And One to Die On (18 page)

Still, Carlton Ji was missing. There was no doubt about that. They went to his room and found it empty. His bed hadn’t been slept in and his suitcase, although rummaged through, hadn’t been unpacked. Gregor didn’t think the rummaging had been a search job. It looked more like the kind of thing someone would do when he was looking for a clean pair of socks. They checked all the other bedrooms, too, just in case Carlton Ji had wandered off and fallen asleep and not been woken by all the subsequent noise. They checked the bedroom closets, too, and any containers—a steamer trunk in Geraldine Dart’s room; an oversize wardrobe in a guest room in the family wing—big enough to hide a body. Then they checked the rooms downstairs. They looked behind the living room couch. They looked under the tables in the library where the things for the auction were kept. They even opened the sideboard in the dining room.

“There are those other floors,” Bennis told Gregor, after they’d failed to find either Carlton Ji or any trace of Carlton Ji anywhere else in the house. “Maybe we’d better try those.”

“I think we’re going to have to,” Gregor agreed, “but I don’t see how we’re going to do it tonight. We’re all exhausted. Christ, I wish we could get hold of the police.”

“I wish we could, too. Do you think Carlton Ji killed Tasheba Kent?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know that either.”

The storm thundered overhead. “I don’t like this,” Bennis said. “I’ve never heard you be so uncertain. Usually when I ask you questions like this, you tell me it’s perfectly obvious what happened and if I just used my head, I could figure it all out for myself.”

Gregor let Bennis go back to looking around the dining room and went out into the foyer. From there he could see Lydia Acken making her way down the utility hallway to the kitchen, hesitantly opening door after door and peering inside. Every time she opened a door, she seemed to shudder. Every time she closed one she looked relieved. Gregor went up to her and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Oh,” she said, jumping. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to squeak. I’ve just been looking in these closets, and every time I open a door I’m just sure I’m going to find—well, and then there’s another one, you know, another hallway like this, on the other side of the house. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stand it.”

“You don’t have to search the other hallway as well as this one,” Gregor told her. “You can let somebody else do that. Are these all closets?”

Lydia laughed thinly. “They’re all specialty closets. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s one with nothing but baseball equipment in it. There’s another one with nothing but rubber rain boots. This is an incredible place.”

Gregor opened the next door down and found a closet full of sets of flatware. They were stacked in boxes on the floor and the shelves. He opened the next door after that and found what appeared to be chauffeurs’ uniforms, all separated neatly into sizes. Lydia Acken laughed again.

“Oh, dear,” she said, somewhat shrilly. “Oh, dear. Do you think the two of them were insane? Or do you think these things were left over from a previous tenant? What would anybody want with so many chauffeurs’ uniforms?”

“I think I want to give up on these closets for a minute and go look into the kitchen,” Gregor said. “Do you want to come with me? We can get back to this hall later.”

“I want to come with you,” Lydia Acken said quickly.

Gregor motioned her along the hallway and they went, Lydia staying just a little behind, as if she were sure a lion was going to jump out at them, and she didn’t want to be in the way of an attack. In spite of the fact that Gregor had said what he’d said about the closets, he looked in a couple more of them as they went along. One was full of old books that had not been cared for and smelled of mildew. One was full of plastic cat feeder dishes. They came to a heavy swinging door and Gregor pushed it open. Beyond it was a brightly lit room that was obviously a kitchen, but so large and well-equipped it could have served a small hotel.

“Here we are,” Gregor said—and then he saw it, stuck to the wall next to the refrigerator, a perfectly ordinary everyday plastic phone. Gregor couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this relieved. He couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this desperate to get in contact with the local police.

“Just a minute,” he told Lydia Acken.

He strode across the room to the phone and picked up the receiver. He dialed 0 for Operator and stood back to wait. A few seconds later he hit the disconnect bar and started all over again.

The reason it took so long for Gregor to realize what was going on was due to his own disbelief. It was such a cliché, he was sure that it couldn’t have happened. It was such an obvious next step in the drama, he was positive that no self-respecting twentieth-century murderer would have indulged in it. It was the kind of thing that happened in books but never in real life to real people with real things to worry about—except, of course, that it had.

