And One to Die On (19 page)

Now she hurried into the pantry, leaving the door open behind her. At the last minute, just to be cautious, she took a can of peas and a can of kidney beans and propped them against the open door. Then she went back in among the cans of vegetables and the sacks of flour and the big jars of honey and maple syrup and looked around. The CD player was just where she had put it in the first place, back around midnight. Its speakers were still aimed at the square mesh microphone that was connected to the intercom system. The microphone had been turned off, but there was no mystery about that. Geraldine had done it herself, that last time she had come in here, looking for Carlton Ji or his body. If she hadn’t, her breathing or her footsteps would have gone bouncing around the house just the way the cackling laughter had, although they would have been quieter.

Geraldine looked over the facing of the player, checking out the settings. As she had suspected, the volume had been turned way up, into the reddest part of the red zone. The program had been fiddled with, too. Instead of being set for one play-through of the disc on the turntable, it was set for seven. If it had been set for ten or eleven, Geraldine might have thought she had made the mistake herself. She had been nervous and jumpy. Her hand might have shaken as she was punching the instructions into the machine. She could guarantee that she hadn’t been calm enough to be paying full attention. She did know that she hadn’t pushed “seven” though. She could remember putting her finger down on “one.”

Geraldine checked the timer, but that hadn’t been tampered with. She had set the machine to go on at one. Whoever had fiddled with it had left it to go on at one. The disc had not been changed, but Geraldine would have been shocked if it had been. She had brought no other discs to the pantry. The rest of the collection was up in Cavender Marsh’s bedroom, tucked away on the top shelf in Tasheba Kent’s closet. Obviously, somebody had either followed her to the pantry when she had come to set the machine, or they had stumbled into the pantry while they were snooping around and decided to take advantage of what they found. Was that last scenario actually possible? Geraldine supposed it was. With the exception of Gregor Demarkian, Geraldine wouldn’t trust any of the people in this house as far as she could throw them.

The thing to do now was to get this silly machine out of here, before anybody else had a chance to use it. Since she’d put it here herself, she couldn’t see why it would be “tampering with evidence” for her to remove it. She wasn’t trying to hide anything. She had every intention of telling Demarkian and Dick Morrow and even the state police just what it was she had done and why.

Geraldine opened the door to the turntable and took out the disc. The plastic case the disc belonged in was lying across three cans of Campbell’s pork and beans on the shelf above the player. Geraldine got it down and put the disc inside. She closed the turntable door, unplugged the machine, wrapped the cord around her hand four times to make sure it wouldn’t dangle, and put the player under her right arm the way a running back would carry a football. Then she turned around and started to leave.

It was a moment that made her believe, forever afterward, that she had no instinct of self-preservation. She was standing in the doorway to the pantry, not five feet from where she had been just a moment before, and she had not felt his presence. She had not heard him walk up. She had not heard him breathing. He was a complete surprise, and as soon as she saw him, Geraldine felt the breath knocked out of her. Never mind the fact that he was grinning in a furious and nasty way that made him look deranged.

“Well, well, well,” Richard Fenster said, shifting his weight a little to the right. Now he was blocking the entire doorway. There was no way Geraldine could get out without pushing against him. “What is it we’re doing here?”

Geraldine nearly dropped the CD player to the floor. “Oh, for God’s sake. What is it you think you’re doing?”

“I think that what we’re going to discuss here is what it is you’re doing,” Richard Fenster said. “Don’t you agree?”

Geraldine Dart agreed. She had to agree. She wasn’t getting out of this pantry until Richard Fenster let her out.

Hannah Graham did not believe in taking pills if you didn’t have to, but she did think there were a lot of circumstances under which you had to, and one of those was if she couldn’t get to sleep at night. Sleep was very important, because lack of it could make you wrinkled. Lack of it could also make you crazy, because the only way anybody could hold onto her sanity was through dreams. This was all a little fuzzy, but Hannah knew what she meant, and what she was afraid of. Right now, she was scared to death that she would lie on her bed for hours and not be able to relax at all. Unfortunately, although she had brought a small suitcase full of nothing but medication, none of the medication she had brought was sleeping pills. She had twenty-two different kinds of vitamins, including liquid vitamin E to rub on her hands and face to keep them from aging. She had six different kinds of tranquilizers to meet every need from mild upset to major emotional breakdown. She had enough different kinds of painkillers, both over the counter and bootleg prescription, to open her own Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. But she did not have a single pill to put her to sleep. Not one.

