Read Somebody Else's Music Online
Authors: Jane Haddam
Somebody Else's Music (13 page)
Chris pushed open the door at her side, leaned out over the road, and threw up.
Her name was Grace Feinmann. Bennis found that out and then wrote it down on a three-by-five card along with the five or six other things she thought Gregor should remember while he was away: Tibor's e-mail address and new cell phone number; the hotel she would be staying at in Los Angeles for all of the coming week; the name of the brand of coffee bags he was supposed to buy in case he was in danger of having to make his own; the title of Elizabeth Toliver's last book (
Conspiracy: The Rise of Paranoia and the Death of Politics
).
Conspiracy: The Rise of Paranoia and the Death of Politics
).
“She says she met you in Connecticut,” Bennis told him, packing his white shirts into the big suitcase he always took when he was traveling, “that time when Kayla Anson died. She had something to do with the case. But I don't remember her.”
Gregor didn't remember her, either. The sight of Bennis packing his shirts was oddly unsettling. It wasn't the kind of thing Bennis did, and for a momentâobviously, he wasn't getting enough sleepâhe had that gut-twisting reaction that people are supposed to have when they realize they are confronted by a shape-shifter. Maybe he hadn't moved in with Bennis at all, but with Lida, in a body she had put on the way she put on her three-quarter-length chinchilla coat to go to church in the winter.
“Gregor?” Bennis said.
“I'm here.”
“Barely.”
“Why does she have the harpsichord?”
Bennis pulled the clothing guard down over the shirts and tied it tightly to the suitcase's side with ribbons. “It's what she does. Plays the harpischord, I mean, and theâwhat. Virginals. That's something else that looks like a piano. She got a job with the Philadelphia Early Music Ensemble.”
“And she moved in here?”
“She says she saw the ad and thought she remembered the name of the street and that you lived here, so she figured it must be a nice street. Or something. You really ought to ask Tibor and Lida about this. Ask Lida. I think what Tibor mostly did was get her to tell him what books he should read on early Renaissance polyphonic song.”
“I'm surprised there was an ad. I take it that was Russ's idea.”
“Probably. I don't know where the ad appeared, though, so don't jump to conclusions.”
“Is she buying or renting?”
“Oh, renting,” Bennis said. “Donna says she hasn't got any money. Apparently, you don't make much playing early instruments. Didn't I tell you all this before? Whatever. From what Russ is hinting, I think that if they like her and really want her on the street they'll make some arrangement so that she'll be able to buy. You know what it's like around here. Even Howard Kashinian behaves himself when it comes to apartments and town houses. Are you sure you want to take all these suits? It's practically summer and you're going to the country.”
“I'm supposed to be working.”
“Sometimes I think you think it's still 1965 and you can't get dinner in a good restaurant unless you wear a tie.”
“There aren't any restaurants where I'm going,” Gregor said. “From what I understand, there isn't even a place to stay in town.”
Bennis hung his suit bag on the high arm of his silent
valet and unzipped it all the way around. “There's one more thing,” she said. “Tibor's absolutely insisting that we all have to go see Grace play when she plays, so he's buying season tickets to their shows, the Ensemble's shows, for when they play here in Philadelphia. They play in a church, but they travel some, so it's a little confusing. At any rate, Lida's buying some, too, and so are Donna and Russ, and they're getting extras. I don't know how many sets there will be in the end, butâ”
valet and unzipped it all the way around. “There's one more thing,” she said. “Tibor's absolutely insisting that we all have to go see Grace play when she plays, so he's buying season tickets to their shows, the Ensemble's shows, for when they play here in Philadelphia. They play in a church, but they travel some, so it's a little confusing. At any rate, Lida's buying some, too, and so are Donna and Russ, and they're getting extras. I don't know how many sets there will be in the end, butâ”
“You said you'd buy some for us.”
“It seemed like the least I could do. And I like early music, or at least some of it. I mean, I don't like chant, but I don't suppose they can be doing chant, not if they have a harpsichord. Anyway, they don't even start playing until September. This summer, they've got rehearsals and some Renaissance fairs and then they're going to make a CD, which is why they needed Grace so early. Their old harpsichordist quit. Grace saysâ”
“Bennis.”
