And One to Die On (13 page)

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.

F
OR 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.

“I think it’s a tort, behavior like that,” Hannah Graham’s voice was saying. “I think you ought to be able to sue somebody over that.”

Carlton ought to have been surprised that Hannah Graham was back in the fold, after that grand exit with the thrown napkin, but he wasn’t. Hannah Graham was the kind of woman who would always make her way back to the fold, because she was the kind of woman who couldn’t stand thinking that something interesting might be going on without her.

Carlton went to the end of the hall and opened the door there. He found a small square landing with stairs leading up to the left and another door, directly opposite to the one he was coming through. He went to that door and opened it. He groped around on the wall and turned the light switch on. This room was a kind of walk-in medicine cabinet. Three of the four walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and these shelves were crammed with bottles. A lot of bottles contained vitamins, bought in bulk quantities from a mail-order house. “
AS ADVERTISED IN
PREVENTION
MAGAZINE!
” the labels on these bottles said. Carlton found enough vitamin E to drown in and enough vitamin A to poison a rabbit farm. He found so many combinations of B vitamins, he began to wonder if the B’s had some nonnutritional usefulness, like being good for polishing silverware. One of the other shelves was full of aspirin and acetaminophen in as many different brands as possible. Another shelf had painkillers like Advil and Motrin. Another shelf was full of antibiotics, in spite of the fact that they were supposed to be available only by prescription. Carlton got down on his knees and looked at the shelves closest to the floor. Two of them had nothing on them at all. The third contained prescription blood pressure medication made out to Cavender Marsh. Carlton Ji picked up one of the bottles and found out that it was both full and well past its expiration date. Obviously, somebody in this house, Geraldine Dart if not Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh themselves, had found a way to get around the laws and stockpile their prescriptions.

Carlton went out on the landing, turned off the light in the little room, and closed the door behind himself. That had been interesting but unproductive. There had been no clue to the things he wanted to know up there. He looked up the dark staircase. This was a servant’s staircase, of course, and maybe nobody used it anymore, at least at night. He had checked all four walls and been unable to find a switch. He had looked up into the blackness and been unable to see a lightbulb or a light fixture or a lamp. What did the servants do in this place when there were servants, if there were ever servants? Did they carry candles?

Carlton thought about going back to the others. He decided against it. He would just wander around mooning about Bennis Hannaford, and she would just go on ignoring him. He could try to confront her, but he didn’t think that would be a good idea. Carlton had a very good eye for the kind of people who would treat his claims to wounded vulnerability with contempt. He climbed a few steps and looked up into the darkness. Things would get better as he went higher, he realized, because there was a window on the landing above him. The problems would come between landings. The half flights were long and steep and narrow. They boxed off whatever light was coming through the windows and made the climber wait for it.

Carlton went up to the first landing. The window there was tall and thin. He looked out and saw black rocks and a black ocean and the tiny lights of a buoy at sea. He was at the back of the house in more ways than one. He wasn’t looking across to Hunter’s Pier from here.

Carlton went up another half landing and found another window. He went up another half landing yet and found another window yet. There were, apparently, going to be windows on every landing but doors only on every other one. He went up another half landing and opened the door there. He had lost track of where he was. He was looking out on a meanly proportioned hall, lined with plain wood doors again. He opened one of the doors and found a miserable little bedroom. It was equipped with a metal bedframe and a thin mattress and a single small wood table. He went back to the landing. Servants’ quarters, definitely. How glad he was that he hadn’t had to be a servant in a nineteenth-century house.

He went up the next half flight of stairs, stopped to look out at the night again—same scene, lots of black, illuminated buoys—and then went up the half flight after that. This was the end. The landing had a door on it, but no further stairs. Carlton opened the door. He was surprised to find that the vast room beyond seemed to be brightly lit. It wasn’t, of course. This was the attic, an undifferentiated space whose low walls were lined with periodic windows. The windows on the far side of the space looked out on the front of the house and let in the light from the powerful security arcs out there. Carlton closed the attic door behind him and took a deep breath of musty air.