by Jane Haddam
Gregor saw Bennis coming out of the parking attendant’s shack. She was hiking along with her shoulder bag balanced against her back and a glum look on her face. Gregor didn’t think she’d gotten the answers she wanted out of the parking lot attendant. She stepped over the curb and came walking toward them on the boardwalk. The rubber soles of her shoes made her the only one of the three who looked really steady on her feet on the wet wood.
“Look up the road.” Bennis pointed into the air behind Lydia Acken’s left shoulder. “Look at what’s coming.”
Both Gregor and Lydia turned to see what Bennis was pointing at. At first, all Gregor saw was a blur of motion on the road. Then the blur came into focus and he realized what it was: a white-and-gold Cadillac stretch limousine, one of the custom-made extra-long ones, with whitewall tires and shiny wheel spokes plated in chrome.
“Oh, my,” Lydia Acken murmured.
At just that moment another car pulled into the parking lot, a small white Toyota Corolla with rental stickers across the back bumper. The Toyota wedged itself into one of the spaces facing the sea and came to a stop. A tall young man, very slight and very flexible, unfolded himself from behind the wheel. The young man was very Asian- and very American-looking at the same time. He also looked very hip. His straight black hair was parted at the side and seemed to sweep around his head when he moved. His tight black jeans and black leather jacket had come right out of a SoHo specialty store. New York, Gregor thought automatically, and tucked the information away in the back of his brain.
The tall young man gave his keys to the parking lot attendant without much discussion—oh, the joys of driving a car you don’t care what happens to—and walked toward them with a rolling gait that had been copied, Gregor was willing to bet, from a 1950s Marlon Brando movie. The tall young man was looking at the white Cadillac limousine just the way the rest of them had been, but unlike them he was not in awe. He had a smirk across his face.
“Hi,” he said, as he climbed over the curb. “Are you people all waiting to go out to Tasheba Kent’s island? I’m Carlton Ji.”
“Oh.” Lydia said it repressively. “The reporter.”
“Reporter?” Gregor asked.
Carlton Ji came the rest of the way to them. “Hi,” he said, sticking his hand out to Gregor. “Who are you? How much do you want to bet it’s going to take Her Highness Miss Hannah another five minutes to get down here, just so she can be sure that everybody in town has had a chance to see her?”
“Who’s Hannah?” Bennis asked.
“Hannah Graham,” Carlton Ji said with relish. “Lilith Brayne’s daughter. Everybody’s always saying that she’s Cavender Marsh’s daughter, but it takes two. I think she’s much more like her mother.”
“She’s certainly dramatic,” Lydia Acken said.
Carlton Ji suddenly realized that Gregor Demarkian was either not going to shake his hand, or had shaken his hand and then taken his own away without Carlton noticing. Whatever the explanation was, Carlton’s hand was hanging in the wind with nothing whatsoever to do. Carlton stuck it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“I work for Personality magazine,” he said to nobody in particular. “This is going to be a great weekend. I can hardly wait.”
The white-and-gold limousine had turned off the main road and begun its winding way through the narrow streets that led to the pier. There were not very many of these streets and none of them was very long, but the car was inching as carefully as if it had been crossing a minefield with a map. Maybe Carlton Ji was right, Gregor thought. Maybe Hannah Graham was making an entrance. If that was her intention, she was doing a very good job. All through the tiny town, people had come out to see the limo pass. There was even a pack of boys sitting on the one flat roof in town, above the pharmacy. The car stopped at every corner, in spite of the fact that there were neither traffic lights nor traffic. Children ran out and touched it and then raced back inside the houses and stores. Hannah Graham probably thought they were impressed, but Gregor doubted it. He thought they were laughing at her, as being another damned fool southerner who didn’t have sense enough not to spend her money on stupidities.
The car turned the last of the corners it had to negotiate to get to the pier. It bumped across a couple of potholes and came to a stop at the little ramp that led from the street to the boardwalk. The people who worked on the pier were now out and watching like the rest of town. The parking lot attendant was standing in the open door of his shack. A grizzled, middle-aged man had come out of the larger shack farther down on the pier and started to mend his ropes outside.
