Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  “I know it’s my father.” Caroline sounded relieved. “I’d recognize your voice anywhere. Anybody would recognize your voice anywhere. How are you? I was thinking about calling last week, when the news hit the papers here, but Colin said he’d called, and you sounded busy. Are you all right? Are they going to arrest you for murder?”

  “No, they are not going to arrest me for murder,” Stewart said. “And I’m fine. There’s a friend of mine they’re bringing in up here to help with the investigation. It’s not about that, though. That really doesn’t matter. It’s, ah. Well. Do you hear from Andrew?”

  “He’s in the Amazon basin,” Caroline said. “He’ll check in in a day or two and we’ll tell him all about it, but he probably hasn’t heard any news for a week. They’re doing—I don’t know what they’re doing. Some kind of lemur, I think. Is that what you called about? You wanted to find out about Andrew?”

  “No,” Stewart said. He was finding it unbelievably hard to say what he wanted to say. He never found anything hard to say. He was proud of his children, though. Caroline was not only a psychologist but married with a child on the way. Colin was a barrister in a first-rate firm in London. Andrew was a zoologist who studied—well, Stewart wasn’t sure what he studied. Nobody was ever sure with Andrew, but Cambridge had taken him on, and some American foundation kept giving him lots of money to mount expeditions to the Amazon, so Stewart assumed that Andrew was well respected in his field. He found it interesting that none of his children had been interested in being an actor.

  Caroline was getting concerned. “Dad? Are you all right?

  Colin said when he called your house, a woman answered. Is it something about that? I talked to Mum about it. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No,” Stewart said. “No, I don’t mind. And it’s, well, yes, it is in a way about her, but not exactly. I mean, not directly.”

  “So is she somebody important? Is she somebody we should know about? It’s been a while since you’ve hung around with one of those six-foot Amazons with the hot and cold running neuroses.”

  “She’s not six feet tall,” Stewart said. “And she’s not neurotic that I know of. Her name is Annabeth Falmer. Dr. An-nabeth Falmer. She—”

  “The historian,” Caroline said. “Really? This is serious. She’s got to be almost as old as you are.”

  “Caroline,” Stewart said. It wasn’t true that all his girlfriends since his marriage had been six feet tall. It was true that they had all been neurotic. He tried again. “I called because I wanted to know if you resented it. The name. If you wish your mother and I hadn’t changed your name to keep you away from my publicity.”

  There was a short silence on the line. “What an odd thing to say,” Caroline said finally. “Especially after all these years. And no, if you want to know, I didn’t resent it, and I don’t think Colin and Andrew did either. Especially not after you became Commander Rees, and it was all over everywhere. You were. I mean by then we were, what, in our teens? We weren’t stupid. We could read the tabloids. I don’t think any of us was interested in having that kind of publicity in our lives.”

  “Some people like it,” Stewart said. “In Los Angeles, there are some people, girls especially, who, ah—”

  “Who become celebrities by proxy?” Caroline said. “Do you really think I’d want to do that? Or that Colin would? Or Andrew? God, can’t you just imagine Andrew in a tabloid, siccing a python on the photographers?”

  “Yes,” Stewart said. “Well. You were always very sensible children.”

  “We’re not children anymore, Dad. Colin is forty-five.”

  “I know that.” He looked at the pictures on the bed again. Then he gathered them up and put them back in the drawer. Maybe the time had come to keep them out and around and not care if people saw them. There was no chance anymore that any of the three of them would be plagued by schoolyard bullies because he had his picture all over American television.

  He had one of those rare but desperate moments when he wished he still smoked cigarettes. It passed. “I did something stupid,” he said. “Not deliberately, you understand, but it was stupid. And now I’m not entirely sure what to do to make it right.”

  “whatever did you do?”

  “It’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t tell Annabeth about the three of you.”

  “You never tell any of your girlfriends about the three of us. I think the last one I met, I was introduced as your niece. And I was fourteen.”