The phone was dead.

T
HE PHONE CORD HAD
been cut at the side of the house just outside the kitchen window. Somebody had climbed up onto the sink and leaned out the window there to get at it, using a smooth-edged slicing blade from the knife rack and leaving it—the blade covered with bits of black rubber—on the drainboard when the job was through. This was not the worst of what was going on. It was just the thing that upset Geraldine Dart the most. For some reason, unlike the bloody death of Tasheba Kent, unlike the sight of Cavender Marsh in his peaceful uninterruptable sleep, the slashed phone cord made it clear to Geraldine that everything had now gone permanently and irretrievably wrong.

It was almost dawn by the time they were all able to go upstairs, and even then Geraldine had to herd them there. She would have left them alone if Gregor Demarkian had asked her to. She was glad he didn’t, because the thought of the bunch of them loose in the downstairs rooms of this house made her skin crawl. One of them had smashed something round and heavy into the side of Tasheba Kent’s head—or Carlton Ji had, and to Geraldine that amounted to the same thing. One of them had given Cavender Marsh a lot of sleeping pills and cut the cord on the phone, too. Then there was the record, which had been played much too loud and much too long. Somebody must have gotten into the pantry and changed the settings.

If there was one thing Geraldine wanted to do, it was to go into the pantry and get a good look at the CD machine. She had already been in the pantry once since Tasheba Kent died—ostensibly to check for Carlton Ji or Carlton Ji’s corpse—but with the way things had been then, she had barely had a chance to notice that the machine was, in fact, still there, never mind whether its volume control was up or if it had been set to replay. It was just about that time that the Demarkian man had discovered that the phone was out. Then everybody had gone running into the kitchen, hysterical and angry, and she had had to follow them. She hadn’t wanted to appear conspicuous. She hadn’t been hysterical then, because she hadn’t expected the lines to be cut. She had only thought that the phone lines were down between the island and the mainland. That happened without the need of outside interference at least once a month.

The Demarkian man seemed to have forgotten all about the ghostly laughter of the beginning of this evening. For that, Geraldine was more than grateful. She knew she would have to explain it to somebody sometime. If she didn’t talk to Gregor Demarkian, she would have to talk to Dick Morrow, who served as sheriff for Hunter’s Pier, or to the state police. She didn’t want to talk tonight, while she was tired and upset and hadn’t had a chance to think.

Outside, the storm was really turning into something special. That hadn’t been in the forecast. Geraldine had been checking the forecasts all week. The worst she had heard was that they were supposed to get “a little rain” on Thursday night. This was more like the start of a wet-weather nor’easter, complete with howling winds and rain that turned unexpectedly to hail, pelting the windows and the side of the house with round hard balls. This house was so solidly built, it was possible not to notice that the weather out there was awful. You had to really listen to hear the hail. Geraldine was the only one who was really listening. The rest of them, she could see, thought things were going to get better when the sun came up.

Which it would, of course. It was just that the sun might not come up until Saturday afternoon.

Geraldine had gotten them all to the second floor. Now she shooed them in the direction of the guest wing.

“I’m not going to set up breakfast until nine o’clock,” she told them. “Nobody is going to want to eat before then. You should all go to bed and get some rest.”

“Rest,” Mathilda Frazier said. “Oh, God.”

“I’m not just going to lock my door, I’m going to bolt it, and I’m going to put a chair in front of it, too,” Hannah Graham declared. “I’m sure I’m not going to be able to get any sleep. How can I know that this house isn’t full of secret passageways?”

“Of course it isn’t full of secret passageways,” Geraldine said wearily. “It’s just a house.”

“It’s going to be a house with a lien on it to pay the fees from a lawsuit when I’m through,” Hannah Graham said.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to be through,” Bennis Hannaford told her. “I’m going to go to bed.”

“I’m going to bed, too,” Mathilda Frazier said.

“We aren’t going to make any sense until we get a little sleep,” Kelly Pratt said.

Hannah glared at the rest of them in contempt. Then she stalked away, down the hall to the door at the end, which belonged to her bedroom. Maybe we should have put her in the family wing, Geraldine thought. She rejected the idea. Hannah Graham might be related by blood to Cavender Marsh and Tasheba Kent both, but in every spiritual sense the woman belonged to another species.

