by Jane Haddam
Actually, she was only thinking about annihilating blasts in that not-quite-subconscious substratum of her mind, the one that played the background music to everything else she did. In the foreground, at the moment, was the fact that she had become increasingly afraid of her telephone. Lately, there was always something coming over it that she didn’t want to hear. That designation applied especially to her sons, who seemed to be coming apart at the seams. From the way they were behaving, you would have thought Margaret’s Harbor was a crack-infested inner-city hood, complete with vacant lots, burned-out buildings, and drive-by shootings.
“You can be out of there in a day and you wouldn’t have to do a thing,” John had said, only an hour ago, for what had to be the fortieth time. “You’ll like Chicago. You’ll be close. We can visit. At least you’ll be away from all that craziness with the movie people.”
“I can send somebody to pack,” Robbie had said, not ten minutes later, and also for the fortieth time. “You’ve got no idea what’s going on out there. It could be a serial killer. It could be a stalker. You had two of those women in your house.”
Annabeth had wanted to say that she had also had Stewart Gordon in her house, but she had a feeling that that would be something she would find hard to explain. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that she and her sons had always had an unspoken agreement. It was so unspoken, she had never really agreed to it. It was odd the way it happened between parents and children, and maybe between parents and grown children most of all.
“You become an icon,” she said to the air while pretending to talk to Creamsicle. “You become a picture in a book. You have no movement.”
She heard the tap at the back door—she was standing in the kitchen waiting to hear it; she wasn’t an idiot—and went to let Stewart in from what looked like the beginning of another windstorm. She’d forgotten how much she hated the cold when she’d decided to come up here. She’d always hated the cold. Even as a child, she had liked snow only when she could look at it from the safety of inside. She had hated it when her mother had bundled her up and shoved her out the door, with the admonition that she needed to “play in the fresh air.”
“I’ve always hated the fresh air,” she said to Stewart as she watched him stamp snow off his boots in her tiny mud-room. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that about myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever told myself that about myself.”
Stewart took off his navy watch cap and his scarf and threw them both over the hook next to the door. “Are you all right? You sound flustered. You haven’t been bothered by the vermin, have you?”
“No,” Annabeth said. “There were some people taking pictures of the house before, but they didn’t come to the door, and I can’t stop them from taking pictures of the house. No, it’s just my children. They’re being—something.”
“Protective.” Stewart had his peacoat off. Annabeth found herself marveling at how incredibly careful he was to stay true to type. “If it was my gray-haired old mother in the middle of a murder investigation, I’d want to get her out of here too.”
“Remind me to dye my hair as soon as I can buy some L’Oréal at the drugstore.”
“I was being figurative,” Stewart said. He came through into the kitchen and let Creamsicle jump down onto his shoulders. Creamsicle liked him, although it might be mostly that he had his own cat and probably smelled like it. He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. His face was flushed and shiny under the thin layer of stubble that seemed to have sprouted from everywhere. It was a little disconcerting. Annabeth was used to seeing him as hairless as a baby.
“So,” Stewart said, “as I said on the phone, I’ve got Gregor Demarkian here, and Marcey’s had another of her half-fake overdoses. And that’s where things stand. Not much, I suppose, but better than we were.”
“And you’re glad to have Gregor Demarkian here.”
“I am. Mostly I am because I know he won’t jump to conclusions. He won’t decide that Arrow must have killed Mark Anderman somehow, because she was there, or seems to have been, or—you know the thing. The thing the police do.”
“The police don’t seem to be doing much of anything,” Annabeth said. “And I thought you liked the district attorney, or the public prosecutor, or whatever she’s called.”
“Clara Walsh. I do like her. She’s a smart woman. But with official authorities, the temptation is always there. Go for the easy target. And God only knows Arrow is an easy target. The girl stupefies me. I can’t figure out how she got into the position she’s in. She’s got nothing at all in the usual way of qualifications for it, and considering how low the qualifications are, that’s really saying something.”
“Go into the living room and I’ll make some tea,” Annabeth said.
“I can make us tea,” Stewart said. “You do too much work. You don’t know how to relax.”
“Go sit somewhere,” Annabeth said.
Stewart got up and headed for the living room, a big lumbering figure with a bald head and a spine far too straight for the twenty-first century. Annabeth picked up the kettle to be sure it was full—which it was, which wasn’t surprising, since she’d filled it as soon as he’d called to say he was coming—and reached for the tea canisters on the shelf. Stewart liked Darjeeling better than Earl Grey. He never put anything in his tea, not even sugar.
She took down a tray and put two tea mugs and two spoons on it. Then she took down a tea ball and filled it full of loose Darjeeling. She’d never been able to handle the British habit of chucking loose tea into the bottom of a teapot and letting the grinds fall where they might. The kettle went off. She poured hot water into the teapot and then picked up the tray and headed for the living room. It was the kind of moment she hadn’t expected to have again in all of her life, and she wasn’t sure she was having it now. It had been a long time since she’d had a man her own age around who wasn’t married to somebody else or somebody she wouldn’t consider in her worst nightmares. She didn’t understand the drill anymore. She was probably misreading all the signals, or misreading the fact that there were signals at all.
