by Jane Haddam
“Watch out,” Calvin Baird said again.
Tony put the cup back in the plastic holder it had come out of and stepped back, grinning. Gregor had a sudden vision of him as a child, high in a tree and threatening to dive off, half-convinced he could really fly. Of course, the inevitable would have happened then, just as it happened now. It didn’t even constitute a crisis. The Pilgrimage Green swung around just another fraction of an arc. The ocean opened up ahead of them, untamed and unlimited. Tony Baird stretched his arms, shuddered, looked surprised, and hopped. A second later, his legs were bumping against the low side of the boat and buckling beneath him.
“Damn,” he said, as he proceeded to go over.
“Damn yourself,” Jon Baird laughed after him. “Watch your head. We don’t want you to drown.”
“He is going to drown,” Fritzie Baird said, almost squealing. “He is, he is. Do something about it.”
“For God’s sake, Fritzie,” Calvin Baird said, “the boy swims better than Mark Spitz.”
Then there was a secondary splash, caused by only God knew what, and Fritzie Baird started screaming.
3
Ten minutes later, it was all over except for Fritzie’s hysterics. Since no one was paying attention to Fritzie, Gregor assumed that hysterics were something she engaged in often. Swimming was something Tony Baird obviously engaged in often. Gregor didn’t think he was really better than Mark Spitz, but he was good, and he kept his head. When he got back on board they could see he’d chucked the heavy boots he’d been wearing so he wouldn’t be dragged down. Gregor had no doubt he would have chucked his sweater and his turtleneck if he’d been stuck in the water long enough to make it necessary. This was definitely a young man who could think.
“Damn boots cost me three hundred dollars,” Tony said to his father, holding up his sock feet. “Eddie Bauer. I hope you’re ready to replace them.”
“Of course I’m ready to replace them,” Jon Baird said. “Go get out of those clothes. You’re going to get hypothermia.”
“Go calm down your mother,” Sheila Baird said. “Now I know what people mean when they talk about a high-pitched whine.”
“Don’t get started,” Calvin Baird said. “That’s all we need on this trip, the wives quarreling.”
In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, the only way Calvin could have escaped the wives quarreling was to be on some other boat—but this was so obvious, it hardly needed expressing. Instead, he bent even closer to Bennis’s ear and began to whisper again.
“Did you notice anything funny?” he asked her.
Bennis shot him a look that clearly said she’d noticed a host of things funny. Everything on this boat was funny. Then she went back to watching Tony Baird, who was methodically stripping to the waist and throwing his water-sogged clothes in a heap at his feet. Gregor felt himself wince slightly and then shook it off. Tony Baird was definitely a very good-looking young man and right up Bennis’s alley in the psychological department. Bennis had always liked men who could have conceivably starred in a movie version of “Leader of the Pack.” Tony Baird was also at least ten years younger than Bennis, and Bennis had never had any use for younger men. At least, Gregor didn’t think she had. Gregor put it all firmly out of his mind and said, “Were you watching him when he went over?”
“I was watching that woman you were talking to with the blond hair,” Bennis told him. “How much you want to bet that she’s pregnant.”
“She’s seasick.”
“That explains the green. It doesn’t explain the waist.”
“I was looking straight at Tony Baird,” Gregor said. “Do you know what I saw?”
“No.”
“He was leaning forward, not backward. He was leaning in toward the table, not out toward the sea.”
Bennis looked at him curiously. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Are you saying he should have fallen forward instead of back?”
“If he had fallen, he would have fallen forward instead of back.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Gregor sighed. “That’s supposed to mean,” he said, “that I not only saw him fall, I also saw Jon Baird push him. Good Lord, Bennis, it wasn’t even subtle. He might as well have picked the boy up at the knees and pitched him overboard.”
Six
1
FRITZIE DERWENT BAIRD HAD been brought up to preside at parties with organization. Her own coming-out party had featured not only a receiving line but three different bands playing three different kinds of music in three different places on her parents’ broad property in Radnor, a fully equipped diner serving hot dogs and hamburgers and cotton candy to anyone who asked, and a session of water games held at midnight in the indoor pool. It was the kind of coming-out party that had been popular at the time, meaning before Jackie Kennedy had brought coming-out parties to national attention and made everybody too embarrassed to spend so much money. It was also one of the reasons why Fritzie had been left nearly destitute when her parents died—except, of course, for what she had as Jon Baird’s wife. Fritzie had never made the connection, any more than she had made the connection between Ronald Reagan and the rise of the religious right or Gorbachev and perestroika. All that sort of thing took place on a different planet, or in another time warp, and had nothing to do with her. Besides, she felt so drowsy and fuzzy and weak, it was hard to think in an orderly way about anything at all. When she did try to think, what she thought about was Sheila, and it came down to this: if that young woman had had any kind of upbringing at all, she would have been up and around and leading the guests in deck games. She would at least have done what Fritzie herself had done, which was to bring something special and important for the holiday, to make her guests feel special and important themselves. Fritzie had brought thirty jars of her Thanksgiving pumpkin rind marmalade, made over the course of two days she could have used for packing or going to the theater or seeing friends. The mason jars were capped with harvest-pattern cotton and sitting patiently in rows at the bottom of her footlocker, waiting to be handed out. Sheila seemed not to have thought about her guests at all, at least not as far as the holiday was concerned.