  “Yes,” Stewart said. “Well.”

  The pause on Caroline’s end of the line was longer this time, and when it was broken it was broken with an explosion of laughter. “Good grief,” she said. “You’re serious. You’re serious this time.”

  “Possibly,” Stewart said.

  “Well, but, how long have you known her? What’s she like? Is she gorgeous—but she couldn’t be as gorgeous as the girlfriends, could she, because she must be in her fifties. Have you asked her to marry you? Are you going to?”

  “I’ve known her for a week,” Stewart said, “and I’m not going to ask her to marry me before I ask her to, ah, yes, that’s none of your business.”

  Caroline was giggling helplessly. Stewart could hear her.

  “It really isn’t that funny, you know. And I have to somehow explain why I didn’t mention the three of you, never mind your mother.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to tell Mum. This is wonderful. And Andrew. He’ll laugh for a week. We’re all grown now, though, so we expect to be invited to the wedding, especially if you’re telling her anyway. And you’d better tell her. If she finds out after you’re married, she’ll have your head, and quite rightly, too.”

  “Caroline,” Stewart said.

  But it was no use. Caroline couldn’t stop laughing, and Stewart couldn’t stop feeling that he had, in his old age, become a figure of fun to his own children.

  2

  For Kendra Rhode, the days since the murder of Mark An-derman had been a raging annoyance, of a kind and duration she hadn’t been required to suffer through since she’d been in high school. Today alone, a day on which nothing much was happening, she had had to take two telephone calls from family lawyers, one from the firm in New York, which was furious at her, and one from the firm in Los Angeles, which was ready to chew her head off. The consensus was complete. Nobody understood what she was still doing on Margaret’s Harbor. She had nothing to hold her there, no obligations she was required to meet, and by staying where she was she was putting herself and possibly other members of the family in jeopardy. Kendra had been told all about the police when she was very young, and about “ordinary people,” who were not so much ordinary as full of resentment against people like the Rhodes.

  “You must never forget,” one of her aunts had told her, at one of those insufferable family “receptions” her father was always making her mother put on, “no member of the public understands who you are, or what you are, or what you’re going through. They think you have an easy life.”

  “Of course we have an easy life,” Kendra’s sister Cordelia had said later, up in her bedroom, where she and Kendra had both gone to hide from the aunts. “What does that woman think? That it isn’t easy not to ever have to worry about paying the bills?”

  Kendra had been about nine at the time, and she had found it difficult to know where her sympathies should lie. She hadn’t much liked that aunt—she didn’t like any of her aunts; her aunts were all “horse people,” which Cordelia said meant they looked like their horses, and sounded like them too—but she hadn’t liked Cordelia, either, and still didn’t. If anything, she found her aunts easier to understand. The ordinary members of the public didn’t know what she was going through. They thought she was brainless and spoiled and shallow, and she was really none of those things. She had emotions like anybody else. Some of them ran very deep. Some of them were painful. She had insecurities. Then there was the simple fact of her career, which had not gotten off the ground, and was having a h
ard time getting, because nobody would take her seriously. When you were born with money, people treated anything you wanted to do as if it were a hobby. You didn’t need the money, so you didn’t need the career. They believed that, and then they laughed at you.

  Cordelia was one of the people who had called over the last few days, and she had not been happy.

  “I don’t know what it is you think you’re doing,” she’d said, her sharp-edged caw bouncing through the ether like a weapon, “but you’re putting yourself in a position to get arrested, whether you had anything to do with the murder or not. You had something to do with him. You know you did. And a piece of utter brainless crap that episode was. I don’t even want to think about.”

  Cordelia was in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford, getting a doctorate in microbiology. It occurred to Kendra that nobody ever failed to take Cordelia’s career seriously. Even their father and the lawyers took it seriously. The people Cordelia worked with sounded like they adored her, on those few occasions when they were required to sound like anything. The occasions were a matter of some animosity between Cordelia and her, because she was always the cause of them.

