Skeleton Key Read online

  And then, of course, there was this cough she had. And had and had.

  What she was supposed to be doing was trying to go to sleep, which was why she had come upstairs to her assigned bedroom, a low-ceilinged, cramped little space under one of the west ell gables. She had even gotten out of her clothes and put on her nightgown and a robe. It was Gregor’s robe, and much too large for her, but she liked the way it smelled. It had a warm aura, like French toast with butter and cinnamon on it. It was hard to say what it meant that that was the kind of thing that reminded her of Gregor. She had taken her books out of her suitcase and laid them on the bed, too. One of them was a mystery novel by P. D. James called Original Sin. The other was a book about Paris in the 1920s that had a lot about Julia Anson in it. Julia Anson the painter. Julia Anson the collector. Julia Anson the lesbian—and famous for it, too, long before it had been fashionable to be famous for any such thing.

  It was impossible to concentrate on P. D. James when the wind was rattling against the house the way it was. Bennis wanted to call Gregor, but she didn’t want to wake him up, or be accused by Margaret of using the house phones for long-distance calls. Margaret Anson seemed like just the sort of woman who would make that kind of accusation, without bothering to find out first if Bennis used a calling card. This room was so small, there was no point to pacing in it. She just kept bumping up against the green-and-gold wallpapered walls. Julia Anson had lived the last fifty years of her life in two small rooms off the rue Jacob. Her parents hadn’t had any money then, and people didn’t pay serious money for paintings by women. Abigail had Julia’s diary from that period, and it was all about half-starving in the midst of some of the most wonderful food on earth. Bennis couldn’t imagine being in Paris and not being able to afford to eat.

  Bennis went to her gabled window and looked out. She’d thought she’d heard a car coming up the drive, but there was nothing out there but trees. She went back to the narrow bed and sat down on it. She wanted a cigarette, but she wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house. It was time to quit smoking, it really was, but somehow she didn’t want to do it right this second.

  She got up off the bed and went back to the window. She left the window and went back to the bed. She was feeling frustrated and she was beginning to feel angry. She got her cigarettes out of the side pocket of her tote bag and stuck them in the pocket of her robe.

  Out in the hallway, the lights were all turned off, except that there was a stream coming from under the door of Margaret Anson’s bedroom. Bennis stopped there and listened, but Margaret seemed to be doing no more than she herself had been doing only a few moments before: pacing, and getting no joy out of it. Bennis went on down the hall and came to the stairs that led to the front entry. She went down those and ended up in a long, high-ceilinged hall. This part of the house had been built later than the part where she had her bedroom. Very early New Englanders always seemed to need wombs more than they needed rooms.

  Bennis went out the front door and looked around. There was nothing to see, and it was very cold. She should have put something on her legs and feet, but she hadn’t thought of it, because she never wore anything on her legs and feet when she was padding around her apartment in her nightgown. She came back inside and closed the door behind her. Then she headed through the living room and the rooms beyond. If this had been somebody else’s house, she would have gone into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, but she wasn’t going to take anything here unless she had Margaret Anson’s permission for it.

  She got to the kitchen and walked straight through it, into the pantry. She looked at the open shelves of canned corn and flour sacks and rose hip preserved in glass jars. One wall was free of shelves and had pegs on it instead. Hanging from each of the pegs but one were jackets that looked as if they belonged to a man. Underneath them were shoes that looked as if they belonged to a man, too. Robert Anson’s shoes.

  Bennis went out the other side of the pantry and onto the back porch. There was a security light here, turned on and pointing to the yard. Bennis could see the raked gravel of the driveway’s turnaround and the outline of the long four-car garage. The garage had been a barn once. The shape was unmistakable. The last bay of it was standing open.

