Wanting Sheila Dead(20)

Gregor sat back and away from his food, feeling a little breathless.

“Mrs. Vardanian,” he said. “Good morning. Ladies.”

The Very Old Ladies nodded in unison. They were like a Greek chorus, those women, a Greek chorus made up of Furies, or Harpies, or something else equally intimidating.

Mrs. Vardanian picked up her walking stick and pounded it on the floor.

“There’s something going on down at Sophie Mgrdchian’s place,” she said. “And I think you ought to go down there and look into it.”





TWO



1


It had been late fall when Gregor Demarkian first moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He had a tendency, when he was indoors, to imagine it always that way: dark and cold, and with that wet sting in the air that promises snow.

It was now late spring, though, and the air was thick and warm, and the landscape was bright. The fronts of the town houses that lined both sides of the street looked washed. The windows of the stores looked as if they’d been polished. Back down the street a bit, back toward his and Bennis’s own apartment, the new Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church glittered in the way that could only happen if women had come out to wash the sidewalk in front of it.

“Probably hired someone,” Gregor said to himself.

“What?” Bennis said.

The Very Old Ladies had led them out onto the sidewalk, and were now marching them down the block in the other direction from the church. The air smelled like something in the country. Gregor wasn’t sure he liked it.

“They probably hired someone,” he told Bennis. “The sidewalk in front of the church has been washed down, and I know the city didn’t do it. When I was growing up, the women did it, the married women, but I can’t imagine them doing it now. Can you see Lida Arkmanian out here with a tin pail on her hands and knees, scrubbing the sidewalk?”

“Maybe if the pail were Gucci,” Bennis said.

The Very Old Ladies were marching relentlessly forward. They moved faster than you’d think they would, but not really fast. Gregor was just reluctant to catch up with them. By now, there was a little parade of people moving along: the Very Old Ladies themselves, Gregor and Bennis and Tibor, one of the Melajian boys (who’d probably been ordered to report back), Sheila Kashinian and Hannah Krekorian and Lida.

They passed Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store and Lucy Ohanian came out, the youngest of the girls, the only one left on the street now that the rest of her siblings had gone off to college and jobs. Gregor always found it incredible how many children people in this neighborhood still wanted to have.

They got to the Donahue town house and Donna came out, looking a little disheveled. Her husband Russ was just behind her, holding the baby, and keeping Tommy from running out into the street.

“What’s going on?” Donna asked Bennis as she caught up to them. “You look like some kind of procession. I thought there was going to be a casket.”

“We don’t know where we’re going,” Bennis said. “Mrs. Vardanian and company came and grabbed us, and here we are.”

“There’s going to have to be a casket for somebody if she keeps up this pace,” Gregor said.

They had crossed another intersection. Now they were in that part of the neighborhood that was exclusively residential. The first block of it had good-looking town houses on both sides, well kept up and repaired. The Kashinians had their place in this block, and there were three houses divided up—like the house Gregor lived in in the other direction—into floor-through apartments. Hannah Krekorian had one of those.

The block after that one was not so pretty. It was not a slum. No part of Cavanaugh Street was a slum anymore. Gregor supposed it had been one when he was growing up here, and instead of floor-throughs the apartments had been more like rabbit warrens. Still, it had always been clean, what with women washing sidewalks, and other women washing clothes so often that lines of the things had seemed normal to him, a part of the architecture.

He snapped himself back to the present. The present was not bad. He liked his life these days. The Very Old Ladies had stopped, and the whole crowd of people who had followed them was now standing in front of a tall brick town house that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in forty years. There was mail in the mailbox out front. It must have been left from the afternoon before.

Mrs. Vardanian mounted two of the steps up to the door and looked the house over. “There,” she said, sounding satisfied about something. “That’s what we want you to do something about.”

Gregor looked the house over one more time. “What’s what you want me to do something about? I can’t fix up the house, if that’s—”