At first, waking up, Gregor Demarkian had no idea where he was. Then he did, and he found himself suddenly depressed. If there was one thing he had thought would be an advantage when he took up consulting, being able to go home at night to his own bed and his own refrigerator was it. It just never seemed to work out that way. Even with cases that were close enough to Philadelphia so that only a snail would need to commute, he found himself sleeping in strange houses, in hotels that obsessed about towels and Pay-Per-View, and even in cars. He’d thought he’d given up sleeping in cars a lot longer ago than he had given up the rest of it. He remembered being promoted off kidnap detail and into a desk job more vividly than he remembered his wedding.
His last wedding. He turned a little in the bed he was lying in and looked at the cell phone lying on the nightstand. There was nothing wrong with this room. It was small, as bedrooms go, but it was clean and well furnished and comfortable. Gregor remembered the first time he had ever seen a “raised ranch.” They called them “high ranches” back then, and they were absolutely the newest thing, out in those minor suburbs—not in the Main Line, nothing expensive like that—where some of the Armenian-American families who had started out on Cavanaugh Street had moved. His own family had not be able to afford anything that . . .well, wondrous. Wondrous was how he had thought of it back then, when he’d been ten years old.
And it had all seemed perfectly normal, he thought. It had all seemed to be just the way things were, with no point in thinking about it, and that was the way it had felt ever since then. The more things changed, the less Gregor had noticed the changing.
He reached over to the nightstand and got the cell phone. It was something called a Razr that Bennis had bought it for him. He didn’t understand why none of these companies could spell anything properly. He flipped it open and checked the time. It was just six o’clock. He had no idea if Bennis would be up by now or not. She was up by this time when he was home, but he’d spoken to her late last night. She might have been up doing wedding things. This would be his last wedding, this one. There was a bit of changing he had noticed: Elizabeth and Bennis, the two women in the world he would least have expected to find himself married to, and the world as it was when he had nobody like either of them in it.
He pressed down on the number one, which was the only speed dial he had set up. He waited while the phone rang at the other end. He was always sorry about the fact that the person calling couldn’t hear the ring tone the person receiving heard. Bennis’s ring tone for him was the theme music for Perry Mason.
The ringing stopped and Bennis’s voice said, “If you’ve found another body already, I’m going to come and get you and we can elope.”
“If we elope, we can never go back to Cavanaugh Street,” Gregor said. “They’d kill us, and you know it. I was thinking about raised ranches.”
“What?”
“When I was ten, some people from the street, the Brabanians, moved out to some little suburb somewhere. It wasn’t on the Main Line. It was one of those places, you know, a lot of houses pretty much alike on a quarter of an acre, one after the other. They bought a raised ranch, except I think we called them ‘high’ ranches then. I’d never seen one before. I thought it was the most wonderful thing that existed in the universe. You have no idea how I wanted one.”
“You want a raised ranch? Gregor, you know, if you really do, we could get one. They’re not expensive particularly. But I don’t think they’ll live up to your memory.”
“I don’t want a raised ranch. The town house will do, once we get it set up. But I’m in a raised ranch, you see. The place where I’m staying.”
“Gary Albright’s house.”
“Right. And it’s pretty much the same deal, except this is a lot farther out in the country, so there are houses only on one side of the street, and the yards are bigger. And you know what? I never was comfortable when people made fun of people who wanted houses like this, of people who were happy to have houses like this. I feel like I’m going around in circles here.”
“I understand. You don’t like snobs,” Bennis said. “That’s admirable. I don’t like snobs, either.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “What I’m trying to say, I think, is that I think Gary Albright has built a good and admirable life here. He’s got a lovely wife. He’s got two beautiful children, and the boy is smart as Hell. He lives comfortably. He does his job. What is there to laugh at, exactly?”
“Gregor, if I knew the answers to those kinds of questions, I’d be writing something more serious than fantasy novels.”
“You’d also be making a lot less money,” Gregor said. “Never mind. It’s the kind of thing I think of when I come to places like this. Because our friend Liz is right. She always says that small towns are the cesspit of humanity, and I can see it. I’ve run into people here who would fit, and I’ve heard about others who would really fit. But then there’s this, and this is good, and there’s something wrong about laughing at it.”