“Right,” Bennis said. She took a deep breath. “I'm acting like an idiot. I always seem to. I'm going to go put on a pot of coffee.”
Gregor thought about saying
Bennis
again, but didn't. He watched her leave the bedroom and head down the hall instead, wishing that the hall weren't so dark. It was a bright day outside, so bright that the bedroom looked as if it were about to become the landing area for the Second Coming. Sunlight streamed in in those hard-edged rays artists used to represent the gaze of God. If he went to the window and looked down to the street, he could see old George Tekemanian sitting under a huge umbrella at a round table his nephew Martin had sent to him from L. L. Bean. Lately, old George had not been looking as well as he might, and Bennis had begun to look formidable, the way women did when they entered middle age with both confidence and resources. It didn't bother him to think of Bennis reaching middle age, although he doubted she'd look it in quite the same way Lida or Hannah had. He was
middle-aged himself, and one of the things that had stopped him for so long from realizing what he felt for her had been the simple fact that he'd thought she was too young for him. His wifeâanother Elizabeth; he was surrounded by themâhad been almost exactly his own age, and they had grown up together, so that by the time they'd been married half a dozen years, they'd no longer really needed to direct whole sentences at each other. He almost went to the drawer where he kept Elizabeth's picture under his socks. When he'd first moved back to Cavanaugh Street, he couldn't remember how many years ago now, he'd kept it out where he could see it at all times. Even after he'd finally made himself put it away, he'd taken it out to look at it almost daily. Now he thought it must have been weeks since he'd seen it, and that part of him that had been able to hear her voice all around him when he was alone had apparently died. Things changed. That was reality. It scared him to death.
Bennis
again, but didn't. He watched her leave the bedroom and head down the hall instead, wishing that the hall weren't so dark. It was a bright day outside, so bright that the bedroom looked as if it were about to become the landing area for the Second Coming. Sunlight streamed in in those hard-edged rays artists used to represent the gaze of God. If he went to the window and looked down to the street, he could see old George Tekemanian sitting under a huge umbrella at a round table his nephew Martin had sent to him from L. L. Bean. Lately, old George had not been looking as well as he might, and Bennis had begun to look formidable, the way women did when they entered middle age with both confidence and resources. It didn't bother him to think of Bennis reaching middle age, although he doubted she'd look it in quite the same way Lida or Hannah had. He was
middle-aged himself, and one of the things that had stopped him for so long from realizing what he felt for her had been the simple fact that he'd thought she was too young for him. His wifeâanother Elizabeth; he was surrounded by themâhad been almost exactly his own age, and they had grown up together, so that by the time they'd been married half a dozen years, they'd no longer really needed to direct whole sentences at each other. He almost went to the drawer where he kept Elizabeth's picture under his socks. When he'd first moved back to Cavanaugh Street, he couldn't remember how many years ago now, he'd kept it out where he could see it at all times. Even after he'd finally made himself put it away, he'd taken it out to look at it almost daily. Now he thought it must have been weeks since he'd seen it, and that part of him that had been able to hear her voice all around him when he was alone had apparently died. Things changed. That was reality. It scared him to death.
He got off the bed and went out into the hall himself. He could hear Bennis in the kitchen, banging around, as if she were doing much more than making coffee. Sometimes she washed a few of the dishes, but not often. One of the first changes she'd made in his life when they'd finally begun to be together was to hire the kind of cleaning lady who came in every weekday and did the dishes and laundry as a matter of course. Some changes, he conceded, were good ones. He had found that he truly loved having his things taken care of so thoroughly that he never had to think of them. His wife had done that for him once, but in the years since her death he had gotten used to always missing things. Suit jackets disappeared and then reappeared under the bed. Clean white shirts became balls of sweat and dust in the bathroom hamper. He went through the living room and stopped long enough to look at the street from the wide picture window there. Then he turned around and looked through the pass-through to the kitchen at Bennis doing something unnecessary at the stove.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what's wrong with you?”
