28 Hearts of Sand Read Online Free Page A

it. She looked at the papers strewn everywhere and hesitated. Gregor and Tibor hurried to push papers out of the way.
    “Don’t worry about getting them out of order, Krekor,” Tibor said. “There is no such thing as ‘in order’ with these things.”
    Linda put the plates down and looked into their coffee cups. “I’ll be back with the pot,” she said, “and if that’s the mortgage stuff, I still say you should just dynamate NationReady and get it over with. We’ve got a whole family staying in our back apartment, and the grandmother keeps threatening to commit suicide. Not that I think she means it, mind you, but this is ridiculous.”
    “It is criminal,” Tibor said.
    “Be right back,” Linda said.
    Gregor watched her go and then looked back at the papers. “You’d think there would be something you could do about outright fraud,” he said. “I know half a dozen first-rate Federal fraud investigators from at least four agencies who would love to bring down a big operation like NationReady.”
    “NationReady has been bought by CountriBank.”
    “They’d love to bring down that, too. You don’t know what these guys are like. Woman, in one case. They live to bring down big operations, especially if the operations are supposed to be respectable banks. They really hate banks.”
    “They can hate banks all they want, Krekor, but that will not get these people back into their houses. And we are now stuck trying to make sure no more of them are forced out. It is not so simple as it sounds like it ought to be.”
    “Maybe I’ll go talk to one of those people for you,” Gregor said.
    “I would much appreciate it,” Tibor said. “I don’t think you will do much good, you understand, but I would appreciate it.”
    “Of course it would do some good,” Gregor said positively, picking up his fork and attacking his sausage.
    He always went for the sausage first, because it was the first thing Bennis wanted to take away from him when she saw he wasn’t breakfasting on fruit.
    3
    An hour later, with no sign of Bennis or Donna at the Ararat, Gregor walked back home to pick up his briefcase. The storm had died down. The wind was no longer violent. There was no more thunder. There was no lightning in the sky. The drizzle was still coming down, though, and it still felt cold.
    Gregor went in through the front door of the house, because that was the place where the house looked most “done.” It was a beautiful entry, really, with a glass-inlaid door and a brass knob and knocker. As far as he could tell, Bennis didn’t intend to do anything at all about the building’s facade.
    He let himself into the foyer, stepped over a stack of tiles, and took his Windbreaker off. There was an old-fashioned coat stand right there in the corner. Bennis had picked it up at an antique store somewhere or the other. He put his Windbreaker over that and headed for the back of the house.
    “Bennis?” he said. “Are you all right? You never made it to the Ararat.”
    He went past little mounds of bathroom fixtures, puddles of carpet samples, stacks of “home plan ideas” magazines that he was sure Bennis had never read. He let himself into the kitchen and heard a sudden, inhuman shriek.
    Bennis was sitting on one of the chairs, holding a small, impossibly frantic animal in her lap. It looked like nothing Gregor had ever seen before. It was skeletal and matted. It was twisting around like it had no bones at all.
    Bennis stood up and thrust it under a pile of blankets on the table. When Gregor looked again, he could see that the pile had actually been shaped into a little blanket cave. Shrieks came from the center of it, and the whole pile seemed to shake.
    “What was that?” Gregor asked.
    Bennis sat down again. “It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a very small cat, and it’s half dead. Donna and I found it under the back porch with what was probably its mother and two litter mates. They were all dead.”
    “All