Glass Houses (24 page)

“No, I haven't,” Bennis said. “I've left people behind in my life before, but I've never gone away and come back.”

“I'm saying I'm not being unreasonable to think you should have talked to me about it before you went,” Gregor said. “Or if you really couldn't have done that, then you should have sent those postcards, just so that I knew where you were and that you were at least thinking about coming back.”

“But I wasn't,” Bennis said. “I suppose I must have been on some unconscious level because I left so many things here, but I wasn't intending to—when I went.”

“I see,” Gregor said.

“I just couldn't stay away,” Bennis said. “And if that's not a good enough explanation for you, I don't know what would be because I don't have an explanation. I left, and I came back because I had to come back; and now I'm here to stay, one way or another. In your apartment or mine. Or both. Except that if it's going to be your apartment, then I need this relationship to change just a little. I really need it.”

“So you did go because there was something wrong,” Gregor said, “something wrong between us.”

“No,” Bennis said. “There was
nothing
wrong between us. That was the problem.”

Gregor took a deep breath. He was still standing. He didn't think he could make his knees bend to sit down. She was the one who should be hyperventilating. Why was he the one who was actually doing it?

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You not only took off and didn't make contact for nearly a year, but you did it because there was nothing wrong with this relationship. Everything was fine. Everything was great. Everything was coming up roses. And that made you feel that you had to spend months reading Dante in Florence.”

“You heard a lot of that conversation,” Bennis said.

“I should have had you wired. Maybe I would have heard enough of it so that you'd start making sense.”

“I really can't explain it to you, Gregor. It would sound stupid. It even sounds stupid when I try to explain it to myself.”

“You can't do this to people,” Gregor said. “You can't walk out on a relationship you've had for years—”

“But I didn't walk out,” Bennis said quickly. “I was careful not to do that. I said I'd be back.”

“You can't just walk out on a relationship you've had for years, and then come back and say you did it because everything was okay and now you're back. There are people involved in this, Bennis, and not just me. People have obligations to each other. Friendships mean obligations. Relationships mean obligations. There are rules to this game. You have to know that.”

“I do know that,” Bennis said. “It's just that I'm me. And things get complicated with me. That really is all. I just needed, I don't know how to explain it, I needed to get this feeling to go away—”

“What feeling?”

“This feeling that the world was going to end any minute,” Bennis said. “There was nothing wrong, so I was always waiting for something to go wrong because something always does. It always has. We'd have a day together and things would be perfect, we'd be easy and at home with each other, you wouldn't annoy me even a little bit, I'd be happy. And all the time the back of my mind would be on full alert, watching for whatever it was that was going to happen to ruin everything. And it never happened. And I couldn't stand the suspense anymore. So I went away.”

“And that feeling's gone? Is that what you're saying?”

“Oh, no,” Bennis said. “It's not gone at all. Except now, you know, there's this part, so maybe something will be wrong because I made it wrong by going away. No, the thing is, I finally figured it out. I know what we have to do—to make it go away.”

Somewhere in the house there was a noise. Somebody had come in the front door, into the vestibule. Either Grace was home or somebody had a key. There were footsteps on the stairs, running. They were too heavy to belong to Grace.

“Bennis,” Gregor said, “if you try to tell me that we have to burn chicken entrails in an alley, or go to a counselor, I will personally take your head off.”

“Oh, no. It's nothing like that,” Bennis said. “We have to get married.”

“What?” Gregor said.

There was a long moment when the world seemed to be silent, but it wasn't really. There were those footsteps, and they had stopped on the landing right outside Gregor's door. He was still searching for words—hell, he was still searching for a way around the shock—when the pounding on his door started and Russ Donahue was shouting. “Gregor. Gregor. Open up. Rob Benedetti called, and it's an emergency.”

I
t was ten o'clock,
and Elizabeth Woodville thought she would never get through the one more hour she would have to in order to feel she had the right to allow herself to go to bed. Margaret was somewhere in the house, muttering to herself and humming to herself in turn. Elizabeth could make out the song but not the muttering, but she understood the muttering better. Margaret would have her boxes out, all those keepsakes and odds and ends she kept of a childhood and adolescence Elizabeth had never been able to see as anything more than regrettable. She'd lay out the engraved invitations from the holiday subscription dances, the pressed flowers she'd kept from the cor-sages she'd been given for balls and college proms, the little favors she'd picked up at dinners during her season—and then what? That was what Elizabeth wanted to know. What good did it do to look over and over these things? Why would anybody in her right mind keep them? It was as if Margaret's life had stopped dead on her wedding day, never to be started up again. Why she wanted to hum “Istanbul” while she was thinking about that, Elizabeth would never know.

What Elizabeth was thinking about was guilt. There was a lot of guilt in the world, deserved and undeserved. She understood why Henry's lawyer wanted to be sure Henry was not sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Or crimes, plural, in this instance. Elizabeth had been thinking for hours now about Henry and the Plate Glass Killings. She had asked herself, honestly, whether she could imagine Henry as a serial killer, and the simple fact was that she could. Henry put on a good front about being an alcoholic and a bum, but that was not what was true about him. Margaret believed it because Margaret wanted to. It gave her an explanation for Henry's behavior that she could live with. People outside believed it because they had no reason not to. They didn't know Henry in any way that made any difference, and there were a lot of alcoholic bums in the world.