“Nothing's wrong with me. I'm not all that happy about our spending a month apart, that's all. If not longer.”
“It won't be longer.”
Bennis cocked her head. “Why do you think that? You're going off to solve a murder that's thirty years old or more. Why do you think you can get it done in four weeks? I mean, for God's sake, they had an investigation once, didn't they? And they didn't come up with anything. Why do you think you will?'
Gregor went all the way into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. “I don't think I will. Nobody wants me to solve that murder. I told you that. They only want meâ”
“To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Maris Coleman is planting those stories in the tabloid newspapers. I thought you said that wasn't even a question. I mean, that it was obvious.”
“It's obvious if you're looking, yes, but according to Mr. Card, Ms. Toliver refuses to believe it.”
“Well, people get like that, don't they, about friends?” Bennis said. “And about family. Look at the way I was about Anne Marie, right up to the end. The way I still am about Anne Marie, really. What good does Jimmy think this is going to do?”
Gregor shrugged. “I'd be the same way, if I thought somebody was exploiting you. I was the same way with what's-her-nameâ”
“Edith.”
“Edith. Except that in that case you realized it perfectly well and I couldn't get you to do anything about it. But Mr. Card's emotions are completely natural. I don't know if Ms. Toliver will actually believe anything I manage to find, but I can at least find it. She sounded like a nice woman, when I talked to her on the phone. From what I've heard of her, she's the kind of nice woman it's fairly easy to take advantage of, and Maris Coleman has been taking a lot of advantage. Let's call it a moral imperative.”
“You're going to go spend a month in some godforsaken town in north central Pennsylvania because of a moral imperative?”
“Well,” Gregor said judiciously, “there's always the obvious.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is that it bugs the hell out of me that nobody seems to give a damn that this boy was murdered. And I do mean nobody. Jimmy Card wouldn't. That doesn't matter. But even the police officer I talked to in Hollman seemed to think that the dead body was secondary to the question of who locked Elizabeth Toliver into an outhouse stall with a bunch of black snakes, and the tabloidsâ”
“You've been reading the tabloids?”
“I do, every once in a while.” Gregor looked around. Surely, he had heard Bennis doing something about coffee, but nothing actually seemed to have been done. There was no kettle boiling on the stove. There were no coffee cups set out on the counter next to the sink. “Well, the tabloids give the detailsâfound in a clearing near a small river, his throat cut straight across; weapon never discovered; motive never discoveredâbut they treat him like a cartoonâ”
“They treat everybody like a cartoon, Gregor. I've been in them.”
“I know. My point is that they don't report the story as if it were the story of a murder. The murder is secondary to Elizabeth Toliver. Or maybe I should say secondary to Jimmy Card's girlfriend. It's the oddest thing. It's not that it's hard to get information. I can get all the information I want. It's that nobody can seem to understand why I'd want it.”
“Well,” Bennis said, “maybe it's like Lizzie Borden. You know, maybe everybody in town already knows who killed him, and they've got some kind of tacit agreement going not to do anything about itâ”
“About an eighteen-year-old boy getting his throat slit from ear to ear during the summer after his high school graduation?”
“You're the one who told me that stuff about Lizzie Borden,” Bennis said. “I don't know. I admit, in a small town like that, you'd think this would be an enormous deal, even after all this time. Are the police who did the investigation still around?”
“One of them is, retired and living in town and more than happy to talk to me, or at least he says he is.” Gregor shrugged. “The chief of police at the time is dead. He was sixty-six in 1969 and had a heart condition even then. He died about ten years later. There was one other officer on the force that summer and he moved to California a couple of years after it happened. Nobody knows how to find him.”
“I can see it right now. He's the real murderer, and his friends on the police force have covered up his crime and given him a chance to escape and make a new life, because the dead boy was really a vampireâ”
“Bennis.”
“Well, it was a thought. You didn't really want coffee, did you?”
