Living Witness (34 page)

 

 

 

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–”

“
Gary
.”

“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?”