Home > One of Our Own(9)

One of Our Own(9)
Author: Jane Haddam

“No,” Father Tibor said definitely. “No. You must not do that. It is a very American thing to do, and I care very much for American things, but in this case it is wrong. To say he is insane is to say he did not know what he was doing, that he did not have control of himself. It is saying he is something less than a human being. But that is not true. He is as human as everybody else.”

“Even if he did the things he did because he thought the world was about to end and he was trying to get enough money to— I don’t know. Build us a bunker? Build us an entire private army? Did he even know where he thought all that was going?”

“Probably not,” Father Tibor said.

“I don’t know if I want to go up again,” Tommy said. “It was depressing. And scary. It was like something out of a science fiction movie. One of the dystopian ones. And he was—different.”

“Yes,” Father Tibor said.

They were right at the intersection where, to get to Cavanaugh Street, they would have to turn left. They had left the Spanish neighborhood behind them by a couple of blocks. They were in a small area of shop fronts, all of which had those metal security barriers over their plate-glass windows. It was not as depressing as the prison had been, but Tommy thought it was pretty depressing.

Somewhere in the not-too-distant distance there was a squeal of brakes. Tommy looked into the weather and could just see the pinpoint glare of a pair of headlights.

“I hope that’s a police car,” he said. “They catch anybody out here in this, they’ll have fits.”

“The sanders should be out by now,” Tibor said.

The vehicle wasn’t a sander. A sander was a truck. This thing sounded like an ordinary car. Tommy adjusted his backpack on his shoulders. He was exhausted.

“I suppose I ought to go home and face Mom,” he said. “I’m going to have to do it eventually.”

“I will walk you to your front door. I will watch as you go inside. I will call and tell her you are coming in the door.”

“I don’t know where you think I’d go in the middle of all this, Father. I haven’t even seen a diner open.”

There was another squeal, closer now. They both turned in the direction of the noise. The headlights got bigger. Then they got bigger still, and the vehicle was finally close enough—about a block and a half away—to be recognizable in the storm. It was a big black van, one of the ones without any windows in the sides, and it was picking up speed.

“What the hell does that idiot think he’s doing?” Tommy said.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.

The engine revved and the van shot forward. Suddenly it was right next to them. It was fishtailing wildly, its rear end swinging back and forth. Tommy grabbed Father Tibor by the chest and pushed him back against the walls of the stores behind them. Didn’t vans like that usually have four-wheel drive? But even four-wheel drive didn’t work on ice. Russ had taught him that.

Russ had taught him practically everything he knew.

The squealing was almost as loud as a siren now. Then the driver seemed to get a clue and began to turn into the skid. The turn was a wide circle. There wasn’t space for it. The van came around and the driver hit the brakes. It didn’t help. The van came around again and then suddenly the side of it hit the streetlamp on the corner. The noise was metallic and enormous. The van’s back doors popped. They hung there in the air for a moment, flapping.

Then the van righted itself. The engine revved again. The van aimed straight ahead and shot off past them.

And as it went, an oversized black garbage bag came flying out of its interior and landed on the street.

And then it was over. The street was empty except for the garbage bag. The ice storm was bad. There was nobody to be seen anywhere. Tommy moved back out onto the middle of the sidewalk and stopped.

The garbage bag was not empty. There was something inside it, lumpy and unpleasantly familiar.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said, grabbing his arm.

Tommy hadn’t noticed that Tibor had moved back onto the sidewalk, too. Tommy shook off the arm trying to hold him back.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.

Tommy went out into the middle of the street.

He knew that there was a human body in that bag before he got anywhere near it.

What he didn’t know until he got right on top of it was that it was alive.

 

 

PART ONE

 

 

ONE

 

 

1


Gregor Demarkian took Pickles out for a walk the long way around, starting at his own house and going all the way up Cavanaugh Street and then back again. The ice storm was over but still a problem. The sidewalk was slick. The utility poles all looked like they were frosted. Pickles was not enamored of this bit of exercise. Gregor was surprised she was willing to get her business done at all.

What Gregor wanted was to take a look at Donna Moradanyan’s house, the same house where Tommy Moradanyan and his sister lived, the same house where they had all lived together with Russ Donahue. He had no idea what he expected to see. There was a time when any house Donna Moradanyan lived was a spectacle for the neighborhood and beyond. She liked decorating for holidays, and her idea of decorating was to wrap entire buildings in lights or colored tinfoil or shiny paper or whatever else occurred to her to carry out a theme. Sometimes she wrapped her own house this way. Sometimes she went on to another building or two on the street. One Groundhog Day she had decked out the Ararat Restaurant with plastic grass and flowers and added a mechanical groundhog that sprang up to celebrate spring. On Valentine’s Day she had covered Gregor’s own house in wriggling cupids with red and white hearts on the tips of their arrows. Stories and pictures appeared on the local news stations. People came from as far away as Bucks County and the Main Line to see what she was going to do next.

This morning the house was dark, with nothing to cover it but its own red brick. There had been no decorating since Russ had gone to prison. In some ways, there had been no Donna since Russ had gone to prison. She went about her day the way she always had. Her children were well dressed and well fed. Tommy got halfway decent grades in school. Charlotte was the star of her ballet class. Donna herself had taken a job as an editor at a small local newsmagazine. Gregor had heard she did well there. Even so, it was like Gertrude Stein said—there was no there there. The Donna Moradanyan of today was a competent, organized woman. She just wasn’t really Donna Moradanyan.

Pickles decided to do her business right in front of Donna’s house, which Gregor thought was a statement of some kind, he didn’t know about what. Gregor used the pooper-scooper and cleaned up after the dog. He half expected Tommy to come barreling out to talk to him. There had to be a lot left to say after the mess of the night before. There was always the chance that Gregor, with his contacts, might have heard something about what it all meant. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t, but Tommy didn’t come out anyway.

Gregor gave a last look at the brick facade and started back toward his own house. He got as spooky as Donna sometimes these days. He didn’t know what to do about it. Things just seemed … wrong, somehow. He couldn’t put them right.

He let himself into his front foyer and heard sounds from the kitchen. A moment later, Javier came running out, and Pickles snapped against the leash hard enough to break free. Javier was talking a mile a minute in Spanish. Pickles was licking his face and scattering wet drops of melting ice everywhere.

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