And One to Die On

by Jane Haddam

  “Of course I was there! Of course I was there! It was just dark and you didn’t see me.”

  “I didn’t see you either,” Mathilda Frazier said.

  “Who did and didn’t see her is not the point,” Gregor Demarkian interjected, before it became a screaming match. “The point is that I didn’t hear her. Ms. Graham, in all the time that we have been in this house, I have only twice heard you shut up for longer than thirty seconds on the subject of just who you were going to sue for what when you got out of here. One of those times was just now, when you were much too interested in what I had to say to interrupt me. The other was the night your mother died—a night, by the way, full of exactly the sort of incidents tailor-made to start you off on one of your litigious monologues. There was no litigious monologue, Ms. Graham, because you were not there to give it. You were running around behind the scenes doing your level best to distract me from noticing anything that might actually be important.”

  Hannah Graham’s sticklike body was backing away down the hall, toward the foyer. She’s going to do exactly the wrong thing, Cavender Marsh thought. She’s more my child than she is her mother’s. She’s going to panic.

  At just that moment, there was the sound of running footsteps in the foyer. Bennis came charging into the utility hall, waving her arms.

  “Gregor!” she shouted. “Gregor, I did it! I got in touch with the mainland!”

  Bennis Hannaford was running fast and not watching where she was going. She ran into Hannah and was caught up short, gasping for breath.

  “Excuse me,” she said, puffing to regain her wind. Then she turned her attention to Gregor again. “It was perfect,” she said. “Absolutely perfect. I was blinking away, sure I was no good at all, and then somebody on the shore started to answer me. It was wonderful. He’s sending help right away. I told him we had a man here with a severe concussion and we needed an ambulance and everything, and he said to sit tight and he’d get somebody to come out here some way or another right away.”

  “Was it Jason?” Geraldine Dart asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t give me his name. I’m going to go back and wait for more messages.”

  “Did he say there were going to be more messages?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

  “Just in case,” Bennis Hannaford said.

  Hannah was panicking. Cavender Marsh could see it. She was backing farther and farther away down the hall, and where did she think she could go? Even if Jason or somebody else did manage to get help out here in the middle of this storm—and Cavender was by no means sure they could; that might have been Maine coast macho posturing talking—what could Hannah do then? Did she intend to jump into the sea and swim?

  Cavender started forward, some vague thought in his mind of stopping his daughter before she did anything that was both stupid and irrevocable. If there was anything he had learned from the first, and real, death of Tasheba Kent, it was that you must never do anything that you couldn’t later flatly deny.

  The rest of them were in a knot, talking excitedly. Bennis Hannaford had run out of the room to go back to her signal lights and Morse code. Hannah was almost to that point in her backing up where it would be feasible for her to turn and run.

  And then the lights went out.

  2

  This time, when the lights went out, Hannah Graham knew that it was not a joke. It was not a prank. It was not a fuse. The storm had finally gotten to the power lines on the mainland and the ones that came out here. They were going to be without light for a while.

  Hannah Graham’s father thought she was panicking. Hannah knew that. She had. seen it in Cavender Marsh’s eyes as he watched her back away. Not that either of them had ever thought of her as anything but a nuisance. That was why her own mother had dumped her on an aunt to come out to this island and indulge the sexual obsession she had with Cavender Marsh. That was why her own father had gone along with it all. They were a pair of prizes, those two, and ever since the moment when Cavender Marsh had contacted her in California and told her what had really happened in 1938, Hannah Graham had been making plans.

  Hannah now knew a number of things the rest of them didn’t know. She even knew things that Cavender didn’t know. He had expected to be in control of it all, and of her, but he had made the very worst kind of mistake.

