And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “Attention,” the loudspeaker over their head blared, through a rain of static that almost made the word sound like an expletive in a Balkan language. “Attention all passengers of MaineAir flights one seventy-seven and two twenty-nine. That’s MaineAir one seventy-seven and two twenty-nine. Flights will be boarding at gate number—” more static “—in fifteen minutes. That’s—”

  The static drowned the rest of the message out.

  “I don’t think they’ve changed the gate, do you?” Kelly Pratt asked.

  “Only way to find out is to walk that way and ask the first MaineAir person we find.” Richard Fenster stood. “Are you coming, Miss Frazier?”

  Mathilda considered asking him to call her “Ms.” but decided against it. It was unnecessarily antagonistic, and it really wouldn’t make sense for her to turn Fenster into an enemy. He had collected so much stuff already. He might want to have an auction of his own one day.

  Mathilda grabbed her bag and stood up.

  “I’m coming,” she told him, in as pleasant a voice as possible. It wasn’t very pleasant.

  In the course of having a single drink that none of them had finished, Mathilda Frazier had gone from disliking Richard Fenster to absolutely loathing him.

  3

  Back on the island, Tasheba Kent was lying on top of the bedspread in her four-poster, king-size, curtained-and-canopied bed. The window curtains were drawn, and had been since noon. The tray with Tasheba’s lunch on it was sitting on the vanity table, untouched. Around about eleven thirty, she had heard the sound of voices down in the foyer, as some of the guests arrived. Since then, things had been very quiet. Tasheba stared up at the underside of the canopy and wondered what was going on down there, who had come, what they were doing, what they were saying about her. The items for the auction were laid out on three long tables in the library, watched over by a man they had hired from the village. Each of the three of them had their own table, with the things that had belonged to more than one of them parceled out at random. She wondered if they were looking through those things now, pawing over them, trying to make them come right. God only knew she had pawed through them often enough herself in the last sixty years. By now she ought to know that no matter how many times she replayed the story, she could never make it come out right.

  Sixty years.

  She reached over to her night table and picked up the Tiffany’s brass carriage clock that she’d had at least since the year it all happened. She and Cavender didn’t get into Tiffany’s anymore. It was a good thing the clock was well made and hadn’t needed repair. Tasheba didn’t have her glasses on and the room was dark. She tilted the clock back and forth in the thin wash of grayness that seeped through a crack in the window curtains. Four fifteen, the clock seemed to say. That was a good time, four fifteen. It was Cavender’s time to be alone.

  Tasheba moved very slowly, first onto her side, then almost over onto her stomach. She had to be careful. She had grown very frail. Simple things had become very difficult or even impossible. She braced herself against the night table and levered herself up into a sitting position, with her legs hanging off the side of the bed. Her big platinum and diamond dinner ring cut into the flesh of her fingers as she pushed against the night table’s edge, making her want to cry out.

  Once she was sitting up, it was easier. She got down to the floor without any trouble at all. She moved across the room at first by holding on to furniture, like a child learning to walk. After a while, it got better. The joints in her legs became operative. The muscles in her calves and thighs gained strength and determination. It was as if her body forgot how to move while she was asleep and had to learn all over again each time she woke up.

  There were French doors leading to a balcony overlooking the pool terrace hiding behind long curtains on one wall. Tasheba got the curtains pulled back and the French doors open and went outside. The pool terrace seemed to be deserted, but she couldn’t see all of it. Cavender usually had a drink there every day at this time, getting a jump on the cocktail hour. Maybe he had stayed inside today to entertain their guests.

  “Cavender?” Tasheba called out, hearing the high whining querulous tone in her voice and hating it. “Cavender, are you down there?”

  There was the sound of metal scraping against the fieldstone of the terrace and then a cough. Cavender came into view underneath her.

  “You aren’t wearing a robe,” he said, looking up. “You aren’t wearing slippers, either. Go back inside and put something on.”

