by Jane Haddam
Jack Bullard had big hands, too. He finished with the cream and sugar and pushed them away. Then he shrugged the parka all the way off.
“So,” he said.
“So,” Carl said.
“Here’s the thing,” Jack said. “I’m a reporter. I may be a reporter for a little pissant paper, but I’m still a reporter. I don’t get paid to withhold information.”
“I understand that,” Carl said. “I don’t want you to withhold information. I thought you said it was your editor who doesn’t want you to print any stories about the case.”
“Oh, we’re printing stuff about the case,” Jack said. “You can’t avoid it, really, it’s the biggest thing to hit the Harbor in decades. She doesn’t like printing stories on movie stars.”
“Unusual, in this day and age.”
“Yeah, well. It’s the Harbor. The people here aren’t much interested, if you know what I mean. The people who are usually here. But anything she doesn’t want to print, I’m allowed to sell elsewhere. So.”
“So.” Carl looked out the window again. When he looked back, he had made up his mind for the first time since this mess had started. “I’m not asking you to withhold information. You can sell anything you’ve got to anybody you’ve got. All I’m asking is that you tell me first.”
“And for that you’re willing to pay me some ridiculous amount of money a week.”
“A thousand dollars.”
“A thousand dollars,” Jack said. “It’s a ridiculous amount of money. If you don’t want me to withhold information, what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me before you give the information to the world so I can get a head start on spinning it. It’s what I do, Mr. Bullard. I spin. That’s what they pay me for.”
“I don’t see that there’s much of anything to spin here,” Jack said. “She shot him. They’ve arrested her. There’s going to be a trial. Isn’t that what usually happens?”
“Absolutely. That’s what usually happens. But it occurs to me you might have heard something, or seen something, on the day in question, or since the filming has been going on here. Something somebody said, or did, or something like that. Your editor may not like to run stories about movie stars, but you’ve been taking pictures of them. I’ve seen you.”
“It’s like I said,” Jack said. “She lets me sell what she doesn’t want. I offered to cut her in on it, but she doesn’t want the money.”
“She’s an interesting woman, your editor.”
“She owns the paper,” Jack said. “She’s okay.”
“One of the things you could do is let me see the pictures,” Carl said. “Before you sell them, I mean.”
“I don’t take the really nasty kinds of pictures,” Jack said. “I don’t have pictures of people naked, or that kind of thing.”
“You’ve got a picture of Marcey Mandret on the day of the murder, don’t you? In that bar, fairly drunk off her ass.”
“Sure. But I wasn’t the only one. Those guys from New York and Los Angeles have been in and out for weeks. And I didn’t take the kind of picture you have to fuzz parts out of before you print.”
“Understood,” Carl said. “But you’ve got others, don’t you? You went to Vegas?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I got that one picture, you know, of the bunch of them together, but I sold it, and that was that. It’s one of those places, you know. I don’t have any advantage there. I don’t know the place, or how it works. Here, I can find things nobody else can because I know things nobody else knows. At least, nobody from outside. With that one, I got a shot and that was all there was to it. They ran around town, they did things, and mostly I could never get there in time to get anything interesting. And there were always those other guys.”
“Photographers.”
“Paparazzi,” Jack said. “I hate that name.”
“Yes,” Carl said.
Then he reached into the back of his pants and came out with his wallet.
2
Here was the odd thing: Arrow Normand didn’t really mind being in jail. She minded not having access to her prescriptions, and not being able to get anything to drink more serious than Diet Coke, but jail itself was something she found it surprisingly easy to take. It might have been different if she had been in an actual prison, or in one of those big-city jails where she would have been locked up with a couple of dozen people. The Margaret’s Harbor jail was not like any of that. There were only three serious cells, and neither of the other two was occupied. The police here didn’t seem to have watched any of the shows on Court TV about life behind bars. She was never handcuffed, and the night guard had gotten so embarrassed by coming in on her at a private moment that he’d brought her a standing screen to shield herself when she was on the toilet. It was less like jail than like being involuntarily committed to rehab. She even had a pack of lawyers to talk to if she needed therapy.
Actually, Arrow had tried rehab once, years ago, and it hadn’t worked out. They kept wanting her to talk about herself, which was fine—she’d probably spent more time talking about herself in the last ten years than she’d spent talking about anything else—but the things they wanted her to say didn’t make any sense to her. She was supposed to have “insight.” She didn’t know what that meant. When other people in group had “insight,” they talked about Their Addiction and Their Cycle of Codependency. Or something. Arrow had never been able to figure it all out. In the end, she had just let herself drift through a couple of weeks of beautiful sunsets and group meals in the big cafeteria that seemed to serve nothing but seafood and fruit, and then one morning she’d woken up and decided to leave. People said they were changed in rehab, but Arrow had not been. She still wasn’t able to see the point.
