And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “No,” Kelly said. “I couldn’t either. That Hannah Graham wouldn’t want to.”

  “Hardly.”

  Kelly Pratt fidgeted. “Well,” he said, “what about just curiosity? Or being uncomfortable. What about knowing something that just makes you nervous?”

  “Do you know something like that?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

  Kelly Pratt nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  “And you want to tell it to me.”

  Gregor Demarkian was not feeling too keen about this. Kelly Pratt could tell. Everything about the man’s body language said the intellectual and emotional fortifications were going up. Maybe Kelly had been wrong. Maybe Demarkian hadn’t come up here to investigate the murder of Lilith Brayne after all.

  Actually, it didn’t really matter. Kelly Pratt had been bursting ever since he came across this information, and telling Bram Kahn about it had done nothing to relieve his distress. Gregor Demarkian was a professional. Gregor Demarkian might actually know what it was all this was supposed to mean.

  “Look,” Kelly Pratt burst out. “Back in 1938, one hundred thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of money.”

  CHAPTER 6

  1

  THERE WERE NO TELEPHONES in the bedrooms at Tasheba Kent’s house. There were no telephones anywhere in Tasheba Kent’s house that Gregor could see, although he knew that there had to be at least one somewhere or, even better, a shortwave radio. You didn’t run a house like this, way out in the middle of the ocean on a rock, with two very old people in it, without having some way of communicating with the standard emergency services. The only emergency service Gregor wanted to contact was his best friend, Father Tibor Kasparian, back on Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia. Tibor was where Gregor went when the world got to be too much for him. Gregor had a feeling that Tasheba Kent’s house was too much for him. The house and its inhabitants were a deliberate assault on reason. Even its guests were only half-sane. There was Lydia Acken, but there was also Kelly Pratt.

  When Gregor finished listening to Kelly Pratt’s chaotic and convoluted story, he went back into the living room and found it empty. Even Hannah Graham had disappeared, although she had left a wineglass full of ice and mineral water on the bare wood of the coffee table, where it was leaving a stain. Gregor put the glass back on the bar and went out into the foyer. It was empty, too. For the moment, the whole house seemed to be empty, and quiet and not quite dark. He looked up the great main staircase to the landing that led to the guest rooms on the left and the family rooms on the right. There was nobody up there, either, but the electrified chandelier was lit. It sent a cascade of light and shadow bouncing down the steps, looking atmospheric and not quite real.

  It’s this house, Gregor told himself in disgust. It looks like a movie set. And it’s Geraldine Dart, too, and all that nonsense she was talking at dinner. I’ve started to spook myself. The next thing I know, I’ll be seeing that idiotic ghost.

  Gregor climbed the staircase with determination. At the landing, he stopped and looked into both of the bedroom wings. The hallways were empty and lit only by the dim wall fixtures placed between the third and fourth doors on each side of each corridor. No lights came from beneath the doors, but Gregor knew that didn’t mean anything. This was an old house built by a rich man. The doors might fit so closely against their jambs, no light could escape.

  Gregor went to Bennis Hannaford’s bedroom door and knocked. There was the sound of a muffled “just a minute” and then a cascade of fluttering paper. Gregor heard Bennis say, “Oh, shit.”

  Bare feet padded across the room; the door opened. Bennis stuck her head out, saw Gregor, and looked relieved.

  “Come on in,” she said, stepping back. “I thought you were that idiotic Carlton.”

  Gregor came into the room. Bennis was in a pair of pajamas and one of his old terry cloth bathrobes. The galleys for her latest book had fallen off the bed and scattered across the floor. She sat down cross-legged in front of them and began to put them in order.

  “Listen to that,” she said. “Every time I hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, I think of Geraldine Dart, blithering away about how there’s no way off this island if the weather is even a little out of sorts.”

