Cheating at Solitaire (44 page)

Annabeth had poured a cup of tea for Mrs. Normand. Now she extended it across the table. Mrs. Normand looked into it and made a face.

“Tea,” she said. “I never drink tea. It tastes like piss. Don't you have any coffee in this house?”

“>She's already told you she doesn't have coffee,” Arrow said, sounding so exasperated now she was almost crying. “She doesn't drink coffee. Why don't you ever listen to anybody?”

“Everybody drinks coffee,” Mrs. Normand said. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“I'm afraid I don't drink coffee,” Annabeth said. She was being polite. She was being so polite it was killing her. “I have orange juice. And I think I have mineral water, in, you
know, little bottles. But maybe not, because it always seems to me to be rather silly to buy water.”

“God, this place gives me the creeps,” Mrs. Normand said. “It really does. All these books. And what kind of books are they?
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent
. Who reads a book like that?”

“It's a collection of essays,” Annabeth said. “By Lionel Trilling. Essays about literature, mostly.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Normand said. “Litrachur. Aren't we all important around here. And that painting. That awful painting. How can anybody live with a painting like that? People don't want to be reminded of death and pain and misery. People want to have fun.”

“That's the point,” Marcey Mandret said. She was sitting all the way up now, and Annabeth thought she looked like an entirely different person. She looked like an entirely different person from the one she'd been just this morning. It was an odd thing to see.

“It's called The Flagellation,” Marcey said, “and I don't remember the name of the man who painted it. It was somebody from the Renaissance, in Italy. And that was his point. That people like to look at the young and the beautiful and the rich, but it's that kind of selfishness that killed Christ. It wasn't the Romans who killed Him, it was ordinary people, and ordinary people's sins, because ordinary people don't help the poor and the helpless, they only care about money and fame. They only care about celebrity.”

Annabeth poured herself a cup of tea and counted to ten in her head. She had no idea what to make of this at all. She had said something to Marcey once about The Flagellation, but not all this. She couldn't imagine that Marcey had thought it through for herself, although she was willing to entertain the possibility that the girl was brighter than she'd thought at first. Right now, Marcey seemed both bright and desperate.

“Don't tell us you've become one of those Christians,” Mrs. Normand said. “Don't tell us we're all going to have to listen to sermons from you on a regular basis.”

“You don't have to be a Christian to understand it,” Marcey
said. “The part about torturing Christ and putting him on the cross is, it's a—”

“Metaphor?” Annabeth said helpfully.

“Yes. Thank you. It's a metaphor. Stewart told me. When we care only about money and fame and youth, we don't just hurt ourselves, we hurt all humanity everywhere, we make the world a worse place than it could be. And we make ourselves worse too. We make ourselves trivial. We make ourselves morally trivial people, and we waste the life we've got, we waste it on—oh, hell. We waste it on Kendra Rhode.”

“I'd be careful what you say about Kendra Rhode,” Mrs. Normand said, her face screwed into a triumph of spitefulness that seemed almost violent in its intensity. “The police haven't ruled out murder yet, you know, and you were the one who was there, weren't you? You were right there in the hospital. If you don't watch out, you'll end up in the same jail Arrow was in, and there won't be anybody to get you out.”

Marcey got up off the couch, as if she didn't want to be on it while Mrs. Normand was still there, and paced across the room to the windows that looked out on the beach.

“I don't care if they do think I killed her,” she said. “Somebody has to start telling the truth about Kendra Rhode.”

