Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  She forced herself all the way up and swung her legs off the couch. Everything hurt. She was probably running a fever. First the truck had gone off the road and onto the beach, and then it was later, and cold, and the snow was pouring in the open window next to her. She didn’t see why anybody bothered to live in New England. Snow was horrible, no matter how neat it looked in the movies. Winter was horrible too. This island was the most horrible thing of all. That was because everybody watched you here, but not like they watched you in L.A. They were like schoolteachers who thought you were stupid, stupid, stupid, and they were always making mental notes about what you’d done so they could tell you all about it afterward.

  She stood up, very carefully. She did not think she was going to throw up. She was past that. She was not sure she could stand for very long. She really did have a fever. Her whole face was hot. She’d probably come down with the flu and shut down the filming and make everybody mad at her again. She leaned against a small table. The woman who lived here had left a book and a mug on it. Arrow couldn’t read the title of the book, because her vision was blurred. It didn’t make sense, anyway. She wondered what time it was. It had been dark when they’d been driving around in the truck, but storm-dark, not night-dark, and as far as she knew it could still be the middle of the afternoon. That would be bad. She needed it to be night. The closer it was tonight, the better off she would be.

  She got to the chaise longue and sat down on the edge of it. She couldn’t have stood up much longer. Marcey was covered with a blanket that was just like the blanket Arrow had had on her on the couch. The woman who lived here must buy matching blankets. Marcey seemed to be snoring. Arrow put out her hand and touched her on the shoulder.

  “Marcey?” she said. “Marcey, you need to be awake.”

  Marcey groaned a little, and turned, and looked up. Arrow bit her lip. They all got pretty drunk, partying. Arrow had been pretty drunk herself just a little while ago. Every once in a while, though, it was important to sober up, and then you—

  And then what?

  Arrow pressed down on Marcey’s shoulder and shook. “Marcey,” she said again. “You’ve got to wake up. It’s important.”

  “Fuck that,” Marcey said.

  She hadn’t opened her eyes. The longer Arrow stayed upright, the more she was sure there was something terribly wrong with her. She was so hot she was burning up, and she was dizzy. It wasn’t the kind of dizzy you got when you were drunk. It was the kind you got when you spun around and around and around without stopping, or went on one of those rides at the amusement park where it did that for you.She shook Marcey again, hard this time. There were all kinds of things she felt she had to say.

  Marcey turned over, flat on her back, and opened her eyes. She turned her head from one side to the other, which couldn’t have helped much, because the chaise had arms on both sides. She sat up a little and looked around. Arrow held her breath.

  “Where are we?” Marcey said.

  “I’m not sure,” Arrow said. “It’s a house some woman owns, in town, I think. Nobody we know. I just—Mark and I had an accident in the truck, and it was cold, and I was walking, and this place was here. I think. I was sort of wasted. This woman made me lie down on the couch and put a blanket on me and tried to get me to drink tea, but I wouldn’t, and then Stewart Gordon brought you here.”

  “Stewart Gordon brought me here?”

  “Carried you in on his shoulders. With his coat wrapped around your middle. I saw it. I was pretending to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk to her, you know, the woman who lives here, and then Stewart Gordon was here and I didn’t want to talk to him. I don’t think it’s right that people like that can call you stupid. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think it’s right.”

  Marcey was suddenly a lot more awake than Arrow was, and Arrow could see it. She was sitting bolt upright and her eyes were clear.

  “I threw up,” Marcey said. “At that place, the bar place on Main Street. Not the inn, the other place. I threw up on the bartender because he had a bow tie. Crap, crap, crap. Where the hell is Stewart Gordon now?”

  Arrow looked away. “They went out. Stewart Gordon and the woman who lives here.”

  “Out? Isn’t there some big storm or the other? Why did they go out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what about Mark? Where’s Mark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “God, isn’t it just like the jerkballs you go out with, there’s an accident in the truck and then he just dumps you there to go walking around in the snow. Are they coming back?”

  “I guess so,” Arrow said. “They’d have to, wouldn’t they? Or the woman would. It’s her house.”

  “It’s a really dinky house,” Marcey said. “You ever noticed that about this place? Most of the houses are really dinky. Except Kendra’s, you know. That one’s good.”

  Arrow took a deep breath and almost immediately started coughing. Her chest hurt. Her head was on fire. “Listen,” she said. “We have to find out what time it is. We have to get out of here.”

  “We can get out of here no matter what time it is.”

  “No, listen, Marcey, be serious. We have to get out of here and we have to go somewhere. Somewhere safe. We have to go to Kendra’s house.”

  Marcey was suddenly very still. “You know how that works,” she said. “Kendra’s getting ready for the party. She’s not going to let anyone in there while the setup is going on. You know what she’s like.”

  “She’s supposed to be our friend. We should be able to go there if we’re in trouble.”

  “What trouble? I get drunk all the time, Arrow. It’s not like I committed a felony.”

