Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution.
—Theodore Dobzhansky
1
On the day Gregor Demarkian married Bennis Hannaford, the sun was shining, the air was crisp with spring, and forty-two Armenian-American ladies of various shapes and ages were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to make sure there was enough food. It was eight o’clock in the morning. The wedding wasn’t due to start for three hours. The reception wasn’t due to start for four and a half. It didn’t matter. The street had been closed off at both ends, leaving a six-block stretch in between. Police officers had been dispatched to patrol the perimeter so that no incident of any kind could mar the proceedings, except for the ones the guests created themselves. Photographers had taken up their stations on the side streets, hoping to get pictures of some of the people who were supposed to have been invited. This was the greatest thing to happen to Cavanaugh Street since the boys had come home at the end of World War II, and the Armenian-American ladies wanted to be ready.
Gregor stood at the window of his apartment and looked down on it all, feeling vaguely put out because he seemed to be expected to go without breakfast. Normally, he would have gone down the street to the Ararat, but the Ararat was closed. It would be open—but not for business—later, because that was where it had been decided that the buffet would be set up and the bar would be in business. This made a great deal of sense, but it played Hell with his routine, and Gregor didn’t like things that played Hell with his routine.
Of course, if that was the case, it was a mystery as to why he was marrying Bennis Hannaford of all people, but he’d given up trying to figure that out years ago.
He pressed his face to the window pane, trying to get a better look at what was going on. He failed. He turned around and went back through his living room to his kitchen. Father Tibor Kasparian was sitting at the kitchen table with Russ Donahue. They both had cups of the coffee that Gregor had made earlier. They both looked unhappy.
“Is this any kind of a mood for you to be in?” Gregor asked them. “I’m getting married in a couple of hours.”
Tibor and Russ looked at each other. Tibor said, “Krekor, this is not coffee. I think maybe it is coal sands.”
“Sands you can extract coal from,” Russ said helpfully.
Gregor went over to the cabinet and pulled out a box. “Bennis left these,” he said, putting the box on the table. “They’re kind of like tea bags but for coffee. You just boil water in a kettle, I’ve got a kettle around here—”
“I’ll get it,” Russ said. “It’s a good thing you’re getting married, Gregor. You could kill yourself with that stuff.”
“Does Bennis make coffee?” Tibor asked.
“I’ll bet anything she knows how to get it delivered,” Russ told him.
Gregor sat down at the kitchen table and took the glass Russ passed over to him. It wasn’t true that his life was going to change radically after today. He and Bennis had been together for years. They didn’t actually live in the same apartment, but they might as well have. Now there was the town house they had bought up the street, so there would be that change, and new furniture, and things like that. But it was all trivial, all of it, except that it wasn’t. Sometimes Gregor wondered why he had been so insistent that they had to be formally married—but he never wondered for long, and he always knew for certain under his skin.
The water in the kettle was boiling. Russ passed out coffee bags. Tibor looked hopeful.
“The whole thing is going to take forty minutes,” Russ said. “They’re planning it like Napoleon just got a re-run at Waterloo. Does this make any sense to any of you?”
It didn’t make any sense to any of them, but the coffee was finally drinkable, so they concentrated on that.
2
They were in Gregor’s living room an hour later, trying to think of things that would keep them from being nervous, when the subject of the case came up. Of course, they would have had far less cause for nervousness if the phone hadn’t been ringing every ten minutes or so, delivering messages so strange they might as well have come from the moon.
“I’m sending Tommy over for the garlic,” Donna, Russ’s wife, had said at one point. “Bennis says it’s in a white mesh bag on top of the microwave. Just give him the whole bag and send him back right away. We don’t have any time.”
“What’s she need garlic for?” Russ had demanded. “She’s helping Bennis dress, she isn’t doing the food. Is she warding off a vampire?”
“And why does it take them three hours to get dressed?” Gregor said. “Bennis can be dressed and out of this apartment in the morning faster than I can. Have any of you actually seen this dress?”
“I haven’t even seen the maid of honor’s dress,” Russ said, “and I paid for that. And there’s something I’d like to know. What kind of a dress costs forty-five hundred dollars, anyway?”
“Bennis’s cost almost ten,” Gregor said. “It’s a Caroline Herrera. Whatever that means.”
“Donna’s is one of those, too,” Russ said.
“You said you would tell me about the murders,” Tibor said. “We cannot do this, you must know that. We will all make ourselves crazy.”
“Just don’t lose the rings,” Russ said.
Gregor stretched out on the couch. In the end, he thought, women always behaved like women. It didn’t matter if they had been tomboys in their childhoods, or if they had joined the army and spent six years in the military police. Give them a wedding, and they took forever to get anything done and spent hours making up and getting dressed, and had little nervous breakdowns about whether earrings matched or bows were put on straight. Even Elizabeth had been like that, and he had known it, no matter how hard she had tried to hide it. That had been a wedding on Cavanaugh Street, too. It had been a long time ago.