Actually, Fritzie was more than a little relieved to find that Sheila really hadn’t been well brought up. For one thing, that solidified Sheila’s image in Fritzie’s mind. It would have been terrible to have been going around for the last she didn’t know how long, thinking of Jon as married to someone no better than a chorus girl, only to find out that the new wife had gone to Spence and been presented at the Junior Assemblies. For another, Fritzie was very tired, and a little panicked. Usually, food served outside didn’t bother her too much. The wind carried the smells away and flies came, which always made her feel faintly sick. Today, for some reason, the mere sight of Danish pastry had been enough to make her ravenous—and that was very odd, because she hadn’t eaten Danish pastry in years. Maybe it was because of the saving up. A few years ago, Fritzie had taken the advice of one of her favorite women’s magazines and started “saving up” calories for holiday parties. For three or four weeks before she was supposed to eat somebody else’s fattening but lavishly proffered food, she would allow herself only 400 calories a day instead of her usual 800. Those 400 uneaten calories would be her “calorie bank,” which she could spend on Alida Halstead’s chicken lasagna or Muffy Stegner’s full-cream tea from Martha Stewart. It was a very good system, really. It let her eat like a horse when she was out and inflamed the envy of all her friends, who stood around at parties nibbling on celery stalks and wondering out loud how she managed to eat like she did and never gain any weight. The only problem with it was that it made her feel as if she wanted to spend her life in bed, and not with a companion. Fritzie never wanted to spend her life in bed with a companion. Being naked in the presence of other people made her much too self-conscious about her thighs.
After the breakfast party had broken up and everyone had gone below—especially Tony, who hadn’t spoken to he
r but who had needed her, Fritzie was sure of it—Fritzie had gone below herself, crawled into her bunk, and closed her eyes. In no time at all, she had been in one of those floating states that always reminded her of the man who had had himself suspended in water. She had been awash on a sea of projection, rocked by the real sea and half-asleep and busy making plans all at once. She worked out what she would do about lunch—not go—and about dinner and schemed pleasantly through the ways she might make contact with Tony. In the middle of all that, she must have fallen asleep for real, because when she came to with a start in the middle of a dream about executing Sheila in an electric chair made of maraschino cherries, her watch said two o’clock.
Two o’clock, Fritzie thought, sitting up carefully so that she didn’t hit her head on the beam. She ought to feel good about it’s being two o’clock. That meant lunch was over and she had missed it, without ever having had to go through an elaborate charade to pretend that was not what she was doing. At home with her own friends, she wouldn’t have had to pretend at all. They all skipped lunch all the time, too, because it was the only sensible way to live on a night when you had to go out to dinner. Here, though, Tony and Jon would stare and disapprove, and she didn’t like to put herself through that.
There was a basin and a jug of water secured into the top of the cupboard that was built into the cabin’s other long wall. Fritzie got up and went to it, poured water out, found soap, and started to wash her face. When she was done she got her makeup out and applied it very carefully, until she looked, as she thought of it, “like herself.” Then she put the makeup away and went to the door to look out into the hall.
“I don’t know what these figures are supposed to mean,” Calvin’s voice said, floating down to her from somewhere out of sight. “They’re not my figures.”
“If you’re going to use unicorns, you’re going to have to be careful not to fall into clichés,” a woman’s voice said. “Everybody thinks they know everything there is to know about unicorns, and it’s enough to drive you crazy.”
Fritzie analyzed the woman’s voice and came up with the picture of the small black-haired one who had come with Jon’s friend Mr. Demarkian. She analyzed the laugh that followed the little lecture on unicorns and came up with Tony. Then she bit her lip and shook her head. The woman was very familiar, but she couldn’t quite work out why. The idea of Tony falling in love with anybody made her sicker than the sight of flies on food.
She came out of her cabin, closed the door behind her, and made her way carefully to the staircase-ladder that would take her up on deck. She passed the room where Tony and the woman who had come with Mr. Demarkian sat and stuck her head in the door, noting with relief that they weren’t anything at all like sitting close together. Tony was stretched out on the floor, and the woman had taken a perch on Tony’s water cabinet.
“Well,” Fritzie said. “I heard you talking about unicorns. I didn’t think anybody talked about unicorns any more.”
“Bennis writes about unicorns,” Tony said, leaving Fritzie to wonder what that meant. “This is Bennis Hannaford. And this is my mother, Frieda Baird.”
“How do you do?” Bennis Hannaford said.
“Are you related to the Bryn Mawr Hannafords?” Fritzie said. “I did quite a lot of volunteer work with a woman named Cordelia Hannaford, before I moved to New York.”
“Cordelia Hannaford is my mother,” Bennis said.
“Ah,” Fritzie said.
“Are you all right?” Tony asked. “You look a little unsteady on your feet.”
