Act of Darkness (26 page)

“Yes.” Victoria stood up too, her heels making her a good three inches taller than Janet. Janet looked unnerved, and Bennis was unnerved along with her. It was a kind of Freudian nightmare. There was the overadequate mother. There was the underadequate daughter.

“I want to make tea,” Janet said plaintively.

Victoria put out her hand, grabbed Janet around the wrist, and pulled her close. “Listen,” she said. “You can’t just fold up now and die.”

“I’m not folding up and dying,” Janet said. “If I was going to do that, I’d have done it when—”

“When Stephanie died,” Victoria said. “I know that. I know what you did after Stephanie died. But that woman killed your husband, Janet, and no matter what you thought of him, you’ve got every right to make sure she goes to jail.”

It took Bennis a second to realize that Victoria was still talking about Patchen Rawls. It took Patchen no time at all. She jumped.

“I didn’t think anything of Stephen,” Janet was saying in a weak little voice. “I didn’t think—”

“I didn’t kill Stephen,” Patchen said. “What would I do that for? He was going to leave her and come with me.”

Victoria swung around, still clinging to Janet’s wrist. “No, he wasn’t,” she said. “You little liar. He wouldn’t get a divorce for you and you know it. And you killed him.”

“He would too have gotten a divorce for me,” Patchen said. “He told me so. A hundred times.”

“Bull dung,” Victoria said. “I heard him talking just this morning in this very room, to Dan Chester. They were talking about just what they were going to do to get rid of you.”

Dan Chester came to life again. Bennis thought it was as if he were like one of those voice-activated dolls, perfectly still when there was no sound to animate him, jerky and hyperactive when there was.

“You might have heard that conversation,” he said, “but if you did, you didn’t hear it here. We talked about it in Stephen’s own room.”

“If Stephen said he wanted to get rid of me,” Patchen said, “he was only trying to mollify Dan Chester. Dan was always threatening him. That was all it was. If it happened at all.”

“It happened,” Dan Chester said.

“I know it happened,” Victoria said. “But that isn’t all, Patchen sweetheart. You were in his room. I saw you there.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“I saw you come out,” Victoria said. “I was in the foyer and you came onto the balcony.”

“That was early this morning,” Patchen said. “That was—very early this morning. You know—”

“It wasn’t very early this morning,” Victoria told her. “It was at quarter of one. Stephen was down here in the dining room talking to Janet, and then he went up. I didn’t see him but I know he must have gone. He wasn’t down here. You must have been watching for him, because there you were, hopping along and letting yourself in.”

“I wasn’t—” Patchen started.

But Clare Markey was sitting up, looking interested. “Yes, you were,” she said, sounding surprised. “You passed my door. I had it open. I don’t know why—”

“Spying,” Patchen said viciously.

Clare ignored her. “You passed my room and you knocked on Stephen’s door. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just assumed—”

“I didn’t knock on Stephen’s door,” Patchen said. “I may have gone down there, but I didn’t knock. His door was open.”

“You knocked,” Clare said, a little uncertain. “It took a while—”

“How long did I stay there, then?”

“Well, I went to the bathroom—”

“I only stayed a second. And I didn’t knock.”

“But I heard a knock,” Clare said.

“Oh, look,” Bennis said, jumping in, desperate for anything that would get this conversation cooled off. This was terrible. “Look, let’s just all calm down—”

They had all turned to stare at her. Victoria Harte was giving her one of those looks meant to kill, or at least meant to be an announcement of murder.

“I’m just trying to get everybody calmed down,” Bennis said desperately. “There’s no point in us getting ourselves all worked up, not with the police in the house. I know. I—”

“You,” Victoria said, “ought to keep your mouth shut.”

“Sex didn’t mean anything to Stephen,” Janet Harte Fox said. “That’s what I can never make anybody understand.”

“I didn’t say sex meant anything to Stephen,” Victoria said. “I said sex meant something to
her.
” She pointed at Patchen with a long red fingernail, the way she would have pointed at something she wanted to buy that was out of reach on a shelf. “And I have more to go on, Janet, than that she was in Stephen’s room. She was always trying to get into Stephen’s room. It’s what’s in her room that matters.”

