And One to Die On (31 page)

“I found the discrepancies in the money,” Kelly Pratt said proudly. “While I was looking over the background to come up for the weekend. We all wanted to make sure the auction would go off without any lawsuits. So I was working it all up, you see.”

Cavender Marsh couldn’t tell if they saw or not. None of them was paying attention to Kelly Pratt. They were all looking at Gregor Demarkian, stunned. Cavender Marsh smiled a little to himself.

“You know,” he said, “all of this is very interesting, and of course it’s also true, but it doesn’t explain very much, does it? About what’s been happening here this weekend. That’s what they all really want to know about. That’s what the police are going to want to know about, too.”

“I think it explains a great deal,” Gregor Demarkian said. “In fact, I think it’s the only way we can explain anything of what happened here. You came to this island to live with Lilith Brayne because you had to, not because you wanted to, and you’ve been wishing her dead for all the sixty years since.”

“That still doesn’t explain how I killed her,” Cavender Marsh said. “It doesn’t explain how I could have swung around what must have been a very heavy object, at my age. My condition is good, but nobody’s condition is that good at eighty.”

“That’s true,” Gregor Demarkian agreed. “This time you had help. This time you didn’t actually kill anybody.”

“I didn’t actually go hauling bodies all over the house, either,” Cavender said. “I couldn’t have lifted them.”

“That’s true, too.”

“So you see,” Cavender said, “it’s not so simple after all.”

“Oh, but it is,” Gregor told him. “Your wife was killed by the one person on earth who had every reason to want her dead in a nasty and deliberate way, no matter how old or how close to death she was. Her own daughter and yours. Hannah Kent Graham.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Hannah Graham’s voice was high and hysterical. “That’s totally ridiculous. How can you possibly say something like that?”

“I can say it very easily,” Gregor told her. “It all comes down to that most famous line from the Sherlock Holmes stories, the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. You were the only one who could have fixed that CD player, the only one who could have cut the lights, the only one who could have cut the phone lines, the only one who could have done all the things that needed to be done in a very short time on the night your mother died, because you were the only one who was not in the group with the rest of us when all that was going on.”

“Of course I was there! Of course I was there! It was just dark and you didn’t see me.”

“I didn’t see you either,” Mathilda Frazier said.

“Who did and didn’t see her is not the point,” Gregor Demarkian interjected, before it became a screaming match. “The point is that I didn’t hear her. Ms. Graham, in all the time that we have been in this house, I have only twice heard you shut up for longer than thirty seconds on the subject of just who you were going to sue for what when you got out of here. One of those times was just now, when you were much too interested in what I had to say to interrupt me. The other was the night your mother died—a night, by the way, full of exactly the sort of incidents tailor-made to start you off on one of your litigious monologues. There was no litigious monologue, Ms. Graham, because you were not there to give it. You were running around behind the scenes doing your level best to distract me from noticing anything that might actually be important.”

Hannah Graham’s sticklike body was backing away down the hall, toward the foyer. She’s going to do exactly the wrong thing, Cavender Marsh thought. She’s more my child than she is her mother’s. She’s going to panic.

At just that moment, there was the sound of running footsteps in the foyer. Bennis came charging into the utility hall, waving her arms.

“Gregor!” she shouted. “Gregor, I did it! I got in touch with the mainland!”

Bennis Hannaford was running fast and not watching where she was going. She ran into Hannah and was caught up short, gasping for breath.

“Excuse me,” she said, puffing to regain her wind. Then she turned her attention to Gregor again. “It was perfect,” she said. “Absolutely perfect. I was blinking away, sure I was no good at all, and then somebody on the shore started to answer me. It was wonderful. He’s sending help right away. I told him we had a man here with a severe concussion and we needed an ambulance and everything, and he said to sit tight and he’d get somebody to come out here some way or another right away.”

“Was it Jason?” Geraldine Dart asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t give me his name. I’m going to go back and wait for more messages.”

