by Jane Haddam
“And has there been that?” Gregor asked. “Trouble?”
On the other side of Clara Walsh, Jerry Young snorted. “Sort of. Nothing serious. A real rash of drug-related crap, the drugs they use for date rapes, and now there’s Jack, and I haven’t talked to him yet. And a lot of drinking and driving, which we get here in the winter in any case. Mostly the big problem has been the photographers. They camp.”
“They camp?” Gregor asked.
“They don’t put up at hotels,” Clara Walsh put in. “Not that there’d be enough room for all of them anyway. But it’s the middle of the winter. You’d think they’d want somewhere warm to go. Instead, most of them sleep in their cars, right outside the houses where the girls live. Young women. whatever. They camp.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “And these photographers, they’re around all the time?”
“They came in when the film people did,” Jerry Young said, “and they’ve been in ever since. Hordes of them. They camp out in front of the inn here, and at the houses where Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand live, and outside where the filming is going on, and in the bars and places like that, anywhere they think they’ll be able to get a photograph. W e’re falling over them all the time. They’re falling all over each other. It’s insane. And I think it’s catching. Jack was getting like that for a while there.”
“Jack, the man who just got drugged and hacked at?” Gregor asked.
“Yes, sir,” Jerry Young said. “Jack’s a photographer too, he’s just local. He was chasing after them for a while there. He said he got good money for the pictures when Linda didn’t want them. I used to have such a crush on Arrow Normand when I was in high school. Now she’s in our jail, and nobody can figure out why. I thought these people had lawyers that got them out no matter what.”
“Jack Bullard got attacked?” Don Hecklewhite said. “Why didn’t anybody tell me that?”
“He got drugged and beat up,” Jerry Young said. “I’ll fill you in after all this. Somebody went at his hands and cut them up. No, not true. Just one hand. The right hand.”
“Linda must be close to losing it,” Don Hecklewhite said.
Clara Walsh looked exasperated. “O.J. had to stay in jail awaiting trial,” she said. “It makes me crazy, this idea that the justice system stops dead just because the defendants are rich and famous.”
“Well, it works for the rich,” Jerry Young said. “Sorry, Ms. Walsh, but you know it’s true.” He turned to Gregor. “Do you know why I’m the only cop in town? Do you know why we take on a couple of extra men in the season, but we never really man up to a full complement? It’s because nobody wants to arrest anybody here. These people who come in the summer, they’re the heads of corporations, they’re the heads of foundations and museums, we even get congressmen and senators and sometimes presidents. They get drunk and drive. Their kids get drunk and drive. We aren’t really supposed to arrest anybody. We just pour them into the back of the cruiser and drop them at home, and if we pick up any one somebody too often, we suggest that maybe it might be a good idea to do a stint in rehab.”
“And there aren’t any real crimes?” Gregor asked. “At all?”
“Burglaries,” Jerry Young said. “We get a fair amount of those, and I’ve gotten pretty good at handling them. And we get what are probably rapes, but nobody calls them that. And nobody will.”
Gregor thought about it. In a way, this made perfect sense. The FBI and the Secret Service operated on similar principles when it came to guarding high-ranking government officials or their children. If a senator got nailed for driving drunk, it was almost always by the regular D.C. police or the police of some town where he wasn’t known and nobody cared. He shifted focus.
“So,” he said. “I asked for some information about Mark Anderman.”
Don Hecklewhite leaned over Clara Walsh’s shoulder and took a thick manila envelope off the lamp table at her side. “This is it,” he said. “Everything we know about the man. Everything Jerry knows, and everything I know, plus a summary of the forensic report. It looks like a lot, but it isn’t much. The bulk is mostly pictures of him with Arrow Normand. He was twenty-four. He graduated from some high school in California, not a place I’d ever heard of. He had a little string of m i nor arrests, disorderly conduct, public drunk-enness, that sort of thing. Nothing much.”
“And family?”
“None that we could find,” Jerry Young said. “The stuff we got faxed from California mentioned a younger sister, but we weren’t able to track her down. His father seems to have been long gone. His mother died about three years ago. He had a job, you know, that wasn’t a very good one, except it let him hang around with Arrow Normand.”
There was a knock on the door. Clara Walsh got up to see what it was about, and came back looking agitated. “That was the management,” she said. “The Versailles Room is full of reporters and they’re not being well behaved. The inn wants us to get in there and get this over with.”
“In a second,” Gregor said. “Something just occurred to me. You said the photographers were everywhere, all the time. They always hung out where they thought they could get pictures of Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand.”
“That’s right,” Jerry said. “Leeches have a less firm grip, if you ask me.”
“Where were they the night of the murder?” Gregor asked. “I don’t remember seeing anything about them being near the truck when it crashed, or after the crash. And I’ve talked to Stewart, at length. He brought Marcey Mandret to Annabeth Falmer’s house over his shoulder, and Arrow Normand showed up at Annabeth Falmer’s door dead drunk, and yet nobody has mentioned anything about photographers being there at any time.”