“This almost has to be an anticlimax,” Bennis told Gregor. “I mean, what would you need to equal that entrance? Muhammad Ali? The Charge of the Light Brigade?”
“I think you’d need the Virgin Mary on a cloud of angel dust at the very least.” Lydia Acken had a faint smile on her face.
Actually, Gregor thought that the emergence of Hannah Graham matched the grandeur of her car’s arrival—not because she was such a spectacular figure, but because she was so weird. The limo came to a stop. The driver’s door opened and a lanky black man emerged wearing a gold-and-white uniform, complete with cap. He walked around the limo and opened the passenger door closest to the curb. He leaned in and gave his arm to the woman inside. Then he helped her onto the ramp with all the care a jeweler would have taken with one of the tsarina’s Fabergé eggs.
The first thing that came to Gregor’s mind was that this woman was a walking corpse. She was too thin, too brittle, and much too frequently operated on. She had no subcutaneous fat on her at all. Her too-tightly stretched skin covered the bones of her face the way a sheet of Saran Wrap would have covered a skull. The veins in her hands looked like a system of tributary rivers suddenly sprung to life on the dead white surface of a desert.
“My God,” Bennis said under her breath. “When I get old, I’m going to let myself get wrinkled.”
The next thing Gregor noticed was the clothes. Hannah Graham was wearing navy blue silk trousers—ordinary enough, except that there were a series of heart-shaped holes running up the sides of each leg, exposing more blue veins and dead white skin. Then there was the top, a tunic arrangement entirely covered with sequins in fifteen different colors, making a pattern across her high, bouncing chest of a male and female symbol intertwined. Then there were the dark glasses, which had sequins too. Bizarre.
“Saline implants,” Lydia Acken told Bennis in a whisper. She was staring at Hannah Graham’s chest.
“Nose job,” Bennis whispered back.
The driver had gone around to the back of the limousine and begun to unload Hannah Graham’s luggage. There was a lot of it—at least three large suitcases and two suit bags, a cosmetics case, a jewelry case, a portable shoe tree with a dozen pairs of shoes in it, an overnight case, and a pair of hatboxes. Hannah watched it being unloaded, then walked away from it. Gregor noticed that even the hatboxes were leather and part of a matched set. Every piece had the initials HK on it in flowing script, like the signet of a monarch.
“The HK is for ‘Hannah Kent,’” Carlton Ji whispered to Gregor. “She won’t use Marsh because she despises her father.”
Hannah Graham walked up the ramp to the boardwalk, put her sunglasses on top of her head, and squinted at the assembled company. She’s blind as a bat and those sunglasses are prescription, Gregor thought. Hannah Graham settled her attention on Lydia Acken.
“Are you all waiting to go out to Tasheba Kent’s island?” she asked. Her voice, like her body, was brittle.
Lydia Acken was the soul of politeness. She couldn’t help herself. “Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course we are. And you must be Hannah Graham. I’m Lydia Acken. I’m your father’s lawyer. And Miss Kent’s, too, of course.”
Hannah Graham looked out to sea. “When is the next boat expected to arrive?” she asked.
For a moment, they were all nonplussed. It was such a silly question, and she had asked it with such c
alm certainty.
“I’m afraid it isn’t like that, Miss Graham,” Lydia said apologetically. “There isn’t any regular boat service from Hunter’s Pier to the island. Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh keep a boat, and they’ll be sending it over to ferry us across very soon, with their handyman driving or maybe Miss Dart. I called as soon as I got here and that was half an hour ago. I’m sure it won’t be long now.”
Hannah walked back and forth on the boardwalk, still looking out to sea, a thoughtful expression on her face. She was wearing wedge-heeled, cork-soled sandals, but she was perfectly steady on her feet.
“Do you mean that there’s no way to get out to that island unless my father and that woman send a boat for you?” she asked.
