And then Martin started to laugh, because he couldn’t help himself. They had been out here all these years, with never any trouble to speak of for either of them, and now this, now this.
Martin started to laugh, and once he started he couldn’t stop. He laughed so hard that he sat down on the ground, doing nothing to break his fall. He felt his tailbone hit a rock and the pain shoot up his spine. It seemed to him to be happening to somebody else in some other universe. Then his stomach began to heave and he swallowed against it. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t inhale worth a damn.
“This is funny,” Henry said, looking about ready to kill him. “You think this is funny?”
Martin got an arm up and a finger pointing in the skeleton’s direction. The skull was hollow and blank. He could see how people could have something like that polished to use as an ornament on a desk.
“It isn’t ours,” he said, when he could make himself talk. “That thing. It isn’t ours. It doesn’t come from here.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s much too young,” Martin said.
And that was the truth. Every single grave in the Fair-child Family Cemetery was at least a hundred and fifty years old. The bones were brittle and thin and dry. They weren’t—they weren’t—
When the first of the bile came up in his throat, he wasn’t ready for it. It slammed into the top of his esophagus like a fist. He threw himself sideways and let it all come up. He wanted to keep it off himself. He didn’t exactly make it. His throat felt so raw and torn he thought he must be throwing up ground glass.
He was still throwing up, fifteen minutes later, when the cops drove into the driveway at their front door and Henry went around to let them in.
9
Margaret Anson had gone to bed, but she hadn’t gone to sleep. Bennis Hannaford knew that, because she could heard pacing in the room down the hall, punctuated periodically by the sound of drawers slamming, or maybe furniture being moved. Bennis tried to tell herself that this was simple maternal concern—Kayla was still out; it was the Friday before Halloween and half past midnight—but she didn’t believe it, and she didn’t think anyone else would, either. Her own family was screwed up enough so that she didn’t expect much of anything from anybody else’s, but Margaret had struck her as an unusually cold and ruthless woman. Bennis tried to remember what Kayla had been like, on the one or two occasions when they had met. The occasions had been too brief to allow her to form an opinion. Maybe Kayla would turn out to be just like her mother. Maybe it was the money that did that to people, although Bennis had grown up with money, and around people with money, and most of them hadn’t been infected with Margaret’s pinching contempt. Maybe it was just that she should not have made tins trip, for Abigail or anybody else. Bennis had a lot to do at home lately. She had people she cared about and responsibilities of a sort. It had been stupid to give in to her restlessness. It had probably been stupid to get restless in the first place. Sometimes Bennis thought she was the worst mess of anybody she knew. She couldn’t make up her mind about anything. She was practically forty, and she still didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. Even Gregor got exasperated with her now and then. He was probably exasperated with her right his minute, sitting back on Cavanaugh Street by himself, wondering what it was she thought she was doing.
And then, of course, there was this cough she had. And had and had.
What she was supposed to be doing was trying to go to sleep, which was why she had come upstairs to her assigned bedroom, a low-ceilinged, cramped little space under one of the west ell gables. She had even gotten out of her clothes and put on her nightgown and a robe. It was Gregor’s robe, and much too large for her, but she liked the way it smelled. It had a warm aura, like French toast with butter and cinnamon on it. It was hard to say what it meant that that was the kind of thing that reminded her of Gregor. She had taken her books out of her suitcase and laid them on the bed, too. One of them was a mystery novel by P. D. James called Original Sin. The other was a book about Paris in the 1920s that had a lot about Julia Anson in it. Julia Anson the painter. Julia Anson the collector. Julia Anson the lesbian—and famous for it, too, long before it had been fashionable to be famous for any such thing.
It was impossible to concentrate on P. D. James when the wind was rattling against the house the way it was. Bennis wanted to call Gregor, but she didn’t want to wake him up, or be accused by Margaret of using the house phones for long-distance calls. Margaret Anson seemed like just the sort of woman who would make that kind of accusation, without bothering to find out first if Bennis used a calling card. This room was so small, there was no point to pacing in it. She just kept bumping up against the green-and-gold wallpapered walls. Julia Anson had lived the last fifty years of her life in two small rooms off the rue Jacob. Her parents hadn’t had any money then, and people didn’t pay serious money for paintings by women. Abigail had Julia’s diary from that period, and it was all about half-starving in the midst of some of the most wonderful food on earth. Bennis couldn’t imagine being in Paris and not being able to afford to eat.