“Whatever are you thinking about?” Russ said.
“I was thinking I’d already been married in Holy Trinity Church, once,” Gregor said. “It’s funny, but I’d never thought of it before. It’s what we should have told Leda and Sheila and Hannah when they were so upset that Tibor wouldn’t marry us in the church. I’ve already been married once in that church. Well, in the old church before it was blown up, but the same one, ah, institutionally. If you know what I mean.”
“To your first wife,” Russ said.
“To my first wife,” Gregor agreed. “A long time ago. Leda and the rest of them would have understood that, you know. They were even there when I married Elizabeth.”
“It’s all right, Krekor,” Tibor said. “We reached a compromise.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “But I never thought of it, and I should have. There’s something—I don’t know—off about the idea, I guess. Getting married twice in the same place to two different people. Even Bennis would have understood it.”
“Bennis did not want to be married in Holy Trinity Church,” Father Tibor said, “but she was not the one giving us the problem.”
“No,” Gregor agreed.
Then he drifted off a little. It had been a long time since he had thought of Elizabeth. When he had first come back to Cavanaugh Street, he had thought of her every day. Of course, she had been newly dead then, and newly buried, and he had come here only because her grave would be near, in the Armenian-American cemetery just on the edge of the city.
Then and now, he thought, but it was harder to get his mind around than that. His life had changed so drastically since the days when he and Elizabeth were both growing up on Cavanaugh Street. Cavanaugh had changed drastically, too. Time is the measure of change. That’s what they had taught him at the University of Pennsylvania. He could close his eyes and see Cavanaugh Street exactly as it had been then: the tall tenements with their railroad apartments; the women on their knees scrubbing the sidewalks because the street cleaners never seemed to bother; the tiny storefronts offering shoe repair and check cashing. The Ararat had been in its usual place, but it had been small, too, with tiny windows and bare floors. Gregor had been away in the FBI, living in Washington, D.C., when the Melajians had done the remodeling. He had no idea when the tenements had come down to make way for the town houses. Someday, he thought he ought to ask.
“Tcha,” Tibor said. “Krekor, if you do not make small talk, we will make you get into your tails. Then you won’t be able to sit down without getting them wrinkled.”
3
People started arriving just after ten. Some of them caused a lot of fuss and had to be ushered onto Cavanaugh Street with a police escort.
“That’s Liz and Jimmy,” Russ said, from his new place looking out the window. “And Mark and Geoff. In tuxedos. Has Geoff hit puberty yet? You should see him in a tuxedo.”
“He was telling us about the phony construction company,” Tibor said. “Listen.”
“I was thinking it was about time we all got dressed,” Gregor said. “If we’re late, I think Bennis will probably kill us.”
“No she won’t,” Russ said. “That’s because she’ll be late. I think that’s a Rolling Stone. I mean it. He looks embalmed and he’s brought a girl who looks younger than—well, younger than legal, quite frankly.”
“The phony construction company,” Tibor insisted.
“Well,” Gregor said, “there’s not much to say. Henry Wackford wanted to get out of Snow Hill for good. And the reason he wanted to get out was exactly what he said it was, because he hated the people there. Because he thought they were all stupid. You name it. What threw me off in the beginning was that he wasn’t faking any of that. He wasn’t even faking his announcements of how the Christian fundamentalists were out to murder everyone who wanted to keep evolution in the public schools. He really believed that.”
“He must have been a very stupid man,” Tibor said.
“I don’t think stupidity is his problem,” Gregor said. “What’s that thing Bennis is always talking about? We all have narratives we use to shape our lives. Christianity is a narrative. She claims to have one of her own she won’t tell me. Well, this was Henry Wackford’s narrative.”
“Still,” Russ said. “He knew there weren’t any Christian fundamentalists committing violence in this case. He was committing the violence himself.”
“Well, yes,” Gregor said, “but as I understand it, logic is not a big element in these narratives. Anyway, what he did was actually very simple. When the town finally agreed to build the new schools complex, they put him in charge of the project. And he invented a construction company, and awarded it the contract. Then he subcontracted the actual work out to various firms, always being careful never to use one firm for very long. That’s why the construction was taking so long. There was very little continuity. Not that he minded, of course, because the longer the project went on, the longer he could skim money off the top of it. And he would have been all right, really, except for two things. The first one was Annie-Vic. The second one was that silly impulse he had to put the Marbledale sisters on the disclosure forms as owners of Dellbach Construction.”
