And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  Lydia Acken walked over to the letters on the wall, touched the shiny surface of the T, and shook her head.

  “Somehow, I wouldn’t have thought this was Tasheba’s style. Of course, it may not be out here for her. It may be out here for us. One more prop to make the auction a success.”

  “Maybe Tasheba Kent has gone a little senile,” Gregor said. “At a hundred years old, she’d be entitled.”

  “She might be entitled, but I know it hasn’t happened,” Lydia said. “I speak to her on the phone quite often. She’s in remarkably good shape for somebody her age. I had an aunt who died at seventy-five who wasn’t anywhere near as alert.”

  “I think she’s practicing voodoo,” somebody said from the living room doorway.

  Gregor and Lydia turned around to see Hannah Graham, wearing what might have been the single oddest piece of clothing Gregor had ever encountered. It seemed to be made of round plastic discs, bone white but painted over with designs in metallic blue and red and green, held together with white metal staples. It was very short, riding high on Hannah’s thighs, showing off skeletal legs with bright blue veins laced through them. It was both backless and strapless, exposing arms as thin as pipe cleaners and a back whose skin was so dry it looked like sandpaper. The whole extraordinary ensemble was set off by a pair of spike-heeled sandals at least four inches high, that Hannah Graham seemed to have trouble walking on.

  Hannah Graham came into the room and picked up one of the quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard happy faces. She put it down again and went over to look at the blue-and-white streamers.

  “My God,” she said. “What a hokey lot of nonsense. I wonder how she thinks she’s going to get away with it.”

  “I don’t think she’s trying to get away with anything,” Lydia said stiffly. “I don’t think any of these things here were her idea. They were probably put out by Miss Dart or Mr. Marsh.”

  Hannah shot Lydia a cynical look. “I’ll bet Miss Dart doesn’t do a thing around here without permission. I’ll bet my father doesn’t either. He’s not talking to me, by the way.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia said. “We’ve barely got here. He hasn’t had a chance.”

  “I’ve given him several chances,” Hannah countered. “He runs away every time he sees me coming. He locks himself in bathrooms. But he won’t be able to avoid me all weekend. I’m faster than he is.”

  Oh, wonderful, Gregor thought. This is going to be just as bad as I feared. Then he looked toward the living room door again and saw a very young woman come in, someone he had not met, a girlish-looking woman with red-gold hair in a conservative long dress. Behind her were two men, the older in a tuxedo like Gregor’s own, the younger in a plain blue suit.

  “Oh,” the young woman said. “This must be the right place for us to go.”

  Hannah Graham was giving the young woman a hard look, one of the hardest Gregor had ever seen. It was a river of pure hate, made stronger by the fact that Hannah was not going to get a chance to do anything about it. Hannah had dieted and exercised and gone under the knife enough so that she looked nothing at all like an ordinary woman in her late fifties, but she looked nothing at all like a woman in her twenties, and that was what she was trying to look like. This was a woman in her twenties, and it showed.

  Lydia Acken came forward with her hand outstretched. “How do you do,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Lydia Acken.”

  “We haven’t met but we’ve talked,” the young woman said. “I’m Mathilda Frazier, from the Halbard Auction House.”

  “Oh, yes,” Lydia said.

  Mathilda turned to the two men behind her. “The tall one is Kelly Pratt—”

  “Kelly and I have met many times,” Lydia said.

  “—and the other one is Richard Fenster. He’s a very important collector and dealer of movie memorabilia.”

  “I know Richard Fenster.” Bennis came in with Carlton Ji in tow. She was wearing a strapless red sheath that seemed molded to her, and Carlton Ji looked stoned. “Richard deals in memorabilia from science fiction and fantasy movies,” Bennis went on. “We’ve been in touch.”

  Gregor looked around and realized that they were all there, all the people who had been on the guest list, everybody who was expected for this party except for the people who actually lived in the house. The clock on the wall above the Happy Birthday letters said five minutes after seven. Gregor wondered where Geraldine Dart was.

