Flowering Judas (29 page)

He tried again, this time searching for “Chester Morton WY,” as if Chester were a town in the mountains. He got a small flurry of hits, most of them the same hits he'd had before, but targetted to the parts of them that mentioned that Chester had always loved Wyoming. He tried the Wyoming Citizen's Crime Watch, and got nothing. He tried the New York Citizen's Crime Watch and got a long lead story about a woman who had robbed a bank wearing a burka. Except that nobody was sure it really was a woman. The burka covered too much.

Gregor got up and moved away from his laptop. He went to stand at the windows that looked out onto the parking lot. He pulled the curtains back and stared at the darkening evening, the lights going on in the town of Mattatuck, the cars in their parking spaces. At the edge of the parking lot, there were grass and trees and what looked like a dirt access road—except that it might not have been dirt. It might just have been dusty from lack of use.

If you eliminate the impossible, Sherlock Holmes used to say, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Gregor had no idea if he was quoting that correctly. But he got the general idea, and the general idea was right. The problem was that everything in this case was improbable, and nothing was really impossible. What felt impossible were the really massive improbabilities—that body wandering all over creation like it was still ambulatory; the complete lack of anything like professional police work in a town that was large enough to qualify as a small city; the entire story of Chester Morton, which was half like a fairy tale and half like the kind of pulp novel that had been popular in the Forties.

One day, twelve years ago, Chester Morton had decided to leave. One day, a couple of weeks ago, Chester Morton had decided to come back and had brought with him a baby's skeleton in a yellow backpack. There was no rhyme or reason to it. None. Maybe, twelve years ago, he'd left town because he'd killed the baby. Maybe that was the baby Darvelle had said he'd wanted to buy. But, what baby? There was nothing in any of the material Howard Androcoelho had sent him to indicate that there was a baby that had gone missing at the same time Chester Morton had. There was nothing to indicate that a woman had gone missing around the same time, either.

Gregor walked back across the room to the door, then back again to the window. He leaned his forehead against the glass. He counted to ten. Nothing shook itself loose.

He opened his eyes again, and looked out.

And that was when he saw it.

Out on the access road, half hidden by the trees and the grass and the puddled darkness beyond the security lights, a car had come to a stop. The light from the headlights hung in the air for a while and then went out. The interior light went on and stayed on for longer than it had any right to. Then that light went out and another light went on in the interior, as if somebody were using a flashlight.

It didn't look right at all, and it didn't feel right.

And Gregor Demarkian didn't trust anything that happened in Mattatuck to be about anything but the Chester Morton case.

2

Gregor Demarkian didn't think for a moment about what he was doing until he got past the parking lot and into the grass. Then it occurred to him that he was behaving like an idiot. It had been years since he'd done any kind of field work, and even that had required him to spend time sitting in a car, not thrashing through the underbrush. He wasn't dressed for this. The slick soles of his wing-tip shoes kept threatening to slide out from underneath him. The landscape around him was too dark. The security lights in the parking lot were aimed inward, toward the hotel. The access road in front of him had no lights at all.

Whoever was in the car still had the flashlight going, though, and Gregor thought that was interesting. Batteries didn't have all that long to run before they conked out on you, and whoever was using these was behaving as if that didn't matter. Gregor tried to see what the person in the car was doing. The impression he got was that the person was … reading a book. But that made no sense.

After the tall grass, there was a stretch of marshy stuff and brush, and then some small trees. Gregor made himself move slowly. He didn't want to be heard, but mostly he didn't want to fall. The closer he got, the more obvious it was that the person in the car was a woman, and that the woman was at least middle-aged, if not edging toward elderly. It wasn't anybody he recognized. It certainly wasn't Charlene Morton. Whatever could she be doing here sitting alone on an access road with her engine off in the middle of the night?

Suddenly, the woman's head went up. She looked around, from one of the car's windows to the next. Gregor stood very still, he wasn't sure why. He must not have stood still enough. The woman put a stiff plastic card into the book she was reading and then put the book down on the dashboard. Then she leaned over and got something out of the glove compartment.

What happened next happened so fast that Gregor was never able to remember it properly, never mind explain it to anybody else. One moment, he was standing still next to a weak tree, thinking he was entirely invisible. The next, the door of the car popped open, the woman inside jumped out, and there was the clear backfire of a bullet going off in the air. Less than a second later, the bullet hit the ground near his feet, and he jumped.

“Damn,” he said.

“Who are you?” the woman said. “Come out of there. Come out where I can see you.”

Gregor thought that if he really had been a mugger, or a crazed homicidal maniac combing the bushes for his next serial kill, this woman would never have made it off this access road alive. She was holding the gun as if it were a Popsicle stick.

“Come out of there,” she said again. “Who are you? What do you want?”

Gregor swore under his breath, for real this time. “For God's sake, stop shooting that thing,” he said, moving closer to her through what was still very tall grass. “You don't know what you're doing.”

“Who are you?” the woman demanded again.

By now, Gregor was out on the access road proper. The woman had to be able to see that he was nearly as old as she was, and probably in far less good physical shape. She was squinting at him through the darkness.

“My name is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said, “and—”

“Oh,” the woman said, letting the gun drop to her side. “Oh, my God. You are Gregor Demarkian. I'm so sorry. I could have hurt you. I didn't mean to. It's just that I have to be so careful, I mean out here, you know, you can never tell who's going to come along, that's why I got this thing, but I've never actually used it before, so—”

“I could tell you'd never actually used it before.”

“Oh, well. Actually. I did use it once. I took it to a firing range. You know. To see how it was. I fired it there.”

“Did you hit anything?”

“I think I hit the floor. I hurt my wrist.”

