And One to Die On (34 page)

“That’s right. Cavender told Hannah where to go and what to do, and Hannah went and did it all.”

“And in the meantime, she ran into Carlton.”

“We think so, yes. This part is mainly conjecture, of course, because we don’t have any of the principals here to tell us what really happened, but my guess is that Hannah saw Carlton Ji sneak off after dinner, and as soon as she had a chance, she sneaked off in the same direction.”

“And found him in the attic.”

“Looking through that trunk full of pictures the young man from the coast guard found,” Gregor said. “Yes, I think that’s it exactly.”

“And being attacked by bats.”

“I doubt if they stayed in the attic proper for very long, Bennis. My next guess is that Carlton Ji being Carlton Ji, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He told Hannah Graham all about how he was sure that the Tasheba Kent who was living on an island off the coast of Maine wasn’t really Tasheba Kent at all, but Lilith Brayne.”

“Which he knew from all the research he’d done into the black feather boa.”

“From that and from the pictures in the attic. You really should have taken a look at them, Bennis. They were a very interesting collection. Anyway, the warming iron or whatever it was was lying on the attic floor. There are half a dozen of them up there. She got one and bashed his head in and left his body where it lay.”

“On the back stairs landing to the attic.”

“That’s right. There was a pint of blood soaked into the carpet up there.”

Bennis tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. She pressed down on the accelerator and surged past a pale blue Toyota. Gregor could see the driver’s face: a pale white blur as they raced by. “So then she came downstairs and fixed the CD player, and then she went to bed.”

“She went to her bedroom and waited for the rest of us to go to bed.”

“Then she went down to her mother’s room? Carrying the warming iron?” Bennis was doubtful.

Gregor shook his head again. “Bennis, you’re making this unnecessarily complicated. Try to remember that Hannah had been trying to contact her father for years. All she had to do was to go down to his room and to insist on talking to him. It would have seemed perfectly natural.”

“While carrying the warming iron?” Bennis repeated.

“She could have carried anything she wanted,” Gregor said. “Lilith Brayne was younger than her sister, but only by a year. Her sight was bad even with her glasses on. She slept on the far side of the bed from the door. My God, Bennis. Hannah Graham could have marched in there carrying a Sherman tank on her back, and the old lady wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. And Cavender Marsh wouldn’t have cared. He was
expecting
Hannah to show up with a murder weapon.”

“So she went in there with the warming iron,” Bennis said, changing lanes without checking for traffic, “and then what did she do?”

“Just what she was expected to do. She killed Lilith Brayne.”

“Right there in the bed like that.”

“That’s right.”

“With Cavender Marsh awake and watching.”

“Right again.”

“Yuck.”

“I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But there isn’t anything pleasant about any of this. Anyway, Hannah did the job right this time and there wasn’t too much blood. That was probably an accident, but it wasn’t an accident that mattered. After that, Cavender Marsh took some sleeping pills that Hannah gave him. We think from something Mathilda Frazier said that she might have stolen them from Mathilda’s room. Anyway, Cavender lay down and got ready to go to sleep. Hannah started to go back to her own room, but then the commotion started with the sound effects and she couldn’t.”

“But, Gregor, wait a minute. Tasheba Kent—Lilith Brayne—wasn’t really dead.”

“Sure she was. Or as good as. What she did, coming down in the wig and the negligee, isn’t really all that unheard-of with head wounds. I could cite you a dozen different cases. That’s not the same thing as saying that the woman wasn’t really dead. She
was
dead. And try to remember, it’s taking me longer to tell you all this than it actually took it all to happen.”

“The sound effects were to distract us,” Bennis said.

“Partially to distract us and partially to give Hannah a definite period of time when she could leave her mother’s room without being spotted. And partially, of course, the whole incident was meant to ensure that the old woman’s body was discovered, and that Cavender was discovered right next to it, sleeping peacefully away.”

“Was that what all the birthday decorations were about later, too, the ones in Hannah’s room and the ones downstairs in the dining room?”

Gregor nodded, keeping his eyes carefully off of the road. “Mostly. Hannah wanted us to find Carlton’s body without going up to the attic to find it. There were lots of things in the attic that she didn’t want us to see. Especially those pictures. She also wanted to say that she was being persecuted, so that it would look as if things were being done to her and not as if she were doing things. She also did not, in fact, want to discover the body herself. So she brought it downstairs—”

“Wasn’t that dangerous, with all of us awake and wandering around?”

“Maybe she didn’t wait until we were all awake and wandering around,” Gregor said.

“I never thought of that.”

“Just try to remember that with Carlton Ji and Richard Fenster, Hannah was on her own. Cavender Marsh had only bought into one murder, not two completed and one attempted.”

Bennis was thoughtful. “Hannah Graham killed Carlton Ji because he figured out that the woman calling herself Tasheba Kent was really Lilith Brayne.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she try to kill Richard Fenster for the same reason?”

“Of course. Richard Fenster had worked it all out from the shoes, you see. As soon as he saw the corpse of the woman calling herself Tasheba Kent, he knew she couldn’t be Tasheba Kent, because of the size of her feet. It just took him a while to accept the fact that he was seeing what he was seeing.”

“I guess I just don’t understand that as a motive,” Bennis said. “I mean, what difference could it possibly make if any of us knew that that woman was really Lilith Brayne? From Hannah’s point of view, I’d think it would be preferable if we did know it. I’d think we would have been far less likely to believe that Hannah would have killed the old woman if we knew the old woman was her mother.”

“Possibly,” Gregor said, “but I think it was something really quite simple. I think Hannah was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“
Ashamed
might be a better word. I don’t think she wanted anyone to know that her own mother had had no use for her even as a baby. I think the idea that anybody might know that tore Hannah up.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

They were bouncing along to their exit now, not far from the turn that would put them on a straight shot into the state of Pennsylvania. Gregor thought about telling Bennis that it was too cold to keep the top down, but decided that it wouldn’t do any good.