Elizabeth did know Henry, however, and the more she thought about it, the more uneasy she was with the way this whole thing was going. People were making too many assumptions, the kind of assumptions that turned the world upside down. She kept getting flashes of Henry around Conchita. It had been an episode in their lives that she had found so bizarre she'd actually tried to talk to Margaret about it. Margaret hadn't listened. Margaret never listened. She had her explanation for everything and anything Henry did. It was his mother's fault. It was because their father had made such a stupid and incomprehensibly tacky second marriage. And what was worse, Margaret was so sure that Henry was addled by alcohol and living on the street, she was convinced that Henry would never do or say anything they told him not to do or say—that the only reason he was in the mess he was in now was that they hadn't been clear about how they wanted him to behave. But Elizabeth had been very clear. She had talked to Henry face-to-face a dozen times. He always managed to find some avenue she hadn't covered, some twist she hadn't anticipated. And there was Conchita. There was proof positive that Henry had stronger emotions, and stronger drives, than he let anyone know about.

Margaret was upstairs somewhere. Elizabeth was in the living room. She tried to gauge the odds of Margaret coming down suddenly and couldn't. Most of the time, when Margaret got nostalgic, she shut herself away for hours and wouldn't talk to Elizabeth at all. It was no fun reminiscing to someone who countered your every memory with a bucket of ice water. Sometimes, Margaret couldn't help herself. She just had to show somebody. She just had to try to get Elizabeth in the mood to remember it all. The problem, Elizabeth thought, wasn't that Margaret didn't remember it, but that she did. She just remembered it differently.

She went out into the foyer and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. Margaret was not moving around. That was a good sign. She went to the back of the front hall and into the little, wood-paneled telephone room there. It was like a booth in an expensive men's club, circa the thirties, when it was not acceptable to have a telephone in the living room. There was a phone in the kitchen, but she didn't want to risk it. Besides, she needed the house directory. She wondered what it was like out there, what real people did. Did anybody, even people like Margaret and herself, have house directories anymore?

The house directory was a Rolodex these days. Margaret thought it was tacky, and wouldn't use it. Elizabeth went through it and found the number she was looking for. What did Margaret want anyway? To go back to the days when they kept numbers in that little wooden spring box that would pop open at the appropriate letter when you pressed a little lever? To get numbers from the Social Register? Elizabeth was fairly sure that this number wouldn't even be in the Social Register, although she might be wrong. Her own number
was in the Social Register, and she would have had to say she was almost the last person on earth to have been willing to keep that up.

The number she dialed was ringing and ringing and ringing. Nobody was picking up. Maybe she was out to dinner. Maybe she was asleep. What had it said on the news this morning? She'd just got back to Philadelphia from being away. Elizabeth tried to remember where she'd been away to but couldn't.

She got a sudden spurt of inspiration and went through the Rolodex again. Here was why you wanted a Rolodex and not one of those silly spring things or the Social Register. You could always add numbers to the Rolodex. She had added this one just this morning. She got it out in front of her and dialed—was it really right to say you
dialed
a touch-tone phone?—the only number she had for Gregor Demarkian. It worked.

The phone picked up on the other end; and instead of the baritone Elizabeth remembered from court, she got a woman's voice.

“Gregor Demarkian's residence. Bennis Hannaford here.”

“Oh, good,” Elizabeth said. “I just called your apartment and you weren't there. I'm so glad I found you.”

“Who are you and why are you so glad you found me?”

The voice was light, but Elizabeth heard the tension in it. It hadn't occurred to her that Bennis Hannaford might be defensive about who called her and what they wanted from her, but it made sense. There were those very odd novels she wrote.

“It's Elizabeth Woodville,” Elizabeth said. “You probably don't remember me, although we've met. We were on the Harvest Day Committee together. A couple of years ago. I know it's a very slight reason to claim acquaintance, but I'm almost at the end of my rope. Henry Tyder is my brother.”

“Henry Tyder?”

“The man they've just arrested as the Plate Glass Killer,” Elizabeth said. “I really am sorry. I am. It said on television this morning that you've been away for a while, so you probably don't know. Last night they picked up my brother, my half brother really, because he was near one of the bodies and had blood on him. They picked him up and charged him with being the Plate Glass Killer, and he confessed. And then this lawyer came along, this Russell Donahue, and he said the confession wasn't true. That people confess to things they haven't done all the time, and this was one of those cases.”

On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford cleared her throat. “That is true,” she said. “I've heard Gregor talk about it many times. People do confess to things they didn't do. But I don't think you have to worry about your brother, Miss Woodville. I know Russ Donahue. He's an excellent attorney. And Gregor is working on the investigation. I don't think he thinks your brother—”

“It's
Mrs.
Woodville,” Elizabeth said. Then she wondered why she'd said it. She'd been a widow now longer than she'd ever been married. “I know that Mr. Demarkian is working on the case, and that's why I called. I thought, perhaps, that you could get me a chance to talk to him privately. Not with Margaret around. Margaret is my sister. Not with the police around. Not even with Mr. Donahue around, although he seems to be a nice enough person. It's just—I don't know how to explain it. It's just something that somebody ought to say. And Margaret won't say it. She won't even admit it. But somebody ought to. So I thought I would.”

“You know,” Bennis said, “it might not matter. Gregor was called out of here not ten minutes ago. By the police. I think they've got another body.”

“Another body?”

“Another Plate Glass Killing,” Bennis said. “I didn't really catch the whole thing, and Gregor had to leave in a hurry; but I do know the police wanted him immediately, and Russ did too; and they don't usually drag him out in the middle of the night if they don't have a body. So, you see, everything might be all right as far as your brother is concerned.”

“What do you mean, ‘all right'?”

“Well,” Bennis said, “if there's been another Plate Glass Killing, and your brother is in jail, he couldn't have committed it, could he? And that would mean that in all likelihood he wasn't the Plate Glass Killer in the first place.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. She did see. She didn't understand, but she did see. “Miss Hannaford,” she said. “Would you mind? Do you think you could get me a chance to talk to Mr. Demarkian in private even if it does turn out that this is a new Plate Glass Killing and Henry couldn't have done it?”