by Jane Haddam
“I’m going to crack up if you don’t do what I tell you. Find some way to get Kendra Rhode out of here before she pushes those two right off the edge of the world and brings down your movie with them. She does it deliberately, Michael. I’m not making this up. She likes to see people crash and burn. I think it’s the only thing on earth that doesn’t bore her.”
“Shit—” Michael said.
And that was all he said, because the service had cut out. Carl folded up his phone and put it in his pocket. He liked the Oscartown Inn. Marcey and Arrow complained about how stodgy it was, and Carl was sure the inn’s management complained about them, but he just found the place comfortable, and that was all he needed to be satisfied. It did occur to him that there had been a time, not all that long ago, when he had needed a lot more to be satisfied, but it was like the man said. You can’t always get what you want.
He took his empty drink glass across the lobby and through the tinted-glass, mahogany-lined doors of the inn’s bar. He went up to the bar itself and sat down on a stool. The bar had the television on, which was a miracle. The cable company up here had to be the best on the planet. The set was turned to a news channel. A woman reporter was standing in the snow in a pastel green parka with fake fur around the hood, talking into a microphone and shivering.
“You want another one of those, Mr. Frank?” the bartender said.
The bar was dark, the way so many bars were. It was as if most people couldn’t really drink in the full light of day. The people around him, sitting at the little tables, all looked like the kind who nursed a single drink for an hour and then went home. Some of the women had tote bags next to their chairs with books peeping out of them. Over on the far wall there was a huge fireplace that went through to the common room on the other side, the fire in it fully stoked and blazing. Carl had seen Stewart Gordon down here some nights, all by himself with a book of his own. There had to be something better he could be doing with his life than what he was actually doing with it. The problem was, he couldn’t think of what.
He made a gesture at his glass and said, “Give me a double this time. I think I’m in for the night.”
4
There were people on Margaret’s Harbor who said that Linda Beecham was a living history of the island. If you needed to know who fell down sloppy drunk on Main Street on Christmas Eve in 1924, or who was and wasn’t at the Montgomery’s Gold and Silver Ball in 1933, all you had to do was to ask Linda. She wouldn’t even have to look it up. She sat there on the second floor of the Harbor Home News Building, looking out her big plate glass window at the people of Oscartown, and it was as if the island had its own fairy godmother, the Spirit of Christmas Past in chinos and fisherman’s sweaters and big clanky suede snow boots that she’d certainly never bought in any place you could get to without driving over water.
The thing was, though, that any picture of Linda Bee-cham as the Spirit of Christmas anything had to come from people who knew her very little, and then mostly as a decoration. It was true enough that she knew everything there was to know about the island. She had been born and raised there, which was incredibly rare, at least until recently. For most of the world, Margaret’s Harbor was a place to take a vacation or to own a second house. People came up from Boston and New York in the summer and sat in the hole-in-the-wall coffee places with copies of Forbes and the New York Review of Books, and even their waiters were from off-island. There were times when it was possible to think that there was no such thing as a native of Margaret’s Harbor. The whole place was just a repository for old New England money, new New York money, and the families of presidents too famous for their own good.
Linda’s family had been fishermen, back when she’d had any family, and some of them had owned stores in the small towns in the island’s center, away from the ocean, where property was expensive. If she bothered to remember it—and she almost never did—she could feel the air on her face biking out to Oscartown to see the rich people when she was still in grade school. The girls had all looked to her like space aliens because they were nothing like the girls she knew, and nothing like the girls she saw on television. Back in those days, Margaret’s Harbor got exactly two television stations, both of them out of Boston. They showed the standard sitcoms and westerns and game shows and the Boston nightly news, which made even less sense to her than the rich people did. The only thing that did make sense to her was her plans for the future. None of those plans had included spending the rest of her life on Margaret’s Harbor.
The reason that Linda Beecham couldn’t be the Spirit of Christmas anything was this: she never smiled, if she could help it, and she never acknowledged Christmas when she was away from the office. The office was always decorated to the hilt, including strings of lights around the entryway that faced Main Street, but home was blank and bare of even so much as a holly wreath. If people sent her Christmas cards, she threw them away. If people showed up with plates of cookies or fruit baskets full of navel oranges, she waited until they’d gone away and then put everything but the oranges down the garbage disposal. She was not an evil-tempered and embittered woman. She didn’t put a lot of venom in her systematic exclusion of all things sentimental. She just went about her life as methodically as possible without actually being transformed into a robot, and when people tried to get her to do more than that, she pretended she hadn’t heard them. Linda Beecham had learned a lot of things in the fifty-five years of her life, but the most important one was this: it was very dangerous for some people to be happy.
At the moment, since it wasn’t even New Year’s Day yet, the decorations were still up on the premises of the Harbor Home News, including a small tree in a wooden pot with bows and candy canes all over it. The tree sat in the window that looked out onto the street, and Linda tried her best to pretend it wasn’t there. In some ways it was too bad that she wasn’t evil-tempered or embittered. If she had been, she could have told the silly little intern who had brought her the tree to shove it up her gilded rich girl’s ass.
