“I only gamble on a sure thing, Valerie.” Chase’s cold voice was dismissive. “You haven’t been in a hit in six years.”
The actress’s hand tightened on the stem of her crystal wineglass. Now her beautiful face had the empty look of a car-crash dummy.
I surveyed my fellow guests with interest during these exchanges. I had no illusions that I could “dowse” guilt for Chase, but I was beginning to have a feel for these people and I wanted to match these judgments against my take of the would-be murderer.
Burton Andrews was a toady, quick to offer an admiring laugh at Chase’s smallest quip, eager to trumpet agreement with the boss’s opinions. But dislike flickered in his eyes when Chase wasn’t looking in his direction.
Valerie St. Vincent was self-absorbed to the point of narcissism. The actress desperately hungered for love and admiration and praise. Why had Chase turned on her so brutally? She still had a look of shock, her lips so compressed that tiny white patches marked the corners of her mouth.
Lyle Stedman sipped his wine and smiled grimly. “You’d better be damned glad somebody’s covering business, Roger. It may not be the best system, but you show me one that works better.”
Miranda Prescott sat at the end of the table opposite her husband. She was lovely tonight in a turquoise silk sarong. An orchid was tucked in her softly curling black hair. But the eyes above her social smile looked anxious, and they constantly sought her husband.
Chase seemed unaware of her scrutiny.
He seemed, in fact, even more feverish than when we’d met earlier in his study. His conversation erupted in staccato bursts and he jumped restlessly from topic to topic: the new church-state relations in Mexico, the concern over stability in the Russian nations, the continuing unrest in the Balkans. He ate little. But the mound of stubs in the ashtray grew fast.
Trevor Dunnaway sat between Miranda and Haskell Lee, who was on my left. I couldn’t see the lawyer very well, but I heard him. It would be difficult not to hear Trevor Dunnaway. His smooth, golden voice rolled on and on, cheerfully describing the latest addition to his collection of trompe l’oeil, an eighteenth-century French oil that absolutely, he exclaimed, looked like a bas-relief sculpture.
I certainly gave Dunnaway good marks for his efforts to be an entertaining guest at a less than rollicking social occasion. But, more than that, I found myself more interested in the handsome lawyer than I had been before. Those who enjoy the art that attempts to look something other than what it is must have, at the very least, a wry sense of humor. I looked forward to talking to him in more depth.
Haskell concentrated on his food and made no effort to talk to me or to Trevor. His was the obdurate, scarcely veiled rudeness of a spoiled child, still so caught up in his own wants that he fails to see other human beings as real. They were, at best, purveyors of satisfaction. They were, at worst, obstacles.
As for Roger, his round face still had a high flush and his voice was querulous. Chase’s son had drunk too much, which made me wonder how much he’d consumed before coming to dinner. Roger was an emotional man consumed by causes. The world thinks highly of cause bearers who succeed, calling them visionaries; those who fail it dismisses as crazies. But there is one certain truth about zealots: They are never bound by the rules the rest of us follow.
Much as he hated to accept it, Chase believed that someone now seated at his dining table was a poisoner.
What did I know about our potential murderer?
Poisoning is a stealthy crime. The killer is seldom present at the fatal moment. In my view, poisoning argues either cowardice or enormous caution.
Valerie St. Vincent would be cautious, as would Chase’s secretary and his lawyer. All three were manipulative, always alert to improve their situation, always hiding their desires beneath carefully preserved facades of beauty or amiability.
Lyle Stedman, on the other hand, would be careful but not cautious. I had trouble picturing that combative man sliding the tip of a syringe filled with cyanide into a piece of candy.
I looked down the table.
My glance locked for an instant with Miranda’s. Her worried eyes probed mine, demanding … demanding what?
I saw Miranda Prescott as neither cautious nor cowardly. Emotions flitted across her face so openly, many of them emotions that should have been alien to her youth and to her position.
For very different reasons, neither Haskell nor Roger would be cautious. Both were impulsive, emotional, passionate. Neither, I felt certain, was a coward.
But poisoning requires more forethought and meticulous preparation than I would expect of Haskell.
As for Roger—Roger would kill for a better good, but it would be an agony for him to do so.
Tomorrow, tomorrow I would …
“My friends.” Chase’s rich voice held no trace of irony. He pushed back his chair and stood.
The dessert had been served and removed and fresh coffee brought. Enrique moved so quietly that he seemed all but invisible.
“I have an announcement to make.” Chase looked at each of us in turn. “I’ve asked you to the island for a special reason.”
Roger reached for his coffee cup. The sound of china ringing against china seemed strident in the waiting quiet.
Every eye focused on Chase.
It was a very clear indication of the power he wielded in each and every life in this room.
Too much power.
“I am very lucky to have persuaded one of the finest writers of our time to agree to work with me in preparing a biography.” He flashed me the ingenuous smile I’d found so charming forty years before. “Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins.” He paused; everyone looked at me.
I managed a frosty smile.