“Well, I’m sure you could hire a boat at this end,” Lydia Acken told her, “but why would you want to? If you’ve been invited, you can get over absolutely free.”
“You might want to surprise them, though,” Hannah said. Her gaze was still on the water. “This is that woman’s hundredth birthday, isn’t it? Maybe some secret admirer somewhere wants to send her a cake.”
“You can’t get out there at all when the weather’s bad,” a voice said.
They all turned to look at the man who had come out of the larger shack on the pier to mend his ropes. He had let them fall to the boardwalk at his feet and now he tilted his chair back to rest against the shack.
“You can’t get from there to here when the weather’s bad, either,” he went on. “Too many rocks. Too hard to dock.”
Hannah Graham walked over to him. She looked him up and down. “Do they ever come out, Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh? Do they ever come into town and just walk around?”
“Not anymore they don’t,” the man at the shack said. “They did when I was a kid, but that was forty years ago.”
Hannah Graham put her glasses back on her nose. “Somebody I knew once said that island was just like Alcatraz.”
“A lot of people say that,” the man at the shack replied. “I don’t think Alcatraz had fifteen marble bathrooms.”
Now, faintly, Gregor could hear the sound of an outboard motor. It was not a very powerful outboard motor—he hoped they had something bigger out there; with a hundred-year-old woman in the house, they needed it—and its hum was almost drowned out by the sound of the sea slapping against the pilings of the piers. The man at the shack was the only one to have caught it besides Gregor. He stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand.
“There she is. That’s Gerry coming in.”
“Who’s Gerry?” Carlton Ji asked. “Geraldine Dart. Miss Kent’s and Mr. Marsh’s secretary,” Lydia Acken answered.
“I didn’t know secretaries knew how to drive boats,” Carlton Ji said.
The boat was now close enough so that all of them could hear it, and see it too. It was a small launch with a sharply edged prow and a squared-off rear. Gregor tried to remember what the rear end of a boat was called. The boat looked to him like the right size for a small example of what people called a cabin cruiser, except that it didn’t seem to have a cabin.
As they watched, the boat slowed down and began to almost drift toward one of the empty docking places. When it got close enough to the wood to actually hit it, its motor cut off almost completely. The man at the shack moved down the boardwalk and out along the dock toward the boat. A plain young woman was standing in the bow and preparing to throw a rope at a post. She threw the rope to the man from the shack instead.
“Hello, Gerry,” the man from the shack said. “These here are your passengers.”
“Hello, Jason.”
Gerry grabbed the hand Jason was holding out to her and let herself be helped onto the pier. Then she stood straight and looked over at the assembled company. She’s something worse than plain, Gregor thought, but even so he liked her face. There was vitality in it, and humor, and intelligence. She had checked them out and looked them over and decided she wasn’t impressed with them at all.
“Oh, Miss Dart,” Lydia Acken said, coming forward. “It’s very good to see you again. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Lydia Acken.”
“I remember you, Miss Acken.” Miss Dart looked past the group to the enormous pile of luggage Hannah Graham’s driver had unloaded from the limousine. “I’m only taking people in this trip,” Miss Dart announced. “Somebody will come back for the luggage later.”
Hannah Graham thrust herself forward. “I can’t possibly allow you to leave my luggage here. I have valuable things in it.”
“Someone will be back for the luggage later,” Miss Dart repeated.
“I don’t think you realize who I am,” Hannah Graham said.
Geraldine Dart gave Hannah Graham such a withering look of contempt, it would have turned any normal human being to stone.
“I don’t have to know who you are,” she said. “All I have to know is that if I put all these people and all that luggage into this one little boat, it’ll sink.”
With that, Geraldine Dart turned on her heel and marched back down the pier to the boat.
“Any of you who want to go out to the island,” she called back, “come on ahead. I’m leaving now.”
2
“Hold onto the sides and hold onto them tight,” Geraldine Dart ordered a few minutes later, when they were all loaded onto the boat and it was breaking away from the dock and into the open water. “The weather is getting a little bit raw.”