  Bennis was right. There was thunder in the distance. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, but now that his attention had been called to it, it was perfectly clear. He went to Bennis’s window and looked out. Her room faced the back of the house, so there wasn’t much he could see, but he did catch a jagged bolt of lightning far in the distance.

  Gregor sat down in the chair in front of Bennis’s vanity table. Bennis was pitching her papers onto the bed. She looked tousled and agitated and restless and tired.

  “So,” she said, throwing herself on the bed as well, “what have you been up to? I’ve been trying to convince the proofreader of this book that there’s no such thing as a ‘chaise lounge.’”

  “You do that every book.”

  “I know, but I never win. I saw you captured by Kelly Pratt. I’m sorry I didn’t rescue you.”

  “I don’t know if I’m sorry or not. He was telling me a very interesting story, a kind of minor real-life logic problem. It was all about the death of Lilith Brayne, of course.

  “Because that’s all anybody around here ever talks about,” Gregor continued. “At least, that’s all they ever talk about to me. The more they talk, the more I remember about the case, or about things around the case, but I’m still no expert. You should have warned me this was going to happen. I would have boned up before we got here. It would have been more entertaining for everybody concerned. Including me.”

  “I didn’t know what it was going to be like.” Bennis reached to her night table for her cigarettes, got one out and lit it with a hot red plastic Bic lighter. Then she took a deep drag and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “If you want to know what it’s been like for me, it’s been Carlton Ji. That’s not quite fair. He left me alone after dinner. But still. And if it hasn’t been Carlton Ji, it’s been Hannah Graham. She really is the most poisonous woman.”

  “I agree,” Gregor said.

  “Well, you should have heard her after dinner. I don’t know where she went after she stormed out, but she didn’t stay away much longer than it took us to retire to the living room for liqueurs, and then all she could talk about was her lawyer. Scaring somebody with false stories of the supernatural was a tort, whatever that means—”

  “It means something defined as wrong in law,” Gregor said.

  “Whatever. Anyway, what Geraldine Dart did to her was a tort and she could sue, and if Cavender Marsh had any sense at all—if you ask me, Gregor, this entire scene was played for the benefit of Cavender Marsh—where was I? Oh, yes. If Cavender Marsh had any sense, he’d make Geraldine Dart apologize. It was really awful and it was weird, too, like one of those conversations that are really taking place in code except you don’t know how to decipher them. If you know what I mean.”

  “Not exactly,” Gregor said drily.

  Bennis sighed. “I don’t know what I mean either, I guess, but you can imagine what it was like. Everybody went upstairs as quickly as they could, but I kept getting caught. I wish I could be like your friend the lawyer. She cut Hannah Graham off right in the middle of a sentence and said, ‘Excuse me, I have to go to bed now.’ And then she just left.”

  “I was in the library looking over the collection of things that are supposed to be auctioned. I don’t know anything about the auction of this sort of thing, but I wouldn’t think Halbard House would be interested in being part of it if it wasn’t going to be profitable. It isn’t what I expected, though. There are a lot of shoes.”

  “What did you think there would be?”

  Gregor shrugged. “Jewelry. Expensive knickknacks of the kind people used to have all over their houses when I was younger, clocks in the bellies of Indian elephants and ashtrays made out of sharks’ teeth welded together with gold. There’
s something good you can say about the ’60s. It put a stop to all that.”

  “No, it didn’t.” Bennis shook her head. “You just stopped knowing people who indulged in it. If there were valuable things like that to sell—intrinsically valuable things, you know, because they had gold in them or precious gems—this would be a different kind of auction. It might not even be an auction.”

  “Maybe not. I still don’t see why anybody is going to want to bid on a pair of 1920s curved-heeled high-heeled shoes with straps with big rhinestone butterflies on them going across the instep. I’m describing this badly. They were on Lilith Brayne’s table. I kept trying to figure out how she managed to walk in them without the butterflies ripping the tops of her feet to shreds.”

