by Jane Haddam
“Sooner rather than later,” Stewart said, “which means it makes even more sense for her to be in her own house instead of here. She’s got at least some security in that place.”
“She’s also alone. She said she always used to have people with her, but Carl Frank made them leave.”
“They all travel with huge groups of people,” Stewart said. “Paid friendship, if you ask me. Anyway, the huge groups of people don’t usually come to work with them, and Carl Frank had had enough of the schedule going to hell, so he packed them all home. I live alone. You don’t worry about something happening to me.”
“Of course I worry about that. But you can take care of yourself. You’d probably do pretty well in hand-to-hand combat. She seems a lot more vulnerable.”
“I can take care of myself,” Stewart said. “But right now, there’s something I want to talk to you about, so if she’s asleep, that’s all well and good.”
There was a sound from the living room, and Stewart realized that what he was hearing was Marcey Mandret, moving around. The disc had finished playing. He heard clicks and whirrs and then the sound of another disc, still The Well-Tempered Clavier, starting up.
“Well,” Annabeth said. “She must be awake. I’ve got those Moravian spice cookies you like over there in that tin. Let’s bring them into the living room and relax.”
“Let’s not go into the living room just yet,” Stewart said. “There really is something I want to talk to you about.”
Annabeth turned to look at him, quizzical. “You aren’t going to confess to a murder, are you? Because I did think about you and Kendra Rhode, and you didn’t seem to have time. Or maybe I’m wrong. About the time.”
“I don’t know,” Stewart said. He reminded himself that, for all her perfections, she was still an American. Then he admitted to himself that he often rather liked Americans. Next to the Brits he was used to dealing with at home, they had a terrific work ethic.
“Listen,” he said. “I was thinking. In spite of all this mess, the filming can’t go on here longer than another two to three weeks. After that, I’ve got three months before I start another project. I think we should go to Australia together.”
“What?”
“Australia,” Stewart said. “You know. We’ve talked about Australia. You said you’d like to see it.”
“I would like to see it.”
“So,” Stewart said, “we should go together, and on the way, we should stop in London and get married.”
“Married,” Annabeth said.
“I know it’s a little quick,” Stewart said, “but we’re neither one of us teenagers, and we both have children who probably don’t want to see their parents jetting off all over the world with a paramour. Or, you know what I mean. My children are all in and around London—well, except for Andrew, who’s in the Amazon, but that’s a long story. We’ll get him out of there long enough to attend the wedding—and we can fly your boys in, and then we can take off and call Australia our honeymoon. Go see the fairy penguins. That kind of thing.”
“Married,” Annabeth said again.
Stewart had a sudden feeling that this was not going well. He didn’t think he could have been that far off in judging the emotional climate between them. Why wasn’t it going well? He was beginning to feel a little panicked.
“When I’m not filming,” he plowed on, “we could travel wherever you liked. We could go to Rome. We could travel across the United States and see the places you want to write about. We could go to China.”
Annabeth had stopped making tea. She had the hot water half poured into a yellow and white polka-dot teapot, and she was still standing next to it, holding the kettle in the air, staring at him. Stewart had begun to feel like Jack the Ripper.
“Or not,” he said, in a last desperate bid to get a response out of her. “If you don’t like traveling, we could stay home. In Scotland, if you wanted. Or in Los Angeles. Or London. Or even, ah, here.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marcey Mandret said. “You’ve got to go down on your knees or have a ring or some flowers or do something romantic. Don’t you know anything about anything?”
Stewart turned, feeling his face go brick red in a way he hadn’t since he was a third-former caught with a copy of a girlie mag in his Latin workbook. He was only somewhat mollified by finding that Marcey was not in her usual strappy little dress, but wearing sweats that covered everything as thoroughly as a burka. She was not, however, making fun of him. She was deadly serious.
“If you’re going to get her to marry you,” she said, “you’ve got to do something romantic. You’ve got to treat her like she’s worth doing something romantic for.”
This seemed to do something to Annabeth, who until then had been frozen in place. She looked at the kettle she was holding and then at the teapot. She poured more water into the teapot until it was full. She put the kettle back on the stove. She bit her lip. Stewart had the terrible premonition that she was about to give him one of those lectures about how they would always be friends.
Instead, she said, “It’s all right, I think. I don’t need anything romantic, at least not right now. I’ll marry you.”
“Don’t do it,” Marcey Mandret said. “Not till he at least comes across with flowers. If you don’t insist, he’ll just go on forgetting to do anything romantic for the next fifty years.”
“We don’t have the next fifty years,” Stewart Gordon said.
“Make him get you flowers,” Marcey said again. “Do it.”
Annabeth put the top back onto the teapot and brought the teapot over to the kitchen table. She put it down and then sat down in front of it. The cat was there, waiting, the way it always was. Stewart didn’t understand what it was about cats.
“We can take the cat,” he said. “We can even take him to Australia if you want to. I don’t mean to separate you from the cat.”
“Okay,” Marcey Mandret said. “You can go back to saying yes. He’s lost it.”