Bennis bit her lip. The tension in the room was bobbing higher and higher, like a hollow ball bouncing across ever-increasing waves.

“What I have in my room,” Patchen was saying to Victoria, her voice tight, “are the ghosts of a lot of dead animals. And you put them there.”

Victoria smiled. “What you have in your room,” she said, “is a jar of belladonna and another jar of foxglove. And we all know what foxglove is.”

The sharp intake of breath was Dan’s. The gasp was Janet’s. Clare Markey was on her feet. Bennis looked in panic from one to the other of them and said, “But foxglove couldn’t have caused what happened to—”

They weren’t listening to her. They were moving in on Patchen Rawls, crowding her, circling her, going in for the kill.

Dan Chester started it. “Foxglove is digitalis,” he said. “For God’s sake. I never thought—”

Victoria was across the room, right in front of Patchen Rawls. “She’s got poisons in her room,” she said, “lots and lots of them. She thinks nobody notices because all they pay attention to is her nonsense, her spells and her crystals, as if anybody really thinks she takes it seriously. She murdered her own mother and now she’s murdered Stephen, too—”

Bennis had to give it one more shot. She had to. “Please,” she said. “Listen to me.”

“Shut up,” Victoria said.

There was nothing else Bennis could do. There was nothing she could say. Victoria had taken Patchen’s shoulders in her hands. Now Patchen wrenched free of them and stumbled backward. The flat, polished plastic soles of her sandals slipped against the hardwood of the floor. The hard overleanness of her body seemed first to dissolve and then to ripple.

“Don’t touch me,” she screamed at Victoria. “Don’t touch me at all. You eat
meat.
”

Then she bolted from the room.

It was like one of those dreams where you feel as if you were walking through water, but you’re not; as if everything were conspiring to keep you from moving, but there isn’t anything there. That was very incoherent, but Patchen Rawls didn’t notice. She never noticed when she was being incoherent. If she had, she would not have had the life she did. It was enough for her that she understood herself, and this time she surely did. All she wanted in the world was to get away from these people, out of their sight, and it should have been easy. Into the foyer and up the stairs. The run wasn’t very long at all. It was taking forever anyway. Maybe it was just that, for the first time, she was aware of how exposed she was. The stairs from the foyer to the second-floor guest wing were open to the living room space. They could see her the entire time she was going up. The balcony was open to the foyer. Even if they couldn’t see her, they could hear her, her sandals were snapping. All they had to do was move half a dozen steps and they would be able to see her again. She had a friend back in California who owned a cave. He went there at least once a month to live under the earth and out of sight of the sun. She had always thought he was crazy—the sun was a benevolent god; the human body was a solar battery—but now she understood. If she had known of such a place within walking distance of this house, she would have gone to ground in it.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she was surprised to find the balcony guarded by a huge policeman, fresh faced and grim, who had no intention of letting her pass. Beyond him, the balcony and all the rooms off it, including her own, were full of policemen. That surprised her, too. They had searched her room yesterday. Why would they do it again today?

Her hair had fallen into her face. It did that all the time, even when she was relaxed, because of the way it was cut. With all the excitement, it had tumbled into her eyes and made them sting. She brushed it away and tried to get some control of her breathing. Her heart was pounding and her lungs felt half the size they normally were. If she could have done her yoga, she would have been all right, but there was no place to do yoga, and she wasn’t sure she remembered how. She sucked in a great bubble of air and counted to ten, like any unenlightened tadpole jerk.

The big policeman was watching her steadily but not moving. He was not going to give way unless she made him go.

She swallowed another great bubble of air and wrapped her arms around her chest to stop it from aching. It didn’t work. “Listen,” she said. “Listen. I want to talk to that man. That Demarkian man.”

“You want to talk to Mr. Demarkian?” the policeman said.

“It’s important.”

The policeman looked her up and down, dubious, and for a second Patchen thought he was going to tell her to go away. Then he turned his head in the direction of her own room and shouted, “Jack? Hey, Jack. Come on over here. There’s a lady wants to talk to Mr. Demarkian.”

