True Believers(167)

“And living on the Main Line,” Bennis said, turning so that they could start the long walk to the front doors and to find a cab. She could have brought her car, but she hadn’t. She’d been feeling far too distracted to drive. “Trust funds are forever,” she said. “You’ve got to wonder what Bobby was thinking. If he thinks. And no. I don’t want to talk to Teddy.”

“I didn’t either, but I got stuck. He called the station. Look, what about you? Are you all right? We’ve had some news out west about this thing your boyfriend is involved in—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “Don’t call Gregor my boyfriend.”

“Whatever. The thing is, I figure by now it doesn’t upset you when he gets caught up in this stuff, so I wasn’t worried about that. But I was worried about the other thing. About Anne Marie. Did you ever get to see her?”

“No.” Bennis bit her lip. “Gregor saw her. He went up there yesterday.”

“Without you?”

“She didn’t ask for me,” Bennis said. “He got in touch with her lawyer to, you know, see if he could get her to talk to me, but in the end she only wanted to talk to him.”

“Did he tell you what she said?”

“No. But I have a feeling that it was really nasty. If it wasn’t nasty, he probably would have told me. If you see what I mean.”

They were out on the street. Bennis had no idea how they had gotten there. In the however-long-it-was since she had been waiting at the station, it had gotten dark again. Why was it that this February it was almost always dark? Daytime was supposed to happen sometimes. She was sure it was. At the very least, there were supposed to be a couple of hours of sunlight in the morning. Maybe she slept through it. Maybe that was the explanation. She was getting a migraine.

Christopher was getting a cab. It was as true in Philadelphia as it was anywhere else. A good-looking white man in expensive clothes could get cabs to appear out of thin air. One of them pulled up at the curb next to them, and Christopher leaned forward to open the door for her.

“Cavanaugh Street,” he told the driver. “It’s—”

“I know where it is,” the driver said.

Bennis climbed in and slid as far over toward the opposite door as she could. The cab’s seats were torn and grimy. The window between the backseat and the front had had so much dirt ground into it for so long, it would never again be able to be clean. Christopher got in and closed the door beside him. His legs were so long they didn’t really fit in the back of the cab.

“Anyway,” Bennis said.

Christopher held out his hand and let Bennis put hers into it. It made her feel as if she were nine years old again, and her father was downstairs, screaming, threatening, promising death and destruction, if she didn’t immediately change everything about herself and apologize while she wasn’t doing it.

“Do you think it’s inherited?” she asked. “Schizophrenia is inherited. Maybe this is, too. Psychopathy. Sociopathy. Whatever.”

“I don’t know.”

“We certainly have a lot of them in this family, though, don’t you think? Not just Anne Marie. Bobby. And Teddy. Sometimes it seems to me that most of the normal ones are dead.”

“I think that if you haven’t been drinking, you ought to start. You can’t do this to yourself, Bennis. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even your responsibility.”

“I helped them catch her,” Bennis said. “That’s my fault.”

“And what was the alternative? To leave her running around loose? She’d already killed three people, and the next on the list was you, and you must know that. Demarkian must have told you that. I mean, hell, you were there.”

Bennis looked out her window. Stores were going by, their windows lit but empty-looking all the same. She was wearing a heavy wool jacket, but she was cold.

“Gregor says that poisoners are particular kinds of people,” she said. “They’re—they’re psychologically different. People who murder with guns and knives tend to be angry. Either they’re angry right at the moment and they go off like bombs, or they’re really furious and have been for a long time and it gets obsessional. Gregor says that to kill with a gun or a knife in anger, you’re looking to avenge yourself or somebody else. Even if that’s not really real, it’s what you think you’re doing. Am I making any sense?”

“Some, yes. I just don’t know what this is getting to.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “he said people who used poison were different. They weren’t angry like that. They felt,” Bennis drummed her fingers against her knee. “It was like the gun and the knife murderers were angry in the explosive sense. Something in particular happened and they got mad. But poisoners were—resentful, rather than angry. That’s the word. They believed that life should have been better for them, and it wasn’t, so they believed they had the right to make it better by any means necessary. I’m getting this hopelessly messed up.”