  “I used to wear clogs when I was in college,” Bennis said. “I tried some on a couple of months ago and I nearly broke my foot. I don’t know how anybody ever walked in them, but I used to, and I don’t remember it being much of a problem.”

  “I’ve always thought women had very peculiar feet,” Gregor said.

  Bennis had finished her cigarette. She stubbed the butt out in her glass ashtray and reached for her pack again. After months of going without, Gregor realized, she was now smoking exactly as she had before she had ever quit at all.

  Bennis took a deep drag, blew a new stream of smoke into the air, and said, “I think when we get back to Philadelphia, I’m going to start a collection of pictures of all the weird and uncomfortable things men have worn for the sake of fashion over the years, and every time somebody like you tries to tell me how strange women are about clothes, I’m going to—What was that?”

  That was a crack, sharp and harsh, like the sound of a two-by-four being broken in half. Gregor stood up, instinctively on the alert, and as he did the lights went out.

  “Oh, damn,” Bennis said irritably. “A power failure.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor told her.

  The next thing they heard was another crack, this time stronger and closer, and then a high giggling cackle that seemed to rain down upon them from somewhere above their heads. Then there was a bright flash of lightning very close, followed by a clap of thunder loud enough to burst eardrums.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Bennis said, more anxious now than irritable. “I hate electrical storms.”

  “Where are your candles?” Gregor asked her.

  Bennis didn’t answer. Gregor got up and looked around for them himself, on the vanity table, on the bookshelves near the door. He finally found a candelabra with three candlesticks in it on top of Bennis’s bureau. He picked it up and walked it over to her, guided by the glowing tip of her cigarette.

  “Here,” he said. “Light these.”

  “Good idea.” Bennis took the candelabra from him and used her Bic to get the candles lit. The light that resulted wasn’t much to talk about, but it was something. Bennis handed the candelabra back to him. “Don’t go away now, Gregor. Wait until the lights come back on. I really do hate electrical storms.”

  “We’re both going to leave,” Gregor said firmly. “Get up and follow me now.”

  “Why?”

  The cackling came again, high-pitched and hysterical, piercing wood and glass until it seemed to fill up their ears.

  “What the hell is that?” Bennis demanded.

  “The House on Haunted Hill,” Gregor said sarcastically. “Get up and get moving.”

  2

  The rest were all out in the hall already, in various states of dress and undress. Some were holding candles. Some hadn’t realized they had candles to hold. Gregor tried to sort them out and make sure they were all there, but in the darkness it was too confusing. He saw Lydia Acken in a nightgown and sedate blue kimono, and Kelly Pratt in a pair of designer jeans Gregor suspected he’d pulled on hastily over nothing at all. After that, the faces and bodies seemed to shift and meld and dissolve.

  Above their heads, the cackling came again, much louder and clearer out here. Lydia Acken jumped and shivered.

  “What is that?” she asked plaintively. “It sounds like the sound track from a horror movie.”

  “That’s about it,” Gregor said.

  “You mean somebody is watching a horror movie around here somewhere?”

  That was Richard Fenster, Gregor thought. Instead of answering him, Gregor went out onto the landing and across to the start of the family wing. The doors on this corridor were all closed, but as Gregor watched one of them opened. Geraldine Dart came out of it, holding a candelabra with six lit sticks and pulling the belt of her robe more tightly around her. She saw Gregor and nodded. Then she shut her bedroom door and came down the hall to the landing.

  “I thought your ghost never said a word,” Gregor told her.

  “This isn’t my ghost,” Geraldine Dart replied. “This is nothing like my ghost.”

  Gregor decided to let it pass. The cackling giggle was shrieking through the house again, sounding ever louder but ever more banal. Gregor went back to the guest wing with Geraldine Dart in tow and said, “I think we’d better all go downstairs. It’s not going to stop until we do what we’re supposed to do.”

  “How do you know we’re supposed to go downstairs?” Bennis demanded.