Jack turned out to be an older policeman, not fresh faced or grim, and someone Patchen disliked on sight. The man swaggered. Patchen hated that. Men who swaggered and wore uniforms at the same time made her think of Nazis, just like religious people did.

“I have something to tell Mr. Demarkian,” she said, as he came closer. Her voice was high and tight and whiny, but she was beyond noticing. “It’s important and I have to tell him now.”

“Tell me,” Jack said.

“No.”

He looked her up and down and back and forth, and Patchen didn’t think he liked what he saw. She didn’t care. He was in uniform. He couldn’t be anyone really important. All the really important policemen wore ordinary clothes, to trick people.

“I want to see Mr. Demarkian,” she repeated. “I want to see him now.”

“What’s all this about?” a different voice said.

They all turned. Coming toward them, Patchen saw the main policeman of the night before, the short little man with the bald spot on top of his head. She couldn’t remember his name. She did remember thinking, the first time she saw him, that he must eat a lot of fatty foods. He had that dead white look to his skin that people got when they filled their bodies with lard and slaughter.

She shifted a little on her feet and held her chest more tightly. “It’s me,” she said, in the best voice she could. Her throat felt like a thin steel shaft with no give to it at all. “I want to see Mr. Demarkian.”

“What about?” the short little man said.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Patchen told him. “I want to tell Mr. Demarkian.”

“She didn’t want to tell me, either,” Jack said.

Patchen took her hands away from her chest. The short little man was looking her up and down, the way Jack had done, but in doing so he had made her feel as if she were holding her breasts up for inspection. She stuck her hands into her pockets and clenched them into fists and kept them there.

“I’ve got something to tell Mr. Demarkian,” she said, “and I’m not going to tell anybody but Mr. Demarkian.”

“You’re not,” the short little man said.

“I’m not,” Patchen insisted.

The short little man gave her a look that said he thought she was simply pulling rank. She was the Great Big Movie Star and they were all supposed to run their lives her way. But he turned around anyway and went back down the hall.

Patchen caught herself gulping air and counting to ten again, but it was all right. In no time at all, the short little man was back, with Gregor Demarkian in tow.

Now that she could actually see him, Patchen wasn’t sure she had done the right thing. He looked much more intimidating than the short little man, and much less friendly. If it hadn’t been for the thought of all those vultures downstairs, circling around her, making her their sacrifice, she would have turned around and run again.

Instead, she reminded herself that she had been telling the truth, for once. She really did have something important to say and something he would want to hear. Then she wrapped her arms around her chest again and hugged herself as tightly as she could, tighter and tighter with every step Gregor Demarkian took toward her.

She had never hurt so much in her life.

Downstairs, Dan Chester was leaning against the back of the staircase, counting to ten himself and trying to think. He had heard Patchen Rawls asking for Gregor Demarkian each of the three times she had asked. He had waited in the hope that whatever conversation she had with him would take place on the balcony where he could hear. He was not in luck. He heard Demarkian’s step just above him and then the deep, studiously polite voice saying, “We can go in here. It’s Miss Hannaford’s room. We’re using it as a temporary workstation.” After that, there was more tromping around above his head, and he knew the two of them—maybe in the company of Henry Berman—had disappeared.

Standing where he was standing, he was in full view of the crowd in the living room space. Fortunately, they were paying no attention to him. Once Patchen Rawls had run out, they had retreated into themselves again. Dan turned away from them and headed across the foyer toward the kitchen.

Dan Chester had never been a kitchen person. He didn’t like kitchens, and he liked the kitchen at Great Expectations even less. It was big and surgical, full of stainless steel and sharp knives. It was also the only available place in the house at the moment with both walls and a telephone, except for Victoria’s room. And he was under no illusions that Victoria would allow him to use that.

He locked the kitchen door behind him after he went in and then went to search the pantry and the bread room. They were empty.

He picked up the telephone, dialed a number he knew by heart, then dialed a little more when he got the series of beeps that told him he’d plugged into the computer. It occurred to him that he would not have been able to make this call if he wasn’t using a touch-tone phone, and that he had come in here without knowing that the phone would be touch-tone.