Bennis went to the pile of materials lying in a heap at the bottom of the ladder and started to look through them. Most of what was there was paper, bits and pieces that looked as if they had been wrongly cut and then discarded, but not exactly thrown away. The heart was very small. Bennis nearly missed it. She picked it up and stood back.
“Do you want me to climb up there and give it to you?”
“No. I’ll be right down. You ought to do something with yourself. You’re driving yourself and everybody else crazy.”
“Well, I was going to do something with Gregor, but then he disappeared. You’re not going to be able to reach over to the other side of the building from where you’re standing.”
“I know.”
Donna let the crepe paper fall from the last place it had been taped. It hung down the front of the building like a ponytail. Then she came down the ladder and rubbed her hands against her slacks.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the heart. “I’m going to move the ladder. You should move yourself. When is your brother coming in?”
“It depends on which brother you’re talking about. Christopher will be here at the end of the week.”
“Are the other two coming? I thought they weren’t coming.”
“Teddy’s already here. He’s in a hotel somewhere holding press conferences. Or he would be, if this whole thing hadn’t been overshadowed by the problems at St. Anselm’s. What do you think Hannah would say? Maybe that the murders happened so that they would chase Anne Marie off the front pages and save my privacy.”
“What about Bobby?”
“God only knows,” Bennis said.
Donna took the heart and went back to the ladder. Then she performed what seemed to Bennis to be an unnecessarily complicated series of tugs and bumps to get the ladder to move down the front of the building and rest somewhere near the middle.
“Do something,” she said. “Why don’t you write a column about being harassed by what’s-her-name. I’ll bet you anything you can get it published somewhere good. The Atlantic Monthly. Harper’s. That ought to make you feel better.”
“Don’t you ever wonder where people like that get their money?” Bennis asked. “I mean, I was born with money, and I still had to work before I started to get seriously published. And I know she’s married, but still—”
“Maybe her husband makes a mint.”
“It’s like other people know where to find money and I don’t,” Bennis said. “It’s like some secret nobody ever let me in on. Not that I need money now, of course, but when I was first starting out and nobody would take my stuff, I couldn’t have lived in a town house in a major city and bought my bags at Coach. And her hair clips, too. Did I tell you she buys her hair clips at Coach?”
“She’s got a husband.”
“She’s got a husband who does something with computers. He can’t be making that much money. Oh, I don’t know. She probably has it from her family, or her husband’s got it from his. Except I know everybody with family money in Philadelphia and on the Main Line, and I’ve never heard of them.”
Donna unearthed something that looked like Christmas lights, except the bulbs were all either white or red. She wound the strand around her arm and started up the ladder again.
“Go do something,” she said again. “Go buy food for when Christopher gets here, unless he’s staying at Lida’s, then go buy him something else. Go buy Gregor a Valentine’s Day card. You’re making us all nuts. You’re worse like this than you were when you first quit smoking.”
“When I first quit smoking, I threw an end table through my living-room window.”
“I know. Trust me, it was less annoying. Go down to the Ohanians and volunteer for the Armenia Relief Committee. Just do something.”
“Right,” Bennis said, but all she did was to step back a little and watch Donna on the ladder, stringing lights through crepe paper. The things that went through her head at times like this—that she wished somebody would rent the top-floor apartment in the building she shared with Gregor and old George Tekemanian; that she wished she had remembered to buy chocolate at the little store she liked near Independence Hall—were sane enough, but didn’t have to do with anything. Donna would probably find them … annoying. She watched as Donna taped the strand of lights to the brick and then taped crepe paper over it, to hide the wires. Then she nodded a little to Lida and Hannah and Sheila and went down the block toward the Ararat and the church and Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. Lida’s coat was the most spectacular, but all three of them had fur. Bennis couldn’t imagine herself wearing something like that in public.