by Jane Haddam
In the third place, the senator’s vital functions began to shut down, or the senator began to believe his vital functions were shutting down. His heart stopped beating. His lungs stopped pulling in air.
In the fourth place, the senator lost the use of his muscles. This part was written in language even more circumlocutory than usual, but as far as Gregor could tell it wasn’t meant to describe paralysis in the ordinary sense. The senator didn’t feel his muscles “lock,” the way someone would if they were frozen by fear. He didn’t feel them at all.
In the fifth place, at no time did the senator lose consciousness. He was aware of everything that was happening to him from beginning to end.
In the sixth place, when he fell, he felt pain, even if he didn’t come out of the paralysis until several minutes later.
Gregor closed the folder and tapped his finger against it, irritated. It was this last point, number six, that was so disturbing. All the others were consistent with a diagnosis of psychosomatic illness, or at least of mental breakdown. Only the pain, which either shouldn’t have been there at all or should have shocked the senator out of whatever trance state he’d been in, didn’t add up.
Gregor dumped the medical reports back in their folder and stood up. Somewhere out in the hall—or maybe somewhere out in the house; with all that open space, who could tell?—a clock he’d never noticed struck the hour. He was hungry, and he thought he’d heard something about lunch being laid out “near the pool.” He suppressed his inclination to wonder about a woman who would build a pool right next to a perfectly good sound and concentrated instead on a lunch “laid out.” It probably meant some kind of buffet everyone would have to attend if they wanted to avoid starvation, and that was good. He thought it was high time he saw how these people operated when they were all together.
[2]
By the time Gregor reached the pool patio—clomping across the sand between it and the deck in the brown wool suit and wing-tip shoes he had never bothered to change—lunch had indeed been laid out, and most of the principals were present. Only Victoria Harte was missing. Because everything about the elaborate buffet showed her hand—among other things, there was a cake decorated to look like the Great Seal of the United States, but heart-shaped instead of circular—missing might not have been the right word for it. Gregor clamored onto the polished slate of the patio itself and surveyed the offerings set out on the long table: an icesculpture American bald eagle melting quickly into the caviar it was supposed to protect; a whole tray of tiny individual quiches made to look like heads of George Washington; a huge cake of pate de fois gras food-colored to resemble Betsy Ross’s flag, with molded hard-boiled egg slices for stars; a huge basket of bread slices cut into Pilgrim’s hats. It was the parody of a party scene in a Judith Krantz novel—or maybe Victoria Harte’s latest slap in the face of Oyster Bay. For some reason, Gregor found he had a stronger sense of the real Oyster Bay out here on the pool patio than anywhere else at Great Expectations. The town seemed to ooze in on him from every side, spreading a mental deep freeze, hard-shelled and smooth as a pearl.
Gregor’s first instinct was to head directly for the man he knew from television as Stephen Whistler Fox, standing now at the head of the buffet table, flanked by his wife and the actress Patchen Rawls. But Stephen Whistler Fox looked pinned and helpless, and so jumpy he might have been carbonated. There were more interesting tableaux on the pool patio. Bennis was talking with Dan Chester and signaling frantically to Gregor for rescue. Gregor made no move in her direction. He knew Bennis, and he’d already talked to Dan Chester.
The man and the woman near the ice-sculpture eagle caught his eye and held it. By process of elimination, Gregor knew they had to be Dr. Kevin Debrett and the lobbyist Clare Markey. By Clare Markey’s posture, Gregor knew something in their conversation was going terribly wrong. He headed for them, moving slowly, feeling as if the mere act of breathing was overexertion in this hot sun.
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Kevin Debrett was saying to a Clare Markey with her arms folded across her chest and her eyes on fire, “is that this whole thing is just another example of Victoria Harte’s self-centered—”
“It’s Victoria Harte’s house,” Clare said coldly. “It’s hardly self-centered if she didn’t have it designed specifically for you.”
