Cheating at Solitaire (5 page)

He started to come up to what was obviously the walk to the house's front door, and the first thing he saw was a small ginger cat sitting in the window. Cats were good. He liked cats. He plowed along, judging his way by the indentations in the snow, and the cat stood up and stretched. It was like the start of some kind of silly movie: there's a knock on the door, and you open up to find this enormous muscled bald man carrying a half-naked girl to your doorstep.

There was no proper porch. They didn't do much with porches on Margaret's Harbor. He thought about knocking and found the bell instead, which at least wouldn't have connotations out of horror movies. He rang once, and waited. He rang a second time. Maybe there was an old lady in there, peering at him from somewhere upstairs, too scared to open up.

A moment later, a woman appeared next to the cat in the window. She was not a particularly old lady. She looked him up and down and then withdrew. A second later, the door swung open in front of him.

“Ride 'em, horsey!” Marcey Mandret suddenly shouted.

The woman in front of him blinked. Stewart thought he was probably blushing. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse us. I'm—”

“Stewart Gordon,” the woman said. “From that science fiction thing. One of my sons used to have a poster of you on his bedroom wall.”

“Good. I don't mean to bother you, but—”

“No, come in, come in.” The woman stepped back hurriedly.
She was, he thought, somewhere in her early fifties, and very neatly put together, like Judi Dench in the best of her middle age.

Stewart brought Marcey into the front hall and looked around. It was a standard Margaret's Harbor colonial except for the built-in bookshelves, and they were everywhere. There were even two in the hall. They were filled with books, too. He wondered if this woman owned the house or rented it.

“Excuse me,” he said again. “She's—”

“Oh, come into the living room and put her down on the chaise. I'd put her on the couch, but here's the thing. I've got one too.”

“Got one what?”

“Girl. I've got a girl,” the woman said. “She came to the back door about twenty minutes ago, in practically no clothes. And she looks sort of familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. And I think she's been raped. She's lost her underwear.”

Stewart sighed. “She probably wasn't wearing any. None of them do.”

“None of them?”

“The young women I'm making this movie with. Sort of. We spend an awful lot of time chasing after the young women and not much time making the movie.”

“This one has blood in her hair,” the middle-aged woman said. She was leading them into the living room, which was large and once again almost completely lined with bookshelves. It was not the room he had seen from the hall, which made him think that the dining room must be completely lined with bookshelves too. The woman pointed him toward the chaise and he put Marcey down on it. She was having a fit of giggles. Then he looked over at the couch and saw Arrow Normand, passed out as completely as it was possible to be without actually being dead.

“Arrow Normand,” Stewart said, pointing to the girl on the couch. Then he pointed to the chaise. “Marcey Mandret.”

“Annabeth Falmer,” the woman said, holding out her hand.

Stewart processed the information. It took longer than it
should have, because he wasn't used to that form of the name. “Anna Falmer?” he said.
“Abigail Adams and the Birth of the American Nation?
You do own this house.”

“What?”

“The bookshelves. I was wondering if you owned the house or rented it. If they were your books or if you'd rented the place from somebody—this is going around in circles.”

“No, no. I understand. Yes, I do own the house. I mean, my sons bought it for me and put the bookshelves in. I said it was a silly thing to do, just to spend a year on the Harbor, but my younger one, the one who's the lawyer, said that buying was better than renting for some reason, I'm not sure what. Writing history doesn't make a lot of money, you see, so I've never had any, and I don't understand it. She's got blood in her hair. And she says there's a man somewhere, in the snow. I've got the kettle on if you don't mind tea. I could put brandy in it.”

“Tea with brandy sounds wonderful. You sound like you could use it yourself. Are you all right?”

Annabeth Falmer sighed. Stewart decided that he had been right in his first impression. She was a neatly made woman, and he liked her general… way of being. He liked her books. He could see some of them, and they were not the books of a self-consciously “intellectual” person. There were intellectual books in great numbers, of course, but there also seemed to be a hefty selection of Terry Pratchett and virtually all the Miss Marples Agatha Christie ever wrote. He also liked the fact that she really had no idea who Mar-cey Mandret and Arrow Normand were, or why she was supposed to care.

She had been leading him out to the kitchen without his noticing it. He looked around and saw that there was even another bookshelf here, although it contained mostly cookbooks. The kettle was screaming. She got a clean cup and saucer out of the cupboard and a bottle of Metaxa Seven Star out of the bread box. He let that one go.

“Here's the thing,” she said. “I was going to go out. I mean, I tried to call the police, but there's no use, not in this
weather, everything is such a mess and there aren't very many police. But I should go out. Somebody should.”

“Why?”

“Because that girl, the one with the blood in her hair, she said there'd been an accident. She'd been with a man, in a truck, and it went down an embankment, over on the beach somewhere. I think. It was hard to get her to make sense. But she did say she was with somebody, and he's probably still down there, and I can't just leave him there, can I? If he's already dead it won't matter, but if he isn't he needs to get medical help somehow or he will die, and—you probably think I'm a lunatic.”

“No,” Stewart said, thinking that this was one of those people with a tremendous sense of personal responsibility for everything. He recognized it because he was one of those people himself.

He took a tea bag from the box of them she was holding out to him and picked up the brandy bottle.

“Let me get some of this into myself. Then let's go see if we can make Miss Normand make enough sense so we can find this person she thinks she left out in the snow.”

6

Kendra Rhode did not speak to people she did not want to speak to, except for policemen in patrol cars, when they thought she was both driving and drunk. The truth was that Kendra was never drunk. She was never high, either, beyond the buzz you could get from sharing a single joint. In all the tens of thousands of pictures that had been printed of her since she had first decided to make herself a celebrity, not one showed her bleary-eyed and stumbling, or fallen asleep on a table in a bar somewhere while somebody poured beer in her hair. Blood will tell, Kendra's grandmother used to say, and Kendra thought that it was true—even if her grandmother had been trying to get something across about her mother, who was another story altogether.

