by Jane Haddam
“The whole thing smacks of an escape hatch,” Bennis had told him solemnly. “Do you really want to spend another holiday on Cavanaugh Street, with Lida trying to shove us together in closets and Hannah Krekorian taking you aside for little chats about all the widowed men she’s known who’ve just keeled over in their prime because they lacked companionship?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“From the way you’ve described them, they sound like a thoroughly nasty group of people.”
“They are. They’ll make me feel right at home. Like being back around good old Daddy’s table, except it’ll be somebody else taking the abuse.”
“Maybe there’ll be an eligible bachelor on board and you can come back to Cavanaugh Street with an engagement ring on your finger. That would set Hannah Krekorian on her ear.”
“Maybe I’ll have discovered the solution to the great mystery of the Baird family relationships: why would Jon Baird even want both of his wives on the same little boat. Maybe he’ll even kill one of them, and then you’ll have a murder to investigate.”
“God forbid.”
“God hasn’t forbidden it up to now, Gregor. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable request on my part.”
Whether it had been a perfectly reasonable request on her part or not, Gregor did not, to this day, know. He only knew that Bennis had been right—he really couldn’t have stood another holiday dinner on Cavanaugh Street, not right this minute, although he had no intention of giving all that up for good—and he’d been feeling the need to get away for months. From that moment it had been decided, almost without him, and he was on his way to this foggy street in coastal Virginia.
Foggy was a very weak word for it. It was now eight o’clock on Saturday morning, an hour before they were formally expected. They were sitting in the car they had hired—a nondescript Ford, this time, instead of the pale pink Rolls Bennis had almost insisted on; the nondescript Ford came with a driver anyway—parked at the curb in front of the boardwalk that led to Pier 36. They could see the sign that said “Pier 36.” They could see the sign underneath it that was supposed to list the boats parked in its berths. The line for Berth 102 had a notation beside it that said “Pilgrimage Green,” but the rest of the lines were empty. The fog was too thick for Gregor to tell if that meant the rest of the berths were empty, or that the harbormaster didn’t really care whether his charges were listed on his signs or not.
Their driver was sitting impassively behind the steering wheel, making no move to get out to open the doors for them or see to their luggage. Bennis shot an exasperated look at the back of his head and opened her door herself.
“I’m sure we can’t actually sail in weather like this,” she said. “I wonder what we’re going to do if it doesn’t let up.”
“Fog like this always lets up,” Gregor told her.
Bennis climbed out of the car and made her way around its nose to the boardwalk. In her jeans and turtleneck and flannel shirt, she looked like a college student who had streaked her dark hair with random polka dot spots of grey. Then she took a step into the fog and disappeared altogether.
“Don’t do that,” Gregor called after her. “If you get lost, we’ll never find you.”
“I’m not lost,” Bennis called back, “I’m holding onto some kind of post. I was going to go look for the boat but I’ve changed my mind. I’d end up falling into the water.”
“You can’t fall into the water,” a voice said. “There are guard ropes all up and down the pier. Give me a minute and I’ll get this light on.”
If there was one thing Gregor didn’t want to hear coming out of a thick fog, it was a voice he wasn’t ready for coming from a place he couldn’t determine attached to no visible body at all. When the sound reached him, he almost jumped out of his skin. Then he opened the car door next to him, stepped carefully out onto the curb, and said, “Who is that?”
“Where is everybody?” Bennis called back. “I feel like I’m floating in mutagen ooze.”
“Just a minute,” the voice said. There was the sound of something metallic being scraped back and forth and then of something plastic hitting the boardwalk. The voice said “Damn” much too loudly and made the fog near Gregor’s ears seem to quiver. The sound of something metallic being scraped back and forth resumed in staccato. “Damn, damn,” the voice said again, and then a light came on, strong and round and well-defined, cutting through the fog. “There we go,” the voice said again, except that this time it was attached to a young man with high cheekbones and long lines and a shock of straight dark hair. He was leaning over to pick up something from the boardwalk. It looked to Gregor like one half of a child’s walkie-talkie toy. The young man got it into the palm of his hand, shoved it into his pocket, and straightened up. Then he turned slowly until he caught Bennis hanging onto her post and smiled. “You must be Bennis Hannaford,” he said. “I’m Tony Baird.”