“It was the storm,” Jerry Young said. “You weren’t here when it happened, and you’re not from around here, so I don’t know if you understand just how bad a nor’easter like that can get. It doesn’t usually, this early in the season, but this was a kicker. Most of these guys are from California. They’re not used to that kind of weather.”
Gregor thought about it some more. “Stewart showed me photographs taken at the scene that he took with his cell phone camera. I’ve got those photographs upstairs in my things somewhere, and I can show you later, but what I remember was that the hood, windshield, and the driver’s-side door of the car were almost entirely cleaned off. This was before you got there, and before the state police got there. Was that a function of the truck being on and running warm?”
“I’ll check,” Jerry Young said, “but I don’t think so. By the time I got there there was snow all over the truck and it wasn’t running, but I don’t know if it was running when Mr. Gordon got there and he turned it off, or what.”
“No,” Gregor said. “He would have known better than to turn it off.”
“We really have to go,” Clara Walsh said. “If this press conference turns into a brawl, we’re going to be in more trouble than we are now.”
Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came up with Stewart Gordon’s surprise, still in its clear plastic freezer bag. Jerry Young blinked. Don Hecklewhite leaned forward. Clara Walsh blanched. Only Bram Winder had no reaction at all, and he wasn’t paying attention.
Gregor handed the gun to Jerry Young, since he was technically the man in charge of the investigation. “Anna-beth Falmer found that in her couch this afternoon,” he said. “You’d better get it checked out. It was the same couch Arrow Normand was collapsed onto the day Mark Anderman was murdered, but I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t Arrow Normand who brought it into the house.”
Chapter Six
1
In the first few moments after waking up, Jack Bullard thought he was in his bed at home. Then, when that didn’t work—the light was all wrong; the windows were too large and horizontally rectangular; the colors were sickly and green—he wondered if he had ended up in the bed of some girl. There used to be a lot of girls when Jack was younger. That was especially true in high school. Margaret
’s Harbor was like a lot of places where the local community lived hand in glove with people much richer and more sophisticated than they were themselves. Advancement fever had infected it, and that meant that the local high schools were full of year-round kids with dreams of going off to the Ivy League, or something close. It was not “cool” to be stupid at Margaret’s Harbor High School, even though the school served the whole island instead of any one town, and it was full of fishermen’s children who resented the hell out of the entire system. No, the biggest status symbol at MHHS was an acceptance letter to someplace “good,” and until you were in your senior year and had one, the assumption was that you were “smart” enough to get one. Jack had always been smart enough. He had always had a place at the best table in the lunchroom, and the attention of the best girls, who were all “smart” enough too. There were dumb blondes at MHHS, and even cheerleaders, but nobody ever took them seriously.
One of the reasons Jack thought he might be waking up with a girl was that there was a girl in the room, over by the windows, standing with her back to him, looking out. Jack wished that he could concentrate, or even make himself sit up. He had what felt like the mother of all hangovers. It had even invaded his limbs. They all felt weak. He wasn’t certain, because he was numb all across his torso, but he was pretty sure his penis was weak too, and just lying there, which might explain why the girl was fully dressed and at the window while he was here in bed and definitely not. It had been a while since there had been hot and cold running girls in his life. College was not everything he had expected it to be. There, everybody had been “smart,” and a lot of people were smarter than he was, and a lot of them were richer, too. It was hard to compete when the girls thought it was sweet but kind of pathetic that he had never been to Europe. Jack thought that it might have been in college when he first began to realize that life was more complicated than he had expected it to be, and that he did not want to be the kind of corporation lawyer his education would best suit him for. Corporation lawyers made lots of money, but they weren’t anybody. They were as invisible as he had been most of his life, and the money did not make up for it.
He was blithering in his head. Maybe he had blithered to this girl, and that was why she had gotten out of bed and left him alone in it. He wished he could think. He wished his head weren’t pounding. He wished a lot of things, the most urgent of which seemed to be that he had been able to explain it all to his mother before she died. His mother had not approved of any of the girls he had gone out with in high school. She was always afraid he would get one of them pregnant and ruin everything.
The girl at the window turned, and Jack noticed a number of things at once. First, he was in a hospital room. It was a bare, blank hospital room, and from the silence all around him it seemed as if the rest of the hospital was empty. He tried to remember everything he could about the hospital in Oscartown, but there was nothing to remember. He’d spent almost no time there. He had no idea if it did a lot of business or not, if it was normal or odd that the place should be dead silent and cavernously empty. Then there was his right hand. It was bandaged up like something in an Abbott and Costello movie, into a wad that looked almost like a fighter’s glove. When he tried to move his fingers, they hurt badly enough so that he wanted to cry out in pain. He didn’t. He wasn’t entirely sure why. He felt as if he were in an episode of The Twilight Zone, so that he knew that making noise would be bad for him, but he didn’t know why.
The third thing he noticed was that the girl was not just a girl. It was Kendra Rhode.