Bennis sighed. “Gregor, are you all right? Did something happen?”
“Between ten last night and now? No. I actually called for a reason, it’s just that I’ve been thinking. About a lot of things. About the wedding. Have you managed to get all those women to talk to Tibor again?”
“I think he’d be happier if they stopped talking to him,” Bennis said. “It’s only been a day, Gregor. It will work out. They just think Tibor is being, I don’t know, mean, I suppose, not to let us get married in Holy Trinity.”
“He isn’t refusing to let us get married there,” Gregor pointed out. “We don’t want to get married there. We never asked him. And we won’t. Because I don’t want—”
“Yes, I know,” Bennis said. “It’s all right, really. I’ll do my best, Gregor. I’ve ordered a bunch more chocolate from Box Hill to give to Mrs. Varamanian so she’ll take the evil eye off Tibor. It will work out.”
“The evil eye,” Gregor said.
“They’re just trying to be good to you,” Bennis said.
“Listen,” Gregor said, “do me a favor. Stop planning the wedding and achieving social peace for a minute and call Sister Beata for me. I’d do it myself but I don’t have her number on this phone and I never seem to get ten minutes to myself where I can talk. I want you to ask her about the Catholic Church’s position on evolution and Intelligent Design. If she’s got something on paper, a pamphlet, or she knows of a book, something I could get my hands on and read, that would be even better.”
“This is almost as odd as raised ranches,” Bennis said. “Don’t you already know what you think about evolution? Have you got Catholics there who don’t accept it? I thought what this was about was Protestants, fundamentalists, that kind of thing.”
“It’s not who it is,” Gregor said, “it’s this odd thing. I’ve been here for a day, I must have talked to half a dozen people, they all talk about the lawsuit. But do you know what none of them talks about? Science.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I mean,” Gregor said, “that if an alien dropped down from his spaceship into this town right this minute and listened to what people are saying, he’d never in a million years guess that this is a scientific question. Everybody is talking, and from what I see they’re doing a fair amount of yelling at each other, but none of them is talking about science. Even the head of the group that’s bringing the lawsuit, this local lawyer named Henry Wackford, even he doesn’t talk about the science. He was on CNN last night, handing out hot and cold running anathemas, and the issues were persecution of atheists, radical fundamentalist nutcases trying to run the country, the rising tide of superstition in the nation, all the fault of eight years of George W. Bush, but not a word about the science. And I find that very odd.”
“I don’t,” Bennis said.
“You don’t find anything odd anymore,” Gregor said. “You spend too much time with Donna and Tibor. But I want to know. Does the Catholic Church have anything to say about the science, or are they worried about declining moral values and the rise in drug abuse and the attempts of radical secularists to make it a crime to be a practicing Christian in America.”
“What?”
“That’s the kind of thing I’m getting,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what I thought I was going to find when I got here, but it’s nothing at all like what I’ve got. So if you could get in touch with Sister Beata and explain my problem and get some information for me, I’d appreciate it. I’d really like to have a better handle on what it is I’m supposed to be dealing with here.”
“Are you staying up there for the duration?” Bennis asked. “You’re going to need some clothes if you are.”
“I’m hoping to be home tonight,” Gregor said. “And I mean it. But, yes. Just in case, it had occurred to me to ask one of the people who are showing me around if we could run out to a store somewhere. I’m pretty sure I saw a Wal-Mart on the way in.”
“Gregor Demarkian shopping at Wal-Mart. There’s something I’d like to see.”
“Call Sister Beata,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to get ready in time for Gary Albright to give me a ride down to Main Street.”
Gregor closed up the phone and looked at it in his hand. It was a black phone, and he had not told her he loved her when he said goodbye. He almost never told her he loved her. He hadn’t told Elizabeth, either, except at the very end.
Maybe that meant something, but he didn’t know what.
Gary Albright was dressed and waiting by the door by the time that Gregor made it upstairs. He didn’t look impatient, but then he never looked impatient. That was something else Gregor had noticed about people who had spent a certain amount of time in the military. Sarah was waiting by the door, too, and she seemed not so much impatient as exasperated.
“Let the man eat breakfast, Gary,” she said. “Not everybody can be you and function on nothing but coffee for three days running.”