  The weapon was a thing called a warming iron, a great round blob of cast iron at the end of a very long cast-iron rod. In the days before central heating, you put the blob end into the fire until it was very hot and then put the hot end between the sheets and the blankets at the bottom of your bed to keep your feet warm on chilly winter nights. Hannah had never seen a warming iron before she came to the island, but she had read about them in books on antiques. This one had been lying on the floor of the attic when she had gone in to see what Carlton Ji was up to. And Carlton Ji had been up to no good, of course. Those people were never up to any good. Hannah Graham hated Orientals.

  The weapon was in the tall narrow broom closet at the very start of the hall leading back from the foyer to the television room. The closet was too small to hold a body, so it had never been searched thoroughly even once all this weekend. It was also full of vacuum cleaner equipment and easy to hide something made of metal in. Hannah got it out and felt the weight of it in her hands. She had never been so glad of the time she had spent working out with weights.

  They were all getting used to the darkness now. They were all beginning to be able to see at least a little in the gloom. Hannah still had the advantage and she knew it. She had walked around this house in the dark many times before. The rest of them had not.

  “Hannah?” Cavender Marsh asked tentatively.

  Hannah smiled. He was just where she wanted him to be, really. She moved closer to the stairs.

  “I’m right here,” she called out. “I’m over near the stairs.”

  “Hannah, listen to me,” Cavender Marsh said. “Try to be reasonable for a moment now.”

  “I am being reasonable,” Hannah told him.

  “I’d be careful if I were you,” Gregor Demarkian warned.

  Hannah was worried for a moment, but then she wasn’t anymore. Cavender Marsh wasn’t paying any attention to Gregor Demarkian. And Gregor Demarkian was nowhere close to either Cavender or the stairs. He was way in back, near the living room door.

  “What’s going on around here?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

  She was way, way in the back, invisible. She didn’t want to come out and see what was happening. Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart were invisible, too. They were all hiding in the dark. They were all hoping this would just go away. Only Cavender Marsh was advancing across the foyer, walking with his hands in his pockets, as if he thought he could make himself look like Cary Grant.

  “Now, Hannah,” he began.

  He sounded just like Hannah’s therapist. Hannah hated her therapist.

  “I’m right here,” Hannah said again. “I’m really not going anyplace.”

  “Be careful,” Gregor Demarkian warned for the second time.

  Bennis Hannaford rushed in again. “They are sending a helicopter,” she said in a rush of enthusiasm. “It’s coming right from some army base to the south of us. We’re all supposed to go up onto the roof and wait for it.”

  “A helicopter can’t land on this roof,” Geraldine Dart said, “It’s not flat.”

  “We can’t get Richard Fenster up to the roof right now either,” Mathilda Frazier said. “We probably shouldn’t move him.”

  “Right,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I’ll go back and explain everything.”

  Bennis Hannaford rushed out again in the direction of the living room. Hannah stayed in her place at the side of the stairs, her back against the wall, waiting.

  “Now, Hannah,” Cavender said for the third time, or maybe the fourth or fifth.

  “Come over and talk to me,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to have to shout.”

  Cavender Marsh came. He came much too slo
wly and too deliberately, but he came. Even now, it seemed, he had to be a movie star. Even now he had to make entrances and exits and melodramas and foreshadowings. Hannah waited until he was almost right in front of her. Then she swung around him, to his back, raised the warming iron above her head and smashed it down on the foyer’s parquet floor.

  Cavender Marsh jumped onto the first of the steps and Hannah smashed the warming iron down again, on the step next to him, cracking the step even though she hit it through the thickness of the runner carpet.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gregor Demarkian demanded.

  This was not a question Hannah Graham thought she had to answer. Cavender Marsh was running as best he could up the stairs.

  Hannah Graham was following him, swinging the warming iron above her head and smashing it down over and over again, like a polo player in pursuit of the ball.

