Wanting Sheila Dead(100)

“I think that if anybody dies, it’s going to be you,” Ivy said, “and I’m going to do the killing.”

Then she took the full plate, and a fork and a knife, and marched out of the dining room.

Grace watched her go, and the rest of the girls watched with her.

It didn’t matter what Ivy thought. Grace knew as much as she needed to know about what was going on around here now.





THREE



1


For Gregor Demarkian, Len Borstoi’s announcement that he was to consider himself hired, or on the case, or whatever the man had said, felt unreal. That was not how he was hired to consult on cases. First there was a letter, or a fax, or a phone call from the chief of police or the mayor. Then there was a discreet little talk about money. Then there was the advance prep, lots of paperwork with forensic reports and detective logs scattered through it. This was more like the sort of thing that would happen in dreams, except that Gregor never had dreams about work. His dreams always had to do with Bennis and Elizabeth meeting, sometimes for lunch, sometimes in the afterlife. He’d talked to Father Tibor about that once, but neither one of them had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

“You love both your wives,” Tibor said. “You hope that if they met, they would get along.”

In the dreams, Bennis and Elizabeth always did get along, but Gregor wasn’t sure they would have if they’d met in real life. They were opposites in ways that weren’t supposed to matter much, but always did: Bennis had grown up rich on the Main Line while Elizabeth had grown up poor in a tenement in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia; Elizabeth had been very traditional about marriage while Bennis had treated marriage like a poison she’d be lucky if she managed to escape; Elizabeth had believed in women being homemakers and Bennis had the career from hell.

Of course, they had both gone to Vassar, about ten years apart, so there was that. But maybe not. Gregor himself had gone to the University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate work, and he could remember better than he liked to, the divide between the live-at-school, come-from-Ivy-League-families crowd and the students who, like him, commuted from home and had really large scholarships.

It had been years since Gregor had thought so much about Elizabeth, who had died of cancer before he’d ever moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He didn’t really know why he was thinking about her now. He was married again, yes, and just back from his honeymoon—but it wasn’t like that was a sudden thing. He’d not only known, but been practically living in Bennis’s lap for years. Thoughts of Elizabeth had never bothered him before.

Donna pulled Bennis’s car to the curb in front of Gregor’s building and cut the engine. “I’ve got to go put this back in the garage,” she said. “Can you believe that Bennis spends three hundred dollars a month just to keep this thing in a garage?”

“If it was mine, I’d probably put it in a vault,” Gregor said. “It’s not the kind of thing that blends into the background.”

“Oh, I know,” Donna said. “And I know it’s supposed to be silly to have a car like this when you live in the city. But it’s a lot of fun to drive.”

“Why don’t you get one?”

“Well,” Donna said, “I’ve got a son and a daughter. And there are going to be tuitions.”

“True,” Gregor said.

He looked up and down the street. When he’d first moved back here, Donna had had a habit of decorating the entire neighborhood for any holiday that came up. She’d once wrapped the entire building in which he lived—and where she then had the top floor floor-through apartment—in shiny stuff and a bow that made it look like a Christmas package. With this last pregnancy, she seemed to have given that up. He was sorry to see that go.

“I miss the decorations,” he said. He sounded abrupt even to himself.

Donna laughed. “You’re not the only one. I’ve just got a lot to do these days. Maybe I can convince the youth group to help me out and we can decorate for the Fourth of July. That’s not too far away. Listen, Bennis is up there practically hanging out of the window. She’s very worried about you.”

“I know she is,” Gregor said. “There’s really nothing to be worried about.”

Donna gave him the kind of look that said she didn’t believe him for a minute, and Gregor got out and started walking up the steps to the building’s front door. He was light-headed, but that was just exhaustion. What bothered him was that he still felt the nagging half panic that had bolted him awake at four o’clock in the morning, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep him in gear. He wanted to sleep, and he wanted to sleep even though he felt that something awful was about to happen any second now, and that he was the only one who could stop it.