Bleeding Hearts (30 page)

She tucked the manila envelope under the waistband of her skirt and pulled her sweater down over it. Then she put the shoe tree back together and stood it up. The bathroom was right across the hall. She went in there and flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink.

“Caroline?” she called, coming back out into the hall. “I’m on my way.”

Caroline didn’t answer. Alyssa thought it was a very good sign.

Alyssa thought it was a very good thing that Caroline never paid any attention to anybody but herself.

S
ONIA VELADIAN WAS A
round-faced, slightly plump, cheerful young woman who looked vaguely familiar, and for a moment or two after Gregor Demarkian opened his apartment door to her he couldn’t remember who she was. It was quarter to six in the evening. Before his doorbell rang, he had been sitting at his kitchen table, going over the timetable Mary and Helen had made out for him and worrying over the things Hannah had told him. He had also been eating, but feeling very guilty about it. He had not been earing well. Just an hour before, Donna Moradanyan had emerged from her unprecedented holiday funk to bring him a heart-shaped chocolate layer cake with strawberries in syrup all over the top of it and real whipped cream in the middle. If Bennis had seen it, she would have delivered the lecture to end all lectures on The Virtues of Green Vegetables and The Necessities of Watching What You Ate Once You Got Older. It was Gregor’s contention that he did watch what he ate. He watched his bacon and eggs. He watched his pepperoni pizzas and his three-inch-thick prime ribs and his
yaprak sarma.
He was keeping an especially close eye on this cake. It was too bad that that wasn’t the sort of thing Bennis wanted him to do.

“I like that police officer they have,” Donna Moradanyan told him. “The one who’s supposed to be in charge of the case but isn’t really, because your friend is.”

This took a while to work out. Finally, Gregor said, “Oh. You mean Russell Donahue.”

Donna nodded. “He seemed very intelligent. And nice too. Not as if he were the kind of person who would—hound Hannah or anything.”

Gregor had wanted to tell her that it was hardly a case of anyone hounding Hannah, but he hadn’t had time. Donna had said something about not wanting to leave Tommy alone so long and ran back upstairs. Gregor had retreated to his kitchen and his timetable and a decent knife and fork. He had just written three very important lines at the top of his legal pad, when his doorbell rang.

7:00 TO 7:05—SHEILA KASHINIAN HEARS MOAN FROM SECOND FLOOR

7:48 (OR SO)—HANNAH KREKORIAN HEARS MOAN FROM OUTSIDE MASTER BATHROOM DOOR

CONNECT.

There was a connection. He even knew what that connection was. He just had to figure out what to do with it. The doorbell rang and he put down his pen and went into the foyer.

“Hello,” the young woman said when Gregor opened up. “I’m Sonia Veladian.”

“Sonia Veladian?”

“Father Tibor sent me,” Sonia said helpfully. “I’m the one who—ah—went to this workshop that Paul Hazzard’s organization ran and Father Tibor said you might want to know—”

“Oh, yes.” Gregor backed up quickly to let the young woman inside. “I do want to know. I’m sorry. I just didn’t connect for a moment. I thought Father Tibor said you were in Somalia.”

“With UNICEF. I was. We were evacuated out about five weeks ago. I’ve been in Rome.”

“And now you’re back.”

“Visiting my mother,” Sonia amplified. She walked into Gregor’s living room, dropped down into the club chair, and laughed. “My mother’s a mess. She’s on husband number five. She’s over sixty and she still can’t balance her checkbook. If it weren’t for my brother and me, she’d probably be on welfare. But she means well.”

Gregor didn’t go into how many murderers he’d known who insisted that no matter what they did, they always meant well. “Would you like me to get you a cup of coffee?” he offered her. “I only have instant, but in this apartment that’s a blessing.”

“That’s okay. I took Father Tibor to lunch. I love to overeat, but this afternoon was too much even for me. Father Tibor said Paul Hazzard was killed here last night.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve got to start reading the papers again,” Sonia said. “I stopped just after we were evacuated because it was all just too depressing. Well, I suppose I’m not surprised. I remember thinking at the time that he was just the kind of person to get his head bashed in. Father Tibor said Mrs. Krekorian is the prime suspect. That can’t be right, can it?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Well, that’s just nonsense,” Sonia said crisply. “I’ve known Mrs. Krekorian all my life. She used to feed my brother and me when Mom would disappear for a couple of days. Her and Mrs. Arkmanian. Does Mrs. Arkmanian still live in the neighborhood?”