  “I just want to ask you a question,” Tasheba said. “It won’t take very long.”

  “You don’t have to ask me any questions. Everything’s fine. Everything’s wonderful. Go back to resting up before dinner.”

  “People came,” Tasheba said. “I heard them.”

  “Some people came. Bennis Hannaford and that friend of hers; Lydia Acken. The reporter from Personality. Oh. And Hannah Kent Graham. It turns out that that’s what she calls herself. Hannah Kent Graham. After her mother instead of after me.”

  “I think that’s very sweet,” Tasheba said quietly. “I think it’s rather—amazing that she didn’t call herself after her aunt Bessie.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like her aunt. I never understood how anyone could. I didn’t talk to her, by the way. I didn’t even let her see me. I couldn’t face it. She’s grotesque.”

  “She’s your daughter.”

  “That’s not something that ever mattered a damn to either one of us. Go back to bed now. You’ve got a long night ahead of you. You’ve got an even longer weekend.”

  “Are the rest of them coming?”

  “They got held up in Boston with some problems with their plane, but they’re coming. Yes. They’ll be here as soon as they can.”

  “I wish it was over and done with,” Tasheba said. “I wish I didn’t have to be so worried all the time.”

  “You don’t have to be worried. Go back to bed.”

  There was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean, cold but pleasant. Tasheba felt as if she could have stood on the balcony all night. But it was silly. It was ridiculous not to care now whether she lived or died, just because she was old.

  I never expected to get this old, she thought, as she went back into the bedroom and shut the French doors tight behind her. I never expected to live much past the age of forty.

  She stretched herself out on her bed again and stared up at the underside of the canopy.

  In a way, she had died just around the time that she was forty.

  She just hadn’t stopped breathing.

  CHAPTER 4

  1

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD DEVISED a quick-and-easy way to determine whether a large house, owned by rich people, was run by the husband or the wife: if house guests were required to come down to dinner in black tie, the house was run by the wife. If house guests were not required to come down to dinner in black tie, the house was not necessarily run by the husband. Gregor had known his share of informal women. It was just that husbands never wanted to dress up for dinner on their own territory, unless they were having a party for five or six hundred people and inviting the president of the United States.

  The instructions on the little card Gregor had found on the table beside his bed—along with an ice bucket, a glass, and a bottle of mineral water—had said, “Cocktails at seven, Dinner at seven thirty, Black Tie.” The card had been written out by hand and had nothing else on it, so Gregor hadn’t been able to pretend to investigate it. He had simply explored his bedroom for a while, decided that there wasn’t very much to see, and stretched out on the bed to read. The bedroom was a small but very high-ceilinged square containing almost all the sins of Victorian interior decoration: The furniture was made of wood too heavy and too dark to have looked graceful in anything smaller than a football field. The curtains on the windows were made of heavy dark damask. Every available surface was clogged with painted figurines in porcelain and plaster, all in varying stages of ter
minal sentimentality. On Gregor’s bedside table there was a porcelain group, consisting of a very large mother figure with three tiny children clutching at her knees, titled “Angel of the Home.” Gregor had to put it away on one of the bookshelves before he felt comfortable moving the ice bucket and the mineral water off the tray.

  What there wasn’t, in this room, was any sign of the life Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh had lived before coming to Maine. In fact, as far as Gregor could see, there was very little of that part of their lives anywhere in the house. Maybe their private rooms were full of the memorabilia of Hollywood and the movies. Downstairs and in the guest wing, there was only a long line of movie posters climbing the wall of the main staircase. There weren’t even any books about the movies lying around. Gregor had gone into the library after lunch; all he had found were books on gardening and the complete works of Agatha Christie.

