Feast of Murder (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  Much too young for what?

  Gregor stomped his way up to the main deck, down to the stern, and up to the high rail there that was meant for observation. Then he leaned over it and contemplated the mobile black glass sea. He was still leaning over it, nearly two hours later, when the bell for dinner rang.

  If he had come to any conclusions at all, about anything, he would have thought the time well spent. Instead, all he had really gotten out of it was a pair of frostbitten ears.

  2

  Like every other American who had been educated in public schools in the years just before and just after World War II, Gregor Demarkian had had a fairly elaborate introduction to the myth of the Mayflower. He had learned about rough seas and calm winds, cramped quarters and women screaming their way through labor into the howling winds of storms. He hadn’t learned anything at all about the mundane details of day-to-day life. What details he did know about living on a ship came from late-night flashlight reading of the sea novels that had enthralled him when he was ten. In those, stiff-spined officers with starched white shirts were served dried beef and venison on china plates by mess boys in pristine uniforms decorated with gold braid.

  On the Pilgrimage Green, dinner was held in the officer’s mess, because on the original Mayflower there really hadn’t been a mess, properly speaking, for passengers. In this as in everything else except religion, the Puritans had been stiflingly conventional. First-class passengers had a room to themselves, tiny because there were so few of them to accommodate, that they used as both a lounge and a dining room. The rest of the passengers ate on their bunks or in the open air when weather permitted. The officer’s mess, however, was nothing at all like the ones in Gregor’s old books. For one thing, it was much smaller, meaning that the passengers on the Pilgrimage Green had to crowd in next to each other much closer than was comfortable. For another thing, the table and the sideboards and all the other furniture except the chairs were bolted to the floor. Maybe the furniture had been bolted to the floor in Gregor’s old books, too, but if it had, Gregor had never noticed it. There was something about this enforced immobility that made the cramped quarters feel even more claustrophobic than they really were. Then there was the large ship in a bottle tucked into the niche in the wall at the table’s rear. Surely that couldn’t be authentic to the Puritan experience. The Puritans had been Calvinists and distrustful of decoration.

  As for what was authentic to the Puritan experience, Gregor decided he wouldn’t have blamed these people if they’d decided to hold a Thanksgiving as soon as they hit land, to thank God just for letting them off their boat. The sheer misery of this existence shed a whole new light on Thanksgiving dinners full of chestnut stuffing and candied yams. Gregor had always thought that rich American WASPS failed to celebrate Thanksgiving (or anything else) with enthusiasm because they were too damned polite to have enthusiasms. Now he wondered if it was some kind of race memory. In their bones they remembered their ancestors’ voyage from England. In their heads, they didn’t think they had anything to celebrate.

  Coming down from the upper deck, Gregor had worked out a plan to make sure he would end up seated next to Bennis Hannaford, but when it came time to put the plan in action, he was foiled. Bennis had gotten to the mess much earlier than he had expected her to. When Gregor reached the door, she was already inside, pushed up against the back wall with Tony on her side and Calvin across from her. She was even on the wrong side of the table. The side where Calvin Baird was sitting left a good bit of space behind the chairs, so that it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to get up and go out of the room during dinner. The side where Bennis was sitting had the chairs much closer to the wall. Sheila Baird and Julie Anderwahl had taken chairs on that side now. Gregor wondered if they thought the tight fit would keep them from falling over if the boat pitched. Then Charlie Shay sat down next to Julie, and Gregor gave up speculating altogether. Fritzie Baird had taken a seat next to Calvin and Mark Anderwahl had taken one next to Fritzie. There were now only two seats left, both on the Calvin Baird side of the table. Since Jon Baird was obviously waiting for Gregor to seat himself, Gregor decided to do it. He pulled out the chair next to Mark Anderwahl’s, tried and failed to catch Bennis’s eye, and sat down.

  His move seemed to break a conversational barrier. Calvin Baird coughed. Sheila Baird giggled.

  “Look,” Sheila said, picking up a mason jar from a row of mason jars in the middle of the table. “Pumpkin rind marmalade. Fritzie has been making preserves again.”

  “I like to do something special for the holidays,” Fritzie said stiffly. “If you don’t do something special for a holiday, it isn’t a holiday at all.”

  Julie Anderwahl jumped in. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “I’ve been smelling cooking all afternoon and it’s just been terrible. I hope you’re not serving us roast buffalo meat.”

  “The Puritans didn’t have buffalo meat,” Jon Baird said. “They’d never seen a buffalo. I don’t even know if they ever did see a buffalo. Wasn’t it a western animal?”

  “There’s Buffalo, New York,” Charlie Shay said. “Would they have named it Buffalo if there hadn’t been any buffalos there?”

  “Jon likes everybody to think he knows so much about the original Mayflower,” Sheila said, “but he really doesn’t.”