“Of course you did,” Gregor said. He got closer to the car and looked inside. Even without any lights at all, it was obvious that the car was loaded down with stuff. Clothes were piled high in the backseat. Books were everywhere. “My God,” Gregor said. “You're living in this car.”

The woman was quiet for a long time. “Only temporarily,” she said finally. “Only until the cold weather hits. I've got almost enough money to rent a place for the entire winter. I only need a couple of more weeks.”

“A couple of more weeks,” Gregor said. “You've got a job?”

“Of course I've got a job,” the woman said. “I've got two of them. If I've got any luck, I'll have three for the fall term. I teach English.”

“At a high school?”

“At Mattatuck–Harvey Community College,” the woman said. “Also at Pelham University. That's a private place, down the road. It doesn't pay nearly so well.”

“You're a college teacher and you can't afford to rent an apartment?”

“I'm an adjunct,” the woman said. “That means I'm only part time. Except with teaching it isn't like part time is most places. They don't divide your hours by the hours for full time and give you that percentage of a full-time salaray. I get paid forty-one hundred dollars to teach each course at Mattatuck–Harvey, and nineteen hundred to teach each course at Pelham—”

“That's what? A week? A month?”

“That's the
course,
” the woman said. “The entire course.”

“This Pelham University place pays you less than two thousand dollars to teach an entire course?” Gregor said. “Over, what is that, three months?”

“Fourteen weeks,” the woman said. “Three classes a week of an hour each, plus office hours every week, plus whatever it takes to do prep and correcting. At Mattatuck–Harvey, it's sixteen weeks. It used to be all right, though, because I used to be able to teach three courses at Mattatuck–Harvey every term, and with the two at Pelham I'd just about make it. But there's a union at Mattatuck–Harvey, and they got a rule passed that nobody can teach more than two classes a term in the entire community college system, so I can't even drive out to Binghamton and teach there. So I'm making some accommodations.”

“That's insane,” Gregor said. “How do they ever get anybody to work for them? Are you the only—what did you call it? Adjunct?”

“Better than three quarters of all the teachers at Mattatuck–Harvey are adjuncts,” the woman said. “And the percentage is higher at Pelham. And the reason why I do it is that it's the only job I could get. I've got a doctorate. I'm almost sixty. Put the combination together and you're not going to get hired full time at much of anything. All the people they've hired full time at Mattatuck–Harvey over the last ten years have been under forty.”

The woman held out the hand with the gun in it, then dropped that hand to her side. Gregor swore he could see her blush, even in the darkness. “Sorry,” she said. “I've never had any cause to take it out before. And it's a good coincidence you found me here, really, because I've been meaning to come and talk to you. My name is Penelope London. I was Chester Morton's English teacher at the time he disappeared.”

Gregor thought about it. “London,” he said. “That name's in my notes somewhere.”

“Oh, it should be,” Penny said. “When they actually bothered to start investigating Chester's disappearance they did get around to me. Howard Androcoelho and Marianne Glew came and interviewed me for nearly an hour. And Marianne took notes. I knew both of them, though, before that, because they'd both been at Mattatuck–Harvey for a while. That's what people do around here. If they go away to college, they don't come back. If they're going to stick around, they go to Mattatuck–Harvey.”

Gregor looked at the woman standing there, and then the car, and then back at the lights in the parking lot of the hotel. He'd come through all that tall grass, and as far as he knew, there were snakes in it.

“Come on,” he said. “You can give me a ride back to the hotel. Then we can go sit someplace and talk.”

3

It took less time than Gregor thought it would to talk her into it, just the assurance that there was an entirely separate room, with nobody in it for the night, and nobody likely ever to sleep in the second of the big queen-sized beds.

“It seems a shame that the man has to spend the entire night sitting up with a corpse,” Penny London said. “And what for? Because Howard Androcoelho can't get his act together. Howard's always a big fave with the Mattatuck–Harvey Taxpayers Association. They're the ones who don't want to pay for anything. They're the reason the police radios don't work for half the town.”

“Excuse me?” Gregor said.

“Oh, I'm not making that up,” Penny said. “Mattatuck's a huge place, really, considering just land mass, and there are dead areas for the radios in at least half of it. So we had a referendum a few months ago, to vote on getting a new system put in and a new service provider, but it was going to cost five million dollars, and that was that. I suppose none of them live out in the middle of nowhere where the radios wouldn't work if they were in trouble. I mean, for God's sake. Really.”

Gregor let her go into Tony Bolero's room to shower and change. He heard the shower go on immediately, and when he did he called down to the restaurant and ordered takeout. He ordered a lot of takeout. He had no idea what Penny London liked to eat. She could be a vegetarian. She was a middle-aged professional woman with a doctorate. She could even be a vegan. He ordered four entrees—everything from the vegetarian stir-fry to a pair of very thick steaks—and slipped out to pick them up. This kind of thing was easier to do in places that had real room service.

When he got back to the room with his bags of food, the room next door was quiet. Penny London had finished taking her shower. Gregor knocked on the connecting door.

“Are you all right for company? Come on in. I brought us some dinner.”

“Oh,” Penny London said, from behind the door. Then the door opened and she stuck her head into Gregor's room. Her hair was wet and sleeked back. She was wearing a pair of loose cotton pants and a sweatshirt. “Oh,” she said again, looking at the food Gregor was spreading out on the table near the windows. “You know, I'm really not poor. I do eat.”

“You're living in your car, and dinner is on me. Come on in and have something and tell me about Chester Morton in your English class.”

“Just a minute.” Penny London disappeared for a second. When she came back, she was holding a manila file folder. She left the connecting door open and came in to sit at the table in front of the food. “This is incredible,” she said. “Do you normally eat this much?”

“I didn't know what you liked. I like steak, so I got two of those, in case you wanted one. Is that folder about Chester Morton?”