2

From the way the light was coming through the windows, Jack Bullard thought it had to be nearly noon—and that, considering how much time had passed since he first woke up, was very disturbing. He was not the kind of mess he had been the day before. The effects of whatever the drug was that somebody had given him had worn off, and aside from that he had only the painkillers to worry about. His hand hurt, but not as much as it might have. That was the blessing of Demerol. He felt very relaxed and tired. That was the blessing of Demerol too. He did not know what he was supposed to feel about the things that were going on or the things that had happened to him, and that was something no Demerol could help. He could sit up and get himself juice and water if he wanted. It felt like too much trouble. He could go to the bathroom on
his own, which he did when it was necessary. He could walk down the hall and talk to whomever had taken Leslie's place for the day. None of this felt to him as having any point at all. He had been watching television for hours, and the television said the same things over and over again, and none of it made any difference. He wondered what would happen now. Maybe there would be a big public funeral, in New York, where Kendra was from. Limousines would line up outside the church in which she had been baptized, even though she hadn't been inside it since. Men and women would walk up the church steps as if they were walking down the red carpet. Maybe that wouldn't happen at all. Maybe the family would revert to type, and the funeral would be private, and there would be no press allowed at the service or the grave. Jack knew what he would want at his own funeral. He would want the limousines, and the long procession to the cemetery, right there on CNN. He would want the commentators on Fox to talk about what a bad influence he had been, because the commentators on Fox always pretended that it was better to be obscure and prissily “moral” than to be famous and sane. He would want Katie Couric, too, if Katie Couric was still working. It was so hard to think about time. Time came and went. It slithered. In fifty or sixty years, when he was ready to die, Katie Couric would probably already be dead.

Linda was sitting in the visitor's chair on the other side of the sliding table. She had been there for fifteen minutes, but Jack hadn't said anything to her besides “Hello.” He couldn't think of what to say, and there was something about the way she was sitting where she was that made him think there was more of a point to this visit than just visiting. Death bothered him, he realized, but only sometimes. The death of Mark Anderman hadn't bothered him at all. Mark was and then he was not, and in between it was as if he had never been. He'd been a blank, or a black hole, a depression in the ether. The death of Kendra Rhode bothered him very much, but not just because she was famous, or rich, or somebody who had come to talk to him only moments before she'd fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck. It was just
that, in his head, Kendra Rhode was not supposed to die. She was supposed to be incapable of dying. He had felt that way about presidents once, when he was very small. He had imagined that there was something about being famous that made you immortal, and that being famous meant being in the encyclopedia, and that presidents were always in the encyclopedia. Something like that. It was confused. He could even remember when he'd realized, for the first time, that this was not true. He was in his seventh-grade math class, and his math teacher, Mr. Lamont, had brought in the news that—but his mind had gone blank. He couldn't remember. His body felt as if all the blood had been drained out of it. All he could see, or think about, was Kendra, on the tele vision in still pictures and video clips, giving interviews as if nothing like death had ever occurred to her.

“Somebody died,” he said out loud.

On the other side of the table, Linda stood up. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, somebody did. Kendra did.”

“Not now,” Jack said. He knew that Linda was taking this all wrong. She was assuming that he was behaving the way he was because he was sick, because he hadn't recovered from the drugs and the things that had been done to his hand. He didn't know how to tell her the truth. He didn't know if it was important. “When I was in seventh grade,” he said. “Somebody died. Somebody important. And it was a big deal at the time. And now I can't remember who it was.”

“When was it?” Linda asked.

Jack thought about that. Seventh grade. Junior year. He remembered most of his time growing up with markers like that, not with real years. He had to think hard to figure out the real years. “Nineteen eighty-two,” he said finally. “I think.”

“Brezhnev died in 1982,” Linda said.

Jack turned his head from side to side. He knew who Brezhnev was, sort of, but he wouldn't have known in 1982. He tried to think about it. He thought about Kendra instead, looking so real up there, looking as if she really existed.

“John Belushi,” he said finally. “It was John Belushi. And my math teacher heard about it somewhere, it happened on
the weekend, and he came in Monday morning and told us all about it. He was very upset.”

“Were you very upset?”

“Not exactly,” Jack said. “I just couldn't understand how it had happened. He was famous, and famous people weren't supposed to die. I'm not making any sense.”

