, and how to make sure that her life would have some meaning. She knew how to get away from all this.