  CHAPTER 5

  1

  SHE WASN’T TRYING TO catch him. Gregor saw that right away. She could run much faster than he could, even carrying that heavy iron instrument. She could have hit him at any time. The shaft of whatever it was was at least four feet long. When Kelly Pratt started to run up behind her to drive her off, she swung it around at him and nearly hit him in the gut. If she had connected, she would have broken his rib cage or his pelvis or caused the kind of internal damages that usually resulted from car wrecks. Kelly Pratt backed up and stopped. Cavender Marsh went higher on the stairs. Hannah Graham followed him, swinging the rod ahead of her, smashing the hard round end of it over and over again into the walls.

  “What’s she doing?” Bennis asked in a whisper.

  Gregor didn’t know when she’d come back from her latest run of Morse code signals, but here she was.

  “She’s driving him,” Gregor told her. “Upstairs. I don’t know where.”

  “Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

  This was a question about on a par with, Is the Pope Catholic? Gregor didn’t answer it. Cavender was almost to the second-floor landing now. Hannah was right behind him.

  Gregor began to climb the darkened stairs, as quickly as he could without attracting the attention of Hannah Graham, or Cavender Marsh. He needn’t have been so cautious. They were paying no attention to him. Cavender Marsh was much too frightened. Hannah Graham was having much too good a time. When they were both on the landing, Cavender Marsh started to dart toward the family wing. Hannah Graham got around behind him and blocked his path. Cavender Marsh tried to make it to the guest wing. Hannah Graham stopped him there, too. She was very fast, when she wanted to be.

  “What’s she trying to do?” Bennis demanded, coming up behind Gregor on the stairs.

  Bennis was very fast when she wanted to be, too. “She’s forcing him up the stairs,” Gregor told her. “Watch.”

  Cavender Marsh had to go on up the stairs, to the third floor or maybe beyond, because there was nowhere else to go. The problem was that the stairs were not a straight shot, rising from the second-floor landing in the same well. The stairs were at the back of the landing, tucked in next to the windows. Hannah Graham got there first and smashed the windows into pieces. Shards of glass sprayed into the shadows. Cavender started to back up and found his daughter behind him again. He bolted upward.

  “He’s going to have a heart attack,” Bennis said.

  “Maybe that’s what she’s after,” Kelly Pratt told her.

  Gregor turned and saw that they were all there, Bennis and Kelly and Mathilda and Lydia and Geraldine, following him resolutely in spite of the fact that they didn’t know how they could possibly be of use. Gregor fixed his attention on Geraldine Dart.

  “Where do those stairs go?” he asked her.

  “To the second and third floors and to the attic. But the doors to the second and third floors are locked.”

  “But not the one to the attic?”

  “I don’t know,” Geraldine said.

  They could all hear the banging of that metal thing on wood, and the sounds of cracking and splintering that always followed it. Cavender Marsh and Hannah Graham were proceeding upward.

  “All right,” Gregor said. “You told us last night, early this morning, whenever it was. There’s another way up to the attic?”

  “Yes, there is. There’s a staircase off a utility hall behind the library.”

  “All right,” Gregor said again. “I want you to go there and go on up. Take Kelly Pratt with you.”

  “I’m ready,” Kelly Pratt said.

  “Just the two of them?” Bennis asked. “What about the rest of us?”

  “Ms. Frazier and Ms. Acken are going to stay right here on the landing in case there’s another way back that Ms. Dart doesn’t know about. You and I are going up that staircase.”

  “What are we going to do if there is another way back to this landing?” Mathilda Frazier asked. “What could we do? She could kill us with that thing.”

  “We’ll be all right, dear,” Lydia Acken said stoutly. “We don’t have to put ourselves in danger. We just have to observe.”

  Actually, they did not have to do anything. Gregor did not believe there was another way back to this landing. He did believe that these two were the weakest ones in the group, and that they needed to be kept out of trouble. He turned to Bennis.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s go on up.”

  They left Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier huddled together on the small balcony overlooking the foyer, and started up the stairs at the back in the direction of Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh.

  2

  It had been dark in the main body of the house, but nothing like it was in this back staircase. There were windows in the walls, Gregor could see them, but they didn’t do much good. The weather outside was still awful. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but it was almost as black as night. Gregor could still hear the sounds of footsteps and crashing iron, but they were far above him now.