“And he did this because they won the lottery?” Tibor said. “When people win the lottery in Pennsylvania, they are all over the news.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “But they won it in New Hampshire, and New Hampshire allows winners to remain anonymous. Still, he knew about it, somehow, and he thought it would be a good blind if push ever came to shove. Then something entirely different tipped me off. That woman I was telling you about, Alice McGuffie. She had a picture of the ribbon cutting on the project. She was there, because at the time she was president of the PTA. Henry Wackford was there, because he was chairman of the school board. Catherine Marbledale should have been there, both because she was principal of the high school and because she was supposedly head of Dellbach Construction, but she wasn’t there. And her sister Margaret wasn’t there either. Margaret wasn’t there because she had no reason to be there. Catherine wasn’t there because she was down with the flu, but Margaret should have been there. If you own a company like that that has just been awarded a major project, you make sure somebody attends the ribbon cutting. And nobody from Dellbach did. Alice McGuffie thought that the fact that Catherine Marbledale wasn’t in that picture was proof that Catherine Marbledale was guilty of something, but she had it backwards. It was proof that Catherine Marbledale wasn’t guilty. That, and the other thing.”
“What other thing?” Russ asked. He was still at the window.
“The fact that Catherine Marbledale couldn’t have killed Judy Cornish without being seen,” Gregor said. “But that’s not the funniest thing about all this. You know what’s the funniest thing?”
“What?” Russ said. “That’s Senator Casey out there. Did you know Senator Casey was coming?”
“I think Bennis gave a ton of money to his campaign,” Gregor said.
“I want to know what the funniest thing was,” Tibor said.
“Ah,” Gregor said. “Well, that had to do with Henry Wackford’s secretary, Christine Lindsay. On the day before we arrested him, she quit. Not over anything illegal he was doing. She wouldn’t have understood that. In fact, Henry Wackford tended to hire secretaries who were not necessarily too bright because he didn’t want them prying into anything he had going. She quit over the lawsuit, Darwin, and all the rest of it. And after she was gone, Henry went looking for the copy of the disclosure form he’d kept for himself. It was in a folder he’d labeled Books to Print, but when he looked through the files, he couldn’t find the folder. The two times I talked to him, he was engaged in a frantic search for the thing, and he never did find it. Because he had to keep that disclosure form out of sight. Anybody at Snow Hill who looked at it would have realized immediately that there was something wrong.”
“So what happened to it?” Russ said. “Did she take it to the police?”
“No,” Gregor said. “She’d actually removed it nearly a month before. She had no idea there was anything wrong with it. She just knew it said it was a file of things to print, so she’d taken it and everything in it to the printers. It was still waiting there when Gary Albright made the arrest. He picked it up later. She’d seen the number one hundred seven on the folder, which was there for God only knows what reason, but she decided that was how many copies needed to be made, so she made them. Gary ran her down at her married sister’s house in Lehigh and she told him she’d just assumed this was material needed for the new school board. She’d never thought anything of it, and she certainly hadn’t read any of it.”
“This was perhaps a good thing,” Tibor said. “If she’d read it, he’d have had to kill her, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “She isn’t all that bright, so I don’t think she would have figured it out, and she’s very deferential to authority, at least according to Gary. If her boss told her something, she’d probably believe it. And all that was good, because murdering Christine Lindsay would have blown the cover story. Christine is not a fan of Darwin. She’s very devout, very devoted to her church, and publicly Christian. It would have been hard to pin any murder of her on crazed fundamentalists looking to rid the land of Darwinism.”
“And the old lady?” Tibor said. “She is going to be all right?”
“She’s going to be fine,” Gregor said. “Bennis knows her, do you know that? Annie-Vic went to Vassar. Anyway, she’s up and around, recovering much faster than she should at her age, and writing an article on her experiences for the Vassar Quarterly. Then she says she’s going to spend the summer on an ecotour of the Amazonian rain forest, but I think they’re trying to talk her out of that.”
“Who’s that?” Russ demanded. “That’s the tallest man I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s taller than you are.”
Gregor came to the window. “Ah. That’s Nicodemus Frapp. He wasn’t one of our suspects anymore, so I didn’t see any reason not to invite him. He’s a very interesting man.”
“You invited a suspect?” Father Tibor said.
“Look at that,” Russ said. “That’s Oprah Winfrey. That’s Oprah Winfrey. She’s got more security than the President of the United States.”
4
It was at the last minute, when he was already dressed and ready to go, that he went into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. Russ and Tibor were also ready and dressed, but they were out in the living room, looking down on the crowd from the windows, trying to spot people they knew. There would be plenty to spot, because Bennis was like that—a best-selling author, a former Main Line debutante. She knew people.