“She’s got the town house right across the street.”

“Dynamite. I suppose you really want to hear about Paul Hazzard. You’re investigating the murder. I do see
People
magazine every once in a while.”

“I think the less said about
People
magazine the better,” Gregor said firmly. “I don’t want you to tell me anything that’s going to be painful for you to discuss. Not unless you think it has immediate and direct importance in the case under consideration. I don’t want you to feel—”

“It’s okay,” Sonia said. “It really is. I don’t mind talking about it at all anymore. Talking about what happened to me, I mean. And you don’t even want to know what happened to me. You want to know what I know about Paul Hazzard. Well. Okay. The way it started was, when I was about eleven years old, my mother got this boyfriend, his name was Ern, and Ern had these proclivities. He used to come into my room at night, and do things—if you don’t mind, I’m not going to go into specifics here, they don’t matter at the moment—and he would tell me that if I told my mother, he would kill us both and I was scared to death and that was how it went on for about six months, when one afternoon my mother came home early because she’d gotten fired from this job she had at a restaurant and there we were. And she blew a fit.”

“I can imagine.”

“Don’t. You have no idea how many mothers in this sort of situation pretend they haven’t seen anything. It’s like I said. My mother means well. Anyway, there was no end of fuss. Mom threw Ern out, she called the police, she took me to a doctor, there was an investigation. On and on and on. And then it just went away. I just forgot about it. Except that I didn’t, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Mrs. Krekorian and Mrs. Arkmanian were a big help,” Sonia said. “And I was good at school and my mother was proud of that, so I worked my butt off and did really well. Then I won a merit scholarship and another scholarship one of the Armenian-American organizations offers and another one, too, for winning second place in a competition this company gave where you had to write an essay on the wonderful things chemistry does for people’s lives. And I went to Penn State. And I had a 3.9 grade average right through the first semester of my junior year. And then I fell apart.”

“What do you mean, fell apart?”

“Just what I said,” Sonia said impassively. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I failed three courses and pulled Ds in the other two.”

“And?”

“And I got lucky. This was, what, at least ten years ago now. It was well before there was all this interest in the sexual abuse of children and adolescents. Nobody knew anything and nobody was doing much of anything except a few people in the self-help field like Paul Hazzard. But my adviser liked me and knew me and he was convinced that I couldn’t have had such a terrible semester without something equally terrible happening to me, so he took me out and grilled me until I just started talking about it. And talking about it and talking about it.” Sonia laughed. “You’d be amazed what you forget. And the emotions. You know, I honestly thought I didn’t feel anything at all about it anymore. And there I was, sitting in this beer bar with peanut shells and sawdust on the floor, getting completely hysterical.”

“I hope your adviser kept his head,” Gregor said.

“He was cool. He still is. We write. Anyway, at that point we had a problem, because I didn’t want to go to individual counseling. The idea of sitting in a little room with just one other person made my skin crawl. Also the campus mental health center at the time was stocked full of Freudians, and you know what that means. You tell them you’ve been molested as a child, and they tell you it’s all in your head.”

“So what did you do?”

“Nothing, for a while,” Sonia said. “I was a little better just because I’d talked about it and it was out in the open. I was still falling apart, but at least I knew why. Then my adviser came across an article in
The New York Times
—it must have been the Sunday edition, he got the
Times
only on Sunday—about the self-help movement. It had a lot of stuff about Paul Hazzard, and it also had a paragraph about how people like Hazzard were approaching reports of childhood molestation differently from traditional therapists. And it had a phone number.”

“So you called,” Gregor said.

“I called. There wasn’t anything down in State College I could hook up with at the time. Five years later, that town was the state capital of self-help workshops, but not then. There was a group in Philadelphia. I arranged to attend that.”

“Father Tibor told me it helped and it didn’t.”