  “What do you think she’s doing?” Bennis asked. “Is she trying to kill him?”

  “At least,” Gregor said.

  “Is she crazy?”

  In spite of all the cigarettes she smoked, Bennis was hurrying up the stairs without a problem, never having to stop for rest, never having to gasp for air. It was Gregor, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, who was having trouble sucking wind.

  “I think,” he said, “that what she really is is royally angry. You’d be angry too if you had two perfectly good parents who had dumped you on a relative and never bothered to see you again just so they could run away to an island together and—um—”

  “Screw,” Bennis said helpfully.

  They reached the landing for the third floor and Gregor stopped, ostensibly to check the door to the third floor proper but really to catch his breath.

  “It was all Lilith Brayne’s idea, of course,” he said. “Cavender Marsh hated the woman by then, but there was nothing he could have done to get away from her once he’d murdered Tasheba Kent. He’d have gone to the guillotine for it if the case had ever been properly solved.”

  “Marvelous. Didn’t Lilith worry that he’d do to her what he did to her sister?”

  “Why should she? That case certainly wouldn’t have gone uninvestigated. It would have brought every cop in the state of Maine out here. It would have been asking to be arrested.”

  “Even after sixty years? Why didn’t he just shove her in the sea?”

  “I don’t know, Bennis. Maybe Cavender Marsh is not one of those people who can kill in cold blood. Maybe he needs to be pushed into a crisis before he can actually do away with anybody. I’m not St. Peter at the gate. I can’t see into a man’s soul. I just know what Cavender Marsh did do.”

  “I don’t suppose you can call what she’s doing killing in cold blood either,” Bennis said. “Can you hear anything anymore, Gregor? I can’t hear anything.”

  They were on the landing for the fourth f
loor now, and Bennis was right. The sounds of footsteps were gone. The sounds of smashing glass and cracking wood were gone, too. Bennis stopped.

  “Maybe they went into the attic,” she said.

  “We have to go up and see.”

  Bennis ran up the next flight of stairs on her own. When she got to the top, she opened a door and poked her head through it. She withdrew almost immediately.

  “Bats,” she told Gregor.

  “What do you mean, bats?”

  “Bats,” Bennis repeated. “The attic is full of them. Do you remember Carlton Ji?”

  Gregor remembered Carlton Ji. He got to the attic landing and opened the door to the attic himself. On the other side of the attic, another door opened and someone coughed.

  “Who’s there?” Kelly Pratt asked.

  “It’s me,” Gregor said.

  “The trapdoor is open,” Geraldine Dart said. “To the roof. Look up.”

  Gregor looked up. At first, all he saw was a mass of moving, black bats disturbed in their rest, pulsing and beginning to call and shriek. Then he spotted the opened square with its pull-down plywood ladder. It had been hard to find because the square was open on nothing but blackness, and because the ladder was swarming with bats.

  “They must have gone up,” Geraldine Dart said. “They must have gone out on the roof. She’s going to push him off.” Her voice sharpened with fear.

  “Gregor, how did they get out of here?” Bennis asked. “How did they get past all those bats?”

  “They didn’t care if they got hurt,” Gregor said.

  “Are we going to follow them?” Kelly Pratt called out. “Do you want me to go out after them?”

  Gregor rubbed his face with his hands. He did care if he got hurt. He especially cared if he got hurt by bats, which were often rabid in the United States. He had once seen a Bureau agent take the necessary series of injections for rabies. He hoped never to see anything like that again. He certainly didn’t want to see it done on himself. I’m a desk man, Gregor told himself. If I have to be a great detective, I want to be a great detective like Nero Wolfe. I want to sit in an armchair all day and think great detective thoughts. Damn Hannah Graham and damn Cavender Marsh and damn Tasheba Kent and damn those bats. “Mr. Demarkian? Are we going to get moving?”