Gregor sat down on the edge of his bed and leaned over to open the bottom drawer in his dresser. Bennis knew about this drawer. He’d made a point of telling her about it. He had not shown it to her, because he never looked at it himself. Mostly, he didn’t want to. He did want to now.
The drawer stuck. It was part of an older piece of furniture. He tugged until he got it open and then reached in for the single thing it contained, a long cardboard box. He put the box on the bed and took the lid off it. He took out the framed photograph of Elizabeth he had always kept on his desk when he was at the Bureau and reached for the small album just underneath it. It was his wedding album, the first one, and he hadn’t looked at the pictures inside it for a very long time.
Time is the measure of change, he thought again, but then he thought of something else, one of the things that had been part of the packet about evolution he’d insisted on reading when he got back from Snow Hill: Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. There had been evolution here, all right. He had evolved from a young man to a middle-aged one, from a poor man to a “comfortable” one, from an ignorant boy to something he liked better.
But he knew this: if Elizabeth had lived, he would have stayed married to her. Even if he had met Bennis under whatever circumstances, he would not have left his marriage. He had been in love with Elizabeth then, and in many ways he was in love with her now. It was supposed to be impossible to find a love that lasted forever, but he had done it.
What struck him was that he was sure he had actually done it twice.
He flipped through the pictures one after the other: Elizabeth in the wedding dress she had bought at a “good” department store; himself in a rented tuxedo; the long bar at the place they had rented for the reception; his own mother and father, and hers. It was odd to think how many of the people he had grown up around were already dead. It was odd to think that Elizabeth herself was dead, and that he had once sat on this very bed in this very bedroom and talked to the pictures of her, and thought that she might be talking back.
He took one more look through the pile and then put everything back into the box and the box back into the drawer. He closed the door and stood up. Things happened, and then other things happened, and in no time at all your life was something you had never expected it to be. That was not all bad. In fact, a lot of it was good, at least in his case. Even so, you needed to keep control of it. You needed to make sure you did not forget, just because living got in the way.
“Culture,” one of his professors at Penn used to say, “is our conversation with the dead.”
Gregor didn’t know about culture, but he did know about life, and there were plenty of conversations with the dead in that.
5
Twenty minutes later, Gregor Demarkian was standing all the way at his end of Cavanaugh Street, just a few feet away from the police barriers. Tibor was at his side, holding the rings in one hand and looking uncomfortable. Russ was at Tibor’s side, still looking through the crowd for people he recognized. At the police barriers themselves, in the place where a priest would have stood if they were in a church, was John Henry Newman Jackman, mayor of the city of Philadelphia, and, as he would tell anybody who would listen, on the way to being President of the United States. John was confident about only two things. One was that he himself would be President. The other was that Gregor and Bennis would last forever. That one was all Gregor cared about.
Down at the other end of Cavanaugh Street, where Russ and Donna had their town house, there was a stir, and Gregor realized that this was it. They were going. There was a band somewhere. Gregor had no idea where they had been placed. There were folding chairs stretched out for blocks on both sides of the street. There were flowers, and ribbons, and a little girl, no more than four years old, with a basket full of rose petals.
A second later, Gregor saw the bridesmaids, Donna in that expensive dress Russ had complained about. It was a very beautiful dress. Bennis did not seem to be of the opinion that bridesmaids ought to look ugly. After Donna came Linda Melajian. After Linda Melajian came a woman Gregor didn’t know—a cousin, the last female member of Bennis’s family alive and young enough to be here. Bennis’s brothers would be in the crowd somewhere. Gregor thought he would deal with them later, or just get Chris in a corner and pretend the rest of them didn’t exist. Especially the one who was just out of jail.
Then there was Bennis, all the way at the back, with a huge bouquet of flowers in her hands. She was not being walked down the aisle by anyone at all, which made sense, but made Gregor feel a little disoriented. She was wearing a spectacular dress, the top part of which seemed to be made entirely of off-white beads that sparkled in the sun. She had her hair up and back. She was wearing pearls that had belonged to her mother. That was because “wearing diamonds before dark is tacky.” She had told him that. Gregor felt dizzy. She was, he thought, a remarkably beautiful woman, and the beauty had not drained away because she’d passed the age of forty. He was finding it a little difficult to breathe.
Then she was standing right next to him, and handing the bouquet to Donna Moradanyan Donahue. John Jackman picked up the book he’d been holding in one hand and said:
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today—”
It was the Episcopal wedding service. Why was he using the Episcopal wedding service? John was a Catholic. Gregor had been baptized in the Armenian church. Bennis had been an Episcopalian once, but Gregor was sure she wasn’t one anymore. At least, he’d never seen any sign of it.
Gregor looked over to Bennis, who was staring straight ahead, ignoring him.
And then she turned her head very slightly, bit her lip to control a grin, and winked at him.