“I thought I did. But all kidding aside, there's something very nasty about the way they treat that murder. I don't care if the kid was on crack and in a gangâ”
“In 1969?”
“âhe still would deserve to be taken seriously. I find myself wondering if this was the attitude they had at the time, or if it's just what's developed because Elizabeth Toliver got âfamous,' so to speak. It's something worse than annoying. It nags at me. So, I thought I'd go help your friend out and see what the problem was at the same time, and I may be kidding myself. Maybe I'll get there and it will turn out that there's a perfectly good reason why nobody pays any attention to Michael Houseman and how he died.”
“I think you're bored,” Bennis said.
“I think you're going to Los Angeles,” Gregor said.
“I think you've got an hour before you leave, and we ought to go somewhere and neck.”
It was early evening by the time Gregor Demarkian reached Hollman, Pennsylvania, and when he did he was as rattled as he had been the one time he took a train in the Alps. He had not, this time, taken a train. There might once have been trains that stopped in Hollman or somewhere nearby, but these days the nearest station was fifty miles away and on the other side of what he could only call mountains. He spent a moment thinking how odd it was that the mountains should be covered with vegetation all the way to their topsâsometimes he caught sight of pine trees sticking up like cowlicks, far above himâand then the landscape closer to the ground started to capture him, and he began to feel uneasy. Gregor Demarkian was not a small-town boy. He had never had any part in the great American story, the one that Elizabeth Toliver now seemed to be the public expression of: you start in an obscure small town somewhere, born to unimportant people; you work very hard and get to go away to a good college on the East or West Coast; you leave college for a wretched apartment in a shabby but Bohemian section of New York or San Francisco; you Make Good. This was the part that was left out of Thomas Wolfe's story, Gregor thought. It wasn't that you couldn't ever go home again, it was that you didn't want to. Gregor had grown up in Philadelphia, on the very street on which he now lived, and he had spent all his life in cities except for his obligatory stint in the armed services. That wasn't the kind of memory that would make anybody fond of small towns, if he wasn't used to themâgodforsaken backwaters in Mississippi and Alabama, bad weather, bad insects, bad feelings all around, the local cops just itching to get to you the first time you did anything out of line or even before, if you happened to be one of the few black soldiers in that newly integrated army. Still, it hadn't been the hostility to all things military that had bothered him,
even at the time. It had been the claustrophobia. It was incredible how airless these small places could get, when they were effectively cut off from the outside worldâand they
were
, that was the odd thing, in spite of MTV and CNN and the Internet. It was almost as if they didn't believe the things they saw and read, as if they thought all that was fiction and that in reality everybody on the planet lived exactly the way they did. Or ought to. Gregor was coming in by car, with a driver. It wasn't a limousineâ“you don't want to be too conspicuous,” Jimmy Card had said, and Gregor had agreed with him. He really hated limousinesâbut it still had a chauffeur, and although that solved the problem of the fact that Gregor never drove except in an emergency, like maybe the end of the world, it still made him a little uncomfortable. Jimmy Card was not the most formidable man Gregor had ever met. During his years with the FBI, he had met both presidents of the United States and presidents of multinational corporations, the kind of men who got done what they needed to get done, no matter what it was. Still, Jimmy Card had the makings of men like that, even if success in entertainment would never give him the same kind of authority. If it had been up to Gregor, he would have come to town in some neutral way and then hired a car and a driver here, or hooked up with a local private detectiveâdid they
have
private detectives in places like Hollman?âbut Jimmy Card had insisted, and Gregor had been unable to resist. Now here he was, in a black sedan with New York plates, driven by a man who was both obviously Hispanic and entirely uncommunicative. He could have gotten more conversation out of a robot. He was also tired. It was a long way up from Philadelphia, and on the Penn Turnpike, too, which Gregor personally regarded as a state-sanctioned instrument of torture. He was also hungry. The Penn Turnpike didn't have rest stops with fast-food places in them every thirty miles or so. It didn't even have rest areas that he could tell. His back creaked. His stomach rumbled. The
sight of Hollman beginning to spin out around him made him tense.
