by Jane Haddam
She went down the passage carefully, leaning to the left to keep her hair out of the candle flames, and let herself into the cabin she shared with Jon. The outer room was empty, but the door to the inner room was open and a wash of light was coming through the door. The light was strong, which meant that Jon was using a great many candles, or that he’d found the flashlight she’d hidden away in the bottom of her make-up case. Sheila thought about going in just as she was, thought better of it, and opened the lid of the boxy looking thing Jon insisted on calling her “locker.” The locker was full of lingerie. She took out a pair of green silk panties, a green silk nightgown, and a green robe so sheer it could have been a form of light and put them on.
“Are you coming to bed?” Jon called to her from the next room.
“Mmm,” Sheila said. If there had been a little teasing in his tone, she would have been heartened, but there hadn’t been. She found a mirror and a comb, combed out her hair, and wished she had the wall of mirrors she had in her dressing room back home. It was impossible to tell what you really looked like as long as you were on this boat.
“What was the gossip rodeo like?” Jon called out again. “Did Demarkian ask a lot of questions about the length of Charlie’s big right toenail?”
Sheila went to the door that led to the inner room. Jon was lying in bed, surrounded by candles in holders, bent over a stack of computer papers. Business, business, business.
“He didn’t ask about toenails at all,” Sheila told him. “He asked a lot about the salad dressing and who had passed it. He asked a lot about the seating arrangements. He wanted to know who was where.”
“I hope you told him where I was,” Jon said, “right across from Charlie Shay and passing out the food and the salad dressing. Although he ought to have known that already. He was sitting right next to me.”
“He mentioned that. I don’t know if he got a lot of answers that mattered, anyway. Tony stormed right off practically as soon as Mr. Demarkian got there.”
“Just Tony? Not Calvin?”
“Calvin was huffy,” Sheila said. “Every time anybody asked a question, he gave a little lecture about how they had no right to ask him any questions. You know what Calvin’s like.”
“I do know that, yes.”
“Is that important business you’re working on? All those papers? It seems to me that ever since you got home from jail you’ve just been surrounded by papers.”
Jon was sitting up on the bunk covered with blankets as well as papers, like a child in a sandbox who had started to bury his knees. Sheila had her own bunk on the other side of the cabin, but she didn’t want to get into it. She didn’t think she could sit still long enough to make a pretense of going to sleep. She went over to Jon’s bunk and looked down at the computer printout, but it was like all the computer printouts. There were long columns of numbers. They meant nothing to her. She picked up a loose page, squinted at it, and put it down again. Jon chucked the papers off his knees and looked up at her.
“I’ll take all this into the next room if you want to get to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got a little more work to do before I can go to bed.”
“That’s all right. I’m not sleepy. I’m going to make myself a drink. Do you want one?”
“Yes. A Scotch. A straightforward Scotch. When you start making something for yourself, try to remember we don’t have any ice on this boat. It won’t keep.”
“I know it won’t keep.” Sheila moved back to the outer room and went for the glasses and bottles they kept in a cupboard near the inner room door. Then she reached into the cupboard above and got down a bottle labeled, “S. Baird. One before bedtime as needed.”
“Jon?” she said. “Were you serious downstairs? Do you really think Charlie just had some sort of fit and wasn’t murdered at all?”
“Of course I was serious.”
“But why couldn’t he have been murdered? All that jumping and twitching around. And Demarkian saying it was strychnine.”
“So?”
“So Donald McAdam died from strychnine. Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?”
“It would be if Charlie died from strychnine. But Charlie didn’t die from strychnine. That’s just Demarkian running his private nut.”
“I’ve never known Charlie to have a fit before. And I asked Julie. She’d never known him to have a fit either. He wasn’t an epileptic.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I don’t know. It’s just like I was telling you. It’s strange. And it makes me feel creepy.”
“Well, don’t feel creepy while you’re still holding onto my drink. All this will be cleared up when we get the body to a competent medical authority. They’ll do an autopsy and they won’t find any strychnine and that will be that. Give me my Scotch.”
“Right away.”
Sheila put the bottles back in the cupboard, including the small one with her name on it, and closed up. Then she picked up a drink in each hand and walked back into the inner room. Jon was sitting up expectantly, no longer poring over papers, no longer oblivious to anything but numbers on a page. What did it mean, when a man became more eager for practically anything on earth except for sex?
“You ought to get yourself involved in a really good book,” he told her. “Read something exciting. That way you won’t be worried too much by all this stupidity Demarkian’s putting out.”
“Mmmm,” Sheila said, and handed over his Scotch. For a moment, the amber of the liquid was caught in the light from a dozen candles. It looked as clean and pure as the water pouring from a spring in an ad for Evian. It made Sheila feel much better, because there wasn’t a trace left of the sleeping pills she’d put in there at all.
