“She’ll come back stronger than ever,” I said. “You know she will. She’s a fighter.”
“Always has been,” Miriam agreed.
“I flipped through one of the photo albums you brought in. Such great old pictures. There was one of a brick building and a cool old panel truck, from the early ’30’s, maybe? The sign said Gregorian and Son, or something like that. Grocers. Your family?”
“No,” Miriam said. “The Gregorians were my late husband’s grandparents, on his mother’s side. The first generation in this country. So many Armenians immigrated at about that time, after the genocide. My family came here then, too.”
In high school, when we studied World War I, Maddie and another girl with Armenian ancestry had brought up the topic of the genocide, although I’m not sure we called it that back then. After centuries of turmoil, the Turks had gone on a last-ditch effort to preserve the Ottoman Empire and rid themselves of the Christian Armenians. Armenians were driven from their homes, and one of Maddie’s great-grandmothers, at only fifteen, had led a group of children through the desert to safety. Hundreds of thousands were killed. The Turks continue to dispute the term “genocide,” with its implications of a systematic campaign, and the tensions still affect regional and international politics. Maddie had told her family story and I’d been so intrigued that I’d read the nonfiction account of the period she brought in, Passage to Ararat. The horrors, and the bravery, were permanently stuck in my mind.
“So that was your husband’s maternal grandfather. Maddie’s great-grandfather,” I said, puzzling out the names and genealogy. “With his son, your husband’s uncle?”
“Yes, Haig,” Miriam replied. “I never knew either of them— they both died when David was a boy, long before we met. So good to see you, Pepper.”
I had more questions, but I also had sense enough to tell when a woman who’d traveled halfway around the world to get to her daughter’s bedside was running out of steam.
“Good to see you,” I said, “despite the circumstances. Tim, I’ll try to get in to see Maddie again later in the week.”
“Your visit did her a world of good,” he said as we brushed cheeks. Given her frustration at all she’d wanted to say but couldn’t, I was not so sure.
I watched them leave, the worried husband, the anxious mother. I’d been wondering why Maddie was so intent on pursuing her vision for the property, sure that it meant more to her than another notch in her tool belt or more rental income in her family’s bank accounts. Why, though, I’d had no idea until I spotted the picture in the album, and the brief conversation with her mother gave my theory some credence: What if that property had belonged to her family, and she’d been trying to get it back?
It was kind of a delicious thought, Maddie Petrosian going around someone, undermining their plans, to get what she wanted. Who’d have thunk she had it in her?
But had it gotten her shot?
And how was it tied to Patrick Halloran’s murder? I let out a long, slow breath and headed for my friend on the park bench.
“Forgive me,” Laurel said as I sat beside her. “I’m being an idiot.”
“Kinda nice to hear somebody else saying that. It’s usually me.”
Her lips curved in a humorless smile. “One of the few things I know for sure in all this is that you are on my side.”
I squeezed her hand, then fished a water bottle out of my tote and passed it to her. She popped it open and took a long drink.
“Have you ever discovered something,” she asked, “that changed your entire view of someone?”
Just today, I thought, about Maddie, though I didn’t yet know how that would play out. And three years ago, when I tripped over Tag’s infidelity.
“But you knew it would change everyone else’s view, too,” she went on, “and you weren’t sure you could stand that, so you kept your mouth shut?”
“Are we talking about Patrick?”
She nodded. I waited.
“Patrick was supposed to go on the soccer trip with Gabe. He always went. By high school, the kids had professional coaches, so he was a parent chaperone, and he loved it.” One hand gripped the top of the bottle while the other hand twisted the bottom. “Two days before the trip, he said he couldn’t go, he had to work. That left the team short a chaperone, so I rearranged my schedule and I went.”
“But you’ve never thought his murder was connected to his work, because he hadn’t brought home any files. Or his office laptop.”
“Right.” She hesitated, then went on. “It was a small house. One bath on the main floor, between the living room and our bedroom. Another in the basement, off the family room, next to Gabe’s room. Not like a modern house with a powder room for guests and a full master bath.”
My loft only had one bath, too, accessible from the bedroom or the living room. I wouldn’t mind a powder room for guests.
“He was killed in the mudroom, but the police searched the entire house for evidence of an intruder or an altercation. No fingerprints, no nothing that shouldn’t have been there. They walked me through the house and one of the officers pointed out a tube of lipstick on the floor in the bathroom, behind the toilet. It must have rolled there.”
I had a terrible feeling I knew where this was going. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you wear lipstick.”
She tightened her lips and gave a tiny shake of the head. “The police assumed it was mine. I said yes. But I had cleaned that bathroom the day before we left.”
“Whose do you think it was?”
The look she gave me