  Felony. That was one of those words. Arrow wished that the air would stop moving. Her chest really did hurt. Really, really, really. All her muscles hurt too. She didn’t know what “felony” meant. People used it all the time, but she had always been too embarrassed to ask. If she asked Stewart Gordon, he would call her stupid stupid stupid. That was always, too. Out there in the snow with the window open on her side of the truck, she had been able to see the sea. It was not the same sea as the one she saw in California, and it didn’t feel the same. It was angry and dark. The beach was full of rocks.

  “I have to get to Kendra’s house,” she said stubbornly. She was sure that was the right thing. She was sure of it. “I have to get there now.”

  “If you try bursting in on her when she doesn’t want to see you, she’ll cut you off. You know she will. She cuts people off all the time.”

  “I have to get there now,” Arrow said.

  She stood all the way up. Her legs felt like water. The skirt of her dress was hiked. She could feel a cold breeze between her legs. There was something about that, about having that part of herself exposed. There was something deeply shameful about it, no matter what Kendra said, but it was one of the conditions, it really was. The snow was coming in the window of the truck and the wind was very strong and very cold and then there was blood in her hair. There was blood everywhere, but there was especially blood in her hair.

  “I have to get to Kendra’s,” she said.

  And then she passed out cold.

  8

  Jack Bullard’s life had been an exercise in delayed gratification. If being about to work and wait was what it took to be successful, he thought he was due to overtake Bill Gates before he was thirty-five. Underneath it all, he had never really believed it. It didn’t seem to him that people who succeeded did it by working and waiting. A lot of them were, like Kendra Rhode, just born to it, and anybody who had grown up on Margaret’s Harbor could name a dozen more like her. The trick, some of the people on the island joked, was to know how to pick your great-grandparents, and that was the only trick they wanted to know. The other trick, the one that ended up making multimillionaires out of people like Mar-cey Mandret and Arrow Normand, was not the kind of thing you were brought up to believe was worthwhile if you lived on the isla
nd.

  Right now, Jack was having a hard time knowing just what was and what was not worthwhile, and he was covered with snow. Everything was cold. This was the largest nor’easter he’d seen in years. There were people on the island who said it was the largest in a century. whatever it was, he kept going out in it, and that was not a good idea. He was behaving like a tourist. The tide was coming in too, he was pretty sure of it, and this house—his parents’ house, the one he’d grown up in—was too close to the water. If this had been a summer storm, he’d have been pumping out the basement for weeks.

  He put his gear on his kitchen table and went to the window to look out. The curve of the beach was visible in the darkness mostly because of the streetlamps that lined the road that ran along it. He could see, on the other side, what looked like a car and people moving among the rocks. He stared at them for a while and then dumped the contents of his backpack on the table. The house was not the way he had remembered it. Once his father died, it was as if the old place had given up. It had been in the family, after all, for over a century. It was odd to think that Kendra Rhode’s grandparents and his own had come to the island at the same time, or at least built houses there at the same time. He wondered what Kendra Rhode’s family had thought of it, in the beginning. It was one of the things he liked least about rich people. They liked to go where the primitive was. They liked to think they were roughing it.

  He went right up to the kitchen window and looked out again. There were people moving along the beach. His throat felt very tight. He had a chill. There didn’t look as if there were any police lights there. Oscartown did have its one police cruiser, complete with lights. It didn’t look as if there were any ambulance lights, either. Maybe it was one of the movie people moving around, seeing something strange, poking at it to see what she found—but Jack did not believe that. The movie people were just too stupid. They were stupid to the point of stupefaction. Jack had never really believed the publicity that came out of the entertainment magazines, that actors and singers and entertainment people were all morons, that the entire celebrity world was just a grown-up version of high school, but there they were. He couldn’t deny it anymore. He had file cabinet after file cabinet of pictures to prove it.

  The file cabinets were right there, with him, in the kitchen. He did not use many of the rooms in the house anymore, because they were filled with junk. He just couldn’t seem to keep it going. It embarrassed him a little because he had been brought up with more than a belief that Old Money was the only kind that mattered. It mattered to people on the island to keep their places up. Sometimes he thought he was going to suffocate here. Linda would miss him for a few days and send Jerry Young, and Jerry would knock on the doors and look in the windows and finally let himself inside, and there Jack would be, stretched out on the floor in front of the stove, blue from the lack of oxygen that was Margaret’s Harbor.

  He looked out the window yet again. There really were people over there. They were making their way down toward the beach. He bit his lip and rubbed the flat of his left hand against his cheek, the way his father used to. He was beginning to look like his father. He was beginning to look old. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He had worked hard in school. He had gotten good grades and good board scores and good financial aid. He had gone off to a reasonably good college. And then what? The college was supposed to flx everything. Instead, he had just turned around and come home, and home had been what it always was.

  He went to his file cabinet and used his little key on it. Here was something the movie people had done to him. He’d never locked anything around his place before. The summer people locked their places. Those places were huge, and there were lots of valuable things in them. Somebody said the Rhodes actually had a Renoir. No burglar in his right mind would bother with a place like Jack’s when he had the Point to invade, and Jack knew for a fact that security at the Point was a lot less good than Kendra liked to pretend it was.