Kendra's grandmother would have said that she should have taken all three of the telephone calls that had come in
in the last twenty minutes, and the other one that had come in over an hour ago, but Kendra knew something her grandmother did not. It was never a good idea to make yourself too available to people who had launched themselves into free fall. Failure was a particular thing, but it was also a cliché, and Kendra could see it coming a mile off. There were different kinds of failure too, and some of them she didn't mind, or was at least willing to put up with. She didn't care if a movie tanked or a song sold almost nothing or a prize went to somebody else, somebody stuffy and snotty and older, whom she wouldn't want to know. She did care about disintegration, and she was sure that everybody on earth was capable of disintegration. She'd seen it happen. They fell over some edge somewhere, or were pushed, and then they couldn't remember where they'd been the night before and they stopped meeting the obligations that really mattered and they got maudlin and wanted to cry on you when the night went on too long.

She stopped looking at herself in the mirror and looked out her window instead. Her bedroom at the Point was the big one with the circular extension that looked out into the Atlantic Ocean, away from the quieter waters of Cape Cod. There was nothing quiet about what she could see out there. The snow was coming down in a steady curtain. The sky had almost no light in it at all. She bit her lip and poked at the diamond barrette she had used to clip back her hair for the afternoon.

“There's going to be trouble getting people out here from the mainland,” she said.

Her mother, sitting on the other side of the room with her legs curled into an overstuffed chair, looked up from her copy of
Vanity Fair
. It was Kendra herself who was on the cover, holding Mr. Snuggles up to her chest and blowing a kiss onto the top of his head.

“They're not going to have trouble,” her mother said. “They're not going to bother. Half your guest list is going to be stranded until the storm is over.”

“If they let themselves be stranded until after the party,
they won't be getting into the house.” Kendra went back to the mirror. Weather was boring. Most things were boring. “Some of them will make it in time, though, just watch. They know I'm keeping a list.”

“You'd really punish people for not making it to a party in the middle of a major snowstorm.”

“I'd punish people for a lot of things. They all know how important this party is to me. I've been planning it for months.”

“You could postpone it, due to weather. People do that kind of thing all the time.”

“I don't. And there's no reason to postpone it. There are plenty of invited people already on the island. It's not like the storm is a surprise, Mother. They've been talking about it on the news for days. If it mattered to you to be here, you'd know that and make your plans accordingly. I can't help it if some people don't find my party very important, but I don't see why I should rearrange my life to make it easier for them.”

“Sometimes I think it's entirely understandable that your grandmother approved of you. Even after you dropped out of high school.”

“Education is for swots,” Kendra said. “And even the most successful swots don't bother with it. Although I've noticed something about success. It comes and goes. I wonder if it always did that.”

Kendra's mother's name was Maverick, which was only one of the things Kendra's grandmother had had against her. By now, she had put down her copy of
Vanity Fair
and was openly staring. Kendra was used to that. Everybody stared at her. Her family had been staring at her since she was in the seventh grade. Kendra stared at herself very hard, trying to look directly into her own eyes, as if by doing that she could see into something that was otherwise always hidden. It never worked. She knew herself well enough to know that everything she was was available on the surface. The mystery people thought they saw in her was actually disbelief. Nobody took her seriously.

“I don't understand your relationships with your friends,”
Maverick said, finally. “That girl who called, what's her name, she's a friend of yours.”

“Which girl who called?”

“The second one.”

“Marcey? She used to be a friend. I don't think she's going to be a friend very much longer. She's going to hell.”

“Yes, I know. I can see that. You drop your friends when they go to hell?”

Kendra bit her lip. “They're not friends like that. They're more like business acquaintances. Do you know what people pay me to come to their parties?”

“To come to their parties? That's it? Not to, oh, I don't know, promote a product, publicize a clothing line—”

“Just to come to their parties,” Kendra said. “Even private parties. They pay me a million dollars. This year, I made almost as much money on my own as I get from the trust fund, and next year I'll make more. That's because I'm the center. I define what it means to be one of the hot people. I can't afford to have Marcey Mandret throwing up on my shoes. Besides, it wasn't actually her who called.”

“Claudine said—”

“She said it was about Marcey, not from her. It was from Stewart Gordon. God, I hate that man. I really hate him. He's so—”

“Intelligent?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“It's true, though, you hate intelligent people.”

“It's not true at all. I find smart people fascinating.”

“There's a big difference between intelligent and smart.”

“Mostly what he is is impossible,” Kendra said. “They hate him too, you know, Marcey and Arrow. There he is every day, telling them how to live their lives, lecturing them when they're just a minute late for a rehearsal or they have trouble memorizing their lines or something. He's impossible. I didn't invite him to the party. I didn't want him around to bring everybody down.”

“But you did invite him to the party,” Maverick said. “I saw the invitation list. What did he do, turn you down?”

“Nobody turns me down.”

“Maybe he's even more intelligent than I thought he was.”

Kendra ignored this. She did not think Stewart Gordon was “intelligent,” and she didn't really “hate” him in the way she usually used that word. He made her uneasy, that was all. She couldn't be around him without starting to squirm, and she didn't know why. She did know she didn't like it. For most of her life, with most people, that would have been enough—except that she'd never had this kind of feeling about anybody else that she could remember. Teachers in school, clergymen at the various churches Maverick had dragged them all through when she was having her spiritual phase, even the bankers and trust lawyers who handled her money, Kendra could take any and all of them in stride. They only thought they knew more than she did. Stewart Gordon just made her want to spit.