Gregor glanced involuntarily at Gary’s legs—he didn’t actually know which one the man had lost; he thought John Jackman might have told him, but it had slipped his mind, and he hadn’t been paying attention in the time since—and then looked away again.
“I don’t need breakfast,” he said. “It’s very kind of you to ask, but I almost never eat breakfast. Coffee will be more than fine.”
This was not true. Gregor ate almost every morning of his life at the Ararat, and, if anything, he ate too much breakfast. He wasn’t hungry now, though, and although he’d found nothing particularly awful about Sarah’s cooking, he’d found nothing particularly wonderful about it, either. The great White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culinary ethic. There was something wrong with food if it tasted like anything at all.
“He still shouldn’t be stuffing you in the car when you’re practically still in bed,” Sarah said.
“Do you drink coffee?” Gary asked. “Or do you drink that caramel chocolate crappu–”
“Sorry,” Gary said.
“I drink coffee,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been able to figure out how to order one of those, you know, whatevers.”
“You’d think a man would be ashamed,” Gary said. “But I don’t know. You’re from the city. Maybe that’s what everybody does up there.”
“It’s Philadelphia, not Fire Island,” Gregor said. “We’re pretty normal, most of the time.”
“Of course you are,” Sarah said. “Don’t listen to him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s convinced the entire country is going to Hades in a handbasket. I keep telling him, if he’s so sure, then we should send Michael and Lily to the Christian school, but he won’t listen to me.”
“It’s not a Christian school,” Gary said. “It’s Nick Frapp’s school.”
“He means a school for hillbillies,” Sarah said. “But we’ve got friends from church who send their children to that school, and they’re very happy with it. And it isn’t like it used to be. There aren’t so many hillbillies anymore, not the way Gary is remembering them.”
“You only think that because you don’t see them,” Gary said. He got his hands out of his pockets. His keys came with them. “We’d better go. I’ve got to at least pretend I’m running the department. And Mr. Demarkian has to deal with Dale Vardan.”
“First thing in the morning?” Gregor asked faintly.
“Oh, Dale’s an early bird,” Gary said.
They went out to the truck, still sitting in the driveway from the night before. Gregor climbed in and settled himself as well as he could. The cab was already warm. Gary Albright must have come out and started up a good fifteen minutes ago. Gary got in and slammed the driver’s-side door behind him.
“If you were only being polite about breakfast, you can get a decent one at the diner up the street from the department,” he said. “That’s one of the places you’re probably going to want to go at some point anyway. Alice McGuffie and her husband run it.”
Gary started to back the truck out of the driveway. Gregor looked up the road in both directions: It was an ordinary two-lane blacktop, one of dozens throughout the state. In spite of the houses, the landscape looked entirely devoid of people.
“It’s the emptiness I find it hard to adjust to,” Gregor said. “The lack of people. I’ve lived most of my life in cities. I’m used to either seeing people around or being sure I was in some kind of danger.”
“You mean there’s danger when the people aren’t around, in cities? I’ve never lived in one, myself. I’ve been in them, but I’ve never lived in one. It’s always been either here, you know, or the Marines.”
“And they didn’t station you in a city overseas?”
“Nope. In combat zones once or twice. I think one of those places used to be a city. I don’t know. I would have reupped if it hadn’t been for Sarah and the kids. After 9/11—” Gary shrugged.
“In cities,” Gregor said, as they began bumping along the blacktop on what he presumed was the way back to town, “any area that seems to have no people in it only seems to have no people in it. There are always people, but they’re sometimes out of sight. And it’s never good news when all the people are out of sight.”
“You mean, like, they’re lying in ambush?”
“Sometimes,” Gregor said. “That’s the worst case scenario. But the more likely thing is that what you’ve got around you is drug addicts. Depending on the drug, that can be various kinds of bad news.”
“I never understood drugs,” Gary said. Then he paused, seeming to consider something. “A couple of times, when I was first in the Marines, I tried smoking some marijuana. A lot of the guys did it. But I couldn’t see the point. It was like having about three beers, and I don’t see the point in that, either. You get fuzzed out. You can’t think. I was bored as Hell.”
