“I suppose,” Gregor said, but he did more than suppose really. He had every intention of making it up with Bennis, who was the only other person on the planet besides himself that he considered entirely sane. It was like that old joke about the Amish couple in their isolated farmhouse. “Everybody in the world is crazy but me and thee, and I’m not too sure about thee.”
He picked up his fork and tried a potato, but it tasted like cardboard and sand.
3
Twenty minutes later, just as a jackhammer went off at the construction site, Gregor Demarkian walked home down Cavanaugh Street. He had come far enough back into his senses so that he did notice the cold this time. It was brutal. The wind was brutal, too. Construction projects sometimes came to a halt because of bad weather, but maybe that was only for snow or rain. This bad weather had not stopped work on this site.
He stopped in front and watched the workers doing things he didn’t understand. He hadn’t the faintest idea how a building went up or what kept it up. He kept his hands in his pockets and his head down in the collar of his coat. The jackhammer made a wall of noise, blocking out the world.
He didn’t hear his cell phone go off—he couldn’t have, even if the ringer had been on—he felt it, vibrating against his hand at the bottom of his pocket.
He pulled it out and said, “Yes?” into the air, where a receiver ought to be.
Somebody said something he didn’t understand, and he said, “Wait.”
The jackhammer was making it impossible for him tohear anything at all. He walked up the street toward his apartment a little ways, and then a little ways more, until he got to the intersection and had to cross.
“Sorry,” he said, “there was construction going on. This is Gregor Demarkian. Who is this?”
There was so long a pause on the other end of the line that Gregor thought for a moment that it was a wrong number. Then he heard somebody clearing his throat.
“Mr. Demarkian?” the someone said. Gregor thought the voice was familiar and not at the same time. It was a very young voice, and it sounded as if it had been crying.
“Listen,” the voice said, “I’m sorry to bother you, and I don’t know if you remember me, but we’ve met; and I thought you were the only person I could think of who would know what to do. And you stayed with us that time, and you did know what to do. So I’m sorry to be so messed up. I mean, my name is Mark DeAvecca—”
Chapter Two
1
Gregor Demarkian would not have agreed to go up to Massachusetts to see Mark DeAvecca if he had believed that anybody had actually murdered anybody else. His malaise about work was neither feigned nor neurotic. The idea of “investigating” anything made his mind numb. Things did not need to be investigated as much as they needed to be understood. That was the decision he had come to, on one of the long and all-too-silent nights after he and Bennis had had their argument in the living room. It wasn’t that Bennis wasn’t speaking to him. Bennis was incapable of not speaking to anyone. She was the kind of woman who preferred to have her fights bare-knuckled and in overtime. It was more that they weren’t having a fight at all. Bennis was speaking to him and usually polite about it. She went down to the Ararat with him for dinner. She went shopping with Donna Moradanyan Russell and came home with packages. She made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with him while she drank it. It was more what she wasn’t doing that was the problem. She wasn’t chattering to him about matters on Cavanaugh Street or with her publishers. She wasn’t reaching for him in bed at unexpected times of the night. She wasn’t lecturing him. What bothered him the most, if he were honest about it, was that she wasn’t fighting with him. It was an ominous sign. Bennis had been fighting with him almost from the day they’d met. It was her preferred method of engagement. Gregor didn’t like to think what it meant when she was not engaged in it.
He tried to tell her about Mark DeAvecca after he got the call—after all, she’d met him; she knew his mother slightly and his stepfather very well—but although she had listened for a few minutes in what appeared to be interest, she’d drifted off on him in no time at all.
“Do what you want to do,” she’d said, while he was caught in one more futile attempt to explain what had so bothered him about that phone call.
He’d looked away and tried again. “He doesn’t sound like himself,” he’d said. “He sounds drugged.”
Maybe it wasn’t so strange that a teenaged boy sounded drugged. If it had been any other teenaged boy, Gregor wouldn’t have thought so. Maybe Bennis hadn’t spent enough time with Mark to realize how out of character it all was. There were other “maybes,” but Gregor didn’t want to think about them. He made himself think about the fact that “drugged” didn’t really describe what he was hearing.