  “What the hell do you think it makes me look like,” Cordelia would say, “when my dissertation adviser is woken up at four o’clock in the morning so that a reporter can ask him how he thinks Kendra Rhode’s sister is going to respond to her latest arrest for DUI? Or the thing with the underwear, which is, believe me, beyond utter crap.”

  “Crap” was Cordelia’s favorite word, and she used it in every other sentence when she was talking to Kendra. It didn’t help that Cordelia was everything the lawyers and their father wanted a Rhode to be, even more so than their sister Melissandra. Melissandra just did all the things that were expected of her, like graduating from high school, and going on to Mount Holyoke for a couple of years. That wasn’t as good as Cordelia’s Yale, or graduating magna cum laude, or getting a doctorate, but it was something, it showed “seriousness,” as their father always liked to put it. Kendra knew they were all missing something. She was serious. She was deadly serious. She just didn’t see the point of trivialities like diplomas and college degrees, when they didn’t matter to anybody who didn’t need them to get ahead in the first place. Kendra was already ahead, and she had every damned intention of staying that way.

  The call from her father had come in just after she’d managed to get Marcey Mandret out the door, which meant she was already past the point her patience could stand. Marcey Mandret had seemed like a good idea back in California, and Arrow had too, but the longer Kendra had known both of them the more she had realized that there would be no point in keeping them around for the long haul. People said that Kendra Rhode never faced up to her mistakes, but this was not true. She’d been very young when she’d first come out to California, only just eighteen and fresh from one of those East Coast debuts that make the guest of honor feel like she’s about to die of boredom or commit mass murder. She hadn’t understood then that there are different kinds of fame, and that some kinds are better than others. Or rather, she had understood that, but she hadn’t know which was which. Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand had looked, then, like the hottest things out there, the real players in a world where being a player was the only thing that mattered. Now Kendra understood that they were only “pop tarts,” and “pop tarts” were, by definition, ephemeral.

  Besides, they had both been too easy. Arrow had been easier than Marcey, but Marcey was no pillar of integrity and common sense either. If there was one thing Kendra couldn’t stand, it was people who let themselves get plowed under when they didn’t have to. She also thought it was never the case that anyone “had to.”

  The house keeper who came to the door to tell her that her father was on the phone was diffident. Kendra did not have rages at servants, but she did have looks, and most of the people working at the Point were a little afraid of her. This was something Kendra did not notice. She expected people to be afraid of her. That was part of being a Rhode.

  She told the house keeper that she would take the call in her bedroom and went upstairs. She was glad her mother had gone back to New York, or wherever she had gone. Her parents were not on good terms with each other, and her mother wasn’t on good terms with anybody else in the family. Kendra was fairly sure her mother had been a “pop tart” once, but a smart one, the kind who did not let herself get plowed under.

  She let herself into her room and locked the door behind her. She didn’t like being walked in on when she was making a phone call. This did not apply to cell phones, where she was required to talk in public all the time, because people always called her when she was walking to her car or in the middle of a designer boutique.

  She stretched out on her bed and picked up the phone. “I’m here,” she said, and waited to hear the click on the other end of the line. Her father waited to hear it too. There was still no guarantee that one of the servants wasn’t listening in, but you did what you could do, and you suffered through the tell-all memoir later.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  Kendra hated talking on landlines. They always felt to her as if the person she was talking to was much farther away than he would be on a cell. This made no sense, and she knew it, so she let it go. You had to be very careful what you said in public. The media would make you sound like an idiot even if you weren’t one. It was so easy to take a sound bite out of context.

  “Daddy?” she said again.

  “I’ve been talking to Tom Marquand in New York,” Kenneth Rhode said. “He says you’re refusing to leave the Point?”