Chase rocked back on his heels, his face genial, his tone expansive. “We all know that each person is perceived differently by those around them. That’s why you’re here. Each of you knows me in a different way. Your part in this is simple. Tell Henrie O what you know, how you feel. Be honest. I want you to tell her exactly what you think of me—what your dealings with me have been. Because this is to be a frank biography. She won’t have any trouble finding people who will tell her nice things. I want the truth. Because, you know, I’m not ashamed of a goddamned thing I’ve ever done.”
It was fitting that Valerie St. Vincent enjoyed the last word. She flung down her napkin, shot Chase a contemptuous glance, and said with her lovely actress’s diction: “If you aren’t, my dear Chase, you certainly should be,” then swung about to exit, her golden head high and her shoulders flung back.
A beautifully flung barb, a gorgeous departure.
That’s how I might have judged it, except for the effect on Miranda.
Her eyes huge and questioning, Chase’s young wife stared after the actress. Then slowly, painfully, her bewildered gaze turned toward her husband.
But Chase was unaware of Miranda. Instead, his face oddly smug, he watched Valerie stride away.
4
Chase was in high good humor as he offered liqueurs to his guests. He seemed totally unaware of Miranda’s pale face and silence. Valerie did not join the rest of us in the living room. I had no chance to talk to him with any freedom. But tomorrow would do well enough. I declined a game of bridge and, at about a quarter to ten, bid everyone good night.
But I wasn’t going to bed.
I was going to think.
I glanced at the fresh carafe of water on my nightstand.
It could so easily be poisoned.
So could the golden box of expensive chocolates that rested near the carafe.
But I assumed Chase could think of that, too.
The maid—I must try to talk with Betty tomorrow —had turned down the silken covers. A mauve card propped on the pillow contained information in elegant calligraphy about other amenities available in the room: an alcove contained a coffee or tea maker and a small refrigerator plus a cupboard with snacks. I checked the pink refrigerator. A fluted crystal dish
contained chocolate mousse laced with raspberry. The enticing dessert was at once both pleasing and disconcerting. It indicated how thoroughly had Chase investigated my likes and dislikes. I shrugged, resisted the temptation, and settled at the desk.
I thumbed through the stack of folders until I found my own.
I didn’t want to read it first because of ego. I’ve long since slaked that hunger. But I had to find out what Chase knew about me and my life.
Nothing in the first few lines conveyed the color and substance and feel of my youth. It merely reported that my father was Douglas O’Dwyer, a foreign correspondent, and my mother, Eileen Cameron, was a poet.
That was enough to trigger memory, of course. Early memories swirled and blended: the rumble of railroad wheels, the thick smell of coal, the lusty whistle of a steam engine. Movement, always movement. I suppose it was a slapdash, uncertain, unstructured growing up, but I knew how to haggle in Arabic and sing roundelays in French and read a railway timetable before I was ten.
I also learned about loss early when Mother went to a sanitarium for tuberculosis and never came home.
I learned to go to a different school every few months and keep a clean apartment for my father and me. The file didn’t mention the day I met a very young foreign correspondent, Richard Corley Collins.
I learned to run and hide when the Germans goose-stepped into Paris. My father was in the south of France, caught up by the invasion. I never saw him again.
I wasn’t yet seventeen when I managed to get out of France and into Spain. The file made it sound easy. It wasn’t. The Pyrenees in winter claimed the lives of many refugees. I found my way to Portugal and a freighter home to America.
The dossier gave my next address as Lawrence, Kansas. And it began the long list of newspapers I worked for.
Because what else in life would I want to do?
The clatter of a typewriter; the scent of melted lead; the desperately difficult task of mastering words, making them sing; the unending challenge of seeking truth, balancing viewpoints.
Conventional wisdom is right: There are two sides to almost every story. That poses the task for the honest reporter.
Almost every story.
I’ve never been impressed that Hitler loved little blond children.
That isn’t enough.
But generally it’s hard to find white or black hats. Villains are seldom easy to spot. They know how to smile, too. Truth is harder to grasp than an eel and always as quick to slip away.
By the time the war was over, I was well launched on the only career I’d ever wanted. The dossier summed it up in a dry, unrevealing list of newspapers and place names.
It charted me to Washington, D.C.
I met Richard Collins again. For the first time I met Chase Prescott.
I read the next few lines carefully, but, once again, it was simply bare bones: place names, the newspaper, the date Richard and I married, Emily’s birth.
I scanned the rest of it and found it all accurate and absolutely uninformative. If the rest of the folders were this spare with information—real information, like the loves and hates of lives, the traumas and mistakes and triumphs—they would be of little help.
I put my own aside and picked up Chase’s. I was grinning by the time I finished it. I wondered what young hopeful on Chase’s staff had prepared it. Although it still didn’t give me meat, real meat, it was a great deal more forthcoming than my own.
All served up, of course, in the most laudatory of terms. I was interested to see that it addressed Chase’s current financial crunch. That meant Lavinia’s information was accurate. It even contained a recent quote of his—from a speech to a men’s dinner club—that Prescott Communications was in no danger of dissolution and the announcement that new money would be infused by fall.