even at the time. It had been the claustrophobia. It was incredible how airless these small places could get, when they were effectively cut off from the outside worldâand they
were
, that was the odd thing, in spite of MTV and CNN and the Internet. It was almost as if they didn't believe the things they saw and read, as if they thought all that was fiction and that in reality everybody on the planet lived exactly the way they did. Or ought to. Gregor was coming in by car, with a driver. It wasn't a limousineâ“you don't want to be too conspicuous,” Jimmy Card had said, and Gregor had agreed with him. He really hated limousinesâbut it still had a chauffeur, and although that solved the problem of the fact that Gregor never drove except in an emergency, like maybe the end of the world, it still made him a little uncomfortable. Jimmy Card was not the most formidable man Gregor had ever met. During his years with the FBI, he had met both presidents of the United States and presidents of multinational corporations, the kind of men who got done what they needed to get done, no matter what it was. Still, Jimmy Card had the makings of men like that, even if success in entertainment would never give him the same kind of authority. If it had been up to Gregor, he would have come to town in some neutral way and then hired a car and a driver here, or hooked up with a local private detectiveâdid they
have
private detectives in places like Hollman?âbut Jimmy Card had insisted, and Gregor had been unable to resist. Now here he was, in a black sedan with New York plates, driven by a man who was both obviously Hispanic and entirely uncommunicative. He could have gotten more conversation out of a robot. He was also tired. It was a long way up from Philadelphia, and on the Penn Turnpike, too, which Gregor personally regarded as a state-sanctioned instrument of torture. He was also hungry. The Penn Turnpike didn't have rest stops with fast-food places in them every thirty miles or so. It didn't even have rest areas that he could tell. His back creaked. His stomach rumbled. The
sight of Hollman beginning to spin out around him made him tense.
“Listen,” he said, leaning forward to make sure the driver could hear him. “Maybe we could stop along the way here for a minute. I'd like to get some breath mints.”
“There's a parking place at the curb ahead,” the driver said, looking straight through the windshield, as if he were talking to a voice on the radio. “There's a place called English Drugs.”
“Good,” Gregor said. “A drugstore. That will be perfect.”
The driver didn't say anything. Gregor sat back and looked out the side window at the narrow streets edged with stores and churches. The stores were made of clapboard and had false fronts, so that they seemed to go up a story higher than they really did. The churches were very old, and looked it. The Methodist one had a square bell tower that looked to be the tallest structure in town. Gregor felt his sense of claustrophobia increasing. He had never been able to understand how people managed to stay in places like this.
The driver pulled the car up next to the curb and cut the engine. He looked up into the rearview mirrorâ
victory,
Gregor thought,
he knows I'm here
âand said, “What kind of breath mints would you like, sir?”
victory,
Gregor thought,
he knows I'm here
âand said, “What kind of breath mints would you like, sir?”
“Oh,” Gregor said. “I don't know. You don't have to go get them for me. I'd like to get out and walk around.” He almost added “if you don't mind,” but didn't, because it was absurd. You didn't apologize to a man being paid to drive you because you wanted to get out and walk around.
The driver was no longer looking into the rearview mirror. He was looking straight out the windshield, but he didn't seem to be paying attention to the other people on the street or the other cars parked at the curb. Gregor didn't think he had brought a book. What would he do while Gregor was walking around, stretching his legs, looking at the scenery? He didn't even have the job of opening Gregor's door and closing it for him. They'd discussed all that
at the outset, and agreed that itâlike a limousineâwould only be conspicuous. Actually, Gregor thought, they hadn't agreed on anything. Gregor had just given directions, and the driver had acted as if he hadn't heard a thing.
at the outset, and agreed that itâlike a limousineâwould only be conspicuous. Actually, Gregor thought, they hadn't agreed on anything. Gregor had just given directions, and the driver had acted as if he hadn't heard a thing.
“Right,” Gregor said now. He popped his door open. “I won't be long. I just want to walk around a little.”