“Yes, well,” Gregor said. “The kind of drug addicts I was thinking of tend to take one of three things. They take heroin, they take cocaine, or they take methamphetamine. A heroin junkie on a full high is no trouble to anybody unless he overdoses, because heroin pretty much acts like a sedative. When a junkie is flying, he’s pretty much passed out at the same time. He just lies there and feels completely calm. Mind you, he could be freezing to death in the middle of an ice storm. He won’t notice. We’ve got people who go into abandoned buildings looking for these guys when things get bad—”
“You mean the police do that?”
“No,” Gregor said. “We’ve got organizations in the city, mostly volunteer. Quite a few of them run by churches. The hard core of homeless people in Philadelphia, the hard core of homeless people anywhere are either addicted to something or mentally ill, and there’s nothing anything can do except for involuntarily committing them to get them off the streets permanently. And we can’t involuntarily commit them just because they’re living on the street—”
“False imprisonment,” Gary said, nodding.
“And they’re not going to be willing to go into a shelter for the long term, because shelters have rules, the first one always being that they have to give up any substance they’re using, which they don’t want to do.”
“Really don’t want to?” Gary asked.
“Some of them, yes,” Gregor said. “I think we underestimate how much of a role choice plays in addiction. Which doesn’t mean that most of these guys aren’t out of control, or that they could quit any time without help if they wanted to, but the fact is that they can’t quit at all if they don’t want to, and quite a few of them don’t. They’re engaged in a form of slow suicide, really. They think they’ve made a complete waste of their lives, which may be true, and that there’s no point in cleaning up because there’s no way to atone for the things they’ve done, no way to build a life no matter how clean they are, and getting clean would mean nothing but having to face all that and living in pain. So, yes, there are some of them who don’t want to.”
They had turned onto another two-lane blacktop. The houses here were on both sides of the road, set way back and often on a downs-lope, so that the front lawns made for fairly decent sledding hills. Gary Albright was thinking. Gregor was surprised how easy it was to tell that that was the case. Most of the time, it was impossible to read anything in Gary’s face.
“Here’s the thing,” Gary said, finally. “That thing that you described, these people who don’t want to get clean because they’ve got nothing to live for, they’ve got no way to build a life. It isn’t true. If you’re right with God, that’s never true. It would always be possible for you to get clean and to build a life in Christ. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’ve got no idea how many of these people believe in God,” Gregor said. “And I don’t think you can assume that, just because they’re addicts, they don’t.”
“I’m not assuming that,” Gary said. “I’m just trying to say—I mean, think about it. When you give your life over to Christ, there’s always something to live for. There’s always something He can do with you. Christ works in all of us. He uses us for His own purposes. I mean, yes, He wants you to live without sin, but we don’t all manage to do that. Most of us fall. Adam and Eve fell. But even if we fall, even if we spend forty years in a mess of drugs, living on the street, being out of it most of the time, even then, our lives our not a waste if we give them over to Christ and let him use us as He wants to use us. Even if we only have a couple of weeks left between the time we accept Him and the time we go to Him, even then, our lives haven’t been a waste. Even if we only have a couple of minutes. Do you see what I mean?”
“I understand what you’re saying, if that’s what you’re asking,” Gregor said.
“Not exactly,” Gary said. They had made yet another turn, and now they were entering Main Street from its least populated end. “If I know that Christ has a plan for me,” Gary said carefully, “if I know that He wants me, that He can use me, then I’ve got an incentive to get clean no matter how long I’ve been addicted. But if I don’t know that, if there’s nothing but just this life right here, nothing more anywhere, nothing else anywhere, then the behavior of the addicts you’re talking about makes perfect sense. What would be the point of any of them getting clean when they’re not going to live very long and they have nothing to look forward to?”
They were coming right up to the police station. There was a parking lot in the back. Gary was pulling into it.
“And?” Gregor asked.
Gary pulled into a parking space. “I went over to the high school the other day, and Miss Marbledale has a big exhibit up. All about evolution. She’s got posters up, I don’t know. ‘Evolution is change over time.’ DNA. Fossils. And you know what? It’s all beside the point. I don’t care if animals evolved or not. I don’t care if humans evolved or not. Not a single one of us who wanted the ID book in the library—and that’s all it was, we wanted the book in the library, and we wanted a little sticker in the textbooks telling people it was there—none of us cares if evolution happened or not. That’s not the point. And it’s not the point for Henry Wackford, either.”