“Did he say there were going to be more messages?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

“Just in case,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Hannah was panicking. Cavender Marsh could see it. She was backing farther and farther away down the hall, and where did she think she could go? Even if Jason or somebody else did manage to get help out here in the middle of this storm—and Cavender was by no means sure they could; that might have been Maine coast macho posturing talking—what could Hannah do then? Did she intend to jump into the sea and swim?

Cavender started forward, some vague thought in his mind of stopping his daughter before she did anything that was both stupid and irrevocable. If there was anything he had learned from the first, and real, death of Tasheba Kent, it was that you must never do anything that you couldn’t later flatly deny.

The rest of them were in a knot, talking excitedly. Bennis Hannaford had run out of the room to go back to her signal lights and Morse code. Hannah was almost to that point in her backing up where it would be feasible for her to turn and run.

And then the lights went out.

This time, when the lights went out, Hannah Graham knew that it was not a joke. It was not a prank. It was not a fuse. The storm had finally gotten to the power lines on the mainland and the ones that came out here. They were going to be without light for a while.

Hannah Graham’s father thought she was panicking. Hannah knew that. She had. seen it in Cavender Marsh’s eyes as he watched her back away. Not that either of them had ever thought of her as anything but a nuisance. That was why her own mother had dumped her on an aunt to come out to this island and indulge the sexual obsession she had with Cavender Marsh. That was why her own father had gone along with it all. They were a pair of prizes, those two, and ever since the moment when Cavender Marsh had contacted her in California and told her what had really happened in 1938, Hannah Graham had been making plans.

Hannah now knew a number of things the rest of them didn’t know. She even knew things that Cavender didn’t know. He had expected to be in control of it all, and of her, but he had made the very worst kind of mistake.

The weapon was a thing called a warming iron, a great round blob of cast iron at the end of a very long cast-iron rod. In the days before central heating, you put the blob end into the fire until it was very hot and then put the hot end between the sheets and the blankets at the bottom of your bed to keep your feet warm on chilly winter nights. Hannah had never seen a warming iron before she came to the island, but she had read about them in books on antiques. This one had been lying on the floor of the attic when she had gone in to see what Carlton Ji was up to. And Carlton Ji had been up to no good, of course. Those people were never up to any good. Hannah Graham hated Orientals.

The weapon was in the tall narrow broom closet at the very start of the hall leading back from the foyer to the television room. The closet was too small to hold a body, so it had never been searched thoroughly even once all this weekend. It was also full of vacuum cleaner equipment and easy to hide something made of metal in. Hannah got it out and felt the weight of it in her hands. She had never been so glad of the time she had spent working out with weights.

They were all getting used to the darkness now. They were all beginning to be able to see at least a little in the gloom. Hannah still had the advantage and she knew it. She had walked around this house in the dark many times before. The rest of them had not.

“Hannah?” Cavender Marsh asked tentatively.

Hannah smiled. He was just where she wanted him to be, really. She moved closer to the stairs.

“I’m right here,” she called out. “I’m over near the stairs.”

“Hannah, listen to me,” Cavender Marsh said. “Try to be reasonable for a moment now.”

“I am being reasonable,” Hannah told him.

“I’d be careful if I were you,” Gregor Demarkian warned.

Hannah was worried for a moment, but then she wasn’t anymore. Cavender Marsh wasn’t paying any attention to Gregor Demarkian. And Gregor Demarkian was nowhere close to either Cavender or the stairs. He was way in back, near the living room door.

“What’s going on around here?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

She was way, way in the back, invisible. She didn’t want to come out and see what was happening. Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart were invisible, too. They were all hiding in the dark. They were all hoping this would just go away. Only Cavender Marsh was advancing across the foyer, walking with his hands in his pockets, as if he thought he could make himself look like Cary Grant.

“Now, Hannah,” he began.

He sounded just like Hannah’s therapist. Hannah hated her therapist.

“I’m right here,” Hannah said again. “I’m really not going anyplace.”

“Be
careful
,” Gregor Demarkian warned for the second time.