The bed in Hannah’s room had a canopy that arched up into the darkness at the top of the room like a gently rolling hill. On the wall next to the window was a steel engraving of a Victorian lady sitting at her boudoir, frowning into a mirror that was not telling her what she wanted to hear. On the vanity table there was a tortoise-shell brush and comb and hand mirror set, with the handles carved into swirling ribbons and fat little bows. Hannah thought about taking a tranquilizer, but a tranquilizer wasn’t what she wanted. A tranquilizer would calm her down enough so that she could go to sleep, but it would block out all her dreams. She would wake up fuzzy and nauseated and not alert, which she couldn’t afford. Hannah knew this from experience.

Hannah got out of bed and checked herself in the vanity table mirror. She looked all right in a dim light, and there were nothing but dim lights in the hall and the bedrooms of this wing. Even in the gloom, though, she could see the start of a sag at the corner of her jaw. It was time to go in and get herself seen to again. This was what came of putting yourself through too much stress, and drinking wine and eating ice cream to calm yourself down. For Hannah, ice cream was the root of all evil. It jumped out of refrigerators at you. It ambushed you in stores. Its entire reason for existence was to make the upper-middle-class women of America look fat.

Her hair was impossible. She could try to do something about it, or put on a wig, but all that seemed like too much trouble at this hour of the morning. She fished a blue silk scarf out of the suitcase she had left open at the foot of her bed and tied it around her head. It didn’t exactly go with either her dressing gown or her nightgown, but it would have to do.

Hannah let herself out into the hall. It was empty and dark and quiet, but she was sure that most of the people in the bedrooms would still be awake. This was not the kind of night that sent you to your pillow and an uncomplicated trip to dreamland. She went down to the door halfway down the hall and on the opposite side from her own and knocked. She heard moving in there that she was sure had to be pacing.

“Just a minute,” Mathilda Frazier’s voice called out. Then, closer to the door, “Who is it?”

“It’s Hannah Graham,” Hannah said.

On the other side of the door, the bolt was pulled back and the knob was turned. Mathilda Frazier opened up a crack and scowled out.

“What is it you want?” she asked Hannah Graham.

This was ungracious enough, but Hannah wasn’t really surprised. This was one of those new young women who tried to compensate for their lack of breeding and ordinary good looks by trying to be more aggressive than any man. If Mathilda Frazier had been a resident of Beverly Hills, Hannah Graham would not have had her in the house.

“I’ve come to ask you if I can borrow a couple of sleeping pills,” Hannah said.

Mathilda made a face. “What makes you think I’ve got sleeping pills?”

“I heard you telling Kelly Pratt you were going to take one.”

“I never told Kelly any such thing.”

“Yes, you did. It was right before dinner. I don’t remember who was doing what to annoy you, but somebody was doing something.”

Mathilda Frazier hesitated. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

“Come on in,” she said grudgingly. “I don’t have very many, but I suppose you can have two. I don’t think we’re going to be on this island for another night anyway.”

“Don’t you?” Hannah asked.

Mathilda’s room was almost identical to her own, but mirror image. Mathilda had a bed with a canopy and a vanity with a curved-top mirror and a steel engraving, but her steel engraving was of a little boy carrying a balloon. Hannah sat down on the vanity stool. Mathilda had done a lot more unpacking than she had, if you could call it unpacking. Three suitcases were lying open on the bedroom floor, spilling slips and bras and blouses and pantyhose everywhere.

Mathilda got a plastic prescription bottle out of her cosmetics case and opened the cap. She shook two pills out onto her hand and walked them across the room to Hannah.

“Here,” she said, handing the pills to Hannah. “These are a fairly strong prescription. They ought to knock you right out.”