The driver said nothing. Gregor tried to remember his name and couldn't. Then he got out onto the sidewalk and stretched his legs a little.
If he'd been expecting a revelation of some sort, he didn't get it. It was quite possibleâin fact it was likelyâthat Hollman had exhibited a few tense oddnesses in the days after Michael Houseman had died, but that was more than thirty years ago. Now it looked exactly like a hundred other places of the same type, from Maine to Nebraska and maybe even beyond. The men who passed him were wearing either stiff-collared polo shirts with little animals embroidered over their breast pockets (but not Izod alligators) or the kind of suits you bought in Sears when you weren't used to wearing them. The women were not so much fat as lumpy in the way women got when they were neither particularly athletic nor committed to working out. Everybody looked tired. Gregor looked up and down this side of the street. Elsa-Edna's was a dress shop with pretensions to sophistication. JayMar's was a restaurant that would have been called a diner anywhere else. English Drugs was a drugstore and the biggest enterprise on the block, except that it wasn't really a block. It went on for far too long in both directions, broken only by driveways.
Midway up from where he stood now, back the way they had come, the flat faces of the false-fronted windows were broken by the existence of a small Victorian house, painted red. Gregor stepped back a little so that he could get a better look at it. It had a sign hanging over the four small steps of its entryway, the way a bed and breakfast would. The sign said: COUNTRY CRAFTS. Gregor moved up the street a little to get a better look. It was not an unusual or particularly interesting place, on its own. Like the town, it was
surely one of thousands of identical places all across the country. The porch made it impossible to see anything that might have been sitting in its windows. Gregor had the idea that that must be a very bad thing for a store. He walked up the slight incline of Grandview Avenue until he was right in front of the place and stopped. There was another sign besides the one over the front porch entry. This sign was bolted into the porch rail next to the steps, and it said more than just COUNTRY CRAFTS. It said: PROPRIETORS GEORGE AND EMMA BLIGH.
surely one of thousands of identical places all across the country. The porch made it impossible to see anything that might have been sitting in its windows. Gregor had the idea that that must be a very bad thing for a store. He walked up the slight incline of Grandview Avenue until he was right in front of the place and stopped. There was another sign besides the one over the front porch entry. This sign was bolted into the porch rail next to the steps, and it said more than just COUNTRY CRAFTS. It said: PROPRIETORS GEORGE AND EMMA BLIGH.
Gregor reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacketâBennis had been absolutely right, as usual. He shouldn't have come here with nothing but suitsâand took out the notebook he'd been using to organize his notes on the Hollman trip. Bennis had given him a Palm Pilot last Christmas, but he'd left it in the top drawer of his dresser, the way he always did. He could not get the hang of using it. What he kept in his breast pocket was a simple stenographer's pad. He flipped through it and found want he wanted:
Emma Kenyon. Now Emma Kenyon Bligh. Runs Country Crafts.
Emma Kenyon. Now Emma Kenyon Bligh. Runs Country Crafts.
Sometimes, Tibor always said, God is trying to tell you something. Gregor figured this must be one of those times. He put his notebook back in his pocket and climbed the short flight of steps to Country Crafts' front porch. Once he was up on it, he realized that there was one of those ubiquitous driveways running along the side of the building. That meant there had to be a parking lot out back. He stopped on the porch and looked at what was in the windows, which wasn't much: a doll made out of “pulled” yarn in an old-fashioned dress; a little set of bright blue clay pots; a swath of hard red velvet that seemed to have drifts of dust across its surface. He pushed through the front door and heard a bell tinkle above his head. It sounded like a brass cowbell.
The big front room of the house was empty except for a woman standing behind a counter, chewing on a Mars bar and looking through a copy of
Us
magazine. She was,
Gregor thought, the single fattest human being he had ever seen outside a hospital. If she went on eating Mars bars, she was going to end up in a hospital. He wondered if she made her dresses herself. He couldn't imagine a store that would sell a size like that. He wondered if she did her hair herself, too. It wasn't just blond. It was a bright egg-yolk yellow.