  There was a knock on the door. Jon Baird called, “Come in,” and a white-jacketed young man entered with a large covered tray in his hands. It was the kind of thing that in movies is always opened to reveal a stuffed goose, and Gregor half-suspected that a goose was what he was going to be presented with. Jon Baird, however, was even less stringently insistent on the “authentic” than his second wife had accused him of being. He waited until the young man had put the tray down in the middle of the table, jumped up, and said, “Here we go. Salad. Hand me your plates, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ll dish out.”

  “Did they have salad on the original Mayflower?” Julie Anderwahl wondered out loud. “I didn’t think they had salad at all until the twentieth century.”

  “Oh, they had to have had salad a long time before that,” Fritzie said. “The French, you know. The French have always been interested in salads.”

  “I don’t think they had tossed salads much before that,” Tony Baird said. He stood up and handed his plate to his father, took it back, then took Bennis’s and handed over hers. “I don’t really care what the Puritans ate. From what I’ve heard, it had a lot of lard in it.”

  “From what I’ve heard, it had a lot of sugar in it.” Julie Anderwahl took her filled salad plate from Jon and immediately began to munch on a sliver of cucumber. “I think about what it would be like sometimes, to live in a world where everybody was just expected to get fat as they got older. That way you could eat what you wanted and never have to think about diets.”

  “I never do think about diets,” Sheila Baird said.

  “You will,” Fritzie Baird told her. “Trust me, my dear, you will.”

  “You forgot me,” Charlie Shay handed his plate across the table. “You got everybody else but—”

  “Got you now.” Jon Baird stood up again—he had only just sat down—-and piled salad on Charlie Shay’s plate. Then he handed the plate over, sat down again, and surveyed the table. For the first time since Gregor had met him, he actually looked pleased. “Well,” he said. “Here we are. You don’t know how I’ve been looking forward to this trip.”

  “He must have been looking forward to this trip,” Mark Anderwahl murmured at Gregor’s side. “If he hadn’t been, he’d never have gotten the rest of us to go along with it.”

  There was a clear cruet of salad dressing traveling around the table, family style in the best middle-class tradition, and Gregor caught it as it came by and doused his lettuce vigorously. Then he turned his attention fully to the young man at his side. He had, of course, been in contact with Mark Anderwahl before, although they hadn’t exactly been introduced. Mark had been present in the bow when they had gather
ed to watch the boat set sail that morning. Unlike the rest of the Bairds, however, Mark had not done any talking. He had simply stood back and watched his wife with fierce and restless eyes. Now he was paying no attention to her at all. Gregor picked up his fork, tried the salad, decided the salad dressing was abnormally bitter, and put his fork down again.

  “You’re Mark Anderwahl,” Gregor said. “I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.”

  “No, we haven’t.” Mark picked up his fork, took a taste of his salad, put down his fork, and winced. “Oh, God,” he said, “here we go again. One of Jon’s salad dressings. They get worse every year.”

  “If you knew it was gong to be bad, why did you use it?”

  Mark Anderwahl blinked. “I work for Baird Financial. I had to use it. Jon gets very huffy if you don’t eat his salad dressing.”

  “Is it just salad dressing, or are there other things he cooks and makes you eat?”

  “He tried a pie once, but it didn’t work out. And he grills steaks, of course. All the men of that generation grill steaks. The steaks are all right.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look at old Charlie,” Mark Anderwahl said. “Practically gagging and stuffing it down all the same. That’s how he got to be a partner. Uncle Calvin, now, he got to be a partner because Uncle Jon knew it was either make him one or be nagged to death. You don’t know what kind of trouble it causes, having so many partners who don’t know the first thing about business.”

  Gregor was surprised. “Calvin Baird and Charlie Shay don’t know the first thing about business?” In his experience, really successful enterprises—and Baird Financial certainly was that—didn’t carry a lot of deadwood.

  Mark Anderwahl chewed slowly on a lettuce leaf, considering. “Well,” he said, “it’s like this. Charlie doesn’t know anything about business—and I mean anything at all. If you’re not going to go for the salad dressing, the only way to explain him is that he’s one of Uncle Jon’s really old friends. With Uncle Calvin it’s different. He’s a businessman, all right, he’s just the wrong kind of businessman.”

  “What do you mean, the wrong kind?”

  Mark waved his fork in the air. “Small-minded,” he declared. “He’d be really good with a McDonald’s franchise somewhere or running a five-and-dime store, but at Baird Financial he just doesn’t do any good.”

  “Do you mean because of these numbers he’s worried about?” Gregor asked, thinking about the meeting in the hall before dinner. “He was talking to me about some sort of discrepancy in some sort of record.”

  “In the cash-on-hand reports in the back-up research for the Europabanc deal.” Mark shook his head. “That’s silly, but at least it’s understandable. You don’t want discrepancies even if they don’t matter. No, I mean when we first decided to buy Europabanc, a couple of years ago. Uncle Calvin didn’t want us to.”

  “I thought the Europabanc deal was a good one.”