2
There were times when Carl Frank honestly thought that the majority of human beings should be prevented by law from viewing any kind of popular entertainment. Viewing it, or reading it—in Carl Frank’s world, books were not thoughtful histories of America’s role in the post–World War II reconstruction of Europe or insightful analyses of the iconographic elements in Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin. Books were like movies, and like television, and all three were engaged in an orgy of conspiracy theories and simple hyperbole that left nothing of reality untouched. Look at it, Carl thought, climbing carefully along the boardwalk as it started to get rocky and badly cared for. Look at the people, the otherwise sensible people, who believed that Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal led by Lyndon Johnson or that the Twin Towers came down on September 11 because George W. Bush had the CIA blow them up. Reality wasn’t good enough for them anymore. The messy, stupid pointlessness of it didn’t ring true. Maybe that part predated popular entertainment. It seemed to him that people had always preferred conspiracy theories to reality. That was why religions were so popular. No, it isn’t a matter of chance and circumstance that you’re here on this earth, or that your five-year-old child died of leukemia, or that you lost your job when the plant moved manufacturing operations to Taiwan. No, it isn’t chance and circumstance at all, it’s a plan, a vast cosmic plan, and you’re a very important part of it.
The boardwalk here was really awful. It was true in Oscartown as it was true everywhere else that the rich got better treatment than the poor, even when it came to public services. Someone ought to come out here and do a good job of snow removal and then sand and paint the thing, and replace the rotten boards. He thought about Gregor Demarkian, and his head hurt. Did a man like that, a man who had worked with presidents, who had headed up one of the most important sections of one of the most important law enforcement bodies in the world, did that man really think that movie producers sent henchmen around to murder prop boys and second assistant grips w
hen they got in the way of finishing a motion picture? What about a bad motion picture? There was a story about G. Gordon Liddy that Carl had heard just after he left college. He had no idea if it was true, but it was a perfect illustration of what was wrong with everything and everybody these days. The story went like this: In the last days before the Watergate mess had unraveled, when the break-in was still secret but didn’t look as if it would be for long, Liddy had shown up at the White House and asked to talk to Halderman and Erlichman. “All right,” he was supposed to have said, “I know how this works, and I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll be on the corner of K Street and Connecticut at twenty minutes after midnight tonight, and I won’t do a thing to stop you from taking me out.”
Carl remembered hearing that story the first time and thinking how funny it was, thinking that it summed up Lid-dy’s goofiness even if it wasn’t true. Life was just not like that, and sane people knew it, but nobody seemed to be sane anymore. Why ever would someone like Michael Bardman, who could eat the cost of a failed minor movie out of his own checking account, bother to pay somebody to murder somebody like Mark Anderman? You could say anything you wanted about Michael Bardman—and Carl had said a lot of it; in some ways, the man was a loon—but he was the most important producer in the history of movies, and not just movies in Hollywood. He was practically a force of nature. It wouldn’t hurt Michael Bardman’s career if Arrow Normand went down in flames, or even if the movie did.There was a difference between not wanting a failure and needing not to have one.
The boardwalk had come to an end. Carl looked up and around himself. He was in an area of small, low houses, the kind that looked, from the road, as if they were too low to stand up in. Here and there he saw a pickup truck parked in a drive next to one. He couldn’t see any proper garages. There was a lot of snow, and a lot of what seemed to be random items piled up on porches that didn’t look long for this world. People fished here, not for relaxation, but for money. People chopped cordwood and cleared other people’s driveways and mowed lawns when the fishing wasn’t good. People used whitewash instead of paint. Carl could remember houses like this. They existed on the edges of every small town in rural America, existed and not much more. He found the sign that said Bellwether Road and counted down from it until he reached number 6. The ocean was here, right here. It came right up to the back doors of half these places, and yet none of them would ever be described as “waterfront property” in any real estate brochure. It was funny how that worked.
He stepped off the boardwalk onto Bellwether Road and was very careful of his shoes, which were not made for wading through the snow. People like Michael Bardman had a certain amount of responsibility for the way everybody was acting these days. They made the movies that used conspiracy theories as their foundations: the ones where the crop circles really were made by mysterious aliens; the ones where Kennedy really was killed by Lyndon Johnson’s undercover dirty-tricks operators; the ones where everything you see and everything you know and everything you do is just code for something else, something darker, something more sinister, something secret. Maybe it had always been like this in one way or another, although he doubted it. He was fairly sure that, at least for his parents’ generation, there had been times when most people would have rejected this kind of thinking in favor of living in the mundane day to day. Entertainment had simply become so big a part of everything, so integral a part of everybody’s day-to-day lives, that nothing else felt real anymore. Carl’s professors in college would have called it the “narrative instinct,” although Carl didn’t think it was an instinct. Lately, though, he’d understood what they’d meant better than he had when he’d first heard them. Human beings were narrative animals. They liked stories. Their brains were hardwired to think in stories. Nothing sounded true to them if it didn’t fit into a story. The Michael Bardmans of the world made it possible for people to live in stories, all day, all night, all of their lives. It took training and practice to learn to think logically. Nobody who spent his life at the movies was ever going to get that far.
“Then we turned the entire country into a high school,” Carl said out loud, “and nominated our own popular crowd.”