  Of course, there were three long tables full of memorabilia, meant for sale at this auction. Those things might once have been scattered around the house and then been collected up to be sent to New York. Gregor didn’t think so, because he never seemed to run into any feeling of absence anywhere. There were no blank shelves anywhere that he could see. There were no empty, unfilled places on coffee tables or sideboards. These little figurines were very old, even if they were maudlin and not very valuable. They hadn’t been bought last week to be shoved into the gaps left by cigarette lighters and rhinestone-encrusted minaudières.

  Gregor tried to check the set of his tie in a mirror that was more elaborately carved frame than glass. Fat cupids chased even fatter maidens around the edges of a silver lake. He could see one side of his tie or the other, but not both at once.

  Gregor went to the door of his bedroom and looked out into the guest room hall. All the other doors on this corridor were closed, as they had been all afternoon. He heard no noise. Either his fellow guests had gone down to cocktails early, or they were being very quiet about getting dressed. Gregor knocked on Bennis’s door and got no answer. He tried the doorknob, found that it turned easily, and poked his head inside. It was impossible to get Bennis to take security seriously. She left doors open and suitcases unlocked and checkbooks and credit cards lying around on tables. The only precautions she would take had to do with her car, and that was more because she was overprotective of the car than that she believed she could be the victim of a carjacking. Bennis was not in her room. There was a mess of papers on the bed—she had been working—and a pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray on the bedside table, but Bennis herself was gone.

  Gregor retreated into the hallway, nonplussed. Maybe he had read the card wrong. Maybe there was a code to messages like that one to which he wasn’t privy. Gregor was not an unsophisticated man. In spite of the fact that he had grown up poor in the days when Cavanaugh Street had been not only an Armenian immigrant conclave but something of a slum, his career since had brought him into contact with more rich people than any sane man would want to know. He had been to dinner at the White House (twice, under two different presidents) and on a long weekend in the Virginia hills where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were spending a vacation. Granted, during that weekend he had been part of the security force, not one of the guests, but that hardly mattered. Gregor Demarkian knew how to operate in the world. It was only around people related to Bennis Day Hannaford that he began to suspect conspiracies and to believe that whatever social occasion he was involved in was really a trap, meant to make him look like an idiot.

  He was still standing in the hallway, staring at Bennis Hannaford’s bedroom door, when a door down the corridor opened and a woman came out. Gregor looked up and saw Lydia Acken locking up very carefully behind herself. The lawyer wore a long pearl white dress in plain, unadorned taffeta. There was a string of pearls around her neck. She had her white hair brushed back into a neat chignon designed to let little curling tendrils escape around her face. She had pearl stud earrings in her ears and a small white taffeta handbag in her hands. She looked, Gregor thought, almost unbelievably attractive.

  Lydia finished locking up and came down the hall to him. He was, after all, standing at the head of the stairs.

  “Are you waiting for your friend?” she asked him pleasantly. “I noticed her especially on the pier. She’s really quite beautiful.”

  “Bennis?” It was true, of course, that Bennis Hannaford was beautiful. It was just that Gregor never noticed it. “I don’t know,” he said now, “I suppose I’ve known her so long, it just doesn’t register anymore.”

  “Maybe that’s why she’s holding you up.” Lydia nodded at Bennis’s closed door. “Maybe she feels she’s being taken for granted, and she’s making you wait, so you’ll appreciate her more.”

  “Bennis?” Gregor said. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it’s not—we don’t—it isn’t like that, you see—we’re—”

  “Oh.” Lydia Acken blushed scarlet. “Oh, I am sorry. I just assumed—and of course I shouldn’t have—that’s what comes of trying to be modern when you don’t have the faintest idea what it is that’s going on—”

  “No, no,” Gregor said quickly. “I can see how you thought what you thought. Lots of people think it. It’s just that it doesn’t happen to be the way—”

  “My mother always told me I didn’t have sense enough to mind my own business,” Lydia said miserably.

  “Bennis isn’t home,” Gregor threw in, feeling desperate. “I came across the hall to see if she’d fix my tie, but she’s already gone.”

