Living Witness (14 page)

“Oh.” Ms. Holder looked stumped.

Nick closed his eyes. He wondered if this woman knew something about the coming of Gregor Demarkian. He wondered if she knew something about anything. Had he sprouted horns and a tail? Did he have an eye growing out of his forehead? For God's sake.

Literally.

He leaned forward on the desk and sighed. “You know,” he said, “
nobody
is trying to get Creationism into the Snow Hill public schools.”

 

 

 

Gregor Demarkian had always had a theory that it was not really possible to get away from places like Cavanaugh Street, but it was a theory he tended to forget about in the press of business. He had certainly forgotten about it on the day he was supposed to leave for Snow Hill, and so he went down to the curb with his briefcase without thinking for a moment that he'd have any trouble along the way. He was carrying a briefcase and not a suitcase because, as John Jackman kept reminding him, Snow Hill “wasn't very far,” and besides, he wasn't much interested in spending yet another month or so away from Bennis before the wedding. He didn't enjoy the preparations for the wedding. He didn't even like to think about them. Still, he was marrying Bennis because he wanted to spend his time with Bennis. It seemed crazy to him to hole up in motel rooms instead of coming back to his own bed.

The decision would have made more sense if Gregor had been willing to drive, but there it was. He did have a driver's license, but he almost never used it. He wouldn't feel comfortable driving himself to Snow Hill, and none of the other drivers on the road would feel
comfortable, either. If it hadn't been for the wedding preparations, Bennis could have driven him, but Bennis was busy, and Donna Moradanyan Donahue had a relatively new small baby to worry about, and the decorations, too. In the end, Gary Albright had decided to do the driving himself.

“Once a day up and back won't kill me,” he'd said, when they'd tried to make all these arrangements over the phone. “People go longer to commute. And it's not like I'm doing much work right now.”

Gregor wondered if it was really the case that there was so little police work to do in Snow Hill. The town couldn't be entirely removed from reality. There had to be drugs, and Gregor knew from what John and Gary had told him that there were cases of domestic violence. Gregor thought back to the beginning of his career. Surely there had always been cases of domestic violence, although those weren't the kind of cases he would have dealt with when he was at the FBI. He remembered one family on Cavanaugh Street when he was growing up. The husband was an immigrant, just over, and the wife, everybody said, couldn't have done any better. He supposed they meant she was not very good looking. When Gregor had known her, she had been washed out and mousy and plain, but that might have been the result of all those beatings. The police didn't come to do anything about them in those days. They would only have been called in if there had been a chance that he was going to kill her, and all they would have done then would have been to try to calm him down. Surely, the new way of doing these things was better. It made no sense to treat women as natural-born punching bags just because they were married to some idiot; making it easier for abused women to get a divorce was
definitely
an improvement. Still, Gregor couldn't help thinking that there used to be less of it, and not only because it was more seldom reported. It seemed to him that men and women were more brutal to each other now than they had been in decades.

He reached the street with his briefcase and looked up and down it, but there was no sign of Gary Albright. There was no sign of anybody. It was early morning, but not early enough for people to be out
and around on their way to work. The day was clear and cold. Even Bennis had disappeared into the mist, running off to Donna's to discuss chocolate sculptures. Gregor had no idea what a chocolate sculpture was. It always made him feel very odd to look at Cavanaugh Street, since what it
had
been was so firmly etched into his memory. When he was growing up, all the buildings had been tenements. People lived in small, cramped apartments with very few windows and only barely adequate heat. The streets were dirty, but the tenement hallways were clean, because the women had come out every morning and scrubbed them down. It was hard to credit the way they had all lived: the clothes that were patched and handed down; the school books that were carefully covered so that the school could not say they had wrecked them and demand to be paid: the old priest from Armenia who smelled of camphor and breath mints and desperately needed a bath. All Gregor had wanted in those days was for his parents to make enough money to move out to the suburbs. It wouldn't have had to have been the Main Line. He'd thought the best thing in the world would be a house and a yard and a car that his father could polish, the way people did on television.

He looked up and down the street again, but the person he saw was not Gary Albright but Leda Kazanjian Arkmanian, crawling down the pavement at a lordly ten miles an hour. Leda always crawled in that car of hers. Gregor thought she only owned it because her children insisted on giving it to her, and he had to admit it was a very impressive car.

“Swedish,” she'd said, when she'd first gotten it, and everybody was asking her about it in the Ararat. “They started out saying they were going to give me a Mercedes, but I couldn't have that. It's a German car. I mean,
German
.”

Gregor had wanted to say, at the time, that it could have been worse. It could have been a Turkish car. He said nothing, because he knew better than to interfere when people started fighting World War II all over again. Now he watched while Leda pulled up to the curb just across the street from him, making the vehicle make funny noises as she parked. If Gregor had had someplace to go that wouldn't
inconvenience Gary Albright when he finally got here, he would have gone there.

Leda got out of the car and looked up and down the street. There was no traffic. There rarely was at this time of day on Cavanaugh Street. She did something that beeped with her key ring. Gregor thought it was a device that automatically locked or unlocked all the doors of the car. He wasn't up on cars. He didn't understand them. Leda waved to him and began to cross the street. She didn't look happy. Gregor wished he didn't already know what she was going to say.

“Gregor,” she said, when he reached him.

Gregor looked up and down the street again. Surely, Gary Albright couldn't be hopelessly lost. If he had been, he would have called. That was what Gregor had a cell phone for. “I'm waiting for the police officer from Snow Hill,” he said, as if Leda was going to listen.

Leda was looking impressive as only Leda could look these days. She might be an old lady, but she was a magnificent old lady. She was wearing three-and-a-half-inch stiletto heels and a three-quarter-length chinchilla coat. Here was the great payoff of raising your children to work hard and study and get as much education as they could. Leda's children had done very well.