  Bennis got her cigarettes out and lit one up. She took a deep lungful of smoke and let it out slowly, as if she were smoking marijuana instead of tobacco. Then she started to cough again, but she held it in. She could do that sometimes. It was really cold out here—freezing, in fact The least she should do was to put on a pair of Robert’s shoes, so that her toes didn’t freeze to the wooden floor of the porch. She didn’t want to do that any more than she wanted to get herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, though, because Margaret was always hovering in the background, looking for something discreditable to report.

  Bennis went down into the drive. The gravel hurt her feet. She moved to the grass and shivered. There was enough frost on the grass to make it stiff. She had to be out of her mind, wandering around like this. She walked over to the barn and looked at the side of it. Its paint was peeling and its wood was gray and dry. It wasn’t really being taken care of. She wasn’t taking care of herself, either. She seemed to be willing herself into a bout with pneumonia.

  Bennis’s cigarette was out. She knelt down and ground the butt against the grass, making the frost melt. Then she put the cold butt into her pocket and got another cigarette out. The problem wasn’t that she went on smoking, but that she went on chain smoking. She had to keep reminding herself that there was nothing romantic about dying young.

  She walked around the side of the barn, back onto the gravel drive. She walked past the three closed bays and stopped at the open one. All the bays were full of cars. There were too many of them for the people who lived in the house. Bennis supposed that at least one of them had been Robert’s own, like the boots and the jackets in the pantry. Probate was supposed to take care of all that, but maybe it hadn’t been a very thorough probate. Maybe Robert Anson had had so many things that it was easy to forget about a car parked in a garage at a house in the country.

  The car in the bay in front of her was a Mercedes four-door sedan, painted a murky brown. It looked like it belonged to Margaret Anson. The car in the bay farthest from where she was standing was a Jaguar. She could tell that just by the shape of it. It was the one she thought was most likely to belong to the dead man. Margaret would say that that was just one more proof that Robert Anson had been flashy and superficial, and the flashy part was probably true enough.

  The car in the next bay was a little BMW and, by some trick of the moonlight that was streaming in through the open bay and the barn’s few small windows, it looked as if there were a person there, sitting bolt upright in the front passenger seat. Bennis stared and stared at the shape, willing it to go away. It was spooky in a way she didn’t like to think about. Her cigarette felt hot and hostile in her hand. It kept burning down to the skin on her fingers. Bennis took a long drag and rocked from foot to foot. The barn floor had been paved over with cement. Her feet weren’t being hurt by the small rocks of the drive anymore. It was still cold.

  The best thing to do about fear is to face it. Bennis had made that rule for herself years ago, when she had first escaped from her father’s house. If you are afraid to face your fear, you simply fold. Bennis wasn’t sure what folding would mean in this case. She wasn’t even sure if it would matter. She dragged on the last of her cigarette—she always forgot how much faster they smoked down outside than in—and ground it out against the cement.

  It was going to turn out to be a jacket left lying across the back of the seat, or a large tote bag stuffed with junk that someone had forgotten to take inside. Bennis wrapped her arms around her body and walked up to the side of the car. This close, she could see even less than she had from the open bay, because it was darker. She put her face to the glass of the passenger side window and got nothing at all. A shape. A hulk. A ragged piece of darkness. Nothing.

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nbsp; “Ass,” Bennis said, meaning herself. She was an ass sometimes, too. She blew things out of all proportion. Gregor always said that she cared more for her imagination than she did for practical reality. She made her living on her imagination. Gregor also said other things, though—such as that she always tried to find the most expensive price for anything she wanted to buy—that weren’t strictly true. They had been together for so long now, in one way or the other, that they exaggerated the things that seemed to them unique in the other person. It was a way of marking territory and soothing the nervousness that came with any serious human connection. A relationship could always fail. A love affair could always fall apart. A friendship could always disintegrate.

  “I am killing time here,” Bennis said, as loudly as she could, just to hear the sound of her own voice. If she had brought Gregor with her, she could go back into the house and get him to help her with this. Of course, if she had brought Gregor with her, she wouldn’t have come out here to begin with. She would probably have had a better bedroom, too. She didn’t believe her bedroom had been Kayla’s idea. Margaret Anson struck her as the kind of woman who always gave the best she had to men, and then resented them for it.