You were supposed to talk about the really important things, she thought now, but she brushed that away. Jail made her calm, and part of the reason it made her calm was that she never had to face the public. Photographers were not allowed in this place. Neither were reporters, although she could talk to one of them if she wanted to meet him in the visitors’ area. She could also get visits from friends, and for the first day or two she had expected those. Every time the door at the end of the hall had opened up, she’d been sure it was because Kendra was waiting in the visiting area, or Marcey was, or… She couldn’t think of who else would come. Her mother might, although she barely spoke to her mother anymore. Her father might come, but she didn’t “barely” speak to him, she didn’t speak to him at all. Her brothers might come, and probably would, because they were still hoping she would set them up with something they’d like better than the jobs they had at home.
The more she thought about it, the more Arrow realized that she had nobody in her life who would like her no matter what. Even Mark wouldn’t have liked her no matter what. If she’d suddenly been poor or not famous anymore, he would have gone off in search of somebody who was rich and in the public eye, and if he couldn’t find that he would find a girlfriend who could help him pay his rent. Stewart Gordon had told her once that she would be better off, and understand more about life, if she read books, but Arrow did read books. She read Nora Roberts, and some other people whose names she couldn’t remember—not crime or horror, because it bothered her, but stories about love, and about what love was. Love in the real world, though, was nothing like love in books. Men were not strong and protective. They weren’t even dedicated and faithful. Love in the real world was like buying a CD, or even clothes. You got what you paid for. When you were sick of it, you lost it in the house and never found it again.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and cold. There was a television at the end of the corridor, but she didn’t like to listen to it. All the news seemed to be about her, even on the music channels. Love in the real world wasn’t like love in music, either. In music, two people were compelled to have each other. They couldn’t stop touching each other. They couldn’t leave each other alone. Everything was obsession, and if you were
in love you couldn’t concentrate on anything else, like making dinner, or going to the movies. In real life, nobody was obsessed with another person unless he was a stalker, and the stalkers were all bad. Lots of them were armed.
Arrow was lying on the cot with the blankets pulled up over her. It was one of the things she missed, the good cotton sheets she had on her bed back home, and the mattress that she could sink into. Still, this was what she liked doing best. She could let herself go half to sleep, not really out of it, but not really here, either. She could remember things or not, as she wanted to. She thought about things that didn’t bother her, or that did, but not in the wrong way. She thought about Stewart Gordon, who actually had come to visit her, twice, and brought oranges and chocolate bars both times. She thought about that woman whose house she had fallen into on the night… the night… she didn’t have to give the night a name. The woman made her uneasy in the same way Stewart Gordon did, but she didn’t know what way that was, so there was no use trying to understand it. Instead, she just remembered the house, and all the bookshelves, and all the books. There were books everywhere, and when there was music on it was classical, which Arrow didn’t understand either. It didn’t make sense to her that people should be different from one another. Some differences made sense—men and women were different, for instance—but others made no sense. It seemed to Arrow that things should be either Good or Bad, and not just Good or Bad for her and maybe different for somebody else. Or something. She got confused. Classical music was boring, and people didn’t like it, except that that woman did, and maybe Stewart Gordon did, too. There were museums full of paintings that people went to see, and bookstores full of books, and none of it made any sense at all. Maybe it made sense when you got older.
The trick was this, very simply: she could not allow herself to talk to anybody about anything, not even her lawyers. She could smile and hesitate and make out that she didn’t really know what had happened. It even helped that that was about half true. She couldn’t tell them anything else, because if she did… if she did…
Nothing would connect anymore. Nothing. The night of the accident, with Mark’s truck falling down the hill or whatever it was. The ocean. The woman with her books and her tea. The Other Thing. The music. The movie. The cats. The woman had a cat. Stewart Gordon had a cat. In ancient Egypt, cats were sacred. If she was ever reincarnated, she wanted to come back as a cat. She didn’t know where Egypt was, exactly. She thought it must be in Europe somewhere, because everything that was really old seemed to be.
Down at the other end of the hall, the afternoon guard was playing solitaire on her computer and talking on her cell phone. Arrow’s cell had a window, with steel mesh in it to keep prisoners from escaping. Since Arrow didn’t want to escape, she didn’t mind. She could see through the window to a patch of sky, which was bright blue and brightly lit. It was a beautiful cold day. One of these days, somebody would come and get her out and she would have to do something about things, but that day wasn’t now, and she was glad it wasn’t.
If she could make herself sleep for the next six months, she could avoid this whole mess altogether. Somebody would sort it out without her, and she wouldn’t have to answer questions about anything at all.
3
For Jack Bullard, most of the island of Margaret’s Harbor was off-limits in his spare time. He suspected that it was off-limits for most of the other year-round people, too, and for the same reason. There was too much of the island where he didn’t feel he fit. In season, that meant that all the places were filled with people who talked in a way, and dressed in a way, and moved in a way that made him feel like a big ox with bad manners. Off season, the effect was a little more subtle, and a little less sane. It was as if they’d left the smell of themselves around, the summer people had. It was like they were cats marking territory, and this particular terri-tory would be forever theirs.