“Gregor,” she said again, as if she hadn't said it the first time, “I came to apologize.”

“There's nothing to apologize for,” Gregor said. “We've got it all worked out. We really do.”

“And you're getting married in the church?”

Gregor sighed. This would be an easier conversation if Leda had been concerned that Gregor and Bennis get married in the Church, with a capital
C
. That would mean she wanted them to have the blessing of the Armenian religion, and Gregor would have had an answer to that that would have been easy for anyone to understand. Unfortunately, Leda was only concerned that the ceremony for Gregor and Bennis's wedding take place inside the physical building of Holy Trinity Church, and she wasn't the only one who was concerned about it.

“I didn't think so,” she said. “I do need to apologize. To apologize
for Father Tibor. To apologize for the whole neighborhood. I never dreamed that he'd be this stubborn, and about what? About a technicality.”

“It's not exactly just a technicality,” Gregor said.

“Of course it is,” Leda said. “And it's un-American, too. Tibor's always so proud of being an American. My niece Alison got married to a Jewish boy not three months ago, and they had the ceremony right in her Catholic church with a rabbi present to give his side of it. And that's the Catholics. The Armenians were never as unreasonable as the Catholics.”

Gregor thought that he could possibly dispute this, but he let it go. “Bennis and I don't want to get married in Holy Trinity Church,” he said, thinking that this was closest to the right thing to say. It was out of the question that he could explain to Leda what the issue really was. He knew that because he had tried, on several occasions. “We really aren't looking to have a religious ceremony.”

“It's not a matter of a religious ceremony,” Leda said. “It has nothing to do with religion. It's a matter of community. You're one of the family here on Cavanaugh Street, and he's treating you as if you were an outsider.”

“No,” Gregor said. “Really. He's not. He's even agreed to perform the actual ceremony, the civil version, you know, just not in the church.”

“Hannah and Sheila and I have come up with a plan,” Leda said. “We're going to make him change his mind. Don't you worry. We know how to make Father Tibor see reason. And if not, well, what of it? I don't want to belong to a church that wants to keep people out more than it wants to bring them in. That isn't what Christ came to teach us. Why should I go to a church that's more snobbish than one of those Main Line country clubs?”

“Really,” Gregor said desperately, “you have this all wrong. You're not thinking about it clearly. If freedom of religion is going to mean anything—”

He cringed as soon as he said it. That was the tack he had tried before, the one that had not worked. Then, at the same moment, he saw
it: a big white pickup truck, the kind almost nobody had in the city. It looked oddly outsized next to all the regular cars. Gregor was sure it was the salvation he was looking for.

“I think that's my ride,” he said, waving at the truck even though he didn't know for sure who was inside it.

Leda wasn't listening. “I think the old ways of religion were bad for everybody,” she was saying. “They were all about keeping people out, and what happened? We all hated each other. We all treated each other as if we were aliens. It can't be like that anymore, Gregor, and I won't put up with it in my own neighborhood.”

The white pickup truck stopped in the street. It didn't bother to even try for a place at the curb. There wasn't enough room, anyway. The driver's-side door popped open and Gary Albright popped out.

“Mr. Demarkian?” he said.

“I've got to go,” Gregor said, grabbing for his briefcase. For a split second he thought he'd lost it. He couldn't remember putting it on the ground. He got a firm grip on it and mouthed a kiss in Leda's direction. He hated that whole custom, whether the kiss actually landed on a cheek or not. “I've got to go,” he said again.

Then he rushed off to the passenger side of Gary Albright's truck. He didn't like climbing into trucks any more than he liked kissing cheeks, but at least this promised relief from the endless machinations of the women of Cavanaugh Street.

“I'll be home tonight,” he said, because he felt he had to say something. “Tell Bennis I got off all right.”

Leda Arkmanian made a face. “Don't you worry,” she said. “We'll fix this. Hannah and Sheila and I have a plan.”

 

As it turned out, riding in a pickup truck was almost more uncomfortable than getting into one. Gregor didn't understand the fascination the damned things had for so many people. It wasn't that he was from the wrong generation. It was men his age who bought these things
when they didn't have to—doctors and lawyers who wanted to seem like—what?—in their spare time. Maybe he just had the wrong history. He'd grown up poor. His experience with rural life had been almost entirely negative until he was well into his twenties, and even then it was more negative than not. God only knew that special agents of the FBI hated the very idea of being assigned to some country backwater, and not because it was bad for the career. There were nuts in them thar hills, and the nuts were armed.

Gary Albright was armed, but that was only to be expected. Gary Albright was a police officer. He had taken himself off this particular case, but Gregor had no reason to believe that he'd stepped down in total. There would be other cases to handle while the problem of Ann-Victoria Hadley went on.

The scenery going past their windows was still unmistakably, uncompromisingly Philadelphia. Gregor took a little comfort in that.

Gary Albright was staring straight ahead. “Mr. Jackman said you were getting married,” he said finally. “Sometime soon. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Gregor couldn't think of anything else to say.

There was a long silence. Gregor had the uneasy feeling that there would be many long silences with Gary Albright. He didn't seem like a man who would talk just to talk.

“Mr. Jackman said you were widowed,” Gary Albright said finally. “I was sorry to hear it. That's a hard thing.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. The statement was true enough. “It was a hard thing. But it's been many years now.”

“Miss Hadley isn't widowed,” Gary Albright said. “She isn't divorced, either. She's never been married.”

“And you think that had something to do with her being attacked?”

“No,” Gary Albright said. He was still staring straight ahead. He was the calmest man Gregor had ever seen who wasn't a serial killer, and Gregor had to remind himself that he had no way of knowing for sure that Gary Albright wasn't a serial killer.