I’m making no sense at all he thought, sitting down on the side of the bed and staring at the phone. He thought about calling room service, but that didn’t feel right. He’d just eaten, and the last thing he needed was more coffee. He thought about calling Bennis, but that didn’t feel right either. He didn’t think he could face the wall of coldness he was expecting from her. It was just the wrong night for it. It was something about that school, he decided, something about Brian Sheehy’s visceral anger at all things Windsor, about Mark’s scattershot descriptions, about his own gut instincts just walking through town. Somehow, Windsor Academy and the old days on Cavanaugh Street connected. He just didn’t know how.
I’m not only not making any sense; I’m positively incoherent, he thought. He picked up the phone, considered his options, and dialed Tibor. He got a message that said the number had been disconnected and he had to dial again. He kept forgetting. Tibor’s apartment had been destroyed in the explosion that had destroyed Holy Trinity Church. Tibor was now living in Bennis’s old apartment on the second floor of Gregor’s building. That meant Gregor had to call Bennis’s number to get Tibor because …
This whole thing is beginning to sound like a sitcom, Gregor thought. Besides, it might all fall apart in a week or two. If Bennis continued to be not much interested in talking to him, she probably would be not much interested in going on living with him. He wondered what she would do if that day ever came. Would she move back to the second floor, or would she leave Cavanaugh Street altogether and go back to the Main Line world she’d come from?
The thought of Bennis leaving Cavanaugh Street made his stomach lurch. The phone rang and rang in his ear, making him think that Tibor had gone out somewhere, to the Ararat, to old George Tekemanian’s to play cards. It was only eight o’clock.
He was about to put the phone back on the hook and try tothink of something else to do with himself for the evening when Tibor picked up.
“Is Kasparian,” Tibor said.
That was new. In the old days all Tibor said when he picked up the phone was, “Hello.”
“It’s me,” Gregor said. “I called your old number first. I don’t know why I can’t get used to this.”
“Nobody can get used to this, Krekor. Three or four times a day, I have phone calls from people looking for Bennis, and people who should know better: Lida, Hannah Krekorian.”
“Bennis,” Gregor said.
Tibor cleared his throat. “You are all right where you are? You have determined that the suicide was really a murder?”
“I’m fine, but the suicide was almost certainly a suicide. I talked to the chief of police today. He took me to dinner. He gave me chapter and verse. I can’t see why he’d lie to me.”
“To protect the people at this school maybe? You said when you left it was a rich school.”
“I know, but Brian Sheehy hates the place. I don’t think he’d do a thing to save it embarrassment. No, it was definitely a suicide.”
“Then you will be coming home,” Tibor said.
Gregor hesitated. “I don’t think so, no. Not right away.”
There was the sound of rapid-fire typing on the other end of the line. Gregor thought Tibor must be on the Internet. “Why are you staying if there is no murder?” Tibor asked. “It’s what you do, looking into murders.”
“I know. Right now I’m looking into Mark DeAvecca.”
“The boy.”
“Exactly, the boy, who is a complete mess. I don’t know how to describe it. You didn’t meet him last spring. I did. He’s done a one-hundred-eighty-degree personality turn, for one thing.”
“This is drugs, Krekor?”
“He says not, and my instinct is to believe him. I don’t know why, but it’s not the kind of thing I think he’d lie about. The trouble is, if it’s not drugs, he’s got to be sick. Really sick. So I called his mother.”
“Why didn’t he call his mother?”
“Because he’s afraid she’ll take him out of school, which would be giving up.”
There was a very long pause, no typing. Tibor said, “Krekor, that is not sensible.”
“I agree, but it’s what he says. And I think I understand the basic thrust. Anyway, Liz will be up here tomorrow, first thing, if she’s not up here late tonight. She made me book her a place at the inn where I’m staying. And I’ve been walking around. For some reason or the other, this place makes me think about Cavanaugh Street in the old days—before you’d ever heard of it. When Lida and Howard and Hannah and I were all children.”