  Lydia Acken stopped in the middle of the muttered recriminations she was still directing at herself and looked up into Gregor’s eyes. Then a smile began to spread across her face, and she bit her lower lip to stop its spreading.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Have I made a fool of myself, or what?”

  “You made no bigger a fool of yourself than I made of myself. By the way, is my tie crooked?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is, as a matter of fact. Here, give me a minute and I’ll fix it.”

  Gregor stood very still. Lydia rose up on tiptoe and fussed around at his throat. The tickle against his Adam’s apple was comforting and familiar. Elizabeth had always fixed his ties for him and straightened out his collars. These are the kinds of things, Gregor thought, that any man can do for himself, but that most men don’t really want to.

  “There,” Lydia Acken said. “You look fine now. Are you going to wait for Miss Hannaford to come back, or are you going downstairs for cocktails?”

  “I suppose I’m going downstairs for cocktails. I don’t know when Bennis is going to be back, or even if. Can I come downstairs with you?”

  “Yes,” Lydia said. “Of course you may. I’d like that.” Maybe on the way down I’ll pump you for the information everybody in the house is just dying to find out about you.”

  “Really? What information is that?”

  “Information on what you’re doing here, of course,” Lydia said. “I ran into Geraldine Dart this afternoon after lunch, in a back hallway while I was looking for the loo, and she’s absolutely convinced that Hannah Graham hired you to find out what really happened to Lilith Brayne.”

  “I can’t imagine what would induce me to work for Hannah Graham. A personal visit from God Almighty, maybe.”

  “Well, Hannah Graham also thinks you’ve been hired to find out what happened to her mother, or maybe to cover it up, but she thinks I hired you. Has somebody hired you? Are you here to find out what happened to Lilith Brayne?”

  “In the first place,” Gregor said, as they started side by side down the stairs, “nobody can hire me. I don’t have a private detective’s license, and I don’t need money. Sometimes I look into things that interest me. I no longer investigate anything for money.”

  “You’re a very intelligent man.”

  “In the second place,” Gregor continued, “as far as I know, everybody already knows what happened to Lilith Brayne. A tragedy. An accident. A mess. But none of my business.”

  “
I wish it were none of my business.” Lydia sighed. “You know, Mr. Demarkian, when I went off to law school, back in the early fifties, when girls just didn’t get accepted, I had this vision of starting out on a great adventure, a modern crusade full of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. And what did I get? Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, two very old people who still think sex is the only point of life and who are just as silly and narcissistic in everything else they do.”

  “Call me Gregor,” Gregor said.

  “My name is Lydia. Lydia Ann. I’ve never liked it.”

  “We’ll have to think of a suitable nickname, then. Look. I think we’re the first ones down. I wonder where everybody’s gone.”

  Lydia Acken’s eyes flashed. “Hannah Graham has probably gone off for a spot of surgery before drinks,” she said tartly.

  Then she marched off ahead of Gregor into the living room.

  2

  Tasheba Kent’s official birthday, and official birthday party, weren’t until Saturday, but while Gregor had been upstairs reading his book somebody had begun decorating the living room anyway. Most of the decorations were the standard sort of thing that could be found in any Hallmark card shop. There was a string of shiny-surfaced multicolored cardboard letters held together with tin swivel fasteners tacked up just above eye level on one wall, spelling out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY.” There were blue-and-white crepe-paper streamers wound barber-pole fashion around the two decorative posts that separated the living room from the study beyond it. There were quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard stand-up happy faces in blue and yellow and green, scattered across the coffee tables and end tables and shelves, each proclaiming “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” in a riot of exclamation points. It would have looked like the setup for a children’s party, except that here and there there were indications that the woman for whom all this fuss was being made was not young. There was a metal walker tucked discreetly into a corner. There was an arm brace lying on the floor next to one of the larger couches. There were magnifying glasses everywhere, as if the person who needed them could never remember where she had put them down.