Skeleton Key(40)

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked around. This was Bennis’s bedroom in the Mayflower Inn. She also had a sitting room. The bed was a big antique-looking sleigh, piled high with blankets and quilts and pillows. Bennis must have asked for extra. Gregor pulled the papers to him and looked at their front pages: the Water-bury Republican, the Torrington Register-Citizen, the Litchfield County Times. The Litchfield County Times was set up to look exactly like The New York Times, so much so that Gregor had thought it was The New York Times until he’d brought it closer and could read the masthead. The other two papers were standard small-town sheets. They used the cheapest possible ink. Their headlines were much too large. None of them had anything at all about Kayla Anson’s murder.

Gregor got off the bed and went to his suitcase. His favorite robe was still there, folded. Bennis not only hadn’t taken it, she hadn’t even gone looking for it. Gregor put it on over his pajamas and tightened the belt on his waist He thought of how surprised Bennis had been when she saw he wore pajamas and then put it out of his mind. In his day, nice men didn’t go to bed in the nude, or just their underwear. He was far too old to change now.

He folded the newspapers and put them under his arm. He opened the bedroom door and looked out into the sitting room. Bennis was sitting at a small writing table next to a window, working away busily on a laptop that was plugged into the wall. The window was open, letting in air that was downright cold. Bennis’s hair was pinned up and coming undone. Great black clouds seemed to surround her head, like some kind of alternative halo. Gregor suddenly felt wonderful, watching her sitting there. This was the way he wanted to think of her, the way he wanted to remember her, not the way he had been remembering her the last day while she’d been gone.

He shifted the newspapers from one arm to the other and cleared his throat. Bennis turned away from the keyboard and looked at him.

“You’re up. It’s after five o’clock. I thought you were going to sleep through dinner.”

“I couldn’t have. I’m too hungry. What are you doing?”

“E-mail. I’ve got an address just for fan mail. It’s on my interview at Amazon-dot-com. You want to see some of this stuff?”

“No.” Gregor dropped the newspapers on a coffee table near the small couch. Bennis wrote fantasy novels, full of knights and ladies and trolls and jousts. Her fan mail tended to consist of long missives from middle-aged women who used the word forsooth at least once every paragraph.

Bennis was still pecking away at her fan mail. “So,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. We’re supposed to have dinner later with the resident trooper up in Caldwell. That’s where he’s from. Not Cornwall Bridge.”

“I was thinking about J. Edgar Hoover,” Gregor said. He sat down on the little couch, in front of the papers. There was a television across the room and a remote on the coffee table. He picked up the remote and turned the set on.

“Start with channel eight,” Bennis said. “That’s WTNH. It’s the one I like best. Thinking about Hoover always puts you in a bad mood.”

“My mood is fine. I was thinking about the Bureau, maybe. About who Hoover hired and who he didn’t hire. About racial and ethnic discrimination, we’d call it today.”

“Ethnic?”

“In my class at Quantico, I was the only Armenian. There was one Greek. Everybody else was at least white. And WASP or Irish Catholic. It was a strange situation.”

“Did it bother you? Did you feel—I don’t know. Disrespected?”

“Not really. I was just thinking that it explained some of the things some of those people did later. Charley Constantinus going to jail for trying to cover up for Nixon. Mike Seranian going into the State Department and becoming such a bloodthirsty hawk he embarrassed Lyndon Johnson. Hyper-Americans, if you know what I mean. Going that extra mile just to prove that their loyalty was absolute.”

“And you didn’t do that?”

“I think it’s because I knew the type. Hoover’s type. I knew what was wrong with him. Although I don’t think I could have explained it at the time. We had a priest at Holy Trinity when I was growing up who was very much the same as Hoover was. I’ve come to think of it as a syndrome.”

“You’ve got to stop reading Tibor’s copies of Psychology Today.”

Gregor pumped up the sound on the television. A blonde woman—“Ann,” everybody kept calling her—was reporting a story on child abuse in a town called Manchester. She had a serious look on her face, but it was a pixie-ish face. He could imagine her laughing.