  Jack looked through the little stack of manila envelopes, all of them full to the breaking point, all of them lumpy, and picked the one marked “Las Vegas.” He opened it up and dumped the contents on the kitchen table next to the contents of his backpack. His backpack was full of photographic equipment. Some of the photographers from the big media companies who hung around town these days, waiting for Marcey Mandret to fall out of her dress, had talked to him about it. There were professional carrying cases and things that professional photographers used. He looked like an idiot carrying his gear around in a backpack. Jack thought he looked like an idiot in any case, because he was older than some of the guys working crew for CNN and CBS, and yet they were there, and he was here, and never the twain would meet.

  Except that they would, if Jack had his way. He was suddenly aware of being wet as well as cold. The collar of his parka had soaked through. He didn’t know why he was still wearing it. He unzipped it and shrugged it off. It hit the floor behind him, and he didn’t notice. The pictures from Las Vegas were good ones. He could get some decent money for some of them. There was the big picture of the whole lot of them when they’d first arrived, Kendra in the center, because she was always in the center, and then the two toy boys, Steve Becker and Mark Anderman. Steve had his hand on Kendra’s ass. You couldn’t really see it in the photograph, but Jack had taken the photograph, and he knew. Anderman was less intrusive, but his left hand was over Kendra’s right shoulder, and the big thick ring on it had spoiled the lighting.

  Jack pushed that picture away and tried another one. The one he came up with was the picture of Arrow and Mark in the living room of the Hugh Hefner Suite. The Hugh Hefner Suite had come as a revelation to him. A hotel room that cost ten thousand dollars a night? That was nine thousand square feet? Who could afford things like that? Who would want to? Kendra had stayed in an ordinary suite, without all the bells and whistles, and even that had seemed too garish for her. Las Vegas was not the kind of place debutantes, or ex-debutantes, ought to spend time. The lighting was all wrong.

  He went through the pictures one more time. They were good pictures, the kind of pictures the tabloid press really loved. It bothered him that he would never be able to use them. Las Vegas was a tabloid dream. It was a place where nothing was really real. It was supposed to be that kind of place. It was on purpose. What he felt he himself was by accident, or bad luck, or karma: a facade without anything to back it up. That wasn’t exactly accurate. Las Vegas was a facade, but he wasn’t even that. He was—something.

  He’d been too cold before. Now he was too hot. There was sweat trickling down the back of his neck. The Las Vegas photographs were fanned out in front of him, and they looked like a movie set. All the people in them were too pretty. He thought he should be happy about his anonymity, at least for the moment. Without it, he would never have been asked to go on that trip, and he would never have gotten those photographs, and he would never have been able to sell that one of the whole group of them together to the Star for $7,500. It was the most money he had ever made for one photograph, and it had ruined his life.

  I have not ruined my life, he told himself. Then he got up and went back to the kitchen window. He had a very clear memory of his first day at Colgate, his father’s old station wagon pulled up as close as it could get to the door to his dorm, his stuff coming out of the back in boxes. He was not hopeless. He knew enough, just from living on Margaret’s Harbor, to have come in chinos and a polo shirt, and good ones, too. There was still no way to mistake the difference, and not only the difference in cars (that old Ford of his father’s, next to the new Volvos everywhere) or in the way the other fathers looked. It was Jack himself who was insuffcient, and he knew it. He lacked that thing these people had, the ability to be really real all the time, to anybody who saw them. It was the same thing people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand had, although they did not have anything else: the ability to be visible. They would not have it for very long, but as long as they had it they would be worth taking pictu
res of. They were careful, though. Visible people never took up with other visible people if they could help it. It worked out badly.

  Jack went back to the table and began to pick up the pictures, one after another, very carefully. In some of them, everyone was smiling. In others, it was obvious that Arrow and Marcey were drunk beyond belief, and so were Steve and Mark. Kendra Rhode always looked upright and cool. All the interiors were too shiny and garishly colored, as if he’d used cheap film, which he never did. He went back to the first picture and looked at it again. There they were, standing in a semicircle, Kendra in the middle, the men on other side of her, Arrow and Marcey on either side of them. Kendra had told him, that night, that none of the women were wearing underwear. Jack had no idea why she would think this was something he would want to know.

  He put the pictures back in their envelope. He put the envelope back in the filing cabinet. He closed the cabinet drawer and listened to the click as the lock snapped into place. It wasn’t much of a lock. Anybody who was determined could destroy it in a second. It was a good thing that nobody he knew would care enough about anything he had to try to steal it.

  He went back to the window one more time. He pressed his forehead against the glass. There really were people out there, more than one, but they must have come on foot. There was no car parked on the road that he could see, and he would have been able to see the headlights. The lights were coming from the beach, and some of them were moving around, like flashlights. He felt so enormously sick he wanted to throw up right there, but he knew he wouldn’t. It was part of his pact with the house never to get it certain kinds of dirty. It was part of his pact with life never to ask it for more than simple survival, but that was what was wrong. That was what was killing him.

  He had spent every single second of his existence trying to escape from Margaret’s Harbor, and he was absolutely certain that this was his last chance.