  “Because downstairs is the only place we can go,” Gregor said. “I suppose there’s an upstairs—”

  “Two more floors and an attic,” Geraldine Dart said.

  “Can we get up there?” Gregor asked her.

  Geraldine Dart thought about it. “The doors to the wings up there on this staircase are all locked,” she said. “and there’s no access to the attic from here. There are a back family staircase and a servants’ staircase. They both have access to the attic. I don’t know what’s locked on them and what isn’t. We never use those staircases anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go upstairs anyway,” Mathilda Frazier said. Her voice was shaky. “That—that noise is coming from up there.”

  The noise came again, almost hiccuping now. Gregor saw Lydia Acken shiver again.

  “The point,” he told them, “is that we’re supposed to investigate. It’s not going to stop until we have investigated. We really can’t go up, it’s much too complicated, so we’ll have to go down.”

  “But what will we find when we investigate?” Kelly Pratt asked.

  “Nothing in particular,” Gregor said. “It’s a game more than anything else. I wonder if that security guard went home or if he’s sleeping in the house.”

  “He’s sleeping in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage,” Geraldine Dart said. “He got off at eleven o’clock, but we couldn’t get him back to the mainland. The storm had already started by then.”

  “You mean there’s a storm?” Mathilda Frazier sounded truly frightened. “You mean we can’t get out of here?”

  “It’s just temporary,” Geraldine Dart said irritably. “This isn’t Alcatraz.”

  Lightning flashed past the window at the end of the hall, illuminating them all for just a second. Then the thunder hit in a rolling sharp slap. Kelly Pratt jumped a little and squealed. Mathilda Frazier rubbed the palms of her hands against the sides of her arms. Bennis lit another cigarette.

  Gregor thought it was too bad that the security man wasn’t in the house. He could have used the help of someone who had not been subjected to Geraldine Dart’s ghost stories. Or maybe he had. Maybe Geraldine Dart told these ghost stories in Hunter’s Pier and everywhere else she went. Maybe they were her preferred form of entertainment.

  The cackle came again. It did a crescendo that sounded calculated and false. In the middle it suddenly switched out of soprano and into bass.

  “Oh, wonderful,” Richard Fenster muttered. “Something new.”

  “Two ghosts.” Mathilda Frazier giggled, almost hysterical. “Isn’t that just what we need? Two ghosts.”

  Gregor touched Geraldine Dart on the arm. “You don’t happen to have a flashlight anywhere around, do you?”

  “Downstairs in the
kitchen,” Geraldine said.

  “You don’t keep one in your own room?”

  “No,” Geraldine said. “No, I don’t.”

  “Funny,” Gregor said. “I would have thought power failures were a fairly frequent occurrence in a place like this.”

  Geraldine Dart started to explain herself. Then the cackle rang out again, and she stopped. Gregor Demarkian ignored both Geraldine and the cackle.

  “Come on,” he told the whole group of them. “Let’s go downstairs and get this over with.”

  3

  They went in a body with Gregor at the head, like a group of kindergarten children being herded around a museum by a teacher. They went down the stairs into the foyer and looked around. There was nothing there, of course. If there had been, they could have seen it from the top of the stairs. They went into the living room and looked around there, too, but as Gregor had suspected, there was nothing there to find. Their candles cast odd shadows on the walls, and all the birthday decorations looked sinister, but that was only to be expected. The way things were right now, Gregor thought, an episode of Leave It to Beaver would have looked sinister.

  Gregor picked up one of the smiley faces and turned it over in his hands, but it was just what it had been before, quilted crepe paper and cardboard. Nobody had slashed it up with a knife or painted it with blood or sprayed it with poison. He put it down again and picked up a silver table lighter. It wasn’t a piece he had noticed before, but he couldn’t see anything special about it, so he put that down, too. The cackle started up again, but it seemed muffled and remote down here. Nobody looked as nervous as they had before.