“I know,” Bennis said. “I think we’ve met.”
“You think we ought to have met,” Tony corrected her. He turned to Gregor and held out his hand. “If this is Bennis Hannaford, you must be Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you. My father’s never hired himself his own private expert on murder before.”
2
If Gregor had wanted to, he could have spent an hour correcting all the misimpressions Tony Baird had gotten about his stay on the Pilgrimage Green. For one thing, Gregor had never once allowed himself to be “hired” by anybody to be an expert in murder, or in anything else. For twenty long years, he had been an employee of the U.S. government as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Since that time, he had been an employee of no one and nothing at all, and he intended to keep it that way. It was true that Jon Baird had offered him money to sail on the Pilgrimage Green. People did offer him money when they wanted him to do something for them. Gregor never took it. He wasn’t rich, but he had more than enough to live on as long as he didn’t develop Bennis Hannaford’s tastes in personal amusement. He liked his independence more than he wanted to buy anything he couldn’t already afford. The furthest he would go, at the end of a successful investigation, was to suggest that Father Tibor’s Armenian Relief Fund was running a little low—which it always was, because Tibor could spend money even faster than Bennis could. Such a suggestion had prompted John Cardinal O’Bannion and the Archdiocese of Colchester, New York, to find an official way of providing the fund with two healthy infusions of cash, for which Tibor and Gregor had both been suitably grateful. It was not the same thing as “hiring” Gregor Demarkian.
The other place Tony Baird had got it wrong, of course, was in the assumption that what his father wanted was an expert on murder. Gregor could have corrected this impression very easily, but he decided not to. There were sometimes advantages to being considered an expert on murder in a situation where no such expert seemed to be required. It put people off balance. It even attracted a few of them, so that they came and told him things he had no right to hear. This was a tactic he had heretofore confined to much more serious investigations, investigations that really were investigations. In spite of the strange visit he had had from Steve Hartigan’s young man from the FBI, Gregor had no reason to think that Jon Baird’s little problem would be anything but inconsequential. He let the misimpression stand because, for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he didn’t like this young man. He didn’t like him at all. As soon as he’d gotten a good look at his face, all the hairs on the back of his head had stood on end.
Bennis was having none of the same problems. She was walking up ahead at Tony Baird’s side, and as the three of them moved toward Berth 102, Gregor found it easy to eavesdrop on their conversation.
“Nobody was supposed to be here before nine,” Tony was saying, “but you know how these things are. Dad and Sheila were here last night and so everybody got antsy that they’d be late or miss out on something or they wanted to get Dad’s attention, so they came. And my mothe
r—have you met my mother?”
“I might have,” Bennis said.
“Well, my mother is a flake. Not that I don’t like her. I like her. I just don’t know what to do with her. I mean, what woman in her right mind would have come along for this weekend?”
“Does your father control her money?”
“Of course he controls it. So what? He couldn’t really take it away from her. She’d make a stink in the press and he’d end up having to give it back just to keep himself from being picketed.”
“I see what you mean.”
“She got here at seven thirty, if you can believe it, dragging me along behind her, and the next thing I knew she was in a cat fight with Sheila. She always gets into cat fights with Sheila. She always goes totally ballistic when she sees the glitter on Sheila’s nails.”
“I take it she didn’t storm off the boat,” Bennis said.
Tony Baird laughed. “Nobody’s stormed off the boat, and I think they all ought to. They’re the ones who’re going to have to put up with all the fighting. I shouldn’t make it sound like that. It’s not really that bad. Except for Mother and Sheila, the rest of them get along pretty well.”