Standing outside on the short stretch of pavement in front of the Oscartown Inn, Jack looked at the vans lining the other side of the street and reminded himself that this off-season, the cats’ territory had been violated. There were other cats in town now, and they were nothing like the pedigreed ones that usually occupied this place. Then the metaphorseemed so trite, and so corny, that Jack felt ashamed of himself. What did it mean that you couldn’t find good words to explain what you were living through?
He went down the street, looking in the windows of stores. The media people left him alone, some because they’d met him, others because he had his cameras around his neck, which marked him out as somebody not likely to be of interest. A lot of the stores were closed for the winter. Nobody who lived on the island was going to be interested in eight-hundred-dollar handbags or slinky little summer dresses at six hundred dollars a pop, and the women who owned those stores spent the winter in Palm Beach, where they had branches. The bookstore was still open, although Jack had heard the two women who owned that one complaining. It seemed that they’d expected that a raft of people from Los Angeles would mean a raft of customers for books, but maybe nobody in Los Angeles read books. At any rate, they weren’t doing any business.
He got to Cuddy’s Bar and stopped. There was a real bar in Oscartown, down near the ferry, but he didn’t want to walk all the way over there. Cuddy’s was always full of photographers these days. It had been even before the murder. Now there was something like a permanent contingent. Jack remembered coming here as a teenager, and coming in the summer, too, wanting to be around all that, wanting to be part of it. He thought most of the kids who were local here went through a phase like that. He’d been in this place a lot more often this year than he’d been in it anytime since.
He went inside and looked around. The bar was nearly deserted. The tables were nearly deserted too. He put his hand up to the chest of his jacket and felt the little wad of Carl Frank’s money where it bulged. He’d been afraid to put it in his wallet. A thousand dollars. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a thousand dollars in cash, although he had more than that in his account these days. He sat down at the bar and asked for a Molson. Then he waited.
It took almost three-quarters of an hour, but she showed up, just as Jack had expected she would. She was not in good shape when she came through the door, but she was in more clothes that he was used to seeing her in. Maybe murder, or the avalanche of bad publicity that had resulted from the murder, had wised her up. whatever it was, she was wearing jeans and a big bulky parka. She even had snow boots on instead of heels. Jack watched her stride down the center of the room and take one of the small tables against the wall.
Jack got up, took his beer, and walked over. Marcey Man-dret unzipped her parka and shrugged it off. Underneath, she was wearing one of those skimpy little halter tops that didn’t permit a bra and didn’t cover her belly button. Jack put his beer down on the table and sighed.
“Go away,” Marcey said. “I’m not talking to you. None of us is talking to you. This is all your fault.”
“What’s all my fault? That Mark Anderman is dead?”
“You know what I mean. Get out of here.”
“I think you ought to put up with me for a minute. I just had a very interesting meeting with Carl Frank.”
Marcey sat down in the chair on her side of the table, hard. She had already been drinking, but this was not unusual. In Jack’s experience, Marcey drank most of the day, although she usually didn’t start hammering it home until after five. He sat down himself and signaled to a waitress who was clearly trying to ignore them. It was Mitsy Kline, who was somebody he had known vaguely in high school.
In high school, there had been two distinct groups of people: the ones who were on their way out; and the ones who would be here forever, doing jobs like Mitsy’s. Jack had been part of the group that were on their way out.
Mitsy came over. Marcey looked up and said, “I want a champagne cocktail.”
Mitsy made a face and went away.
“You could say please,” Jack said. “I
t wouldn’t kill you. And people around here expect things like that.”
“I don’t care what people around here expect. I don’t care about anything. God, I hate this place. I don’t know why I ever agreed to come up here.”
“You agreed because you needed the work. It was the only movie you’d been offered for two years.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not being an ass,” Jack said. “I only know what I read in the newspapers. Especially lately. I’m a photographer, for God’s sake. I sold a picture. That’s what I do. And what else was I supposed to do, under the circumstances? Just get up and disappear, like Steve?”
“Steve didn’t disappear,” Marcey said. “He—”
“I know what happened to Steve,” Jack said, “but you can’t do things like that and expect to get away with them. People will notice, eventually. People have noticed.”
“They wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for you,” Marcey said. “And what’s that supposed to be? We all trusted you. We did. We all trusted you and then you went off and did the one thing that—”
Mitsy Kline was back. She had a single champagne cocktail in the middle of her tray, and her face looked as stiff as cardboard.
“I want three more of those,” Marcey said. “Right now. I want to line them up on the table.”
“Of course,” Mitsy said.
Jack looked at Marcey. She hadn’t noticed anything, and her face was blurred. It didn’t seem possible for a face to be blurred, but Marcey’s was. Here was one of the differences between Marcey and Kendra Rhode, between all those people and Kendra Rhode. Unlike Kendra, their faces lacked definition. Jack took a deep breath.
“It’s not the only picture,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not the only picture. Not the only one I took on the Vegas trip. In fact, I took a lot of pictures on the Vegas trip. In a lot of places. And before you give me another lecture about how I betrayed all of you, I haven’t sold any but the one you’re all pissed about, and some of the others are a lot more interesting.”