Bennis Hannaford rushed in again. “They are sending a helicopter,” she said in a rush of enthusiasm. “It’s coming right from some army base to the south of us. We’re all supposed to go up onto the roof and wait for it.”

“A helicopter can’t land on this roof,” Geraldine Dart said, “It’s not flat.”

“We can’t get Richard Fenster up to the roof right now either,” Mathilda Frazier said. “We probably shouldn’t move him.”

“Right,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I’ll go back and explain everything.”

Bennis Hannaford rushed out again in the direction of the living room. Hannah stayed in her place at the side of the stairs, her back against the wall, waiting.

“Now, Hannah,” Cavender said for the third time, or maybe the fourth or fifth.

“Come over and talk to me,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to have to shout.”

Cavender Marsh came. He came much too slowly and too deliberately, but he came. Even now, it seemed, he had to be a movie star. Even now he had to make entrances and exits and melodramas and foreshadowings. Hannah waited until he was almost right in front of her. Then she swung around him, to his back, raised the warming iron above her head and smashed it down on the foyer’s parquet floor.

Cavender Marsh jumped onto the first of the steps and Hannah smashed the warming iron down again, on the step next to him, cracking the step even though she hit it through the thickness of the runner carpet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gregor Demarkian demanded.

This was not a question Hannah Graham thought she had to answer. Cavender Marsh was running as best he could up the stairs.

Hannah Graham was following him, swinging the warming iron above her head and smashing it down over and over again, like a polo player in pursuit of the ball.

S
HE WASN’T TRYING TO
catch him. Gregor saw that right away. She could run much faster than he could, even carrying that heavy iron instrument. She could have hit him at any time. The shaft of whatever it was was at least four feet long. When Kelly Pratt started to run up behind her to drive her off, she swung it around at him and nearly hit him in the gut. If she had connected, she would have broken his rib cage or his pelvis or caused the kind of internal damages that usually resulted from car wrecks. Kelly Pratt backed up and stopped. Cavender Marsh went higher on the stairs. Hannah Graham followed him, swinging the rod ahead of her, smashing the hard round end of it over and over again into the walls.

“What’s she doing?” Bennis asked in a whisper.

Gregor didn’t know when she’d come back from her latest run of Morse code signals, but here she was.

“She’s driving him,” Gregor told her. “Upstairs. I don’t know where.”

“Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

This was a question about on a par with, Is the Pope Catholic? Gregor didn’t answer it. Cavender was almost to the second-floor landing now. Hannah was right behind him.

Gregor began to climb the darkened stairs, as quickly as he could without attracting the attention of Hannah Graham, or Cavender Marsh. He needn’t have been so cautious. They were paying no attention to him. Cavender Marsh was much too frightened. Hannah Graham was having much too good a time. When they were both on the landing, Cavender Marsh started to dart toward the family wing. Hannah Graham got around behind him and blocked his path. Cavender Marsh tried to make it to the guest wing. Hannah Graham stopped him there, too. She was very fast, when she wanted to be.

“What’s she trying to do?” Bennis demanded, coming up behind Gregor on the stairs.

Bennis was very fast when she wanted to be, too. “She’s forcing him up the stairs,” Gregor told her. “Watch.”

Cavender Marsh had to go on up the stairs, to the third floor or maybe beyond, because there was nowhere else to go. The problem was that the stairs were not a straight shot, rising from the second-floor landing in the same well. The stairs were at the back of the landing, tucked in next to the windows. Hannah Graham got there first and smashed the windows into pieces. Shards of glass sprayed into the shadows. Cavender started to back up and found his daughter behind him again. He bolted upward.

“He’s going to have a heart attack,” Bennis said.

“Maybe that’s what she’s after,” Kelly Pratt told her.

Gregor turned and saw that they were all there, Bennis and Kelly and Mathilda and Lydia and Geraldine, following him resolutely in spite of the fact that they didn’t know how they could possibly be of use. Gregor fixed his attention on Geraldine Dart.