Authors: Jane Haddam
I wonder what Karla was doing in Africa, Liza thought. Maybe she’s been like Julianne and Patsy were that time, all in love with primitive peoples and trying to go back to the land. That hadn’t worked out all that well with Julianne and Patsy, had it?
Liza picked up the receiver on her phone. You had to do odd things to the answering machine to make sure it didn’t start working right in the middle of your making a phone call, but Liza avoided those by just unplugging the thing. Then she dialed Julianne’s office number and waited.
“The office of the Honorable Julianne Corbett,” a female voice said.
Liza made a face. “This is Liza Verity,” she said. “I would like to talk to Julianne.”
“I’m not sure the congresswoman is available at the moment. Is there something I could help you with?”
“I’m a friend of hers from college. She left a message on my machine.”
“Just a minute, please.”
Music began playing in Liza’s ear: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Liza made a face at her feet. Then Julianne’s voice came on the line, sounding bright and strained.
“Liza,” she said. “How good of you to call. I must have just missed you. It was only minutes ago.”
I’m sure it was, Liza thought. “What was Karla doing in Africa?” she asked. “Was she living in tree houses and learning how to make native jewelry?”
“No, no.” Julianne sounded impatient. “She’s a photographer. Did you see
The New York Times
last Sunday, the magazine? The cover story on the war in Rwanda?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.” The hospital had several subscriptions to the
Times
, for doctors and patients. The hospital administration seemed to assume that nurses couldn’t read.
“Well,” Julianne was saying, “that cover picture, that black-and-white thing of all the boys, that was Karla’s. And the rest of the pictures in the article were Karla’s too. She’s practically famous, I mean it. Like Annie Liebowitz or Mary Ellen Mark.”
“I’m impressed.”
“So am I.” Julianne sounded impressed. Liza heard her take a deep breath. “Anyway. I thought I’d give a party, and we could have all the people from our Vassar class that I could find—there have to be dozens of us. The Main Line has a very active alumnae club. We ought to get a very good crowd. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds wonderful.” Actually, Liza thought it sounded terrible. She could just picture it: herself in her nurse’s uniform and all the rest of them in their Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein; herself with nothing to talk about but bedpans and union troubles and the rest of them going on at length about the prospects for a rise in IBM stock in the new year. It would be like starting out at Vassar all over again.
“Good,” Julianne said. “Then it’s all settled. I’m going to have to go through her agent—can you believe that? It’s been so long since any of us has seen Karla, I’ll have to go through her agent. Unless you’ve been in contact with her? Have you?”
“Julianne, I didn’t even know what she was doing for a living.”
“Oh. Yes. Well. Anyway, I’ll have to go through her agent, but I’m sure it can all be arranged. And I was thinking that maybe I’d invite a few members of the press too, you know, because—”
“Ah,” Liza said.
“I don’t know what you mean by that.” Julianne was stiff. “Ah.”
“Ah, now I understand what all this fuss is about. Why you want to give this party.”
“I want to give this party because Karla is a good friend of mine and I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“I never thought Karla was that good a friend of yours.”
“She was one of my closest. And so were you. We were almost a family, the four of us—”
“Six,” Liza said automatically.
“Whatever. We were almost a family, and now you’re saying God knows what. Honestly, Liza, that attitude of yours is going to get you in trouble.”
“It already has. On several occasions.”
“Well, then. You see what I mean.”
Liza kicked her right shoe off and listened to it land with a thud on the floor. She began to work her left shoe off with the toes of her right foot, digging at the shoe’s heel the way some people used toothpicks to dig at their teeth.
“Don’t you wish you could find out what Patsy MacLaren thought about all this?” Liza asked Julianne. “Wouldn’t you just love to hear it?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Sure you do. Patsy MacLaren, relegated forever to obscurity. Karla Parrish, getting famous as a photographer. Karla Parrish getting famous as anything. Do you remember the things Patsy used to say about Karla?”
“Patsy and Karla were very good friends,” Julianne said.