“I would have thought it was the whole point,” Gregor said.
“Do you ever read that guy, Richard Dawkins?” Gary asked. “He doesn’t think it’s the point, either. He thinks evolution proves that God doesn’t exist, and we have to teach children evolution because that’s the only way to raise a generation that will believe that God doesn’t exist. Henry Wackford will tell you the same thing—just listen to him on television. Well, I’m not interested in raising a generation that believes that God doesn’t exist. I don’t think it’s good for them. I think it leads to depression, and addiction, and hopelessness, and all your addicts who want to stay addicts because they have nothing to live for. I think I’ve known a lot of decent people who aren’t believers and a lot of nasty people who are believers, but at the end of the day, all the hopeful people I know believe. And that’s my bottom line. The science doesn’t matter a damn one way or the other.”
Every once in a while, Gregor thought about actually learning to drive. He had a driver’s license and renewed it religiously every time the paperwork came in the mail, but he didn’t think he had been behind the wheel in years. The last time he remembered was in a small Pennsylvania town called Holman, and then he’d only been trying to divert a horde of paparazzi. He had been only nominally successful.
Still, there were times when he wished he could drive instead of be driven, because there were times when being driven meant losing all sense of where things were and how far they were from each other. When Gary Albright went into the police station, Gregor stayed in the small back parking lot and looked around. Then he went out to Main Street and looked at that. Then he took his notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and looked at that. The problem with small towns was that they were, very often, not really small. When people said “small,” what they really meant was “only lightly populated.” It was the lack of people they noticed, not the physical size of the place. Gregor had been in “small towns” in Kansas and Nebraska whose square footage would overwhelm places like Los Angeles and New York, at least if you stuck strictly to the city limits. That was because of the farms. People had farms out there that felt as large as some small countries, but there were very few people on them.
Gregor didn’t think there were farms of that kind anywhere near Snow Hill. The landscape was wrong, for one thing. For farming on the scale of the American Midwest, you needed a lot of flat, and not much about Snow Hill was flat. Still, he had no idea what the physical size of the town was, or what people thought of as “walking distance.” People seemed to come and go, back and forth, up and down, and Gregor had no sense of what that meant in terms of time, or of effort. It was one thing to go up to Annie-Vic’s house on foot when it was a distance you would walk on any stray day. It was something else to go up there if it took an extra expenditure of effort to make the trip. There was that, and there was the question of cars. It seemed to Gregor, given what people had told him about the things they’d done over the last few weeks, that at least some of the people from “the development” went everywhere in cars. He thought that the people who were really local, deep local, probably did not. It was very hard to work out.
He looked to his left. Nick Frapp’s church was down there, on the end and a little tilted, so that that end of Main Street was almost like a cul de sac. On his right, up about a block and a half, there was the Snow Hill Diner, where the infamous Alice McGuffie held sway on most days. Another block and a half or farther in that direction, the road began to make its way out of town. But Gregor thought, from what he remembered about the drive to Gary’s the night before, there were more houses before “town” ended.
He was thoroughly exasperated with himself. He went to his right, looking back and forth, at the store fronts, at the very few street signs, at the churches. There were churches everywhere, and they were by far the biggest buildings on the street. He checked out the Baptists from across the street. Then he looked through the windows of the Snow Hill Diner. The diner was doing a very good business, probably half full of the people who belonged to the news vans parked up and down the street, still. Gregor was beginning to think of them as fixtures. The diner had those little gingham cafe curtains, on rods that were placed only midway up the glass. Gregor had never understood the attraction of that particular look. He did understand it was supposed to represent something “homey.” Gregor thought of suggesting something to Bennis that took in the idea of homey, and her imagined reaction was so immediate, he almost winced.
He got to the end of Main Street proper, to the end of the stretch where the street was lined with stores on either side. Like the other end, where Nick Frapp’s church was, there was a little slant that made it almost seem as if the street was closed off. It wasn’t, though. It just angled off to the right, and there was a steepish hill. Gregor wondered if it made people claustrophobic to live in a town where the Main Street looked like a closed loop. He imagined that some people found it comforting, as if they were being protected from something.