She brought the tea into the living room. Stewart was half stretched out on the couch with Creamsicle on his chest. She put the tray on the coffee table and headed for the wing chair.
“Here’s the thing,” she said as Stewart sat upright and reached for the teapot. “I’ve got a problem, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I’d know if there was any sense that the police were on hand, anybody in particular to talk to, but there doesn’t seem to be. So I thought, you know, we could talk to your Mr. Demarkian, and he’d know what to do next.”
“What to do about what? Has somebody been bothering you? I know a certain amount of bother is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Nobody’s been bothering me,” Annabeth said. “It’s just that my cleaning service isn’t coming in this week. The storm caused a lot of problems, so they can’t get anybody here until Monday at the earliest, and probably not until after that. So I cleaned up some on my own.”
“You’d think there’d be somebody on the island who wouldn’t mind having the work,” Stewart said. “You’d have to pay them under the table, but it would be worth it not to be held up by the ferry service.”
“Yes,” Annabeth said, “I know. But I’ve got this service, and they aren’t coming in, so I cleaned up a little. And I found something.”
“Found what?”
Annabeth bit her lip. “You’re practically sitting on it. I didn’t want to touch it, you see. I mean, I watch as much true crime as anybody, and I know there are all kinds of things that matter, fingerprints, and fibers, and things like that. But I’ve been sitting on it for days, and now you are, so I’m not sure how much all of that matters. Oh, for goodness’ sake. You’ve got to stand up. And look between the cushions.”
Stewart still had the teapot in his hand. He put it down, stood up, and turned around. By now Annabeth was biting her lip so
hard she could taste blood. She hated this feeling she had that she was being puerile and hyperfeminine, that she was behaving like those women in the Miss Marple mysteries she’d been thinking about on the night of the storm.
Stewart bent over and pulled apart the cushions he’d been sitting on. Then he stepped back and said, “Christ on a crutch.”
“Exactly,” Annabeth said.
“How did that get there?”
“Well,” Annabeth said, “I don’t know, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, I suppose it could be the murder weapon, but that doesn’t make any sense. Why would it be here? But it’s a gun, and a big one, and I think it’s the right kind. I’m not sure. I don’t know about guns. But it’s not mine, and it doesn’t go with the house. And there it is. And on the night of the storm, Arrow Normand was lying right there on that couch all bundled up in one of my blankets.”
“Did she have a gun on her when she came in?”
“I don’t know, Stewart, I really don’t. I just found it a few hours ago. And then I just left it there and walked around it because I really didn’t know what to do next. But I’ve got to do something. I can’t just pretend I’ve never seen it.”
“No,” Stewart said. “You really cannot.”
“And my sons are going to blow gaskets over this,” Annabeth said. “So I thought I’d wait until I’d had a chance to talk to you. I don’t know why I thought you’d know more about this than I would, but there is your Mr. Demarkian, and he would. Wouldn’t he?”
I sound like Doris Day, Annabeth thought. Next thing, I’m going to start stamping my foot when I’m angry. She reached to the tray and poured herself a cup of tea. Stewart was standing with his back to her, holding the cushions, looking at the gun. Annabeth thought it was a very big gun, maybe the size of a small cannon. Or maybe she was just losing it altogether.
Stewart let the cushions drop and turned around. “All right,” he said. “We get Gregor over here and see what he can do. But in the meantime, I’m going to use your other chair. I’m not going to sit on that.”
2
There were people who said that Kendra Rhode acquired friends and lost them when it served her best interests, and although that was only half true, Kendra didn’t understand why it was something she should be ashamed of. There was, in reality, very little Kendra understood about the man-on-the-street understanding of a “friend,” which seemed to her to be a pledge of mutual self-destruction: a friend was someone you attached yourself to, and stuck to, even if it meant chopping your own head off in full view of the American public. Did that make any sense? Why would anybody be like that, even for somebody she was married to? In Ken-dra’s world, there were exactly three kinds of people: family, about whom you could do nothing; people you knew, about whom you could do very little; and “friends,” meaning people you went to clubs with, and shopping, and got photographed with, who were important only as long as they were part of the scenery that built your image.
Arrow Normand had definitely been part of the scenery that built Kendra’s image, and so had Marcey Mandret, but it had actually been months since either one of them had interested her as individuals. With Arrow, there had been very little interest to begin with. Kendra had seen what was wrong the first day they’d spent hanging out together, and she didn’t believe, even now, that anybody else had ever been fooled. Kendra didn’t care much for “intelligence.” In her experience, “intelligent” people were either bitter and poor, or snobbish and self-important. Even the best of them took too many things too seriously, like art. That being said, Kendra saw no virtue in stupid people, either, and Arrow Normand was profoundly, almost breathtakingly stupid. She was also something worse. She was someone who could not maintain her identity, even for a second, without the help of the machinery that created it.