  He didn’t have to wonder for long. She came through the living room door carrying a long silver tray of identical cocktails, exactly eight of them, one for each person in the room, not including herself. Gregor had no idea what the drinks were. They looked like they had grenadine in them. Obviously, guests in this house were supposed to take what they were served and make the best of it.

  “Here we go,” Geraldine said, giving Hannah Graham a swift look of wariness and delight that passed so quickly it might not have occurred at all. “Everybody take one of these, and then we’ll be ready for the arrival of the king and queen.”

  The arrival of the king and queen turned out to be a production with a lot in common with the way Bennis Hannaford’s more ardent fans liked to conduct their introductions. First, a gong sounded in the hall—not a chime or bell or the bass note of an old clock telling the hour, but a real gong, the kind of sound that could only be made by a felt-tipped hammer smashing against a large brass disc. Then Geraldine Dart shooed a few stragglers away from the living room doorway, and the procession began.

  Cavender Marsh came in first. He was a very old man dressed in a tuxedo, but he still looked spry and alert and admirably, almost miraculously, trim.

  The Tasheba Kent who followed him was something of a shock. The actress was an ancient woman, bearing all the usual marks of great age. Her skin was as soft as tissue paper and looked as thin. There was a lot of it, with wrinkle after wrinkle falling down the side of her face and along the bones of her arms. She did not have a dowager’s hump, but she was hunched over. Her head and neck hung low between her shoulders. She was not really able to stand up straight. She was not fat, but her body had lost whatever shape it ever had. Her breasts did not curve upward and outward. Her stomach was a round mound jutting out from beneath her rib cage.

  None of this would have been particularly disturbing, if Tasheba Kent had been dressed like an old woman, or even in simple conservative clothes. Instead, she was dressed like the silent movie vamp she had once been. Her dress was a tight black tube of beaded satin, hugging every wayward contour. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black feather boa and a beaded satin shawl. Around her forehead was a beaded satin headband; the hair it held back was jet black and as thick as a full-cream chocolate mousse. It was a wig and it looked like a wig, but it was less grotesque than Tasheba Kent’s makeup. That was so highly colored and so thickly applied, it belonged more properly on a clown. Tasheba Kent’s eyes were laden down with at least three sets of false eyelashes and rimmed with kohl. Her lips were painted into a bright red cupid’s bow. Her cheeks were rouged into two shiny bright apples.

  “Good God,” Lydia Acken whispered into Gregor’s ear. “Like niece, like aunt. Here we go again.”

  But Gregor didn’t think that was really true. It was most definitely not the same, what Tasheba Kent was doing and what Hannah Graham was doing. Hannah actually expected to fool people. At least when the serious competition—meaning women like Mathilda Frazier and Bennis Hannaford—was out of sight, Hannah thought she would be able to wipe away time. Gregor didn’t think Tasheba Kent had any illusions about the way she looked. She knew she was grotesque. She wanted to be grotesque. She was reveling in it.

  Now why, Gregor asked himself, would a woman want to do something like that?

  3

  After the entrance, dinner was inevitably an anticlimax. They sat around the long table in the dining room, eating impossibly bland food off Royal Doulton plates by the light of three eight-stick sterling-silv
er candelabra. They made polite conversation with each other of the kind common to people who do not know each other well and never expect to. The dining room table was strewn with happy birthday reminders, including a set of little plastic balloons with “100” written across each one. People kept picking those up and commenting on them, as if they were significant in some way.

  Gregor had managed to get himself seated on Lydia Acken’s right, so when the conversation turned to ghosts just before dessert, he was not desperately bored and searching for something new to occupy his mind. Neither was Lydia, as far as he could tell. They had been talking for the last twenty minutes about his early years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about how he had felt about J. Edgar Hoover (“a bigot and a psychopath”), about why he had stuck it out (“the idea of the Bureau is a good one, if you see what I mean”). They had just gotten started on the way the confidential files had been disposed of in the three long days after Hoover’s death—“the blackmail files,” they used to be called; the dirt Hoover had on senators and congressmen and presidents—when Cavender Marsh said what he did about the concubine.