“You're making some,” Linda said. “They do die, though. She died. I know you were fond of her.”

It was, Jack thought, a very Linda-like phrase. “Fond of her.” What would that mean, if it meant anything? Had he been “fond of ” Kendra Rhode? He really didn't know. He thought that most people who had come into Kendra's orbit might have the same kind of confusion. Kendra wasn't a person that you liked or disliked. It was far more fundamental than that.

“They don't say what it was,” he said. “On the television, that is. They don't say if somebody killed her, or if it was just an accident.”

“She fell down the stairs,” Linda said.

“I know.”

“She fell down these stairs, right here,” Linda said.

Jack turned to look at her. He had the bed propped up. It was one of those mechanical ones you could operate with a little handheld thingee. Linda was sitting in the chair without her back touching it. She was sitting straight up, the way grown-ups always wanted children to in church.

“She was in the room,” he said finally. “She was standing right over there, by the window.”

“You mean she came to visit you?”

“I guess. I got the impression that it wasn't on purpose. She hadn't come out to the hospital to visit me.”

“Just the impression? She didn't tell you why she was here?”

“We didn't talk about why she was here. We didn't talk much at all. She stood over by the window. Then she got up and left and went down the hall. I could hear the footsteps. Or not. I don't know. There was something about her leaving. And I got angry.”

“Did you? At something she said to you?”

“Not exactly.” Depression was different from being tired. When you were tired, you just wanted to sleep. When you were depressed, it was as if you had been weighted down with lead. You tried to get up, and there was too much weight you had to pull with you, weight that didn't belong to you.

“I was angry a lot the last few weeks,” he said. “Since we got back from Vegas. We got back. Listen to me.”

“It was ‘we,' ” Linda said. “You all went out together. You all came back together.”

“It still wasn't ‘we,' ” Jack said. “And it doesn't matter, I guess. But she was here, and she was being a pain, and then she left. And I got so angry I got up. I know I wasn't supposed to get up, because of the hand—”

“It wasn't because of the hand,” Linda said. “It was because of the drugs. You'd been given some kind of drug. Too much of it, Mike Ingleford said.”

“I know.” Really, Jack thought. Lead weights. It was exactly as if somebody had sewn lead weights into the skin of his back and the back of his legs. “It was because it was the wrong drug. People who don't know anything about drugs don't know how they work. They pick the wrong ones for the job they want to do. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Linda said.

“It doesn't matter,” Jack said. “I knew all about the drug. I just got angry and I thought I'd catch her, I'd catch up with her, I'd talk to her. So I got out of bed. It was really hard. I got myself out of bed and then it was hard to walk. I was stumbling all over myself. I don't know why I kept on with it. I just kept going. It was like that.”

“Did you catch up to her?”

“I called out to her and she heard me and she stopped. That was right at the fire doors. I've been wondering all morning where Leslie was. I mean, it's not like this ward is a busy place. It's empty. She must have heard me. Leslie must have heard me. Kendra heard me. Why didn't Leslie come?”

“She was in the bathroom or something,” Linda said.

“And then things got crazy. Marcey Mandret found her. Found Kendra Rhode. And the silly twit, instead of getting somebody at the hospital to do something, she ran all the way across town to the inn and blurted the whole thing out to a press conference full of idiots. And then you had, you know, what's been on television all day.”

“There's supposed to be something else on the Internet,” Jack said. “They've been talking about it all morning, but they won't show it. I passed out on the floor. In the corridor. I just lay down and went out like a light.”

“I know,” Linda said.

“I wish they'd say whether it was an accident or murder,” Jack said. “I just wish they'd say. I was so angry. It's almost as if my anger reached out and broke her neck.”

“They're never going to know what broke her neck,” Linda said. “The paparazzi stormed the scene, and it was contaminated, and now they can't get any evidence at all. It wouldn't matter if you'd stuck a knife in her heart. They couldn't catch you on it.”