Cavanaugh Street had been blocked off to traffic by order of the Philadelphia Police Department, but it was full of people. Gregor didn’t think he had ever seen so many women in pastel silk dresses. Donna’s many bridesmaids—there seemed to be hundreds of them, but Gregor knew that wasn’t possible—were milling around at the front of the church, waiting to march in. Lida Arkmanian was walking around in a straw cartwheel hat that Gregor thought ought to have been piled with plastic fruit. It was a beautiful June day, bright and warm without being too hot. It would have been terrible if it had turned out to be rainy and wretched the way it was that last afternoon with Julianne Corbett.
Gregor made himself stop thinking about Julianne Corbett and went up the church steps into the vestibule. Russ Donahue was waiting there, looking pale. The only good thing to have come out of the Julianne Corbett mess was the way Karla Parrish and Evan Walsh were getting along. A lot more good could come out of this wedding. Gregor put a hand on Russ Donahue’s shoulder.
“Relax,” he told him. “You’ll be fine.”
“Have you seen Donna?” Russ asked. “Is she all right? Is she really going to go through with this?”
“Of course she’s going to go through with this,” Gregor said.
“All week I’ve been thinking she was on the verge of changing her mind,” Russ said. “It’s been making me crazy. And here we are. Here I am. You know what I mean.”
“We’ve been here all morning,” the young man who was serving as Russ’s best man said. “He got me out of a sound sleep at four. Four.”
“Oh, God,” Russ groaned. “Who cares what time it was?”
Gregor would have cared what time it was if somebody had woken him up at four o’clock in the morning. He didn’t say so. Bennis was running up the church steps into the vestibule, trying to hold the train of her dress high enough up off the ground to keep it from getting dirty.
“They’re going to start ringing the last church bells any minute now,” she said. “Come, you two. Get up to the front of the church. And, Gregor. Do something about that tie.”
“I’m supposed to go up to the front of the church?” Gregor asked.
Bennis shook her head impatiently. “The two of them are. That tie is unraveling or something. I’ve got to go.”
She went. Gregor went too, into the church and the second pew from the front on the bride’s side, where old George Tekemanian was already waiting. The church was nearly full. On Russ’s side there seemed to be the entire population of the Homicide Division. They all wore the same navy blue suit, like a wedding uniform.
Up at the front, Gregor suddenly spied a glimpse of Donna Moradanyan herself, adjusting her veil. It was impossible to see her face, the veil covered it, but the set of her shoulders was very reassuring: not panicked anymore, not hesitant, not unsure. In the Armenian church the bride and the groom came up the aisle together. Donna would have to go around the church’s side or through Tibor’s apartment to get where she was supposed to be.
But it was where she was supposed to be, Gregor thought.
And finally, for the first time since the decorating had started for this wedding, he was no longer depressed at the idea of Donna Moradanyan, or anybody else, getting married.
Elizabeth would have loved to be present at a wedding like this.