“Hello?” Bennis said in that deep voice of hers that could never quite lose the Main Line debutante, boarding-school accent.
“It’s me,” Gregor said. “How are you? I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. I was just listening to the news. There’s a story about a dog found eviscerated in Elizabeth Toliver’s garage. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do. But don’t even begin to think that’s the strangest thing about this place. It’s insane. It’s like living in Lord of the Flies.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. It’s a long story. I wish you were here. I’ve got no way to judge what people tell me about this place. And they all tell me things. A minute ago it was about a bunch of kids who asked Liz to have pizza with them and then they sneaked out of the restaurant after they’d ordered and stuck her with the bill. Eight pizzas.”
“Well, that was sucky of them.”
“One story would be sucky. I’ve heard maybe half a dozen since I got here, and the thing is, when they tell you about them, they act as if it’s all perfectly normal. Liz Toliver doesn’t, but she was the victim. The rest of them behave as if there’s nothing unusual about the stories at all. And what do I know about it? My high school was in an inner city and all I ever did in it was study like a maniac so the University of Pennsylvania would give me a scholarship. If we had a Homecoming Queen, nobody ever told me about it.”
“My high school was a rich girls’ boarding school where the girls brought their horses and boarded them, too. I’m not really much more of an expert on this sort of thing than you are.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but I keep feeling that you could tell me what’s real and what isn’t in this place. You’ve got to know more about it than I do. Sometimes, I stop in the middle of everything and it all just feels absurd. These are grown people. Most of the ones we’re dealing with are fifty or close to it. Can they really still be so—obsessed—with what happened when they were in high school? And I do mean obsessed. It’s like they don’t have any other frame of reference.”
“Well, the murder—”
“Forget the murder. It might as well not have happened. You mention it and people say, ‘Oh, I forgot about that.’”
“Well,” Bennis said in her “soothing” voice, “they’re all stuck out there in the middle of nowhere. Maybe high school was the only interesting thing that ever happened to them.”
“I wish you’d come,” Gregor told her. “Just get in the car and drive up. If the news about the dog has been on television, it’s only a matter of time before we’re inundated with reporters. Maybe not the full-court press, but at least a few of them making nuisances of themselves. I could use your point of view, even if you do think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re having a bad case of cultural dissonance. Besides, I can’t come up. There’s no place for me to stay. We looked it up in the triple-A handbook, don’t you remember?”
“The room I’m staying in has a double bed.”
“Oh, marvelous. I can just camp on Elizabeth Toliver’s doorstep and announce I’m staying. She won’t mind. What’s the harm of having one of Jimmy Card’s old lovers installed in her guest room?”
“Bennis—”
“Be reasonable,” Bennis said. “Besides, I’m supposed to go over to Donna’s and help her with the flags. Tibor was supposed to help her, but he’s having an argument with his friend Vicki about gun control, and it’s really heated up, so he spends all his time on the computer posting messages to RAM, and Donna says that if she wants to make the Kashinian’s building look like the Armenian flag she’s got to order the materials now, and she can’t do that until she gets a good picture of what the Armenian flag looks like, and she’s hopeless with search engines.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “Donna wants to make Howard Kashinian’s house look like the Armenian flag?”
“Right. The Kashinians are the Armenian flag, Lida is the American flag, and we’re the U.N. I forget what she’s doing to her own place, but it’s another flag.”
“Why?”
“Because June fourteenth is Flag Day,” Bennis said reasonably.
On the other side of the room, a middle-aged waitress was putting an enormous pizza down on the table in front of Kyle Borden. Kyle looked up, saw Gregor staring, and waved.