Fritzie felt a little unsteady on her feet, unsteadier by the minute, in fact. The motion of the boat seemed to be getting to her, even though she’d never been seasick a day in her life. She wondered how far out to sea they were. She’d grown up with sailboats. She knew how fast they could move. How fast they could move when they were built like this was beyond her, but—
But her mind was wandering again, the way her mind always did these days. If she gave it a chance, it would be planning the holiday again, the holiday that was really Sheila’s to plan. It was just too bad that Sheila didn’t seem to understand what was really involved. The island. The cooking. Was Sheila taking care of any of that? Fritzie retreated into the hall and stretched her smile wider, unable to decide whether she was happy this woman was a Bryn Mawr Hannaford or not. Surely she had to be much too old to be interested in Tony.
“I’m going up on deck now,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll see you both later.”
“We missed you at lunch,” Tony said.
“I slept through lunch. I’ve been very tired lately.”
“Mother?”
Fritzie didn’t answer. She went quickly to the staircase and climbed up, making the best time she could in spite of the fact that her legs felt like sand. With her head stuck up into the wind she felt cold. Once she got her shoulders through, she felt frozen. There was a stiff wind blowing in off the water, filling the sails over her head and chilling her body. She was wearing a turtleneck and a wool sweater and a jacket as well, but she could have been naked. She’d become very sensitive to cold over these last few years, anyway. Tony and Jon and Calvin and Julie would all be sitting around pouring sweat, and she’d be ready to get under a good wool blanket.
She got herself all the way up on deck and looked around. There were men in the rigging, but no one she knew. She knew the man at the helm, but he was just the captain Jon had been hiring since he bought his first boat more than twenty years ago. She moved carefully up the deck and looked into the bow. It had been cleared of all the things that filled it that morning and now looked like nothing more than the front part of a boat, well-polished but littered with lines. She retreated again, feeling stopped.
In the beginning, she had wanted to find Tony and talk to him. She had found Tony, but she hadn’t been able to talk.
After that, she had decided to find Jon, and she was still looking for him. She had thought he would be standing on deck, the way he often did for hour after hour on the first day of a sail. Instead, he was nowhere to be seen, and that left her with two possibilities. Either Jon was relieving himself, sitting on one of those terrible forklike things and hanging off the back of the boat like the bait for a whale. If that was the case, she only had to sit still and she would find him soon enough. If he wasn’t there, though, the situation was hopeless, because it meant he was down in his cabin. Jon never spent daylight in his cabin unless he had something serious and secret going on. When he had something serious and secret going on, he didn’t want to talk to her.
He never wanted to talk to her.
She started to think it all through again, working out the options one by one, in case she’d missed anything, and then she heard a noise. She looked up, half-hopeful she would find either Jon or Tony, and was surprised to be confronted by a wooly mammoth version of Mr. Demarkian instead. Wooly mammoth was really the only description of it. He had on a thick coat and a scarf wound three or four times around his neck and even a hat, although that only seemed to be half on. Fritzie backed up a little and tried her smile again. It was silly to be so disturbed by this. Mr. Demarkian was a guest on this boat. She was likely to stumble across him more than once in the next ten days. It was entirely natural.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I was just going to do something very foolish. I was going to ask if I could help you with anything. But you must know this boat much better than I do.”
“Know the boat?” Fritzie was blank for a minute. Then she brightened up. “Oh, I don’t know the boat,” she said. “It was never a family thing with Jon, not until this time, anyway. It was more like his private hobby. I’ve been on it before, of course.”
“Of course,” Gregor said. “Can I help you with anything?”
“I don’t have anything I need help with. I should have worn a heavier coat. There’s that. I was looking for Jon, that’s a
ll.”
“Mr. Baird is in his cabin,” Gregor said solemnly. “With the other Mr. Baird. I left them there not more than five minutes ago.”
“Oh, dear.”
“You had something private you wanted to discuss?”
What Gregor Demarkian had just said was an impertinence. Fritzie knew that. She also knew that in the old days, she would have frozen him out or left him standing where he was. Now all that seemed like much too much effort.
“It hasn’t been a very cozy divorce,” she said suddenly. “I don’t go to dinner with Jon and Sheila. There’s been nothing like that.”
“I hope not.” Demarkian sounded faintly shocked.
“It has been an amicable divorce, though. I think that woman tricked him, if you want to know the truth. I really think she did. Jon didn’t want to leave me. He hasn’t completely and absolutely left me yet.”
“Oh?”
“He pretends he needs my help,” Fritzie said. “You know how that is. You’re a man. An ordinary man would have lost a button and needed me to sew it on or shown me his refrigerator when it had nothing in it but moldy Chinese food, but of course Jon has a valet for his buttons and a cook. Jon did the most obvious thing he could do, just to let me know.”
“What was that?”
“He came to me and borrowed money,” Fritzie said triumphantly. “Just this past August. Can you imagine that? Jon Baird needing money?”
“This past August,” Demarkian said slowly, “Jon Baird was in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury.”
“I know where he was, Mr. Demarkian. I went there to see him. He called me up and asked me to come.”
“And then he asked to borrow money?”
“Three million dollars from the trust he set up for me. He’s got control of it anyway. He didn’t have to ask my permission. He was just trying to let me know, if you see what I mean.”
“Not exactly,” Gregor Demarkian said.