  “I’m not refusing to leave it,” Kendra said. “I’m just not leaving it at the moment. I will in a couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks could be too late. You know, nobody is trying to scare you here. We’re being absolutely honest with you. Local prosecutors have reputations to make, and prosecuting a Rhode for murder would make a reputation.”

  “They’re not going to prosecute me for murder,” Kendra said. “They’ve got Arrow in jail. I asked Tom about it and he said it really was odd that she was still in there. He said any decent lawyer could have gotten her bail in a couple of hours. He said—”

  “I know what he said. He said it to me, too. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re sitting there in the middle of everything, reminding people that you’re a part of that mess. That’s what I don’t like. Granted, given the way you live, you can’t seem to stop reminding people that you exist, although that would be the better course of action. Go out to Hawaii and stay at the place there. It’s the most secure one we’ve got; we can keep the reporters away indefnitely. Drop out of sight for a while and let events take their course.”

  “I don’t want to drop out of sight for a while,” Kendra said. “I don’t want to drop out of sight at all. I know you’re not interested in taking me seriously, Daddy, but I really do want a career. A real career. And dropping out of sight won’t get me that.”

  “No,” Kenneth said. Kendra made a face. She could practically see him rolling his eyes. “If you can’t drop out of sight, and I admit I didn’t expect you to, the least you could do is change the context. You’re just sitting out there, right where that man was killed, and people not only notice you, they put two and two together. Pack up your stuff and go back to California. Get your picture taken at clubs. Do whatever it is you have to do so that people will stop connecting you to—”

  “They don’t connect me to it, Daddy,” Kendra said. “They don’t even connect me to Arrow anymore. They know we had a falling-out, weeks ago. It was in all the papers, and on MTV.”

  “The district attorney may not read those particular pa-pers,” Kenneth said. “And I’ll bet you anything she doesn’t watch MTV. If you keep this up, I’m going to order the Point closed so that you have to get out of there.”

  “If you do that, I’ll move into the Oscartown Inn, or rent a house. Or move in with Marcey. There’s always going to be something I c
an do. I’m not going to leave here until the movie is finished filming.”

  “Why? You’re not in the movie.”

  “I’ve been in movies,” Kendra said.

  “You’ve been in two,” Kenneth said. “In one you had one line, in the other you had none. Oh, and that doesn’t count the tape, which—”

  “Which was not my fault,” Kendra said, “and you know it. That was a private tape, it was just between the two of us—”

  “Well, it’s not between the two of you anymore,” Kenneth said. “And how you failed to anticipate that would happen is beyond me. What was that guy anyway? He makes sex tapes. He calls them something else, but that’s what he does. Your tape was just a little harder core than his usual. You’re not in this movie. There’s no reason why you should hang around a murder scene until the movie is finished shooting, which I understand is a bit iffy anyway. With Arrow Normand in jail, they’re going to have a hard time getting it into the can.”

  Kendra hated it when her father tried to use media slang. He got it wrong. He always got it wrong. She looked down at her bare feet. She had had little American flags painted on her toenails, she couldn’t remember why. American flags were for the Fourth of July. Usually, she was very careful about these things.

  “If you close the Point, I’ll move into town,” she said again, because the easiest way out of any conversation with her father was to repeat things until he couldn’t stand to hear them anymore. “And I have to go. I’ve got things I’ve got to do.”

  “What things?”

  “Things,” Kendra said.

  Then she put the phone back on the receiver and lay back across the bed, staring at the underside of her canopy. When she was growing up, all the girls at school had had canopies on their beds, and one or two of them had had bed curtains. Kendra hadn’t understood the idea of bed curtains at all. You closed them and then you were in a small space with no air where nobody could see you. Why was that supposed to be a good idea? Kendra had had the same problem with English literature, and biology, and especially mathematics. She hadn’t understood why anybody would want to know anything about them, never mind why she should be required to. She still didn’t understand why most people wanted the things they wanted, unless they were also the things she wanted.