Free Wanting Sheila Dead by Jane Haddam

there was going to be a casket.”
    â€œWe don’t know where we’re going,” Bennis said. “Mrs. Vardanian and company came and grabbed us, and here we are.”
    â€œThere’s going to have to be a casket for somebody if she keeps up this pace,” Gregor said.
    They had crossed another intersection. Now they were in that part of the neighborhood that was exclusively residential. The first block of it had good-looking town houses on both sides, well kept up and repaired. The Kashinians had their place in this block, and there were three houses divided up—like the house Gregor lived in in the other direction—into floor-through apartments. Hannah Krekorian had one of those.
    The block after that one was not so pretty. It was not a slum. No part of Cavanaugh Street was a slum anymore. Gregor supposed it had been one when he was growing up here, and instead of floor-throughs the apartments had been more like rabbit warrens. Still, it had always been clean, what with women washing sidewalks, and other women washing clothes so often that lines of the things had seemed normal to him, a part of the architecture.
    He snapped himself back to the present. The present was not bad. He liked his life these days. The Very Old Ladies had stopped, and the whole crowd of people who had followed them was now standing in front of a tall brick town house that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in forty years. There was mail in the mailbox out front. It must have been left from the afternoon before.
    Mrs. Vardanian mounted two of the steps up to the door and looked the house over. “There,” she said, sounding satisfied about something. “That’s what we want you to do something about.”
    Gregor looked the house over one more time. “What’s what you want me to do something about? I can’t fix up the house, if that’s—”
    â€œNo, no,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “It’s not the house. It’s Sophie Mgrdchian.”
    â€œShe’s the woman who owns the house,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said.
    Sometimes Gregor could not keep the Very Old Ladies apart in his head, except for Mrs. Vardanian who was easy to remember because she had a lot in common with the bogeyman of his childhood.
    Gregor tried to think of what he was supposed to say here. “Is she a friend of yours?” he asked.
    â€œWhat difference does it make if she’s a friend of ours,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Of course she is, or she used to be. She doesn’t go out very much, not even to go to church these days. Her husband Viktor died—”
    â€œIn 1984,” yet another of the Very Old Ladies put in. “I remember the funeral. It wasn’t a very big funeral. There’s a niece, I think, in New York somewhere.”
    â€œIt’s California,” the first of the Very Old Ladies said.
    Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy trying to remember who was saying what.
    â€œHere is what we want you to do,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We want you to find out what has happened to her.”
    â€œHas something happened to her?” Gregor asked.
    â€œYesterday,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “I saw a woman come out of this house and leave the neighborhood. She came back in a taxi half an hour later with grocery bags. It was not Sophie Mgrdchian.”
    â€œMaybe it was the niece,” Gregor said, “or, I don’t know, the sister? Brother? Whoever had the niece?”
    â€œIt’s a niece,” one of the Very Old Ladies said. “Sophie’s two sisters are dead. It was a terrible thing, really, there were practically no children. One of Viktor’s brothers had a daughter. But the niece can’t be more than, I don’t know—”
    â€œForty,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “She’s probably younger. This woman looked as old as Sophie. And she was—”
    â€œShe was messy,”