  Bennis got her arms unwrapped from around her body and her hand on the car door’s handle. She held her breath and counted to ten and jerked the car door open. When she heard something start to slide out, she thought she had been right about a tote bag. It made the kind of sound cloth bags make when they are full of clothes. Then she felt something brush against her legs and looked down.

  Eyes, Bennis thought a second later. Those are eyes I see, staring straight up at me. This must be some kind of ventriloquist’s dummy.

  But Bennis knew enough about ventriloquist’s dummies to know they didn’t have eyes like that, eyes that stared straight up, eyes with whites that were threaded through with tiny red veins. This was a body she had lying against her legs. It was a body that had been dead for at least some time. It was stiffish and awkward, as if it were just beginning to freeze with rigor.

  Bennis backed away from the car, moving very slowly. She backed away until she hit the Mercedes in the open bay. By then the body was off her legs and wholly on the barn’s cement floor. It lay on its back with its legs splayed and its clothing spattered with blood. Hit on the back of the head, Bennis thought. And then she started to half-run, half-walk to the house.

  Outside, the full moon was floating in a sea of black, free of even the trace of clouds. The house looked backlit and deserted, so dark it might as well have been haunted. How long would the body have had to be out there, in the cold like that, before it got into the condition it was in? How long had it been tonight since someone had bludgeoned Kayla Anson to death?

  The first thing Bennis Hannaford wanted to do was to call Gregor Demarkian and tell him what had happened. The next thing she wanted to do was to pack her things and move right out of this house.

  Somewhere in there—maybe when this latest coughing fit was over—she would have to find the time to call the state police.

  PART ONE

  One

  1

  For Gregor Demarkian, the most frightening thing was not that he couldn’t sleep when Bennis was not at home, but’ that it mattered so much to him that Bennis shouldn’t know he couldn’t sleep when she was not at home. Like everything else about his relationship with Bennis Hannaford, this was a thought so convoluted that he almost couldn’t express it in words. He got it tangled up. He started talking nonsense, even in his own mind. Then he would get out of bed and go down the short hall to his living room. He would make himself coffee strong enough so that he wouldn’t even have to think about trying to sleep for hours. He would stand in front of the broad window in his living room and look down on Cavanaugh Street. This morning, like all mornings, was a dark and silent one. There might be crises in other parts of Philadelphia, crimes and accidents, parties that raged so loudly they broke windows in houses across the street, but in this place there was only sleep, punctuated by streetlamps.

  He had a digital clock on the table next to his bed, one of the kind with numbers that glowed red. When he woke up, it said 2:37:09. He turned over onto his back and stared up into the dark. When he had first bought this apartment—when he was still newly retired from the FBI, and newly a widower—there had been times when he had thought he could hear his dead wife’s voice in the hallway, or her movements in the kitchen. That was true even though she had never been in these rooms. She had never even been on Cavanaugh Street when these rooms were in existence. Her memory of this neighborhood had been like his, then: a marginal ethnic enclave, marked by decaying buildings and elderly people who just didn’t have the resources to move. He still thought of the street that way sometimes, the way it had been on the day he and Elizabeth had come to Philadelphia to bury his mother. Sometimes he thought of it even further back, when he was growing up, when it was full of tenements and ambition. This was something he had never been able to work out. How much of a person’s childhood stayed with him forever? How much could he just walk away from, as if it had never been? Sometimes, sitting with Bennis in a restaurant or listening to her complain about work or parking tickets, it seemed to Gregor that the gulf between them was unbridgeable. Bennis, after all, had been born in a mansion on the Philadelphia Main Line.