“Who are the rest of them?” Gregor puffed mightily and managed to catch up, putting his head between Tony’s and Bennis’s so that they had to part to let him in. Before he’d come up, they had been walking so close together, their shoulders touched. “I got a guest list with my invitation,” he said, “and little descriptions of everybody from your father when we talked, but I still don’t have any flesh to go along with the names.”
“What kind of flesh do you want?” Tony asked. They had reached Berth 102, and he shone his light directly on the plank going up to the Pilgrimage Green. Gregor found himself nonplussed. He knew the boat was a replica of the Mayflower, of course, and he knew that the boats of that time were smaller than the ones that sailed now. He’d visited the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport and found vessels that would have been considered small by most of the operators of modern day cabin cruisers. Still, he had expected something a little larger than this, and a little more sturdy looking, too. The Mayflower had sailed across the Atlantic. If it had been this small, how had it managed not to sink?
“The fog’s lifting,” Bennis said. “Maybe the driver will deign to bring up our things once it’s gone. I told you we should have hired the other car, Gregor, we would have gotten better service.”
“I’ll get one of the crew to get your things,” Tony said. “My father’s not totally crazy. We are traveling with a full crew and a cook and a waitress besides. He had to pay them an arm and a leg to get them to sail on this thing, but he’s got an arm and a leg to pay them, so I suppose that’s his business. Be careful when you get to the top of the plank. There’s a nail sticking up I’ve been tripping over all day.”
“You were going to tell me about the other people on the trip,” Gregor said, being very careful of the nail, even though he couldn’t see it. He climbed off the plank onto the deck and looked around. Seen from here, the boat looked even smaller than it had from the pier. It also looked … richer. The original Mayflower had been a poor man’s boat, built with good but no luxurious materials. The Pilgrimage Green was all teak and polish, thickly applied wax, and four coats of paint.
Tony led them to a formal hatch door that looked like a little tree house perched inexplicably on the deck. Inside it were a single set of steep and narrow stairs leading to the deck just below.
“All the guests’ cabins are on this level,” Tony told them, “with the crew cabins on the deck below. You two are on the port side toward the center. Not too bad.”
“Is it port out and starboard back or the other way around?” Bennis whispered in Gregor’s ear.
Gregor shrugged.
“My father’s got the entire bow on this deck,” Tony was going on, “and my mother’s got the cabin in the stern. That’s the one she liked best when the boat was being built, meaning it was one of the two or three things she didn’t hate without limit. Sheila hates the boat, too, but we don’t know if that’s because she’d rather have luxury or because she gets seasick sitting in port and then throws up without stop until she gets back on dry land. My cousin Mark’s wife Julie gets seasick, too. She’s got the cabin next to yours. She does PR for Baird Financial. Then there’s Charlie Shay. He’s got the cabin on the other side of you. He’s one of the three partners in Baird along with Dad and Uncle Calvin—am I giving it enough flesh for you?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“I didn’t think I was. But you really can’t blame me, can you, Mr. Demarkian? I don’t even know what you’re here for.”
“I’m here to get away from my apartment,” Bennis said firmly. “Where are these cabins you’ve been talking about? And where’s the bathroom? I’ve had a long ride out from Philadelphia and I feel like grunge.”
“I wasn’t trying to get you to implicate your entire family in a spy ring,” Gregor said. “As far as I know, there isn’t any spy ring. There isn’t any murder, either. I was just mildly curious about the people I was going to be traveling with.”
Tony Baird stopped before a door, turned the knob, and looked in. “Here it is,” he said. “And there isn’t any bathroom. This is a replica. If you want to use the john you have to,” he shot Bennis a look and grinned, “you’ve been on sailboats. You must know what to do.”
“For ten days?”