“She didn’t have it designed specifically for anyone, except herself. She had no consideration for her future guests. She must have expected to have guests. She built a guest wing.”
“So?”
“Don’t you see? Every time you leave your room, you’ve got to leave it open, unlocked. Anyone could steal—”
“This is Mr. Demarkian,” Clare Markey said. “Why don’t you stop obsessing about your personal belongings and turn around and say hello?”
Kevin Debrett didn’t just turn, he whirled. The movement tipped him off balance, making him stumble. He fell forward nearly into Gregor’s shoulders, righted himself at the last possible minute, and flushed.
“Excuse me,” he said, and then shot Clare a look of pure murder. It was as if he thought Clare had made him fall, even though she wasn’t standing close enough to touch him. “Excuse me,” he said again. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m Dr. Kevin Debrett.”
“Dr. Debrett is having paranoid fantasies about someone stealing his medical bag.”
The flush that rose on Kevin Debrett’s neck this time was dark and thick and far worse than murderous. Gregor got the impression that Clare Markey had been pushing the man toward the edge of something for a long time now, and had finally pushed him over.
“There’s nothing paranoid about it,” Debrett bit out. “There’s nothing fantastical either. No more than two months ago—”
“Dr. Debrett is one of those old-fashioned, caring physicians who carries his medical bag everywhere.”
“Clare—”
Gregor coughed, to break the tension. “Is that so very unusual?” he asked them, and Clare Markey laughed.
“It’s damn near unheard of,” she said, “but about two years ago, our good doctor got caught in an emergency in the National Opera House without his bag, and the publicity was absolutely—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“—awful,” Clare Markey finished up. “So you see, now it’s sitting up in his bedroom and the door is unlocked, and he’s convinced someone around here is a coke head—”
“—I never said anything—”
“—and he’s all worked up. Hello, Mr. Demarkian. Are you going to find out what’s wrong with Stephen Whistler Fox?”
The shift in the conversation had the intended effect. It changed the emotional atmosphere entirely, although Dr. Kevin Debrett didn’t seem to get with the program. He at least retreated, pressing his lips together, hunching his shoulders, and fading back to the edge of the conversational circle. In the meantime, Gregor considered the uselessness of covers. In all his long experience, he had used exactly one that actually worked. In fact, Robert Ludlum novels notwithstanding—and not counting drug stings, where you were dealing with people who spent at least half their time non compos mentis—he had only even heard about two that worked. The one he hadn’t been involved in had been Abscam.
He began to turn his attention to Clare Markey, and then saw that they were being joined—deliberately by Stephen Whistler Fox, reluctantly by Patchen Rawls. Ms. Rawls had attached herself to the senator’s arm and had no intention of letting go.
“Uh-oh,” Clare Markey said. “Here comes our matricide. Do you know about that?”
“Vaguely.”
“It was one of those permission-to-end-life-support things. Mrs. Rawls had broken her hip. The life support that was removed was the intravenous feeding tube.”
“Fight that battle later, if you don’t mind,” Gregor told her.
Clare looked a little startled, as if she wasn’t used to being read so clearly. But she didn’t look balky, and Gregor thought she would do what he had asked her,
even if she didn’t know the reason. He turned his attention completely to the senator and Patchen Rawls. Then he remembered something and turned again to look for Janet Harte Fox. She was gone.
Senator Fox sidled up to Gregor’s shoulder and smiled, too widely and too well. “Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “Mr. Demarkian! Hello! I’m Senator Stephen Whistler Fox!”
The man talked in exclamation points, and he shouted. He was also holding out his hand. Gregor held out his own and let it be shook.
“Well!” Senator Fox said. “Well! Here we are!”
“Oh, Stephen,” Patchen Rawls said.
Gregor could feel Clare Markey beside him, holding in a laugh that was threatening to become explosive, and he didn’t blame her. Patchen Rawls’s “Oh, Stephen” could have been part of the sound track from a soft-core video. Its flavor was evident even to Senator Fox, who struck Gregor as the sort of man who never noticed much of anything.