2
Julie Anderwahl had always thought that morning sickness was just that, a sickness that came in the morning. The only other time she’d had a chance to find out otherwise, she hadn’t given herself a chance to find out otherwise. She’d been seventeen years old and scared to death. Because of the way the laws on parental consent were written in her state, she’d had to go over the state line to get a private abortion. Later she would wonder why she had wanted to go over the state line at all. She got along very well with her parents. They were both conservative and traditionalist, but they were not doctrinaire, and they weren’t naive, either. What was she hiding from them for? She’d had no answer to that, and she’d had no answer to the other question that had come up almost as soon as the abortion was finished and her life was supposed to go back to normal: What exactly had she done? She had expected the answer to that one to be easy. She had thought it would be like the final disposition of the one that went: Is there life after death? You died. If there was life after death, you knew it. If there wasn’t, you knew nothing. Surely, she’d thought, it would be the same way with abortion. You had one. Then, if the antiabortion people were right, you sank down under a crushing weight of guilt. If they weren’t, you felt—nothing.
Julie Anderwahl had not felt nothing following her abortion. She had not felt a crushing weight of guilt, but she had not felt nothing. She had not told anyone she was going to have it, and she had not brought anyone with her when she had gone, so she had no one to discuss it with, but after a while she worked it out. Never again. That was it. She had girlfriends who had two and three and, in one case, even four abortions, but that was something she knew she couldn’t do. She didn’t care if it was a right. She didn’t care if her life would go down the tubes and she’d have to give up her career for welfare. She didn’t care about anything. Never again.
It was because of Never Again that she was lying here in this bunk, listening to Mark bouncing around their cabin and willing herself not to vomit, feeling depressed beyond all reason at this odd mutation of Thanksgiving. Back home, Thanksgivings were not like this, pretentious and self-conscious on the surface, pinched up and mean underneath. Thanksgivings were a time for everybody’s children and eating too much food and forgetting about the fi
ght you’d had with your cousin Andrea last spring. Julie wrapped her arms around her stomach and closed her eyes. The storm had nearly dissipated now, or they had sailed out of it, and the motion of the boat was once more gentle—but in some ways that was worse than the violent rocking and shaking had been. There was something insidious about it, oozing and sly, that got under her skin and into her throat and made her want to race for the upper deck. She restrained herself, because she knew there really wasn’t any way to race for the upper deck. It was an obstacle course of beams and ladders and ropes and candles out there. She couldn’t stand the thought of battling her way through it.
Mark was pacing back and forth at the side of her bunk, taking off his shirt, taking off his belt. He seemed more excited and happy than he had for months, and interested, too. Julie didn’t think she’d ever seen him really interested in anything before. There were things she had thought he was interested in, like work. They’d never elicited a tenth of this response from him. What did that mean?
“It was really amazing to watch him work,” Mark was saying. “It was just like an Agatha Christie novel, or Albert Finney in that movie of that Agatha Christie novel, you know, Murder on the Orient Express.”
“Don’t say that,” Julie said. “That’s the one where everybody did it together, and they had a perfect plan and got found out anyway.”
“If Charlie Shay really was murdered, I’m sure Demarkian will find whoever did it. I wasn’t just throwing Agatha Christie around because it’s a name even a moron would recognize, you know. I’ve read about Demarkian in the papers. They call him the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
“Yes,” Julie said. “Yes, I know that.”
“I thought he was going to haul out a piece of paper and start making a timetable right there. Tony had the salad dressing at four oh five and two seconds. Fritzie had the salad dressing at four oh five and seven seconds. It was wonderful.”
“It was after six o’clock.”
“You know what I mean. It was just a stunning performance. God, I wish I could do something like that with my life. It’s so much more interesting than—business.”
Business. Julie had been lying flat on her back, keeping her eyes open, trying not to feel the boat move. Now she eased herself up into a sitting position and arranged her pillows as props behind her back. She had to move slowly. Every sudden movement made her feel as if she were being stabbed. Mark had stripped down to his shorts and was standing in the middle of the cabin, lost in a daydream and looking sort of soft-boiled. Julie didn’t think she’d ever noticed how unattractive his skin was.
“Mark?”
Mark came to with a start, looked around guiltily, and grabbed for his pajama top. It was navy blue and covered with little tiny dollar signs embroidered in gold thread.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am sorry. I seem to be—out of it tonight.”
“I can see that. Did he say anything in particular? About anything besides salad dressing, I mean.”
“He talked about the salad,” Mark told her. “And, of course, who was sitting next to who and who was sitting next to Charlie and all that kind of thing. It’s like I told you. It could have been right out of a—”
“Out of an Agatha Christie novel,” Julie finished for him, a little impatiently. “That’s not what I mean. I mean did he say anything about the other thing.”
“Oh,” Mark said.
“Well,” Julie said, “you have to admit it’s strange. Sick as I am, I can tell it’s strange. Donald McAdam died from strychnine. And now Charlie Shay dies from strychnine—”
“Jon doesn’t think it was strychnine at all,” Mark put in. “He and Tony and Calvin, too. They’ve been going around staying Charlie took sick and had some kind of convulsions and all this talk about strychnine is just Demarkian promoting himself.”