The second shoe was off. The two shoes lay like dead white jellyfish on the carpet.
“Patsy MacLaren was never a friend to anyone,” Liza said, “and certainly not to awkward, drab girls who didn’t know how to dress.”
“Really,” Julianne said. “The things you think about to say. And I don’t see what good it does obsessing about poor Patsy now. She’s not even around for you to take it out on.”
“I think it’s a very good idea that she’s not around.”
“Well, I miss her,” Julianne said, “and you probably do too, if you’re honest about it. And besides, it’s hardly her fault that she’s—relegated to obscurity, as you put it.”
“I’ve got some work to get done around here,” Liza said. “Call me back when you’ve got some details on this thing.”
“Oh, I will. I will.”
“Say hello to Karla for me if you get the chance.”
“You can say hello to Karla yourself. At the party.”
“I’ve got to go, Julianne.”
Julianne said something else that Liza didn’t hear. Liza hung up and spent a moment staring at the phone, as if it would tell her things she needed to know, like how she could be almost fifty and still not satisfied with her life. Her parents’ generation had made such a point of trying to grow up. Maybe she should have made a point of it too, so that she didn’t feel adolescent and geriatric at the same time, staring at white shoes on a blue carpet.
Crap, Liza thought, standing up and heading for the small kitchen at the back.
It really was too bad there was no way of knowing what Patsy MacLaren would have thought about Karla Parrish making a success of herself. It really was too bad that Patsy had sunk out of sight and left not so much as a ripple in the water.
Still, Liza thought, sometimes you had to admit it. Sometimes life really did work out just the way you wanted it to.
F
ORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, AT
precisely eighteen minutes after four o’clock, a black Volvo station wagon parked on the second level of a Philadelphia garage began to rock. The noise it made was so distinctive, the man in the glass ticket booth at the garage’s entrance began to get disturbed. He was worried that there were vandals in the garage, or teenagers looking to steal something they could sell for serious money. The neighborhood around there had been going to hell for years. The man put out his cigarette on the cement floor of his booth and stepped out into the air. He lit another cigarette and rocked back and forth on his heels. Maybe he ought to go back into the booth and call the cops. Maybe he ought to just walk away from there, take what money he could and leave. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking this cigarette. Nobody was supposed to smoke on duty in the garage. He took a deep drag and started up the incline.
The Volvo was parked in one of the spaces that faced that ramp. He saw it as soon as he came up over the rise, bucking and shuddering, as if somebody were having trouble with a standard transmission. For a moment he thought that must be what it was. Somebody was having trouble getting their car started. Then he saw the driver’s seat behind the wheel and realized that no one was there. The car was absolutely empty and the locks on the doors closest to him were pushed all the way down.
The woman who wanted the all-day parking ticket, the man thought to himself as he continued climbing up the ramp. Then he heard something like a pained grinding of gears and stepped instinctively back. The stepping-back probably saved his life. A second later there was a scream and a blast. The garage was suddenly so hot, it was like being in a blast furnace. Smoke and fire shot up out of the Volvo and side to side too, hitting the cars on either side of it, starting a chain reaction in a small Toyota that had come in only half an hour before. Smoke and fire was rising up into the concrete. Metal was everywhere, and glass, and what felt like melted rubber still hot enough to burn flesh.
The man began to back down the ramp. Then he turned and started to run. He ran right out of the garage and onto the street. The sidewalks were full of people at a dead stop. Black smoke was billowing out of the garage’s third level. Windows were broken on cars half a block away.
“Fire department, fire department,” the man started shouting, but no one was listening to him.
They were all standing stock-still in the street, so that when the second large blast came—the biggest one, ripping through cars on either side of the Volvo like a buzz saw through balsa wood and shooting bits of debris into the air like lethal snow—three people had their eardrums shattered and four got bits of powdered glass in their eyes.