He stopped where the street angled and looked around. The hill really was steep, but the road beside it had been well plowed and sanded. The only snow was on the bare ground behind the Main Street buildings, and there wasn’t much of it left. He turned around and around and around, trying to place everything in reference to everything else. Then he went back to looking up the hill. The branches on the trees were bare and black, except toward the top of the hill, where there were evergreens. He went a little ways up the angled road and looked to the left. There wasn’t much there, but it wasn’t entirely barren, either. There were houses, older houses mostly. They looked like they might have been built in the twenties, in that last big building boom before the Great Depression. He looked to the right and saw only one house, and that set back from the road.
It wasn’t until he saw the police tape that he realized what he was looking at. Then he walked back a little, looked up and down Main Street again, and returned to where he had first understood what he was seeing. The house was right here. Anybody who was on Main Street could have walked to it, right on the road. It was likely that he could have been seen, too, without anybody thinking anything of it.
Gregor started to climb. He didn’t get all that much physical exercise, but he was large and powerfully built. There was a time in his life when people had tried to talk him into playing football. Football was not his kind of thing, then or now. Walking was, but he went slowly, so that he could look around.
There wasn’t much to see. The houses looked empty, but that didn’t mean anything. Houses of that era often looked empty, because they were dark and hulking things. He wondered who these particular houses belonged to. He had been given an excellent rundown on the Main Street locations, or non–Main Street locations, of most of those on the suspect list during the day, but he knew nothing at all about where they went at night.
He got to the top of the hill, and he was right there. There was a state policeman sitting in a car at the end of the driveway, and another, in another car, on the far side of the front walk. Gregor wondered if they had somebody in back, guarding the back door. He supposed they did. He stopped and looked the house over again, up and down, the hedges, the entry with its overhang, the blank windows on the second floor. That was when the policeman at the front entrance got out of his car and came over.
“Can I help you?” he said. He was polite, but he sounded faintly disgusted. Maybe he’d had enough rubberneckers for this lifetime.
“I don’t think I need any help,” Gregor said, looking up to the second floor again. “I was just trying to get myself oriented. I’m Gregor Demarkian.”
The policeman hesitated, then looked closer, then stepped back. “Well,” he said. “You are.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Gregor said.
“No bother. You don’t know the kinds of crap we’re getting, though. People from everywhere coming by, just to see where the body was. And not just people from here, either. They’ve come all the way from New York, some of them. I’ve seen the plates.”
“But some of the people have been local?” Gregor asked.
The state policeman shrugged. “Sure, I suppose so. And there’s the grandniece, or whatever she is. She came by and complained about the mess in the dining room. There was a woman bludgeoned to death in the dining room, and she was worried about papers being all over the floor. Can you believe that?”
“It does seem like the wrong priority,” Gregor said.
“I think it’s bats, myself. Papers on the floor. According to this woman, the grandniece, whoever, according to her, the woman who usually lives here, the first one who was attacked, always kept her stuff very neat, kept paperweights on it to make sure it wasn’t blown away, that kind of thing. And then when she, the grandniece—when she got here today to pick up her things the papers were blown all over the place and they didn’t have their paperweights, and they had them when the grandniece left the house on the morning of the murder, and blah blah blah. I couldn’t believe the whining.”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“Some people,” the state policeman said. “I’ve been doing this job for twenty years, and I still can’t get over some people. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t a good thing, being in police work for the long haul. You get peculiar. You get so you don’t trust anybody anywhere. You want to go in and have a look around? The crime scene boys have been here and gone. Well, girls maybe—the ME is a woman—but you know what I mean. We’re authorized to let you in any time you want to go.”
Gregor looked at the house again. It could have served as the setting for a fifties horror movie. He couldn’t imagine an old woman living there alone. He turned and looked down the hill again.
“All right,” he said, finally. “I would like to have a look around, if it wouldn’t be putting the two of you out.”
“Not at all,” the state policeman said. “It’s like I said, we’re supposed to allow you in if you want to go. And, to tell you the truth, I’ll be glad to have somebody in there that’s alive and well and sane. This place creeps the Hell out of me.”