On the other side of the office, her best reporter—her only full-time reporter—was setting up a presentation.on a tripod. The tripod had an easel on it and the easel was covered with photographs, most of them in color, even though the Harbor Home News never published anything in color. Linda had a big cup of coffee that she wanted to bury her face in. She sometimes thought that if she ever decided to become a legend in her own time, she’d start spiking the coffee with gin.
“You know,” she said, “there’s a major storm out there. You could go home.”
“You could go home too,” Jack Bullard said. “It doesn’t matter for either of us. We walk. I want you to look at these photographs.”
“They’re very nice photographs. They’re just photographs of silly people.”
“Photographs of silly people fetch a lot of money these days. I’ve got one I haven’t developed yet of Arrow Nor-mand falling into her car dead drunk and probably worse not an hour and a half ago, and I’ll bet you anything I could sell it to the tabloids for a few thousand dollars. And Arrow Normand isn’t even a big deal anymore.”
“Was Arrow Normand ever a big deal?”
Jack Bullard sighed. “These people may be trivial, Linda, but they’re not unimportant. At least, they’re not unimportant to the people who have money to spend on photographs of famous people. And we’ve got lots of photographs of famous people. If you don’t want to run them in the Home News—”
“I don’t.”
“At least consider the possibility of selling them to somebody who does want to run them. These people are here. We get the pictures nobody else gets—”
“How do we do that, Jack? I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“I just don’t look like a paparazzo. Because I’m not one. Although lots of people probably have the same pictures, they just get them on the cameras from their cell phones and they’re not very good quality. Mine are excellent quality. She wasn’t wearing any underwear.”
“Who wasn’t?”
“Arrow Normand. She had on a mini skirt cut up to, well, wherever, and she wasn’t wearing any underwear. I’ve got at least one picture in my camera nobody could print anywhere. Except they do, you know, they show them on tele vision with the wrong place just sort of fuzzed out. It’s really incredible what they’ll do on MTV these days.”
“When I was growing up, the Home News used to run society pages. Parties, you know, and debutante things. Nobody seems to do any of that anymore.”
“Nobody seems to care,” Jack said. “Look, I know what you think and I see your point. These are not stellar examples of human beings. They’re not distinguished except by their publicity and they haven’t accomplished anything you’d say was important.”
“Most of them haven’t accomplished anything at all,” Linda pointed out. “I mean, you can say what you want about the old robber barons, but they built industries. They provided jobs for millions of people. They were good for the economy. What you’re asking me to do is to run stories on people who—”
“On people other people want to read about,” Jack said. “It’s no use, Linda. Not everybody has your high-minded idea about what should be news, and not everybody is more interested in George Steiner and Steven Pinker than in Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret. Maybe they should be, but they’re not.”
“It’s like high school. The people who are accomplishing something are invisible, and the people who are visible are all, well…. You see what I mean.”
“I do see what you mean. But this is a good story, Linda, and we should use it. And if we don’t use it, we should at least sell the pictures to a tabloid that’s willing to pay money for it. But I say we use it, because it really is a good story.”
“Arrow Normand falling into her car dead drunk is a good story.”
“She didn’t just fall into her car. She was with that guy she’s been all over, one of the camera crew people she took up with. Mark Anderman. That’s it. They were together.”
“I thought they were always together.”
“They are, but this time they were fighting. She kept kicking him and screaming at him that he was a bastard—”
Linda cleared her throat.
“Sorry. But that’s what she called him. Then she took her nails to his face and ripped a couple of good-sized streaks in his skin. He was bleeding. It was incredible. I got pictures.”
Linda took another long and deep drink of coffee. She liked Jack Bullard. He was young, and he was definitely from the rich people part of the island, but he was direct and without pretensions, and he didn’t try to make her something she was not. That made his obsession with the movie people all the more stupefying.
“It’s incredible that Arrow Normand scratched the face of Mark Anderman until it bled,” she said. “You do realize you’re not making much in the way of sense.”
“I’m just trying to make money. Although, I’ll admit, the whole scene was weird as hell.”
“I think the very idea of these people on the island is weird as hell. The world isn’t what it was when I was growing up. Lord, Jack, really. Thirty years ago, somebody like Kendra Rhode would no more have been seen in public with somebody like Arrow Normand than—I don’t know than what. It’s the sixties. I’m sure it is. That’s what changed everything.”
“The sixties have been over for forty years,” Jack said, “and that’s not what I meant. I meant there was something about the scene that was weird. It can’t be that she was fight-ing with him or scratching him. She does things like that all the time. It was… I don’t know. Something about the car. Truck. It was a truck. A big purple pickup truck.”
“So the scene wasn’t just incredibly vulgar, it was also incredibly tacky?”
“You talk like an etiquette book sometimes, Linda. An old etiquette book. Come and look at these pictures. We could run a story about the movie. We could talk about how it’s affected life on the island, having the movie people here. It would sell a lot of extra copies—Alice could probably even sell some extra advertising around it.”