I did learn facts about Chase that I hadn’t known:
He was raised by an aunt in Chicago (both parents dead in a train crash). Chase and his aunt Sylvia were achingly poor.
He married his first wife, Elizabeth Warren, the same year Richard and I married. Their son, Roger, was born a year after Emily. Elizabeth inherited six newspapers and two radio stations from her father. These became the core of Chase’s vast media chain. Cancer killed Elizabeth when Roger was eighteen.
I understood what that meant to Roger.
Chase married Carrie Lee the following fall. Valerie St. Vincent was Carrie Lee’s sister. Chase’s second wife died four years ago in a small plane crash en route to their summer home in Aspen. Chase was in Paris on business; Haskell was in Spain. Roger’s whereabouts weren’t mentioned.
Two years later Chase and Miranda Temple married on Valentine Day. She was an evening-news co-anchor for his Chicago television station.
The list of Chase’s awards, achievements, honorary degrees, and publications ran six single-spaced pages. Chase was the subject of a recent unauthorized biography, The Man Who Picks Presidents, by Jeremy Hubbard. Immediately before the book’s publication Chase filed a libel suit. Litigation was pending.
It was hard not to be aware of the book at the time, for it dominated bestseller lists and trashy headlines for months. I had not read it, however. And not simply because Chase was a closed chapter in my life. I refuse to increase the profits of garbage journalists by purchasing their frothy cocktails of gossip, innuendo, and half-truths. I have a similar policy for the kind of fiction that excites critics because of its viciousness and commercially crafted violence. But now I made a check mark in the margin. I wanted a copy of The Man Who Picks President. Chase unquestionably had one here on the island.
I took a chocolate break after I finished Chase’s folder. My hand hesitated for only a moment above the selection of assorted truffles in the candy box. After all, nobody wanted to poison me.
The ineffable essence of chocolate laced my bloodstream, and I returned to the folder stack with renewed energy.
It was slow going. But I was determined to read them all tonight. I intended to get an early start tomorrow talking to my fellow guests, and I wanted all the ammunition I could carry. I made notes, jotted down lines of questioning, even came up with a few theories.
The lights went out.
“Damn.” I said it softly, without too much rancor. After all, it was late now—quite late. The luminous dial of my watch read ten minutes after two. And a power outage on a remote island certainly was no cause for surprise. I’d recently done a series of stories in the Virgin Islands. It was rather more a matter of celebrating when the lights were on than remarking when they were off. I knew from my earlier nosing about that this island had its own generator. I didn’t know what would cause it to fail, but I was confident it would come back on. Eventually.
I never travel without a flashlight, of course. Hotel fires do happen. I always put my flashlight and my room key—when in a hotel—on the television set, so I would know immediately where to find them in an emergency. Here I’d placed the flashlight on the delicate writing desk. I picked it up and turned it on. I had enough light to finish the folder on Lyle Stedman, but I was suddenly tired. Enough was enough.
But I was restless. Tired, yes, but not ready for sleep.
I enjoy moving about in the night, walking quietly in the darkness while others sleep. Now I slipped down the stairs and stepped outside through the unlocked door. I was getting accustomed to the lack of locks on Dead Man’s Island.
It was dark beyond belief. I almost went back upstairs for the flashlight but didn’t. My eyes would soon adjust to the darkness. The lights in the gardens and near the house were extinguished, and not a gleam of starlight pierced the thick overcast.
I walked cautiously down the shell path to the pier. An erratic wind skittered leaves one way, then another. The air felt sodden. Waves slapped unseen against the pier, flinging up spray to sting my face.
With no warning the lights on the pier came on. I turned away from the brooding water. The massive house was dark, except for my room in the south w
ing of the second floor.
I was at the steps leading down to the gardens when I heard footsteps crunching on a shell path.
Of course. Someone—probably the manservant—had been to the generator and restored the power.
I hurried down the steps and headed that way. I wanted to intercept Enrique. Chase’s valet had been in Chase’s New York brownstone the day the poisoned chocolate piece had killed the dog.
I always like to catch people at an unexpected time or place. Knowledge they might otherwise hide is more likely to slip out. My fatigue from studying the dossiers evaporated. I walked swiftly, eager to plunge into the quest Chase had assigned me. What better time than now?
I suppose I made a good deal of noise on the path. I had no reason to be quiet. Just as I came around the side of the house, I realized the other footsteps had ceased.
I’m fairly good about sounds.
I was almost certain the other footsteps—when I’d last heard them—were still some distance from the house.
Lights only spottily illuminated the long swath of lawn behind the house. The tennis courts were dark. The wind rustled the shrubs.
It was silent except for the sounds of night.
“Hello,” I called out.
The rattle of the palmettos, the rustle of magnolias, the scratch of leaves … but not another telltale footstep.
Someone was out there, hidden in the shadows. Watching me?
An old homicide cop once told me, “If something don’t seem kosher, run like hell.”
I’m a fairly steady jogger, but my wind-sprint days are gone. Instead, I ducked away from the path into the sanctuary of shadows. Two can play that game. I ran lightly and quickly toward the house.
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