Us
magazine. She was,
Gregor thought, the single fattest human being he had ever seen outside a hospital. If she went on eating Mars bars, she was going to end up in a hospital. He wondered if she made her dresses herself. He couldn't imagine a store that would sell a size like that. He wondered if she did her hair herself, too. It wasn't just blond. It was a bright egg-yolk yellow.
The woman looked up from her magazine and said, “Hello, there. Can I help you?”
“I don't know.” Gregor walked up to the counter. “I'm supposed to be spending the week with a friend. I thought it might be a good idea to take some kind of house gift.”
“And you just thought of that this minute?”
“What?”
The woman put her copy of
Us
down on the counter. “I said I can't believe you thought of that just this minute,” she said patiently. “I mean, I'll help you out if I can, but let's face it, you'd probably have had a larger selection of house gifts wherever it was you came from.”
Us
down on the counter. “I said I can't believe you thought of that just this minute,” she said patiently. “I mean, I'll help you out if I can, but let's face it, you'd probably have had a larger selection of house gifts wherever it was you came from.”
“Philadelphia,” Gregor said politely.
She looked him up and down. “Yeah. I figured it had to be at least Philadelphia. You staying here in Hollman?”
“Yes.”
“Anybody who lives in Hollman will have seen everything I've got a hundred times and hated all of it. Unless they're into crafts, of course, and then they come in to buy the material they need. Yarn. Material. Pipe cleaners. Do you smoke a pipe?”
“No. Are you Mrs. Bligh?”
“What?” The woman looked startled. “Oh,” she said finally. “The sign. Yes, I'm Mrs. Bligh. Emma Bligh. Emma
Kenyon
Bligh, as they put it in the newspaper when they write me up for being on some committee at the high school. Kenyon was my maiden name. Who are you?”
Kenyon
Bligh, as they put it in the newspaper when they write me up for being on some committee at the high school. Kenyon was my maiden name. Who are you?”
“Somebody who needs a knickknack to present to a friend of mine before I'm unconscionably late arriving.”
The cowbell rang again, and they both looked up at the front door at the woman coming in. To Gregor, she seemed
less alarming than Emma Kenyon Blighânot fat, and with ordinary brownish hair instead of yellowâbut there was also something out of key about her, as if, if you scratched the surface, you would get something you didn't expect to see. The surface was ordinary enough, though. She had on a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of the kind once favored by the women called in Gregor's youth “old-maid schoolteachers,” and if it hadn't been for the thin gold wedding band on the fourth finger of her left hand, that was what Gregor would have thought she was.
less alarming than Emma Kenyon Blighânot fat, and with ordinary brownish hair instead of yellowâbut there was also something out of key about her, as if, if you scratched the surface, you would get something you didn't expect to see. The surface was ordinary enough, though. She had on a short-sleeved shirtwaist dress of the kind once favored by the women called in Gregor's youth “old-maid schoolteachers,” and if it hadn't been for the thin gold wedding band on the fourth finger of her left hand, that was what Gregor would have thought she was.
“Peggy,” Emma said. “What are you doing downtown so late?”
Peggy looked at her feet. She seemed not only unwilling, but incapable of looking anyone in the eye. “I had to work late. We had chess club. Iâ” She looked confused.
“Shit,” Emma said, under her breath.
Peggy looked up at the ceiling. There was a fan there, turning slowly, not doing much good. “I had to talk to you,” she said.
“Shit,” Emma said again.
Peggy seemed not to have noticed.
Gregor grabbed the first thing at handâa little wooden plaque with a ceramic inset with the words “The Kitchen Is the Heart of the Home” printed across the top of it and a poem underneath, probably a bad one. Emma had come out from behind the counter and was moving through the shelves full of inanities toward the front door, where Peggy was still standing almost still, as if she had just come in. Gregor hadn't realized how many shelves and knickknacks there were. He hadn't been paying attention. Now the place seemed to be stuffed full of them.
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A Cookbook Conspiracy by Carlisle, Kate
Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay
Contract to Wed by Holly Bush