“I’m not going to print a picture of Arrow Normand’s private parts in the Harbor Home News. Not even on an inside page.”
“I haven’t developed those pictures yet,” Jack said. “Come ahead and look at these. I wish I could get into the party tonight. That would be a coup. Kendra Rhode’s New Year’s party on the society pages of the Harbor Home News.”
“There haven’t been society pages in the Harbor Home News for twenty years.”
“Come look,” Jack said again.
She got up from behind her desk and started across the room to him, thinking that he got too enthusiastic over everything. He had yet to learn that enthusiasm, like happiness, could be dangerous.
She had just reached the point where she could see the photographs clearly—Marcey Mandret doing one of those over-the-shoulder hooded-eye poses that had been a staple of Marilyn Monroe’s; Kendra Rhode carrying her little dog into an accessories store called Mama’s Got a Brand-New Bag; Arrow Normand looking like she was about to throw up—when Jack straightened up and frowned.
“What is it?” she asked him. “Is one of the photographs that bad?”
“The photographs are fine,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stay behind today to develop those pictures. I wish I could put my finger on what’s bothering me so much about that scene. It’s like I almost saw something, but then I didn’t. I didn’t really see it.”
“You should go home and go to bed,” Linda said, and she meant it. She really wasn’t either evil-temperedor embittered. She liked Jack, and she wished him well, even more than she wished most people well. She just needed to keep herself in check, so that she didn’t do something to destroy the first resting place she’d ever found.
She looked at the easel and the photographs pinned to it, the pictures of people who did not matter in any serious sense but who would always matter more than they should in every other sense.
Then she told herself she really ought to start spiking her coffee with gin.
5
Stewart Gordon thought of himself as a sensible man, and he was certainly sensible enough to know that different nationalities had different ways of dealing with common problems. That was the kind of thing they had taught him at St. Andrew’s, and that was the kind of thing he stuck to when he experienced the inevitable collision between Scottish sanity and Hollywood lunacy that hit him every time he worked in the States. This time, though, things had gotten far beyond out of hand. If he had been the parent or guardian of any of the spoiled brats being paid hefty seven-figure salaries to work on this project, he would have locked them up on food and water for a year, long enough to beat some sense into their heads. As far as he could tell, though, none of these people had parents or guardians. They had fathers who were off somewhere—in at least one case, in prison—and mothers who hit the bars as hard as they did. And they all hit the bars. Stewart Gordon liked his ale, and he liked his Glenfddich even better, but he’d never understood why anyone wanted to get drunk enough to suffer through the headache on the following morning.
Not that he hadn’t suffered through a few in his time. He had. He was normal. But that was it. He was normal. These people were—
“Stupid,” he said, out loud, and on his back, Marcey Mandret giggled.
It was still the middle of the afternoon. There were lights on here and there, but that was only because the cloud cover was so thick that everything was hazy. He could have gone right down Main Street and deposited the woman in the lobby of the Oscartown Inn, but he was uncomfortably aware that Marcey’s behavior had attracted an audience. There would be photographers out any minute, if there weren’t already, and that was all he would need. He did not get his picture in the tabloids. He didn’t hide. He didn’t surround himself with forty people whose only purpose was to run interference between him and the press. He just went around living his life, and people mostly left him alone. People did
not leave Marcey Mandret alone, mostly because she spent so much time getting their attention.
He looked around. He was off the track, he was sure of it. He was too close to the water. The girls had rented a house, and he’d thought he knew where it was, but now he was slogging through snowdrifts and he could hear the sea. He was cold, too. He’d wrapped his jacket around Marcey’s ass when he’d first hauled her onto his shoulder—why didn’t these women wear knickers? why?—and even his wool commando’s sweater wasn’t much help in this weather.
The houses around him looked mostly closed up. He always had to remind himself that most of the people with houses on the island used them only as vacation homes, in good weather. There was the Point, but not only was it too far away, he didn’t like the idea of asking Kendra Rhode for anything. The only other house with lights on was a relatively small one, and it had lights on everywhere. He made a calculation. In his experience, Americans were pretty good in an emergency. They took you in and dried you off and warmed you up and gave you a phone. He could only hope that the house with the lights on had an American inside, and not some visiting twit from Paris.
It was hard to figure out how to get where he needed to go. The snow was high enough to be obscuring the sidewalks. He tried a direct route, moving carefully, hoping that he would neither fall nor provoke Marcey Mandret into another bout of vomiting. My God, that girl could spew it out. He stumbled a little here and there, but the house continued to come closer, and he started to worry that he would look too threatening for even an American to let in. Of course, the American might recognize him, which was usually a good sign—but it happened less often on Margaret’s Harbor than in other places he’d been, because Margaret’s Harbor was Sophisticated.
He started to come up to what was obviously the walk to the house’s front door, and the first thing he saw was a small ginger cat sitting in the window. Cats were good. He liked cats. He plowed along, judging his way by the indentations in the snow, and the cat stood up and stretched. It was like the start of some kind of silly movie: there’s a knock on the door, and you open up to find this enormous muscled bald man carrying a half-naked girl to your doorstep.