He also struck Gregor as a man who was only barely in control of himself, if that. From across the room, Gregor had thought he looked “carbonated.” Close up, Gregor thought the senator was more like one of those pictures drawn with a stylus on a child’s magic board. If you didn’t raise the sheet to erase what you had drawn, the sheet began to come undone anyway, on its own, in odd places, erasing half the wall of a house or a dog’s nose. Gregor looked for Janet again, half-thinking he might need help, and found that almost everyone had disappeared. Bennis was standing alone at the other end of the table, eating her way thoughtfully through a pile of red, white, and blue cupcakes. Other than that, only Gregor’s own little group was left. Clare Markey was doing her best to fade rapidly out of that.
Gregor thought momentarily of discretion—of the possibility that he should not say anything about the senator’s attacks in front of an outsider like Patchen Rawls—and realized it was silly. He didn’t know if Miss Rawls had witnessed any of the senator’s attacks. He did know she must have heard about them.
Gregor suddenly found it desperately important not only that he should ask the senator all the right questions, but that he should remember what the senator’s reactions to those questions turned out to be.
“I’ve been reading your medical reports,” he told the senator abruptly. “They were very interesting.”
Senator Stephen Whistler Fox went stone white, “interesting? How could they have been interesting? They didn’t say anything.”
“That’s not true, Senator. They said a great deal.”
“Well, they didn’t say anything that made sense.” The senator sounded fretful. “All the doctors said they’d never heard of anything like it in their lives.”
“That’s because they’re not coming from the right plane of reality,” Patchen said. “I told you about that.”
Gregor ignored her. “May I ask you something, Senator? When you get these attacks, when you begin to feel paralyzed, do you go rigid or do you go limp?”
Stephen Fox looked perplexed. “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I don’t feel anything at all.”
“Do you fall straight like a board, or do you crumble?”
“Oh, well. I fall forward, but I seem to sort of melt.”
“She thinks I put a hex on him,” Patchen Rawls said. “She ought to know better. If I was going to put a hex on someone, it would be her.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Fox?” Gregor asked her.
Patchen flapped her hands in irritation. “Of course I don’t mean Mrs. Fox. She’s just Janet, you know, and she’s a lump. She’s always trying to reason with you and make you act like a lady.”
“Patchen,” Stephen Fox said uneasily. “I don’t think—”
“It’s Victoria Harte I’m talking about.” Patchen bulldozed on. “She’s trying to destroy me. Literally.”
For once, Patchen Rawls sounded perfectly sincere. Gregor found that very interesting. “Do you mean she’s making trouble for you in your career?”
“Of course not.” Patchen did a good job of making herself look like she had never heard of the word career. “It’s my psychic balance she’s after. You should have seen the room she put me in—you should have seen it before I cleaned it up, anyway. Animal head trophies all over the walls. A moose skin for a bedspread. It took me hours to get all that stuff out of there, and I’m still living with the ghosts of all those poor murdered animals. I can hardly sleep.”
“Patchen—”
“Well, she does it on purpose, Stephen. You know she does. She gets Janet to invite me to things and then she ambushes me.”
“She does not get Janet to invite you to things,” Stephen said. “She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do it to Janet, for God’s sake.”
“She got Janet to invite me to that, you know, whatever it was. That dinner. Then she sat across the table and sniped at me all night.”
“It was Janet who invited you to that dinner,” Stephen said. “She was just trying to—she was—she was just filling the table—”
“She could have filled the table with one of her bloodless little friends from Bryn Mawr.”
“Did Janet go to Bryn Mawr?” Bennis’s voice asked chirpily. Gregor thought that, in that Very Old Main Line accent, chirpy sounded very odd. “What a coincidence,” Bennis went on. “I grew up in Bryn Mawr.”