A Marriage Made in Heaven or Someplace
F
ROM THE MOMENT THAT
Gregor Demarkian had first heard about Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, he had wanted to be happy about it. After all, he kept asking himself, what could there possibly be not to be happy about? In all the years Gregor had known her, the one thing she had really needed was a good husband. She was only twenty-two years old and on her own with a small child. The small child’s father had disappeared into the mists of studied irresponsibility as soon as he had heard of the impending arrival of the small child. The man she was marrying was a blessing too: Russell Donahue, once a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department, somebody they all knew. Donna was even going to go on living on Cavanaugh Street. Howard Kashinian was fixing up another dilapidated stone house on the northern edge of the neighborhood. Donna’s parents were giving her the down payment for a wedding present. Russ was just as happy to live there as anywhere else—happier, in fact, since the neighborhood was safe and he liked most of the people in it.
“Donna can even go on decorating everything,” Lida Arkmanian had said, explaining the whole thing to Gregor one afternoon just before Christmas. “It will be like nothing has really changed at all, except that Donna will have Russell and Tommy will have a father.”
“It’s just like Howard Kashinian to ask for a down payment from Donna of all people,” Father Tibor Kasparian had said about a week later. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Howard. I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about Howard.”
Gregor Demarkian had known Howard Kashinian all his life. He
knew
there was nothing to be done about the man—but Howard Kashinian wasn’t the problem, and thinking about him wasn’t going to solve anything. Week after week went by. Winter turned into spring. Donna wrapped the four-story brownstone they all lived in in red and silver foil for Valentine’s Day and in green and yellow ribbons for Mother’s Day. She wrapped all the streetlamp poles in bright red bolts of satin cloth and strung balloons between them for her son Tommy’s birthday. Sometimes Gregor would hear her, pacing back and forth in the apartment above his head, her step light and oddly rhythmic. Sometimes he’d see her out his big front living room window, skateboarding along the sidewalk with her hair flying while Lida or Hannah Krekorian kept Tommy sitting safely on a stoop. Once Gregor had gone downstairs to Bennis Hannaford’s place, to see if she would feed him coffee and cheer him up, but it hadn’t worked. Bennis was Donna’s best friend on Cavanaugh Street, maybe the best friend Donna had in the world, in spite of the fact that Bennis was nearly forty instead of just past twenty and nothing like Donna in background at all. Her apartment was full of bits and pieces of Donna’s wedding, strewn about like dust among the debris of her real life: big maps of make-believe places called Zed and Zedalia; papier-mâché models of dragons and trolls. There was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf built into the wall in Bennis’s foyer, filled with editions of the books she had written herself.
The Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia
had a unicorn on the cover and a dragon with a curling tail.
Zedalia in Winter
had a lady in a conical hat and a lot of veils, riding on a horse. The latest one,
Zedalia Triumphant
, had a plain red background and nothing else at all. Bennis was on the
New York Times
best-seller list. As far as her publisher was concerned, she was now making enough money to be considered a Serious Writer, and Serious Writers did not have the covers of their books cluttered up with garish four-color pictures of rogue trolls.
“They wanted me to go out to the Midwest and tour the week of Donna’s wedding,” Bennis had said as she let Gregor through her door. He had a key to her apartment, but he never used it. It made him feel odd—somehow—to have it. “But I told them to forget it. I mean, for God’s sake. I just got back from England. I’m going up to Canada in four days. It’s not like I’m recalcitrant about doing publicity.”
“Mmm,” Gregor had said.
Bennis led him into her kitchen. Her thick black hair was piled on top of her head. Her legs and feet were bare under her jeans. Her long-fingered hands looked cold. Gregor sat down at her kitchen table and cleared a place for himself. Bennis had pieces of a copyedited manuscript spread out everywhere. Every single page seemed to display a pale yellow Post-it Note with a message in navy blue ink and a plain white Post-it Note with a message in red.
Don’t you think you should mention Hitler here?
one of the blue-inked messages read.
This is taking place in 1882, for Christ’s sake
, the red-inked message shot back.
Hitler hadn’t even been BORN yet.
Gregor wanted to ask what Hitler had to do with Zed and Zedalia, but he didn’t. Bennis put a large cup of coffee down in front of him.