  When the clock said 2:45:00, Gregor sat up and got one of his robes. When Bennis was here, she always took one. It felt wrong, somehow, to actually be able to lay hands on his favorite and use it, for himself. He went down the hall and through the living room into the kitchen. He opened his refrigerator and took out a big plate of stuffed grape leaves. Lida Arkmanian had brought them over to him, as she did even when Bennis was here. Bennis couldn’t cook. Gregor and Lida had gone to school together right here on Cavanaugh Street, in the days when children got new shoes only for Easter and getting them was an event.

  “Stuffed grape leaves,” Lida had told him, when they first began having coffee together, that Christmas after Gregor had moved back to Philadelphia. “Not stuffed vine leaves. For goodness sake, Krekor, you sound like a yuppie.”

  Stuffed grape leaves didn’t have to be heated up. Coffee did, but that meant only putting the kettle on the stove and getting out the Folgers crystals. Gregor took a large white mug and a small white plate out of the cabinet and put diem on the kitchen table. He took stuffed grape leaves out of the bowl and put them on the plate. He made a mountain of grape leaves, high enough to be unsteady. He wished somebody was awake, somewhere on the street, or that Bennis was staying in an ordinary hotel where he could call her at any hour of the night Instead, Bennis was staying in some rich woman’s spare bedroom, and even Father Tibor Kasparian would be passed out on his couch with a book on his chest.

  Was it even possible, to find someone to love when you were nearly sixty? And what was it supposed to mean? With Elizabeth, he had had all the usual things. They had started out together young. They had built a life, and would have built a family, if they had ever been able to have children. That kind of marriage was made of little things—a tiny apartment made the scene of many small sacrifices, endured to save the money for the down payment on a house; a period of trial and error over cookbooks; the choice of lights and decorations for a Christmas tree. Gregor understood that kind of marriage. He understood what it was for and why he had gone into it. He even understood, finally, that it had not all been ruined because Elizabeth had died badly. It was terrible what cancer did to people, and not just to the people who had it.

  The problem with this—situation—with Bennis was that he didn’t have a name for it. It wasn’t a marriage. They weren’t married, and Gregor wasn’t even sure that Bennis would marry him if he asked. They had other things together, things Gregor had never had with anyone else—they had gone off alone together, to Spain, for an entire month, just a little while ago, and the memories of it could still make Gregor turn bright red—but he was sure you couldn’t base a life on that ki
nd of thing. It wore off eventually, or the woman got tired, or you did. Besides, he and Bennis had been together for years before they had been together like that. Bennis had bought her apartment, on the floor just below this one, just to be near to where he lived. They had to have something going with each other, something deeper and more complicated, maybe even something simply more mundane, than—

  —sex.

  The water was boiling. Gregor took the kettle off the stove. He dumped a heaping teaspoon of Folgers crystals into the bottom of his mug. Then, thinking better of it, he added another. He took the water off the stove and poured it over the instant coffee. He watched the water turn a darker brown than he should have allowed himself to make it.

  Maybe this was the problem, the thing he hadn’t been able to get past. Maybe it was the sex that was bothering him. Because the more he thought about it, the more he realized that sex had been filling his life, taking it over, ever since they had gone to Spain. It wasn’t that they spent all their time actually having sex. If it had been that, it would have been over very quickly. Gregor wasn’t twenty anymore, and he had no intention of getting addicted to Viagra. It was that he seemed to spend all his time thinking about sex, or about things related to sex. Before Spain, when he had called up an image of Bennis in his mind, it had been Bennis in her working uniform: jeans, knee socks, turtleneck, cotton crew-neck sweater. Now, when he called up such an image, he saw her in the gray silk nightgown she had bought especially to be with him in Spain, or in one of his shirts, buttoned only halfway up, and asleep next to him in bed.

  “Sex gets in the way of friendship,” he said aloud, trying it out He felt instantaneously foolish. That was the kind of thing boys said to girls in high school, or girls said to boys—the kind of thing that, before you knew any better, you thought was kinder than coming right out and telling someone you found her unattractive.