Patchen Rawls looked Bennis up and down, made a face like she was smelling red meat, and then turned back to Stephen Whistler Fox. What she saw there seemed to give her pause. Stephen Whistler Fox was paying no attention to Bennis Hannaford. He was paying no attention to anything at all. He had mentally decamped for another plane of existence.
“Stephen?” Patchen said.
Stephen snapped to. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, well. I ought to go find Janet.”
“Janet,” Patchen Rawls said.
Stephen looked back at the house. “She’s very angry with me. We can’t have that. It would ruin everything.”
Anyone else would have realized he’d just said something strange. To Gregor, Stephen Whistler Fox seemed not to realize there was anyone around he might have said something strange to.
For a moment, the senator hovered. Then he turned around in a jerky full circle and headed straight for the house, walking rapidly, impervious to sweat even in 98 percent humidity. Patchen Rawls muttered a half-shocked “Excuse me” and hurried after him.
“Well,” Bennis said drily, “that was weird enough.”
Gregor said, “Mmm.”
“I suppose if something was happening to me and nobody had the faintest idea what, I’d be a little crazy, too. I want you to come to the beach with me, Gregor.”
Gregor was thinking. The word beach hit him like a bullet in the arm. “I can’t go to the beach. I never go to the beach. And I’m wearing a suit.”
“You’re half on the beach already and it’s three o’clock and I don’t want to go alone. Come on. Let’s go look at the water.”
She hooked him around the arm. Gregor found himself being dragged off the pool’s polished slate patio, onto the sand and toward the muddy restlessness of Long Island Sound. Around him, red, white, and blue accents hung damp and tired under the palpable weight of the afternoon. Once he got beyond the fence that screened the pool from the property next door, he could see people over there, listless and stiff, as if they’d come out into the sun only to do their duty to the season.
“Old money,” Bennis muttered under her breath.
Gregor stopped where he was. “It’s not true, you know,” he told her. “That nobody has any idea what’s happening to Stephen Whistler Fox, I have an idea.”
“Really?” Bennis was curious enough not to berate him for bringing a halt to their march to the sea. “What is it?”
“Well, that’s it. I have an idea, and it has to be right, but it can’t be right.”
“Why not?”
“Because symptoms or no symptoms,” Gregor said grimly, “if what was happening to Stephen Whistler Fox was what it looks like was happening, the senat
or would already be dead.”
[3]
Nearly two and a half hours later—two and a half of the most uncomfortable hours Gregor had ever spent—Bennis was finally convinced to march them both back into the air-conditioning. Between Gregor’s refusal to elaborate on the condition of Senator Fox and the polluted condition of the sound and the frozen stares of the people on the next property—she kept saying “old money” at them in a hiss, like a hex—she was in a thoroughly bad mood. It stayed bad as they reached the balcony of the second-floor guest wing together, Gregor sweaty but silent, Bennis cool and complaining. There had been a couple of holdups along the way—for some reason, Bennis had decided to put on her sandals to walk to the house, and had kept losing them every few steps—and by the time they got to the doors of their rooms, the clock downstairs was chiming a half hour that had to be half past five. Bennis made a face in the direction of the chime.
“It ought to be a cuckoo clock,” she said. “At least that wouldn’t make my teeth grate.”
Gregor caught one of her sandals just as it slipped off her foot. “You ought to have straps made for those,” he told her.
“If they had straps, they’d be sandals for nerds. Oh, nuts. My door’s locked.”
Gregor’s head shot up. “It can’t be locked. None of the doors on this floor can be locked from the outside. And you’re out here.”
“Well, maybe it’s got one of those trick catches and I didn’t realize it. You know, I pulled the door to and it locked by itself.”
“It’s got a bolt, Bennis. You pointed that out to me yourself. It’s got to be thrown from the inside.”
“So maybe the maid threw it and forgot about it. We can get in through your room. We’ve got a connecting door.”