If he could have sat up or reached for anything in any way, he would have grabbed the white styrofoam cup that was sitting next to a can of ginger ale on a flat, high table next to his bed. Ginger ale would be good. Anything would be good. His mouth was dry. His head still hurt. He wanted to reach out and touch Kendra’s arm, that perfect arm. In a world of ghosts, of outlines of people without substance, Kendra was one of the very few whose outlines had been all filled in.
She was leaning against the heating register under the windows, looking at him. She knew he was awake. Jack stuck the tip of his tongue out and tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry. He was lucky it didn’t stick out there, making him look like a retarded person.
“Kendra,” he said. It came out, but only barely. He made another effort. “I thought you. Weren’t. Weren’t. Talking.”
Kendra came over and looked down at him in the bed. It wouldn’t occur to her to offer to get him ginger ale, but he didn’t mind that. He was a ghost. She had no reason to think he needed ginger ale. He really was blithering. He was. How close to the sun did you have to get before you got warm? How close to the sun did you have to get to burn yourself dead? Was heat better than light? Would light illuminate you if you were only an outline of a person, if there was nothing really real about you?
He put out his hand, and she got the idea. She picked up the cup and looked inside it. Then she popped the top on the can of ginger ale and poured some of it in. Jack’s hand was still out. She put the styrofoam cup full of ginger ale in his hand. It was his left hand. It didn’t work that well. He spilled more ginger ale down the side of his face than he got into his mouth.
Still, it worked. It worked well enough. “I thought,” he said, and this time the words came out the way they should have, although he sounded hoarse, “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”
“I’m not talking to you,” Kendra said. “Why should I talk to you? You betrayed me.”
“I didn’t betray you. I sold one picture. I have to sell pictures. That’s how I make a living.”
“You sold the wrong picture.”
“No,” Jack said. And this was true. He remembered the pictures. He remembered the one he sold, and he remembered the ones he still had back at the house. “There were other pictures,” he said. “There were worse pictures.”
Kendra turned away, back to the window again. Jack hated this. He hated it. When she was not looking at him, he felt as if he weren’t really real. It was as if she took some part of him with her. This was an important point. Before the movie people had come to Margaret’s Harbor, Jack had spent most of his time feeling not really real, feeling as if he were a ghost, but he hadn’t been able to pin it down to something specif c. Now he thought he had, and it was only this terrific dryness in his mouth and throat that was keeping him from articulating it.
He tried to drink more ginger ale. He got some. He got more down his face and neck. There was a point here. There really was. He only had to grasp it.
“Why am I here?” he said.
Kendra turned around again. Jack felt warm. “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “Something happened to your hand.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Kendra said. “I didn’t even know you were in the hospital. Marcey’s downstairs. With alcohol poisoning, the silly cunt. I was walking back to the Point from the inn and there were all these paparazzi, trying to get a picture of Marcey on her ass, so I ducked in a door. It’s not true that I always want my picture taken.”
“I know,” Jack said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Marcey,” Kendra said. “It’s bad enough with Arrow. Not that I think she killed anyone. But the police do. Maybe they’re going to give her the electric chair. Do they have the electric chair in Massachusetts? Maybe it’s all lethal injection now. I don’t like lethal injection. It lacks drama. It lacks everything, really. People go to be witnesses at executions, but with lethal injection there isn’t anything they can see that they wouldn’t be able to see anytime. The electric chair would be better. People would jump.”
Jack wanted to put the styrofoam cup back on the table, but he didn’t know how to do it. He was suddenly infinitely, inconsolably depressed. He had no idea why Kendra had come into this room, or why she would have been going back to the Point on the back streets she would have had to use to end up at the hospital, but he did know that she had done none of thos
e things out of a desire to see him. It should have been enough that she still recognized him, but it wasn’t. And that was in spite of the fact that he knew she was perfectly capable of treating people as if they had never existed, even after she’d known them for years.
“I want to know what happened to me,” he said.
Kendra turned away from the window. “I think I can get out now, if I go out this end. They’re all over there. They don’t seem to be moving. Marcey’s such an ass. She’s always flashing around making an idiot of herself.”
“I want to know what happened to me,” Jack said again.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Kendra said. “Maybe it will be on the news, and you can find out that way. There’s going to be something about me on the news in a day or two. You should watch for it. That is, if Marcey and Arrow haven’t done some other stupid stuff and everybody is watching that.”
Jack wanted to say that Kendra was always on the news. She was even on the real news, like CNN. Instead, he watched her check through her purse for he didn’t know what and then send him the kind of little smile and wave she gave to photographers when she wasn’t feeling antagonistic about being photographed. Then she was gone, out in the hallway, out of sight. He couldn’t even hear her footsteps walking away.
He was still lying in bed with the styrofoam cup in his left hand. The cup was still half full of ginger ale. He still couldn’t put it down.
This was a metaphor for something, and as soon as his head cleared up, he would figure out for what. At the moment, he was only angry, as angry as he had ever been in his life, the kind of angry that makes some people rise up like rockets and lay waste the landscape, and in no time at all he was actually sitting all the way up.
