27 Blood in the Water (7 page)

He was almost all the way up the other side of the curve when he saw it, the thing he would describe later, to the police, as “a flicker.”

“Flicker” was the best word he had for it, and he was willing to admit that on another day, on a day when he was not already worried and a little upset, he might not have noticed it. It came up and bent a little in the wind. It shuddered in and out of sight. It was like looking at the flame on a candle on a birthday cake when somebody without much breath was trying to blow it out. And it was—
inside
the building.

He slowed his car to look and tried to see. For a moment or two there was nothing. Then the flicker came back. It rose and fell and rose again. It shuddered and died. It rose again. It shuddered and seemed to twist.

Fire,
Arthur thought.

He brought his car almost all the way around and stopped at the small parking lot next to the pool house. He looked around. Most people traveled by golf cart inside Waldorf Pines. There were no golf carts parked in the parking lot. He looked at the pool house. It looked the same as it always did. He looked at the roof of it. There was nothing going on there that had not been going on there the last time he saw it.

He turned off his engine and waited. This was the back of the pool house he was looking at. The front faced the golf course, because people liked to swim and watch the play at the same time. He watched the back windows. He looked at the caution tape. He wondered where Michael Platte was, but not for long, because Michael Platte was never where he was supposed to be.

Arthur got out of the car. He put his keys in his pockets. He left his briefcase on the front passenger seat where he had put it when he left home. He closed the car door behind him and stood, listening.

The sound was definitely there. It sounded like paper crackling.

He walked across the gravel to the pool house door and stopped. The crackling sound was louder and louder. The closer he got to the doors, the louder it was. If he stepped back, it was very faint, almost as if he were making it up.

He went to the doors and tried them. He was sure he would find them locked. They were supposed to be locked. Instead, the door swung open easily.

He stepped into the foyer. There was a big glass case for trophies on the far wall. There were no trophies in it. The case looked forlorn and a little lame.

Arthur tried to listen again, but now he could hear nothing. He might really have been making it all up. He was upset with himself. He didn’t like looking like an idiot. He didn’t like looking like one of those old fussbudget perennial bachelors from the movies of the Fifties, either. He knew the kinds of things people said about him.

The door
snick
ed closed behind him, ending in a heavy
thump
. The lights were not on. He didn’t know how to get them on. He tried to hear the noise again. He got nothing.

The pool was to his left. The changing rooms and showers were to his right. He went first to the changing rooms. He pulled the door of the men’s room wide open and looked inside. There was nothing to see. He backed up and pulled at the door of the women’s room, but he felt a little wrong doing it, as if women might still be inside. He stepped through and the door closed behind him. He was in pitch darkness now, but in a way that was reassuring. If there was pitch darkness, there couldn’t be a fire, or not much of one, not yet.

He went back into the lobby and looked around again. Then he went toward the pool. There had been something about the pool at the last residents meeting. Something about the water being left in it until it could be properly drained by the people coming in to do the repairs. Something. He didn’t remember what.

The doors to the pool were big and heavy. He thought he could hear water sloshing on the other side of them, but he was sure he was making that up. The water wouldn’t be sloshing. There wouldn’t be anybody in it.

He stared into the darkness. The darkness was very, very dark. There were no windows here. He let the door shut behind him. The darkness became even darker. He began to feel along the wall, slowly and slowly, inching his way in case there were things left lying on the floor that could trip him.

He found the first set of switches when he thought he’d gone a mile and a half, even though he knew he couldn’t have, because he hadn’t turned a corner.

He flicked the switches on one after the other.

A couple of dim lights came on and then the sound of air being pumped through a grate or a pipe—maybe he had turned on the air conditioner? He didn’t know what he was doing. He’d never tried turning the lights on in the pool.

One of the dim lights was coming from under the water itself. That was all right. The pool had heat and light so that people could swim in the winter and at night.

Arthur turned and looked into the water, and for just a moment he did not know what he was seeing. There was somebody in the water, yes, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the water itself. It was the wrong color, the wrong shade, something. There was something in there, something dark against the palish clearish blue, but—

But it didn’t matter, because that was when the building went up in flames.

PART I

ONE

1

It was six o’clock on the morning of Monday, the fifth of November, and it was cold. It was so cold that Gregor Demarkian found himself staring down at the jacket his wife had laid out for him across the back of the living room couch and wondering if she’d gone insane. Insanity was never to be completely ruled out when it came to Bennis Hannaford Demarkian, but the forms that insanity took were not usually thin cotton jackets presented for wearing in the freeze that heralded the run-up to winter. Bennis was much more likely to do things that would not be considered illegal only because she was a very good friend of the mayor.

Gregor picked the jacket up and put it down again. It was the jacket Bennis had bought him a couple of years ago, when she had gone on one of her periodic campaigns to “update” him.

“Somehow or the other, you just don’t seem to get the spirit of the times,” she’d said.

He’d been at a loss to know what she was talking about. Maybe he was too stodgy for the business casual atmosphere of the twenty-first century? Maybe he was too rational for all the television shows about mediums and psychic children?

It had turned out that he didn’t own any kind of outerwear that was not utterly formal, as if human beings would not be able to survive in the world of the Obama administration if they didn’t own something called a “barn jacket.”

The shower was on down the hall in the bathroom. Bennis was singing something that required her to hit the C above high C, which she couldn’t do. This would be something by Joni Mitchell, who was the singer Bennis loved most in the world. All of that meant something, Gregor was sure. He just didn’t know what.