“Thanks.” Hannah knew what kind of prescription they were. She had some of her own back in California. She would classify them as middle of the road. The pills were blessedly small, though, and she was able to swallow them dry.

“Can I ask you something?” Mathilda Frazier said. “What was it you meant before? Do you think the police are going to make us spend another night in this house?”

“I think the police are going to want to get us out of here as soon as they can,” Hannah said. “I just don’t think we’re going to get off this island. At least, not tomorrow.”

“But why not?”

“Listen to the wind,” Hannah told her. “And it’s not just the wind, either. Go look at the weather.”

Mathilda hesitated again, as if she thought Hannah was out to trick her in every way she could. Then she walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains.

“It’s still so dark out there. It’s hard to see anything at all. You’re right about the wind, though. The wind is just plain awful.”

“Do you hear those pinging sounds?”

“Like hard rain hitting a metal roof.”

“That’s hail hitting the side of the house,” Hannah said. “It’s going to get worse all day Friday, too. I heard it on the radio.”

Mathilda let the curtain drop and came around to sit on the edge of her bed. “God, I hate this. This is just the most creepy thing. And the idea of that man wandering around here—where do you think he’s gone to? Do you think he’s hiding in the attic or the basement or someplace else we haven’t looked?”

“I think he’s long gone,” Hannah said. “I think he killed Tasheba Kent and took off out of here. I don’t care what Gregor Demarkian says.”

“But why would he kill Tasheba Kent? That’s what I don’t understand. I mean, I think it’s obvious that he must have done it. There isn’t any other reason for him to be missing, unless he’s—” Mathilda blanched. “Oh, dear.”

“I don’t see why he would be dead,” Hannah said, completing Mathilda’s thought. “Unless he killed himself trying to escape in the storm. I couldn’t see any reason for any of us to have killed him. None of us had ever met him before.”

“I can’t see why anybody would want to murder Tasheba Kent,” Mathilda said. “I mean, the woman was practically a century old and she spent all her time out here in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t a danger to anybody. And she couldn’t have lasted very long anyway. Why would anybody want to go to the trouble of murdering a woman who was almost a century old?”

“I don’t think of her as a woman who was almost a hundred years old,” Hannah said. “I think of her as the woman who was responsible for the death of Lilith Brayne. And it seems to me that there must be dozens of people who would want to see her dead.”

“Well, from your point of view I suppose that’s perfectly natural.” Mathilda didn’t sound as if she meant it. “I’m sorry,” she went on, “but I took two of those pills nearly twenty minutes ago, and I’m getting a little sleepy.”

“Of course.” Hannah stood up.

“I hope you’re wrong about the storm,” Mathilda told her. “I don’t want to spend another night in this house. I don’t want to spend another minute in it.”

“Well, maybe it will let up,” Hannah said.

Going back to her room, though, Hannah knew that the storm was not going to let up, not on Friday, and maybe not on Saturday, either. The man on the radio had been very explicit. This was the first of the great winter storms arriving early. They were likely to be socked in hard for the rest of the weekend.

Down at the end of the hall nearest the landing and the stairs, Bennis Hannaford was sitting cross-legged, writing notes in the margins of her galleys that she knew she was going to have to black out later. They had a lot of four-letter words in them, and even more sarcasm. They were the kinds of things that made copyeditors and proofreaders quit in tears, or threaten to sue. Bennis couldn’t help herself. She was exhausted. She was agitated. She wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep for hours. She had to do
something.

When the knock came on the door, Bennis had just finished her fourth cigarette in a chain of cigarettes, a chain that she had every intention of going on with until she could go downstairs for breakfast. She took a deep drag of it and went to her door.

“Who is it?”

“Gregor,” Gregor said.

Bennis opened up and ushered him inside. “Come on in,” she told him. “I’m just sitting on my bed quietly going mad.”

Gregor sat down on the stool to Bennis’s vanity table and stretched out his legs.

“Stop going mad for a moment and try to concentrate,” he said. “This is important. I want you to tell me everything you know about the death of Lilith Brayne.”