“What do you think?”
“I think Charlie Shay died from strychnine.”
Julie nodded. It made her head hurt to do it, but she nodded. “That would have been too much of a coincidence, really. The two of them convulsing all over the place and with one of them it’s strychnine and with the other it’s not. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Do you remember what we said when McAdam died?”
“We said we couldn’t be sure.”
“Oh, Mark, for God’s sake, don’t chicken out on me now. We said McAdam had enemies and it was likely. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I know we also said we couldn’t be sure and it didn’t make any sense to do anything with what we knew because McAdam was McAdam and who could tell, but now it’s Charlie Shay we’re talking about. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill Charlie Shay. Can you?”
Mark looked confused. “That’s what Jon and Tony and Calvin are saying. Charlie couldn’t have been murdered because nobody would have wanted to murder Charlie.”
Julie eased herself up a little farther on the pillows, shook her head out carefully—she felt full of fuzz, as if she’d been lined with felt—and rearranged her blankets. It was so hard to think, but she had to think, because she was the one who did the thinking in this marriage. Mark couldn’t think his way through the moves in a game of Chinese checkers.
“Look,” she said. “You’re impressed with this man Demarkian, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Julie. Of course I am.”
“All right then. It’s not like it was back in New York, back in August, when we weren’t impressed with anybody and it was just McAdam who was dead and it wouldn’t have mattered what we said to anybody or what we started because it was just going to come to nothing. Things have changed, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said truthfully. “Things have changed, but have they changed that much? Aren’t you going a little overboard on this?”
“No.”
“Julie—”
“No,” Julie said again. “I’m not willing to spend the rest of my life looking across the dinner table at family parties and wondering if the person I’m talking to is a double murderer. We have to tell somebody. I say we tell Demarkian.”
“Now?”
“In the morning.”
“You might change your mind in the morning.”
“If I do, I’ll tell you about it. I won’t.”
“I don’t know. You’ve been acting really strangely on this trip, Julie, you really have.”
Had she been? Julie supposed she had, and it wasn’t just because that old woman on the street yesterday had told her what she already knew, or at least suspected. She was beginning to wonder if pregnancy caused some kind of fundamental biochemical change in the brain. It probably did.
Mark had his pajama bottoms on now, more navy background, more gold dollar signs. Julie eased herself back down on her mattress, turning her attention again to the ceiling above her head, turning her attention away from Mark. The motion of the boat was a little more pronounced now but not so effective. The steady pressure of sickness she’d been feeling since the start of dinner had begun to recede.
“Mark?” she said. “Promise me something. When it’s time for us to talk to Demarkian tomorrow, don’t chicken out.”
“I won’t chicken out,” Mark said. “I never chicken out.”
Julie closed her eyes. Mark chickened out. Mark chickened out all the time. He called it “prudence,” but chickening out was what it was and what it always would be.
Lying here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a boat without a motor or a radio, with a murderer on board and a baby on the way in the bargain, didn’t seem the right time to tell him so.
3
There was a great iron bell hooked into a bell lever on the main deck near the wheelhouse, and every hour someone from the crew was supposed to go up and ring it. The crew was a very good crew, but this was too much for them. They got distracted by serious work and forgot about the bell for hours at a time. Tonight, they forget at ten and eleven and remembered again at midnight.
Tony Baird heard the gonging as he was coming out of the kitchen below. He’d gone to the kitchen for the obvious reason. He was starving. He’d eaten less than half a salad, run around like a maniac chasing a convulsing Charlie Shay all over the main deck, and then forgotten all about his dinner. Everybody had forgotten about dinner. When he finally made his way to the kitchen to see what there was to eat, he found an entire crown roast of pork with the little paper crowns still stuck onto its bones hiding under the lid of a silver serving tray. He was willing to bet they hadn’t had silver serving trays on the Mayflower, but he wasn’t willing to bet with his father. His father was a dyed-in-the-wool eccentric. Tony had accepted that long ago.
He got himself a huge, heaping plate of pork and a half loaf of hard brown bread that came from Zabar’s and that he had always liked very much. He said a prayer of thanksgiving that his father’s peripatetic passion for authenticity didn’t extend to salt pork and hard cod. Then he climbed back up the stairs and down the passage to his own cabin with the plate in his hand, moving as easily in the darkness as he did in the light. The crew might forget about the bell for hours at a time, but they didn’t forget about the candles. The candles were authentic. They were also dangerous. One forgetful hour and the whole ship could burn itself straight into the sea. The crew came down every half hour or so and checked them out, and at eleven when everybody was supposed to be asleep they put the candles out.
Tony went to his cabin door, balanced the plate in one hand, and unlocked to let himself in. Here, as back in New York, he was always careful to lock up behind him. He didn’t like the idea of someone being able to get in and look at his things. Especially not now. Especially not with that man Demarkian on board. Tony propped open the door with his foot and felt along the wall just inside for the empty space of table. He found it and put his plate down there. Then he got his matches out of his pocket and lit the candle in the holder next to the door.