“Whose cabin is this?” Gregor said, sticking his head through the door and looking at the two berths, deep coffin-shaped things that had been built into the wall with thin foam mattresses at the bottom of them. The berths looked short, the way this whole deck felt. Gregor was well over six feet, and the average height of the full-grown Puritan male had been five four. The difference showed. Maybe this was the cabin that was supposed to belong to Bennis and his own would be something different, built to accommodate someone of his size and bulk.
Bennis Hannaford cleared her throat. “Gregor,” she said, “I think this is it.”
“What do you mean, this is it?”
“This is our cabin,” Bennis said. “Both of ours. You know. Together.”
“Together,” Gregor repeated.
“I’ll leave you two to get settled in,” Tony Baird said. “I’ll have your luggage brought up. I hope you didn’t bring too much. Sheila’s already got practically all the storage space on the boat stuffed with clothes. There’s breakfast being laid out on the upper deck right this minute. Normally we eat in the mess, but Dad thought you’d all like to be standing there watching when we got tugged out to sea. That ought to be at nine thirty, fog permitting. Everybody else is here except Uncle Calvin and he’s on his way. We shouldn’t get held up. Anything else you want to know?”
“Together,” Gregor repeated in stupefaction.
Tony Baird didn’t notice. He looked around the cabin one last time—there wasn’t much to look at; it was tiny and low-ceilinged and cramped—and then withdrew into the hall, ducking his head as he went. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, but Tony had to be close to six two himself. On this deck he kept himself always carefully stooped, so he didn’t bump his head.
Gregor was keeping himself carefully stooped, too. It was giving him a sharp stabbing pain in the side of his neck.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “We come all the way from Cavanaugh Street to get away from being match made to each other for a little while and they give us a cabin together?”
“It’s worse than that,” Bennis said, “look at the bunks.”
“What about the bunks?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, Gregor, but I couldn’t get into the top one. The space between the side of it and the ceiling is too narrow. I’d scrape my skin into shreds if I tried. That means we’ve only got one operative bunk.”
“One operative bunk,” Gregor repeated.
“Don’t get upset,” Bennis said. “We’ll work something out.”
Gregor
didn’t know if they were going to work something out or not. He didn’t know what they could work out. He only wanted to get off this deck and up into the air, where he could stand upright.
He started to stomp back down the hall to the narrow staircase, forgot where he was and what he was doing, and smacked his head on a beam.
Five
1
GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER been to a family reunion of his own. His father had died when he was very young. His one, much older brother had been killed in France at the end of World War II. His mother and his single maiden aunt had moved in together soon after Gregor had gone into the army and stayed together until his aunt had decided to visit distant relatives in Alexandria. His aunt had died in Egypt. His mother had died six months later at home. From that time to this, except for Elizabeth, Gregor had been alone. Thinking back on it and on all its peripheral oddnesses—strange to think that he’d been drafted right out of college, in peacetime, and thought nothing of it—Gregor would have said he had the best sort of deal. He was close to what family he had and enjoyed visiting with them. He was spared the hosts of great-aunts-by-marriage and third-cousins-twice-removed that plagued so many of the people he’d grown up with. Of course, he knew happy extended families. Lida’s was one. It had enough people in it to qualify for a small country and they all got along beautifully. They were definitely the exception. In Gregor’s experience, large and extended families were usually involved in war games if not in actual war—and that became truer the larger and more extended and richer the family got. When the family got so large and so extended and so rich it began to include people who were not really family at all, there was almost always trouble. The longtime business partner, the best friend from the old days at Alpha Chi Alpha, the family doctor who had assisted at the births of every family member now over the age of forty-five: these people were buffers or lightning rods, drawing out all the nastiness and attracting it to themselves. As soon as Gregor had seen the guest list for this excursion, he had had his suspicions. As soon as he had heard Tony Baird assuring him that most of the people on this boat got on very well together, he had been convinced. He thought back to the cases he’d had—the Hannaford case in particular, with Bennis and her parents and her six brothers and sisters all stuffed together in a house that would have been too small to contain them if it were the palace at Versailles—and almost decided to go straight back home.