  “That’s who I think it is wandering around this house in the night,” Cavender Marsh said, his deep bass voice booming down the table from his place in the host’s chair. “I think the old man couldn’t bear the idea of shutting himself up in this place alone, so he got himself a hired companion, and then one day she wanted to leave and he decided to cut her throat and stuff her body in the well. And her soul has been here ever since, trying to take revenge.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Tasheba Kent said, in a wavery voice, from her own end of the table. “Now, don’t any of you people worry about a thing. Cavender doesn’t even know if old Josiah Horne ever had a companion living out here with him at all, never mind a lady companion that he used for a mistress and then murdered. And we’ve had all the wells checked out at least three times since we moved here, and nobody’s ever found a body or a skeleton in one.”

  “If the place is haunted, I’d think it would be haunted by Josiah Horne himself,” Carlton Ji said. “From what Miss Dart told us on the boat, he sounds strange enough to haunt a place all on his own.”

  “This is just some game they’re all playing,” Hannah Graham announced scornfully, “to keep us off balance. There aren’t any ghosts, here or anywhere else. I’m not going to let them scare me.”

  Geraldine Dart was sitting at the end of the table on Tasheba Kent’s left, close enough to cut the old woman’s food and help her with her utensils if she needed help. She was wearing a plain black dress and a long necklace of black glass beads and a terrible pair of glasses that went up into points at the outside corners, like the kind of thing divorcees wore forty years ago. Now she took the glasses off and put them down on the table next to her wineglass.

  “You know,” she said in a slow careful voice, “I really was telling the truth on the boat this morning. There really is a ghost, and I really have seen her. Three times, as a matter of fact. In the main family wing, upstairs near the bedrooms.”

  “Miss Dart is always telling us all about it,” Cavender Marsh boomed cheerfully.

  “It can’t be Josiah Horne because it’s most definitely the ghost of a woman,” Geraldine Dart continued. “And she can’t be a recent arrival because she’s dressed in an old-fashioned dress. Long to the floor with a high collar. That sort of thing.”

  “Does she talk?” Richard Fenster asked curiously.

  “She’s never talked to me,” Geraldine Dart said. “She just stands at the window at the end of the hall up there, looking out. Then when she hears me, she turns to see who I am. Then she just fades away.”

  “I think I’m disappointed,” Carlton Ji said. “I think I’d prefer to have chains rattling and blood dripping from the ceiling, like in that Shirley Jackson novel.”

  “I think I’d rather have a love story,” Mathilda Frazier said. “You know, she sets herself down in front of the portrait of her lost lover and pines away for him.”

  “She couldn’t be pining away for him,” Kelly Pratt said reasonably. “She’s already dead.”

  “Well, I don’t know what she’s doing,” Geraldine Dart told them, “but she seems to be harmless enough. One minute to twelve midnight exactly, when she comes. Some of you ought to go up there tonight and see if you can catch sight of her.”

  “Maybe we will,” Bennis Hannaford said.

  Down at the middle of the left side of the table, Hannah Graham shot out of her seat, wadded her blue linen napkin into a ball, and sent the ball flying at the nearest candelabra. She almost hit it. If she had, she would have set something on fire.

  “You little bitch,” Hannah snarled at Geraldine Dart. “Don’t think I don’t know what kind of shit you’re pulling. Don’t think I’m going to let you get away with it, either.”

  Then Hannah Graham kicked her chair over backward, so that it hit the floor with a crash, and went marching out of the dining room.