He went down to the end of the hall where the bathroom was and knocked on the door. The apartment felt small and cramped these days, because it was filled with too much “stuff.” The worst of the stuff had disappeared over the past few weeks. He didn’t have to go on tripping over stacks of bathroom tile samples and books of dining room wallpaper samples. Bennis had made enough of the decisions about what would happen to this house they had bought to renovate that it wasn’t necessary to live any longer with her indecision. Still, there suddenly seemed to be too much of everything in the apartment, as if she never put anything away anymore, on the assumption that they’d have to take it out and move it later anyway.

He knocked on the door again. The sound of the water got fainter. Bennis must have turned it down.

“What is it?” she called out.

“I’m going to go get Tibor,” Gregor said. “I’m feeling too restless to stand around here. Do you mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. You ought to take another case.”

“Yes, I know, I ought to take another case.”

“I left the paperwork from the last case out on the kitchen table. You’ve got to give it to Martin as soon as you can. It’s getting to be the end of the year. You can’t just leave your paperwork in a mess. The IRS gets cranky.”

“I’ll get to the paperwork this afternoon,” Gregor said.

He meant it, too. At least, he thought he did. He didn’t remember that he’d always had such a hard time taking the paperwork seriously. There it was, though. If you got paid money for doing anything at all, you had paperwork to do, and the state of Pennsylvania and the government of the United States to answer to.

He went down the hall and into the living room. He went through the living room and into the kitchen. Bennis had not just left the paperwork from the Mattatuck case out on the table. She had spaced it out in neat stacks that, Gregor was sure, would turn out to be organized. Bennis had been “self-employed” for a lot longer than he had. She understood these things.

Of course, he’d been self-employed himself now for over a decade. He ought to understand these things.

He left all the paperwork where it was and went out into the hallway. The apartment door snicked shut behind him. He tried to hear the lock click into place, but it was difficult. Grace was upstairs with her door open again, practicing on a harpsichord. Either that, or she was practicing on something called “mother and child virginals.” A lot of keyboard instruments were lifted up through the windows of Grace’s apartment.

“Grace?” Gregor said.

The playing stopped. There was a slight pounding of feet and a head appeared at the stair rail above him.

“Hello, Gregor,” Grace said. “Are you all right? Where’s Bennis? Did I wake you up with my playing?”

“I’ve been up for an hour, and you never wake me up.”

“I’ve got a concert tonight at the museum,” Grace said. “It’s too bad, don’t you think? They call it early music and nobody comes, so we have to play in museums. A lot of people would like harpsichord music if they could hear it, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure they would,” Gregor said. “I like it when I hear you play it. Bennis wanted to know if we should make some special arrangements when you move downstairs. For the instruments, I think she means. I know it won’t be for months now. She seems to think she needs to know everything at once.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Grace said, “she just wants to be prepared. I understand that. I don’t think there’s going to be a problem. They pack up, you know, and it’s not like we’re trying to get them through the front door. Do you have any idea why they made that front door so narrow? I mean, I know most people aren’t trying to get instruments in here, but still. It’s like squeezing through a toothpaste tube.”

“I think it was to discourage break-ins,” Gregor said.

“On Cavanaugh Street?” Grace snorted. “The only person who’s going to break into a house on Cavanaugh Street is Donna, and all she’s going to want is to get at your windows so she can decorate. You’d think they’d know better than that, wouldn’t you? I mean, they’re supposed to be running the entire city.”

Gregor had no idea if Grace was talking about the mayor’s office, or the police, or who. He didn’t think he’d learn much by asking.

“I’m going to go get some breakfast,” he said. “You should talk to Bennis so she doesn’t get too crazy.”

“I will. Have a good morning, Gregor. And try not to be so depressed.”

Grace’s head disappeared from the stair rail, and a moment later Gregor heard playing again. It was the harpsichord he was listening to, he realized. That was Bach’s Concerto in D Minor. It was one of maybe four harpsichord pieces he could recognize just by listening to it.

He turned down the stairwell and went carefully and slowly, as if he were afraid to trip. The apartments in this building were all “floor-throughs.” There was one apartment on each floor, taking up the entire floor. The floor below Gregor’s own, the second, actually belonged to Bennis, and was now part of the apartment above it. Bennis’s first idea for making a home had been to knock out some walls and some ceiling and meld the two apartments together. Gregor had thought this was a very good idea, but for some reason it had never quite come off. The two apartments were melded together, but he and Bennis always stayed upstairs on the third floor, as if the second did not exist. Bennis did her writing on the second floor, but that was all. She hadn’t even stored her renovating samples down there.

Gregor stood on the landing and stared at the door there for a while. He listened to Grace playing above his head. He thought he ought to go to Grace’s concert tonight. It had been years since he had heard her play in person. He thought he and Bennis ought to do something unusual, like take a vacation. He would even be willing to take a vacation where there was sand. He thought he had spent too much of his life being narrowminded about vacations where there was sand.

He looked around and told himself he was spending this time of his life acting like a four-year-old who thinks he can make the bogeyman go away if he just pretends he doesn’t really exist.

But the bogeyman did exist, of course. He existed and lived and breathed and was never far away from anybody’s front door. It was just that, as a grown-up, he called the bogeyman “death.”

Gregor made himself go down the last flight of stairs and into the foyer below. He looked out through the door with the glass panel that led to the vestibule with the mailboxes in the wall. Then he turned away and made himself look at the door to old George Tekemanian’s apartment.

It was funny the way that worked, he thought. He could tell that the apartment was empty—not just empty because nobody was home, but empty because nobody lived there. He would have been able to tell that even if he’d never entered this building before, and if he’d never known old George Tekemanian.

Gregor went back to the door and turned the knob. It opened easily. He pushed it in. Most of old George’s things were already gone. What was left was laid around in very neat stacks, most of them with white slips of paper taped to them. This stack was going to the homeless shelter. This stack was going to the yard sale. This stack was …