Grace stood with the dress in her hands and watched them go. Then she went over to the door and made sure it was shut.
Suzanne was still sitting on the bed, but this was Suzanne’s room as well as hers. She couldn’t make a fuss about that.
Grace laid out the dress and looked at it. This really would be enough for dinner tonight, and if Sheila Dunham didn’t like it, she could do what she wanted. Grace wouldn’t even mind being eliminated first, the way this was going.
What she did mind was the idea of that security camera in the study. She kept forgetting that there were cameras everywhere.
It really was not a good omen, though, that there had been a camera there, and that whatever was on it was now in the hands of the police.
THREE
1
Gregor Demarkian did not like to be involved in things he was not officially involved in—that was a convoluted way of putting it, but he knew what he meant. It was one thing to be paid by police departments to consult on difficult cases. He liked that, and even in his days at the Bureau, he had never been one of those men who liked to bemoan the depravity of all things human that he was forced to confront in his work. He knew very well that not all human beings were depraved, or anything close to it. Most of them were good enough for the lives they lived. They weren’t great saints, like Augustine or Aquinas or Frances. They weren’t great sinners, like Hitler or Stalin or even Jeffrey Dahmer. They were just people. In living every day, they made the small but necessary decisions that kept the whole enterprise going: get up and go to work, do your job, pay your bills, help your friends, contribute a little to charity, pick up your garbage when it drops on the ground.
David Mortimer had given Gregor a ride back into Philadelphia proper. He would have dropped Gregor at his own front door, but that wasn’t what Gregor wanted. It was getting late, although not quite dark, not yet. Spring was well under way. Gregor had Mortimer drop him off on City Ave and started walking. He got onto the campus of St. Joseph’s and walked some more. He liked city college campuses. He liked the fact that they did not look pristine and sealed off from real life.
He didn’t want to go home, right this minute, that was all. And apparently he didn’t want to go home because he was thinking of human beings. In his experience, plenty of human beings did more than the minimum to keep things going. They organized food drives for the holidays. They volunteered in food banks and homeless shelters, and at literacy schools that taught new immigrants how to speak English and pass the citizenship test.
Gregor always found it odd to realize how much work it took just to do the minimum, though. He found it odder to realize how little slacking off could land you and everybody else in a very bad place. He thought he was being obscure again, but he probably wasn’t. If he had walked the other way on City Ave, he would have landed in the middle of a place where too many people did too little of the minimum.
If I keep this up, I’m going to go crazy, he told himself. He sat down on a bench and looked around. The college was in session. There were students everywhere, and too much traffic on the roads. The real problem was going home to face Bennis. The two of them did not talk often about the way they had met, or what it had led to. Every once in a while, Gregor would think that the whole past thing was about to blow up in his face. Then the crisis would come and go, and it would be as if it had never happened, at least as far as he could tell. It had been several years now since that long weekend when the murderer of Bennis’s father had gone to the gas chamber. Bennis had barely talked to him about it at the time, and she hadn’t said a word to him about it since.
The bench was cold. It was colder than the air around it. That was the trouble with spring. The days were warm enough. The evenings got cold, and now it was marching toward evening. It was raining, too, although not as badly as it had been a few hours ago. Gregor’s jacket was soaked through, and he hadn’t noticed it. So was his hair. This was very bad. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe that a marriage had to be an absolute meeting of the minds, with no secrets withheld between both parties. He had his secrets, and he was sure Bennis had hers. That was what happened when two people married in late adulthood.
But there was something wrong with a situation that required him to get pneumonia on a college campus bench rather than go home and talk to his wife.
It would have been different if he’d had an affair. Or if she had.
What was he thinking about?
He got out his phone, found his speed dial list, and called the cab company. He promised to be out on City Ave in less than a minute and a half. It really was interesting, the numbers Bennis had thought to put on his speed dial list.