He felt better after he’d heard the sound of his own voice. He wished there was somebody around here, even though it meant he would have to be more careful doing what he had to do. It was true, what he’d said, about high school. First they made the stories the most important things, and then they made the people who acted out the stories the most important things, because those people would have to be. The paparazzi didn’t chase Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret because they were idiots or because the editors of the tabloids were terrible human beings or even because the public was stupid. The paparazzi chased and the editors published and the public paid attention because these were the people who defined the stories that defined their lives. And defined was the right word, Carl thought, picking his way carefully over a little mound of snow and ice that cut across the road with no way to go around it. Stories were how people defined themselves as well as each other and the world they lived in. Identity was a story. In very traditional societies, the stories were myths and legends. In very religious societies, the stories were religious ones. In this society, the stories were at the movies, and on television, and in music videos, and without those stories the whole damned thing would fall apart. He’d spent a lot of his time in college rolling his eyes,wondering how anybody could spend his time worrying about this kind of bullshit, but now he saw that it wasn’t bullshit at all. It was the most important thing. “Identity narratives,” his professors had called them, and that was what he had spent his life doing. He had spent his life in the care and maintenance of the only identity narratives most Americans would ever know.
“Probably most people in the world,” he said, aloud again. His voice echoed slightly, and the street felt uncomfortably still. Here was a narrative for you: a man alone on a strangely deserted street, where things seem to be moving just out of sight, in the shadows, a man destined to meet evil face-toface before he even knows what hits him. It was not a terribly inventive narrative. Some version of it had probably existed forever, since long before human beings knew how to write things down. Maybe all narratives had existed forever. That was why people couldn’t walk through cemeteries without getting the creeps, and couldn’t stay long in an empty house without putting on some music or the tele vision. Maybe all narratives started in raw emotion, the kind of raw emotion people were helpless to control. Maybe they started in the conviction that being alone was so awful a thing, it was better to deny that it could ever be true.
He found the mailbox that said “Bullard” and looked up and down the street again. He might as well not have bothered. There was nobody here. He wondered where all the people were. They couldn’t be off on vacation, or at jobs in Boston. In either case, their houses would be better than these were. Besides, it was obvious that the houses on this street were not shut up for the winter. He looked around yet again. Maybe there were people here, but out of sight, behind curtains, lurking at windows. If anyone was here, he would know that Carl Frank did not belong, that he had no right to be trying the door at one of these houses. Would it matter? There was only the one town policeman. The state police had other things on their minds.
Carl walked up onto the front porch. It was a wide front porch, but the wood was old. Something would have to be done about the porch floor soon or Jack Bullard would find himself falling through it. There were planters hanging from hooks in the porch ceiling. The plants inside them were dead. There was an old glider up against the porch wall just outside a row of small windows. The glider was broken, and the fabric that had been used to cushion it was torn.
“He doesn’t take care of his place,” Carl said, out loud again, because he really couldn’t help it. He tried the door and found it locked, but not locked in any serious way. He jiggled the handle a couple of times and felt the door rattle in its frame. He gave it one
good push with the side of his hip and it popped. He wondered if there was a problem with theft in this neighborhood. Idiotic as it had always seemed to him, theft was a big problem in poor neighborhoods. There were thieves—apparently, thieves who couldn’t count—who preferred to steal from poor people rather than rich ones. Maybe it was laziness. Maybe poor people’s houses were just easier to break into than rich people’s houses. Maybe fewer people cared.
He stepped into the living room and looked around. The house was full of stuff. There were things piled everywhere, not important, not expensive, but plentiful, as if Jack Bullard spent money for the sake of spending money. Maybe he did. Carl knew very little about him, except that he wanted to be a celebrity photographer and he’d spent a lot of time following Kendra Rhode and Arrow Normand around. Well, a lot of people did that. That wasn’t unusual.
He picked his way through the old furniture and the boxes full of things that had never been used and made his way into the kitchen. The kitchen looked much more lived in than the living room did. It was obvious that somebody had been using the stove. There was a coffee cup on the round kitchen table, still half filled with coffee. If this had been summer instead of winter, the coffee would have gone to mold.
Carl turned around, and looked, really looked. There were cabinets, but the ones that were open seemed to be half empty. There was a sink full of dishes. They may have lain there, dirty, for weeks. There was the stove and the refrigerator and the sink. He opened the refrigerator and then the freezer. That was an old writer’s trick, from the days before digital, when a single manuscript copy might be all you had. You put it in the refrigerator when you weren’t working on it, because that would save it if the house burned down. There was nothing in the refrigerator but old food, almost all of it rotting and gone to mold.
Carl went to the line of cabinets and opened one. There were a couple of plates, a couple of coffee mugs of the same kind as the one on the table, a couple of small bowls. He opened the next one and found what had to be two dozen boxes of family-size beef Rice-A-Roni. He went to the next one and hit pay dirt: regular folders, accordion folders, loose photographs, documents held together by paper clips. There would be order to this mess that Jack Bullard would understand without thinking about it, but for Carl it was just a mess, and it would stay that way. He took out the three largest accordion folders and dumped them onto the kitchen table.