Kendra was smart enough to know that she did, in fact, have considerably more wattage than the people she hung out with. She had infinitely more wattage than Arrow, and enough more than people like Marcey so that if she was out with them the cameras would be on her. This was partly good luck, and partly calculation. You couldn’t arrange to be born with wattage, any more than you could arrange to be born a Rhode, but she’d been born with both advantages, and at the very core of her soul she believed she had deserved them. It was silly what people said to her sometimes, what people called out to her as she was walking into clubs or premieres or wherever it was everybody was being photo graphed. It would not have been a better thing to have started poor and worked her way up. The people who did that kind of thing were not interesting. They weren’t admirable. They were just the grown-up version of the kids they’d all called “grungies” in school, the ones who spent all their time trying desperately to qualify for the Ivy League.
The calculation part was trickier, and this afternoon Kendra was aware that she was taking a risk. She didn’t like risks, except for the kind that made people call you “daring,” meaning the silly kind, like taking off your clothes and jumping into the fountain at the Plaza. Zelda Fitzgerald was one of Kendra’s icons, and also one of her cautionary tales, the first in a long line of celebrity debutantes gone bad. Brenda Frazier, Gamble Benedict, Cornelia Guest. Kendra could come up with half a dozen names, girls who had come out and then blown out, or disappeared, after they’d gotten the reputation for being entirely crazy. It was why she was careful about what she drank and what she put up her nose, but it was also the reason she had days like this one. The trick to longevity was taking care about the things that should be taken care of, and never forgetting which those were.
If she had wanted to make a splash right off the bat, she could have gone right out her front door. There were no photographers at that door, but that was only because the door was set back from the road, and there was a gate. Robber barons knew a thing or two about maintaining their privacy and managing their publicity, although not enough not to get tagged with a name like “robber barons.” At any rate, there was a gate, and the photographers were camped out there, and she could have gone straight through in her car and gotten her picture taken just as much as she wanted.
Calculation really was tricky, however, and this afternoon Kendra had a lot of it to consider. There were things that could kill you in this business—which was the way she thought of it, her life, her career, this business, although she never did spell out, even to herself, what any of those things meant. Getting sloppy drunk and ending up in rehab, or, worse, in jail, was one of those things. She had actually been arrested once, for driving without a license, and the pictures in the papers the next day had scared the hell out of her. Drugs and liquor were only cool so long as it looked as if you and your friends could indulge in them without having to worry about the grubby little details, like federal laws. They were fun only as long as it looked as if you were in control of them and not them in control of you. There was nothing more pathetic than a celebrity who weaved and bobbed and made a fool of herself on camera, like Danny DeVito on that talk show. As soon as a celebrity appeared on camera obviously out of control of himself and his environment, you knew it was the beginning of the end. Or, worse, it was the beginning of the beginning, the beginning of the endless rounds of stories about epic drunks and bar fights and getting refused entry by clubs.
Still, drunk and disorderly was bad, but it wasn’t fatal. People came back from that. They went to rehab. They rebuilt careers. They took on the coloration of people who had had religious conversions, and went on Larry King Live to talk about how terrible they had been before they’d confronted their addiction. No, the thing that really killed you, the thing that colored you so that you could never get clean again, was the legal system.
She had gone out the back door, toward the ocean, and walked along the little stone path that skirted the edge of their private beach. On another day, one of the photographers might have been walking back and forth along the fence and seen her, but today she was fairly safe. Not only was just about everybody staking out the little
jail where the police were still keeping Arrow Normand, but the last thing Kendra had seen on television before she came out was a report that Marcey had ended up in the emergency room with some kind of overdose. Then there was that Gregor Demarkian person, whom the police were bringing in to help with the investigation. There were a lot of diversions, in other words. She would be able to get where she was going with the minimum amount of fuss, and only be photographed after, when she was ready.
The easiest way into town from the Point was the footpath they’d used to call the Road to Oz because it was made of sort-of yellow bricks. Kendra had dressed up like an Eskimo in a parka and high shearling-lined boots, and she imagined that she looked like anybody else would look, walking into town, except that she was taller. Town seemed to be deserted when she got to it too, which was both satisfying and a little annoying. There was nobody from the media hanging out on the porch of the Oscartown Inn, and nobody at the door of that little bar everybody went to because there was nowhere else to go. It occurred to Kendra that Marcey Mandret might have died, which was more interesting than it might have been under other circumstances.
Carl Frank was waiting at a table in the main dining room. It was not a private table, in a private room, but there was no help for that. The only private rooms at the Oscar-town Inn were the bedrooms upstairs, and the last thing Kendra needed at this point was a rash of stories about how she’d gone to some PR person’s room. PR people were people you hired, and when they screwed up and you had to fire them, you gave interviews where you said things like, “Suzi wasn’t just my PR person, she was my friend, and as a friend the best thing I can do is urge her to go to rehab.”