  CHAPTER 5

  1

  FOR CARLTON JI, THE great questions of late-twentieth-century existence—if the races would ever be able to learn to live with each other; whether a cure would be found for cancer or AIDS; how the world was going to be supplied with the technological comforts it wanted without poisoning itself in the process—could be boiled down to a single proposition, the quintessential interview question for Personality magazine: How does it make you feel when you think about these things? There were people even at Personality who knew that this question was idiotic. How an immunologist felt about AIDS was far less important than what he knew about it. No matter how miserable the contemplation of race hatred made you, it would not tell you how to solve the problems of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Feelings, though, were what Personality dealt in, especially the mushily maudlin feelings of well-heeled people about their miserable childhoods. It was amazing how many highly successful television actresses and bankable movie stars—none of whom had ever been known to shut up for fifteen seconds on any other subject—had suffered in silence for decades on the subject of their mothers’ shopping addictions or their fathers’ love affairs with emotional coldness and the National Football League. Personality used to publish revelations far more powerful and far more inflammatory than either of those, but they had had to give it up, because they kept getting sued. It turned out that you could not print accusations about an ordinary, nonpublic person if you could not prove them to be true. It also turned out that “somebody said so,” even if the somebody was the hottest romantic comedy lead since Carole Lombard, did not constitute proof.

  For Carlton Ji, the insidious part of all this was how much it made him want to be like these people, and how hard he tried to rewrite his life to fit the paradigm their lives all seemed to fit. He had actually grown up in fairly pleasant surroundings, in one of the nicer suburbs on Long Island, with a father who worked full-time as a banker and a mother who worked part-time as a research biologist at a small chemical company. He had three brothers and a sister, plenty of pocket money without having to work for it, and the kind of high school career that leaves more happy memories than the other sort. Second cousins coming in from miserable apartments in the city and endless hours of after-school work in the family restaurant looked on his life with awe. For some of them, the mere fact that he had his own room that he had to share with nobody else, that he could just go into and shut the door, meant that he was being brought up like an imperial prince. Carlton never paid any attention to these second cousins, because they made him uncomfortable, and because he could never get over the feeling that their lives were somehow their fault. Other people had come over from Asia, and from worse places, too. Other people had had to start small. Why did it seem to be only his second cousins and their parents who never got anywhere with it?

  For Carlton Ji, everybody was responsible for his own fate, unless he was being sabotaged by his dysfunctional family. In Carlton’s own case, his family got him every time. That was
why, no matter how brilliant he had tried to be at the dinner table tonight, Bennis Hannaford hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to him.

  Everybody else went into the living room for liqueurs after dinner—except for Tasheba Kent, who was looking extremely tired and extremely frail—but Carlton drifted off on his own, feeling disenfranchised and disgruntled. The best thing to do with a mood like this was to express it. The problem with expressing it was that that was likely to get him into trouble. Business etiquette had not been invented with the emotional health of the whole human being in mind. Carlton wandered down to the library and looked in on the exhibits. The man from town who was supposed to be guarding the room looked him over once or twice, as if he were a sea slug, but did nothing to stop him from going in. Carlton looked over the loot on the three tables and decided it bored him. Tasheba Kent’s table had a lot of jet-black fans and beaded dresses. The dresses on Lilith Brayne’s table ran more to pastels. Cavender Marsh’s table held not much of anything. By the 1930s, when Cavender Marsh had been famous, movie stars were no longer living their lives in a sea of props. Or maybe they were, but the props were subtle ones, that didn’t become famous in and of themselves. Carlton thought about the sale, at auction, of “the last cigar Charlie Chaplin ever chewed on in a movie,” and decided that people were just plain crazy.

  He left the library by the far door and found himself in a narrow service hall. The hall was lined on both sides by plain wood doors. Carlton opened one and found a laundry room. He opened another and found a pantry. He opened a third and found a lot of old trunks, some with broken sides and shattered clasps, piled up inside and on top of each other with no concern for order or logic. Voices floated down to him from the living room, deep and courteous, high-pitched and discontented.