  “It is a good one. It’s a spectacularly good one. It’s not just the chance of a lifetime, it’s the chance of a millennium. There hasn’t been an opportunity like it before and there probably won’t be one again. I mean, for God’s sake. We’re going to do in one fell swoop what it took the Rothschilds generations to put together.”

  “Then why was your uncle Calvin opposed to it?”

  “He got hung up on details. It bothered him because we didn’t have any money.”

  “What?”

  “I have to go topside for a moment,” Charlie Shay said, standing up at his place and looking a little green. “I may be up there for quite some time. I don’t think you ought to wait for me.”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” Sheila Baird said.

  “If you’re going to throw up, go to the bow,” Jon Baird said. “The rail’s low there. You won’t splatter all over the polished teak.”

  “What an awful thing to say,” Fritzie Baird said. “You ought to have proper toilets on this boat. That way you wouldn’t be forced to worry about your teak.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Charlie said again.

  He lurched painfully toward the door, stopped still to get it open, then had to jump back a little as the young man came through again, this time carry a gigantic tureen. There was a ladle sticking out of the tureen at one end, through a small round notch that also let out the smell of nutmeg and pumpkin and thyme. Charlie Shay stared at it for a moment, got even greener, and then lunged into the hall outside.

  “Oh, dear,” Sheila Baird said. “That’s just what we needed, isn’t it? Someone going right off their feed and doing it in full view of the rest of the company. Isn’t it just like Charlie Shay to be rude?”

  Gregor didn’t think Charlie Shay had been the least bit rude—and he didn’t think anyone else did either—but Sheila Baird was one of those women nobody argued with. It was too much trouble and it wouldn’t do any good. She wouldn’t listen to reason and she had no common sense.

  “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I think I’ll go topside and make sure Mr. Shay doesn’t fall overboard.”

  Jon Baird flushed red. “I’m the one who should go,” he said. “After all, I’m the one who invited Charlie here. Sit down, Mr. Demarkian. I’ll take care of this.”

  “I’m already up,” Gregor pointed out, “and besides, I could use the air. I’m not a much better sailor than Mr. Shay is himself. Leave it to me.”

  “But—”

  “Leave it to me,” Gregor said firmly, propelling himself to the door quickly enough so that he could not be overtaken by a man who was still sitting down. He got the door open, looked out into the hall, and was a little disturbed to see that it was already empty. He hadn’t thought Charlie Shay would have been able to move that fast in his condition.

  “Leave it to me,” he said again.

  Then he went out into the hall himself, shut the mess hall door behind him, and headed for the stairs to the upper deck.

  3

  Sitting at the mess hall table, Gregor had thought it was a little strange that Charlie Shay had been taken so ill so fast. Once in the hall, he changed his mind. What he hadn’t noticed in the mess, maybe because of where he was sitting, was how much the weather had changed since they’d first sat down to eat. There had been a stiff, steady wind coming out of the south all day, pushing them forward evenly and relentlessly, allowing them to make much more progress than they had had any right to expect. Now, however, the steady wind had evolved into a gusting one. Instead of a steady push, there was a fretful power jerking them forward and sideways, up and back. Instead of a gentle roll there was a kind of roller-coaster pulse. Gregor made his way along the passage carefully, but no matter how careful he was he couldn’t help bumping into the walls around him or the ceiling above his head. Just when he thought he understood how the boat was going to move, it changed its mind and he was thrown against a beam or into a latch on a door. Making his way to the upper deck was worse. He got hold of the rails on either side of the staircase and hauled himself upward, tensing himself against the motion of the sea, but his shoes slipped on the slick wood of the risers. By the time he got his head up out of the hatch, he had hit it at least half a dozen times, and not lightly, either. He was well on his way to having a roaring headache. The sea seemed to be getting more violent by the minute. He had to drag himself upward onto the deck, pulling himself forward with his arms. When he was finally standing in the wind he lasted only moments upright before he was pitched sideways into a pile of lines. There was rain in the air now and a wind that whistled. If Gregor had to make a prediction, he would have said they were about to be visited by a very serious storm.

  He sat up against the lines, stretched his arms, and looked around. There was no sign of Charlie Shay and no sound of him either. Charlie must have taken Jon Baird’s advice and gone forward to be sick. Gregor hauled himself carefully to his feet, holding onto lines and rails and anything else he could find as he stood. Then he began to move very carefully forward, toward
the bow, where he supposed Charlie Shay was. He had just made it to the wheelhouse wall when he turned back and saw a head pop out of the hatch behind him. He turned back and waited while Tony Baird came out.

  “Loosen up,” Tony Baird told him. “Don’t think about it. If you think about it, you fall over.”

  There had been an exercise like this for new recruits at Quantico, at least since the 1970s. Gregor had never had to go through it himself, but he had heard about it. He let go of the wall he was holding onto and willed his body to relax. He didn’t quite make it, but he did get close enough so that he could feel his body begin to move with the boat and not against it. For the first time since he had left the mess hall, he was in no danger of falling over.