“It helped in the beginning.” Sonia was emphatic. “It helped a lot in the beginning. Look, Mr. Demarkian. People come out of cases like this in all sorts of shape. My own case was relatively easy. The incidents happened, but they weren’t of very long duration. Some children suffer through years. My mother was on my side and she took direct and unambiguous action. Some children live through their mothers’ deliberate blindness or accusations that the abuse was all their fault or I don’t know what else. So you see, all I really needed was a chance to talk about it for a while and work it out of my system and to feel bad and not have to apologize for it. The worst part about being the way I was then is that you want to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and eventually people just get bored. Even if you don’t.”

“I can see that,” Gregor said. “So what went wrong?”

“It’s not so much that anything went wrong, as that nothing really happened. I went to Group every week, and I talked and listened to other people talk, and I began to feel better. I began to feel a lot better. My grades went back to normal. I was sleeping. I had a boyfriend that I’d told all about everything and relations between us were good. And nothing changed.”

“In the group, you mean,” Gregor said.

“That’s right. The thing was, nothing was supposed to change. I hadn’t paid much attention to psychological theories when I signed up. I was going crazy. But as I began to get better, I began to notice things. Such as the fact that you weren’t supposed to get better. Not really.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sonia made a wry little face. “The theory was, once something like this happened to you, it would be with you the rest of your life. You’d never be free of it. You’d need Group all the time and forever, for as long as you lived. It made me angry. It seemed to me to be saying that the son of a bitch had won. He set out to destroy you and he did destroy you, because you’d never really be you again. You’d always be sick.”

“I take it there was more.”

“Oh, yeah.” Sonia nodded vigorously. “If it had been just that, I would have quit and that would have been the end of it. What kept me in and fighting were the amnesiacs.”

“Amnesiacs?”

“Well,” Sonia said, “you see, it’s like this. Some people who have been sexually exploited as children don’t remember that they’ve been sexually exploited as children. The experience is so horrible, they just repress it.”

“I think that’s understandable.”

“Of course it is,” Sonia went on. “The problem is, the group I was in—all of Paul Hazzard’s organization, as far as I could tell—well, they used that fact to their own advantage. I can’t put it any other way. Yes, it’s true that there are people walking around out there who were abused as children and don’t remember it, but the group had a twenty-two-point checklist you were supposed to complete if you thought you had been abused but couldn’t remember, and if you came up with yes answers to three or more items on the list, then you were supposed to join a group because you probably had been abused. Let me give you three of the items that were on that list. ‘You always think before you speak.’ ‘You feel a great need to take care of other people and comfort them.’ ‘You often have trouble getting to sleep.’ ”

“But—” Gregor said.

“Exactly.” Sonia moved to the edge of her seat. “Don’t you see? There’s nothing in the least pathological about thinking before you speak. Practically every mother on earth feels the need to take care of her children and comfort them. And as for having trouble going to sleep—” Sonia shrugged. “These are disturbed people we’re dealing with here. There are a million and one reasons they might have trouble getting to sleep, including drinking too much coffee. You could have all three of those ‘symptoms’ and not be disturbed in any way at all. But there was more to it than that. There were the other groups.”

“That’s right,” Gregor said. “Paul Hazzard ran a variety. I heard that.”

“Shopaholics. Compulsive gamblers. Codependents. Love addicts.” Sonia counted off on her fingers. “The groups were held in this big building in downtown Philadelphia, sometimes six or seven different ones on the same night. One night I went around to all the groups and collected their pamphlets. They all had checklists. And guess what?”

“What?”

“The checklists were pretty much identical. Oh, there would be one or two particular items. The compulsive gamblers’ list included things like borrowing money to gamble or play the lottery. But mostly the lists were just repetitions. It didn’t matter if you were a shopaholic or a love addict or a codependent or a compulsive gambler or a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, the symptoms were all the same. The only thing that determined what kind of sick you ended up calling yourself was what group you wandered into. It was a terrible thing, Mr. Demarkian. These were people in terrible pain. They might not have been sexually abused as children, but they were in terrible pain. In the codependents and the shopaholics, you sometimes just got narcissistic jerks, but with us you got very damaged people. And I didn’t see what good it was going to do them to spin them a fantasy about what was supposed to be wrong with them and then keep them locked up in an identity marked ‘sick ’for the rest of their lives. So I came to a decision.”