“People ought to be more careful about children,” Gregor said instead. “Adults treat children as if they’re still being formed in the womb in some ways, as if their emotions aren’t complete. But their emotions
are
complete. They’re subject to monsoons of feeling they can’t understand and can’t control and can’t begin to come to terms with, and when they try to get help they’re treated as if they’ve got nothing worse wrong with them than a cut finger. Adults think that what children don’t understand, they don’t feel.”

“Wonderful,” Bennis said. “A lecture on children from a man who basically thinks they’re all right as long as they belong to someone else. Can I quote you, Gregor?”

“You can always quote me, Bennis. I don’t see how I could stop you. I can’t stop you from doing anything else.”

Bennis seemed about ready to make an answer to this, but the road was widening out and there were signs she had to watch, and she reached for her pack of cigarettes instead. The Joni Mitchell tape had finished playing. Bennis popped it out and fished in the well for another one.

All the Joni Mitchell songs Gregor Demarkian had ever heard had been played for him in cars driven by Bennis Hannaford, and all of them had concerned the excruciating breakup of one love affair or another.

It was beyond Gregor’s understanding why Bennis would want to listen to songs like that.

A
N HOUR AND A
half later, Bennis Hannaford pulled the tangerine orange Mercedes into the parking garage where she kept it while she was in town, raised the roof, took the keys, and made sure she had everything that had been scattered around on the seats safely in her shoulder bag. Then she walked the keys to the garage office and dropped them off. Several minutes before, she had dropped Gregor Demarkian off in front of the brownstone where they both had floor-through apartments. She had dropped the luggage off with him and told him to find a kid to haul it upstairs for him. There were always kids hanging around Cavanaugh Street, looking to make money doing errands. There hadn’t been when Bennis first moved into her apartment, but in the meantime the Soviet Union had collapsed and Armenia had declared its independence and the refugees had come pouring in. Now Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church was running a parish school of its own and most of the older women were placing displaced families in equally displaced housing and the neighborhood was expanding again, for the first time in decades. It was an immigrant neighborhood again for the first time in decades, too. Over the past several months, Bennis had been developing an ability to swear prodigiously in a language she hadn’t even known existed until she was over thirty-five years old.

Bennis turned off Wessex onto Cavanaugh and checked out the windows of the Ararat restaurant, where Linda Melajian was sitting behind the cash register, reading a John Grisham novel and looking tired. Linda looked up and waved. Bennis waved back and kept going. The doors of Holy Trinity Church were open, but nobody was going in or out, and she couldn’t see Father Tibor Kasparian anywhere. The windows of Lida Arkmanian’s living room were open, and Bennis could see Lida. She was moving back and forth in a flurry, tidying up for the arrival of the maid.

Lida Arkmanian’s town house was directly across the street from the brownstone where Bennis and Gregor had their apartments. Bennis could see Gregor sitting on the stoop there next to Old George Tekemanian and little Tommy Moradanyan. Old George Tekemanian had the ground-floor apartment in their brownstone. Tommy Moradanyan and his mother, Donna, had the top-floor apartment. Donna Moradanyan was Bennis’s best woman friend on the street. Bennis wondered where she was.

“So,” Bennis said, coming up to the two men and the small boy and sitting down herself. The luggage had disappeared, which she took as a good sign. Gregor hadn’t just sat down on the stoop and decided he was too exhausted to cope.

“So,” Bennis said again. “Where’s Donna gone?”

“Donna is off at the art-supply store,” Old George said. “She will be back in a moment. Did you see this wonderful thing my grandson Martin bought me?”

Bennis took the gadget Old George was holding out to her. It was made of metal and cork and looked like nothing she had ever seen before.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a device for pitting pomegranates,” Gregor said. “Sterling silver.”

Bennis handed it back to Old George.

The wind was rising and it was getting cold again, but it was a good kind of cold, full of sunshine and the smell of roasting chestnuts. In a few hours, they would have to tell everyone they knew on the street everything that had happened on that island in Maine, and they would do it, because it was an obligation, like paying taxes and making sure not to litter. Bennis was just glad that they did not have to do it now. Bennis knew that Gregor thought she was obsessed with what he called his “extracurricular murders,” but that wasn’t quite true. Sometimes she was and sometimes she wasn’t. The weekend had taken a lot out of her.

Now she got out her cigarettes and lit one. She blew a stream of smoke in the air and suddenly found herself attended by a furiously frowning Tommy Moradanyan, aged four.

“You’re not supposed to be doing that anymore,” he told her sternly, pointing to her cigarette.

“Well, I’m trying not to do it,” Bennis told him.

“If you go on doing it, your lungs will rot,” Tommy Moradanyan said. “They’ll turn to black powder and fall out of your chest and then you won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

“Where does this kid get his vocabulary?” Bennis asked the air. “Where does he get his ideas?”

“From Tibor,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“If your lungs don’t fall out, they’ll get full of junk instead,” Tommy Moradanyan continued relentlessly. “They’ll get so full of junk you won’t be able to put any air in them. You’ll turn blue.”

“Tibor smokes like a chimney,” Bennis said. “Israeli cigarettes. Without filters.”

“When you die they won’t even be able to bury you in the regular place,” Tommy went on. “Your body will smell so bad, none of the other bodies will want to be around it.”

Bennis Hannaford looked into Tommy Moradanyan’s big black eyes and got the distinct impression that he was having a very good time saying these things to her.

Then she took one last drag on her Benson & Hedges menthol, dropped the cigarette to the pavement, and ground the lit tip cold under her heel.

Welcome home.

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