“I’m going to go to bed myself,” Geraldine said. “I’ll set my alarm and get up at quarter to nine. I’ll have breakfast on the sideboard for anybody who wants it. Don’t feel you have to get up.”

Mathilda Frazier looked down the stairs. “I wish we could move her. I know all about… not tampering with the evidence and all that, but… I wish we could move her.”

“I do, too,” Geraldine said gently. “But Mr. Demarkian says not, and Mr. Demarkian is the only one of us who knows what he’s doing around here. Go to bed now?”

Mathilda Frazier nodded, and the rest of them took their cue from her. Even Gregor Demarkian began drifting obediently off. Geraldine watched until all of them were safely in their rooms. Then she turned away and went into the family wing.

The first thing she did was to stop in and look at Cavender. He was lying exactly as they had left him, perfectly still and on his back. His chest was rising and falling in even, rhythmic sweeps. He seemed to have a smile on his face. Gregor Demarkian had said there was nothing to worry about. Cavender wasn’t exhibiting the symptoms of true coma or showing signs of going into respiratory failure. If anything, according to Demarkian, he was exhibiting admirable fitness of lung and heart, especially considering the fact that he’d been smoking cigars since he was nineteen years old. Geraldine trusted Demarkian, but she wanted to check anyway. Demarkian was a detective, not a doctor. There were probably a lot of things about the human body he didn’t know.

Cavender was fine. Even standing right next to him, Geraldine couldn’t find anything, no matter how small, to worry about. There was no hitch in his breath. When she laid her ear on the covers above his chest, she heard no murmur or stumble in his heart. Stop being ridiculous, she told herself. You’re just trying to postpone the inevitable.

It was true, too. The last thing Geraldine Dart wanted to do right now was to walk back down those stairs past Tasheba Kent’s body, but it had to be done. She left Cavender Marsh’s room and went out into the hall, but she didn’t turn toward her own bedroom door. She went out to the landing and looked into the guest wing. Everything seemed to be quiet over there, perfectly silent, dead. All the doors were closed and no lights were showing under them, even in the two cases where Geraldine knew the doors were out of true.

Geraldine went down the stairs, quickly at first, then slowing down as she got near the bottom. Tasheba’s body was lying on a diagonal, so it wouldn’t roll anymore, but it still took up most of the steps it touched. Geraldine scooted around Tasheba Kent’s feet so quickly, she almost lost her balance and fell. By the time she got to the foyer, she was running. She turned to look back, but there was nothing to see but a sheet. Gregor Demarkian had said that leaving her where she was didn’t mean they couldn’t cover her up. Geraldine thought he had been stretching things a little.

Whatever he had been doing, she was past it now. She didn’t have to go upstairs again if she didn’t want to. There were couches all over the first floor that she could sleep on. Earlier tonight, she had gone around to the pantry by the back hall. Now she didn’t want to waste the time, or spook herself going through all those dark hallways, so she went straight from the foyer to the kitchen. The utility hall that connected these two was short and very well lit. Getting to the kitchen, Geraldine turned on all the lights she could and tried not to look at the knives in the knife rack next to the stove. To get to the pantry, she had to go all the way across to the door that led to the way out at the back. Then she had to cross an almost unheated little mud room, climb four steps, and let herself through another door into the back utility hall. This hall was not well lit. The principle that seemed to have been operating when this house was wired for electricity was that servants were able to see in the dark.

Geraldine left the door between the mud room and the back hall open, as she had left the door between the kitchen and the mud room open, so that some of the kitchen light would filter through and help her do what she was doing. The pantry door was two doors in from the mud room door, just past the beginning of the back stairs. Geraldine didn’t look up there any more than she had looked at the knives in the kitchen. She hated those back stairs. They were like something out of a novel by Alexandre Dumas. They should have belonged to a dungeon or a torture chamber. The two or three times Geraldine had been forced to climb those stairs, she had taken a flashlight and been careful to wear the plain gold cross she had been given in Bible class at the Hunter’s Pier First Full Gospel Baptist Church.