Lily allowed herself to be led to a chair. Then she sat down and looked from one of them to the other. She put her hands up on the table and folded them.
“I wish you wouldn’t do these things,” the woman in the nursing uniform said. “I do realize there are legal issues here, and we’d all like to know who this woman is, but you disrupt her entire routine. You make her more disoriented than she already is.”
Lily leaned forward. She was smiling.
“I’m not disoriented,” she said, in a perfectly clear and lucid voice.
The three of them turned to stare at her. It was, Gregor thought, the oddest thing. It was as if they had been looking at a statue, and the statue had ended up being a real person who moved. There was a change not just in the expression on Lily’s face, but in the way she held her body and the tilt of her head. Even her spine was straighter.
“Is there something wrong with the whole bunch of you?” Lily demanded. “Can any of you talk? Because I wish one of you would. I’d like to know where the hell I am.”
It was LeeAnn who moved first. “Maybe we ought to clear the room,” she said. “I’m this woman’s lawyer, and I want to make sure that there’s nothing said here—”
“You’re my lawyer?” Lily said. “Why do I need a lawyer? And where is this place and what am I doing here?”
“Clear the room,” LeeAnn insisted. “Lily, please, stop talking until I can make sure—”
“My name isn’t Lily,” the woman said. “Whatever made you think my name was Lily?”
“You told us your name was Lily,” Gregor said. “Yesterday, when we found you in the house of a woman named Sophie Mgrdchian. Do you remember anything about that at all?”
“I will not have you asking her questions,” LeeAnn said, now positively frantic. “And I don’t want you answering them, either. I’m your attorney, and—”
“Of course I remember being in Sophie’s house,” the woman said. “I’ve been staying there for two weeks. She’s my sister-in-law.”
2
A cab was pulled up to the curb right in front of the hospital when Gregor walked out, and the driver was willing to go to Bryn Mawr. That was the only reason Gregor went to Bryn Mawr at all, and it surprised him that he did. Not all cabs were willing to go out to the Main Line. Of course, not all times found Gregor more than happy to pay the asking price, either.
He sat in the cab and put his head on the back of the seat, trying to think. There would be no talking to Lily—no, to Karen—any time soon, and he could hardly blame LeeAnn Testenaro for that. He probably should have called Bennis and told her what had happened. The problem was, he didn’t know what he would say. That scene had been so bizarre, and so completely improbable, that—
He thought back to yesterday when he had first seen Lily. There she had been in Sophie Mgrdchian’s foyer, smiling and babbling like someone in a trance. He tried to picture it in his head exactly as it had been. He hadn’t thought to question the authenticity of it at the time. That was partly assumptions. He was on Cavanaugh Street in the presence of a harmless-looking old lady. You didn’t usually assume that harmless-looking old ladies would fake dementia. And what would they want to fake dementia for? He’d talked to the police and to the doctor who was looking after Sophie Mgrdchian. They didn’t know what had happened to her, or why she persisted in her coma, but they weren’t suggesting that anything had been done to get her that way, either. They’d checked for all the usual things and found nothing.
Part of the reason he had not questioned Lily’s dementia, though, was that it had not felt fake at the time. It frustrated him that he was not able to just recreate the scene in his head. It hadn’t felt fake at the time, so that meant that, if Lily was acting, she must be a good enough actress to convince nonexperts and distracted people. Later, though, she had been in the presence of experts and of people who were devoting their whole attention to her. They hadn’t spotted a fake, either.
They were out of the city now, and on those long roads that wound through big houses and wide stretches of lawn. It had been a long time since Gregor had been out here. It had been nearly a decade since he’d been at Engine House. He couldn’t remember what that first night had been like, either. He did remember he’d met Bennis then, and John Henry Newman Jackman, now mayor of Philadelphia, when he was just an investigator for the Bryn Mawr police.
Gregor got out his phone and looked at his speed dial list. He knew that the point of putting people on speed dial was so that he could call them just by tapping a single number and not worrying about looking them up, but he could never remember which number was tapped for who. He found Tibor and held that down, hard. Then he put the phone up to his ear and waited.