kids. He’d be talking to himself and one couple or another would sneak off to the choir room. We all did it some. It was sort of like playing spin the bottle. I took my turns, too. That was how I started to figure I was barking up the wrong tree. The boys just left me cold.” Teri laughed out loud at the memory, proud of the defiance if nothing else. But Evon knew that for a woman of Teri’s age to say that, even to herself, had taken considerable courage.
“Anyway, Zeus and Lidia, I knew they were taking more turns than others. But twenty years later, I figured everybody had grown up and moved on, and my Lidia, she needed a job. You got more use out of a spare tire than anybody could of Mickey with his messed-up heart.
“Lidia, when I finally heard the story from her, many years on, she made it sound like Zeus had his way with her, but I never got an answer when I asked how many times exactly she got herself taken advantage of.” Teri cackled for a second. She loved the way sex made idiots out of everybody. She was on her brother’s side in a determinedly old-fashioned way. But Lidia was the sole support of her family, without any choices. Zeus was, politely put, a complete asshole. “Anyway, she got herself knocked up and never said a word to Zeus, or me for that matter. Probably didn’t want to turn me against my brother.”
“And what about Mickey, her husband? Did he know?”
“Well, sick as he was, everybody kind of took it as one hell of a surprise when Lidia got pregnant, but he always acted happy about it. Course after I knew the real story, it made me wonder how big a cluck he could have been. While she was pregnant, she was always whispering to her closest friends how he could still manage about a minute’s worth, but even then I wondered. But she must have convinced him. You can never tell what people will choose to believe.
“Right after Mickey’s surgery, it was like the twins’ second birthday party, and Mickey was drunk, and started in how they were no children of his, and Lidia, who usually would go crazy angry when she was upset, she just got weepy on him. ‘Don’t say that, Mickey. Why would you say something like that? They’re yours and you know that. You can’t be saying things like that.’ Pretty soon he was bawling, too, and begging her to forgive him. Even when he started breathing fire about Zeus a few years later, he never said anything about my brother touching his wife. That’s another thing you can’t tell Hal-that those boys are Zeus’s. Can you imagine? They are, he isn’t. You’d have to post guards at the windows.”
Evon’s instinct was the same as Teri’s. Not only would Hal be devastated, he was likely eventually to go into one of his bewildering tailspins, obsessing over the legal complications that might entitle the twins to some share of Zeus’s estate. Evon and Tim had agreed that the best solution when they finally spoke to Hal was to stay on the subject-the tests showed the blood at the scene was from neither of the Gianis twins. That might be shock enough to keep Hal from asking his usual sideways questions. Hal was preoccupied anyway these days, inasmuch as his bankers were raising questions about the YourHouse deal that Hal and his lawyers felt should have been posed before the closing.
“If we end up having to tell him the blood is a woman’s,” Evon said, “he’s not going to leave it at that. He’ll want to know who killed his sister-and what Lidia had to do with it.”
Teri shifted back among the silk pillows, trying again to get an eye on Evon.
“And why say that?”
“It has to be Lidia’s blood at the scene. The twins have a type-B parent, and it wasn’t your brother. Lidia wore an Easton class ring on her right hand that would have left that circular bruise on Dita’s cheek. And you can see now why she was desperate to stop Cass’s relationship with Dita. Tim and I are beginning to wonder if Cass pled guilty to keep his mother out of prison.”
Teri pursed her bright mouth and shook her head adamantly.
“Lidia didn’t kill my niece.”
“And Cass did?” Evon asked.
“Hon, I’m just like you. I wasn’t there. But I’ve known Lidia Gianis my entire life, and I’ve heard all of her secrets by now. And she didn’t kill my niece. Worse comes to worst, I’ll tell Hal the same thing. She’d say it to you herself, if she could, poor thing. I still go over there to see her, when I can stand it. The caregivers, they dress her up and move her around as if she was a doll. But her brain is like the stuff you scrape out of a cantaloupe. Breaks my heart. She can still talk some, if you don’t mind hearing the same thing five times in a minute. But she didn’t kill Dita.”
Evon struggled with this a second. Teri had clearly not reached the end of what she knew, but the old lady wasn’t going to share the rest, and Evon had no place to demand it.
“You know,” Teri said, “I didn’t think this was why you were calling. Hal said your girlfriend did you wrong and then went all batshit crazy on you. Thought you wanted advice, one old dyke to another.”
Evon laughed out loud at Teri’s boldness, but she was embarrassed that Heather had made her the talk of the ZP Building. Hal hadn’t heard about Evon’s domestic problems from her.
“She showed up at my apartment building last night and I swore out a protection order at the police station.”
“Oh dear,” Teri said. “Doesn’t sound like a good time.”
“It hasn’t been. I may be off relationships for the rest of my life. You seem to have survived.”
“I don’t know,” Teri said. “I always had my doubts about that stuff from Aristotle, that love is one soul inhabiting two bodies. But if you think I’m sitting here by myself with a highball and a cigarette because I wouldn’t prefer some old biddy coming in to nag me to get rid of both of them, you’re wrong. Here’s another saying.” She reverted to Greek.
“Meaning?”
“That’s Socrates. ‘Find a good wife and you’ll be happy; if not you’ll become a philosopher.’”
Evon was laughing when German came in. Teri apparently had been ordered by her doctors to take an afternoon nap. She fussed at him but got ready to say good-bye. Evon walked around the coffee table to hug the old woman and Teri brought her face and her powerful scents to Evon’s cheek.
“Oh, you’re such a nice girl,” she said.
Hal was screaming at somebody on the blower when Evon and Tim were shown into his office the following afternoon. It sounded from all the talk of collateral that it must have been one of his bankers. Tim went to the window for a minute to enjoy the view from the fortieth floor. He’d lived his whole life pretty close to the ground, no more than two stories for the most part, four if you counted his time in McGrath Hall. He felt excited as a country boy by the chance to stare through the wall of glass at the full stretch of the Tri-Cities. From here, you could see the River Kindle, a satin ribbon in today’s sun, cutting the municipalities apart. Within the embrace of the river’s branches sat block upon block of his city, the perfect squares that looked from this vantage like the pieces in a children’s toy, but which were actually full of all that throbbing life. The feeling welled into Tim again that had come to him as he aged: All in all, people were a whole lot of fun.
Evon moved over to stand beside him. Eventually she pointed, with a grim chuckle, to a bug that had somehow worked its way in between the two layers of glass in the double-paned window. It was some kind of beetle that had gotten flipped onto its back. With the bug unable to turn itself over, its six little legs were churning wildly.
“Talk about a design flaw,” Tim said.
“Right,” said Evon. “And humans have heartbreak.”
For a second, Tim hugged her to his side.
Hal slammed down the phone.
“There have to be plant forms that have more brains than bankers,” he declared, and directed Evon and Tim to his sofa. They took their places dutifully. She spoke.
“I know your hair is on fire with the bankers and YourHouse, so we’ll make this fast. The DNA came back early. The blood isn’t Paul’s.”
Hal gasped, winced, and dropped the pen he’d been holding.
“Damn,” he said, and repeated the word a few times. “So it
“No,” Evon said. She sat forward in a locker room posture, her elbows on her knees. It was game time for her, Tim realized. “It’s not from either of them.”
Hal’s full face went still, and his eyes flicked around under the weight of a fact neither he, nor anyone else for that matter, had imagined.
“Neither?”
