Skeleton Key(120)

“This whole thing sounds nuts,” Stacey Spratz said.

“Not nuts. Just careful. And very elaborate. Some people like to be elaborate.”

“Some people should be locked up for more reasons than one.”

“Get some people out and at work,” Gregor said. “Find out about people passing on One-oh-nine that night. Not this part of it, the other side of Four Corners, on the way to Margaret Anson’s house. That has to be—what? Ten or fifteen miles. It was a long walk.”

“Walk?”

“Didn’t it bother you at all, about the times? The Jeep is following Kayla Anson’s car at six o’clock at night or so. All the rest of these things don’t start happening until nearly midnight.”

“This is worse than nuts,” Stacey Spratz said.

But, Gregor thought, it wasn’t nuts at all. He wished it were nuts. Nuts was easier to deal with than premeditated.





4


Half an hour later, sitting in the parking lot of the Adams Super Food Store in Watertown while Stacey ran in to buy a six-pack of Coke, Gregor Demarkian finally gave in to exhaustion. He could feel it start almost as soon as Stacey left the car. He turned up the radio and found that Big D 103 FM out of Hartford was once again playing “Fun, Fun, Fun.” He thought of Bennis Hannaford and her little tangerine orange two-seater Mercedes convertible. Then the music changed to the Beach Boys doing “Sloop John B” and he thought about Cavanaugh Street, where everything was empty and sad because Donna Moradanyan hadn’t been able to concentrate on decorating for Halloween. In fact, it was Halloween. The days had been going by with such formless insanity, Gregor hadn’t realized it.

Like most people who have spent a significant part of their lives in law enforcement of one kind or another, Gregor Demarkian didn’t like Halloween. That was the holiday when people felt justified in causing pain, and fear, and death. The streets were full of people who thought they had made pacts with the devil.

Gregor put his head back on the seat, and closed his eyes, and dropped into unconsciousness.





Six



1


It was one of those days that felt like rain even though it wasn’t raining. The air was wet as well as cold. So many leaves had fallen from the trees that there was a rustling along the ground in even the slightest wind. Martin Chandling kept putting his hands up to touch the top of his head, to see if raindrops had fallen there. Then, when his hair seemed dry but all too thin, when the slick curve of baldness underneath was all too evident, he put his hand down again and tried to get some work done. He had a lot of work to do. It was going to be Halloween tonight. Maybe it was Halloween even now. Out there somewhere there were teenaged boys, hot-rodding up and down the back roads. They had six-packs of Coors in the back of their trucks and their radios turned up loud. They had girls who had convinced themselves to love them, and later, when it got dark enough and they got tired of scaring lonely women driving home by themselves in the dark, they would take the girls out onto the dirt lanes where there were no lights. Martin had taken girls out onto the dirt lanes himself when he was seventeen. He could still feel the cold on his back as they squirmed underneath him. He could still remember not caring if he froze to death.

Right now, he had to clean out the gutters. They were clogged full of leaves, and if it did rain in the next couple of days, the clog would bring the gutters down. He tried to remember what it had been like, to make love to a woman, even when he was married, but all that stuff was pretty hazy now. He remembered high school better than that, when he and Henry had walked through the halls with their books and their high-topped sneakers, and the girls they both secretly wanted—the blonde ones with the Villager skirt-and-sweater sets, the ones who looked like magazine models and who were going away to Connecticut College or Smith—wouldn’t even talk to them. Cecily Harkness, that was the name of the one Martin had liked best She had gone to Vassar and then married a man from Goshen who had gone to Yale. He sometimes saw her in the Dan-bury Fair Mall, going in and out of Lord & Taylor looking like an advertisement for a country club. Except that country clubs didn’t have advertisements. Had he realized, even then, that life didn’t usually work out for people like him?

He got out the stepladder and popped it open next to the big casement window block that looked into the kitchen. He climbed up a few steps and saw that the leaves were all bunched down at one end, the other end, and he would have to move his whole operation to the far side of the house. He got down off the stepladder and wiped the palms of his hands against his jeans.