It was true. There had been so much going on back there, with Hannah Graham and Carlton Ji and Jason at the shack, Gregor hadn’t noticed it. Now he saw that the wind was high and stiff and the ocean had a hostile rhythm. Above their heads, the late afternoon sky was thick with storm clouds.
“Do you suppose he was telling the truth, that man back there?” Bennis asked. “Do you suppose there really isn’t any way to get on or off the island if the weather is bad?”
“Oh, that’s true enough,” Geraldine Dart said from the wheel, not bothering to turn around to see who had spoken. “The weather doesn’t have to be all that bad, either. You don’t need a hurricane or a nor’easter. It’s the rocks, you see.”
“It does look very rocky,” Lydia Acken said worriedly.
“I think they’re making it all up,” Hannah Graham said. “I think the both of them are just trying to scare us.”
Everybody ignored her.
“I wouldn’t think this would be the optimum situation,” Gregor said slowly. “Miss Kent is very old. And Mr. Marsh, even if he isn’t as old as Miss Kent, he must be nearly eighty.”
“Just about,” Geraldine Dart agreed.
“I always forget that there’s such a great difference in their ages,” Lydia Acken said. “They’re both so old, I think of them as elderly and let it go at that.”
The boat hit an air pocket and bounced first upward, then down hard onto the surface of the sea. Gregor felt his stomach roll dangerously.
“We tried to talk them into moving into town a couple of years ago,” Geraldine Dart said. “They wouldn’t hear of it. I guess they like it out there.”
“I’d hate it out there,” Bennis said. “Just look at that place. Does Vincent Price live in the attic?”
That place was just visible now to the front of them, a tall Victorian pile with cast-iron railings around the large square of its main roof and smaller squares of the roofs on the turrets. It was at least three stories high, not counting the attic. The house rose up off the rock like the physical embodiment of the wrath of God. Gregor had never understood why the Victorians had painted so many of their buildings brown and black in that way, but this was an extravagant example of the style. The windows were tall blank sheets of glass divided into four parts and curved at the top. Bennis was right. Vincent Price ought to be living in the attic.
“Did Tasheba Kent build this house herself?” Carlton Ji asked. “It doesn’t look like her style at all.”
“Tasheba Kent bought the house,” Lydia Acken said. “It was built by a man nam
ed Josiah Horne back in 1837. First he made a lot of money selling rum and slaves. Then he got religion and went running around the country preaching repentance and revival. Then he got an attack of the guilts or a case of clinical depression and built this place out here. He moved in and nobody saw him for twenty years.”
“They found him dead in there in 1857,” Geraldine Dart said cheerfully. “Been dead for a couple of years, too, and his body rotted and eaten away to almost nothing, sitting bolt upright in his best chair in front of the fireplace in the library. The place was filthy. He’d never let a cleaning lady in to do for him. He never let anybody in. He would never have been found at all, but some people from his church wanted to hold a revival and they didn’t have the money for it, so they came out here to see if he’d give them what they needed.”
“That must have been before born-again religion became a profit-making enterprise,” Carlton Ji said.
Hannah Graham was glaring at Geraldine Dart. “She’s just trying to frighten us again,” she hissed. “We shouldn’t let her get away with it. The next thing you know, she’ll be telling us the place is haunted.”
“It is haunted,” Geraldine Dart said calmly. “And I’m not making it up. You can read all about it in a book called Ghosts and Legends in Rural New England. We’ve got it in the library.”
“She’s making it up,” Hannah Graham snapped.
The boat was pulling closer and closer to the island. Gregor could see the dock jutting out from the rocks, and then a long steep flight of wooden stairs. Long and steep were the operative adjectives. The stairs were more like a ladder than like ordinary stairs. He wondered if that was the only way up to and down from the house. It seemed to be.
“I can’t believe Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh can handle those stairs,” Gregor commented. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to manage them.”
