by Jane Haddam
“What are we supposed to be doing down here?” Richard Fenster asked. “Is this some kind of treasure hunt? Are we supposed to be discovering something?”
“We’re supposed to be making idiots of ourselves in a very public manner,” Gregor told him. Then he turned to Geraldine Dart. “Why don’t you go get us those flashlights now? We’re going to need them if we ever intend to get the power back on.”
“You mean you want to go down to the basement to fuss with the fuse box right now?” Geraldine asked.
“No, not right now,” Gregor said. “Right now I’m going to go looking around in the library, which is the next logical place to look.”
“Oh,” Geraldine said. “I don’t know if I could let you do that.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kelly Pratt said. “You said that guard went off duty at eleven. It’s got to be nearly one now. Any one of us could have come down here in the last two hours and stolen every single piece on those tables.”
“Well,” Geraldine Dart said.
“It’s too bad you don’t keep a flashlight in your bedside table,” Gregor said blandly.
Geraldine Dart blushed. “All right,” she told him. “I’m going. I’ll be right back. But for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”
Geraldine half ran out of the room, heading toward the foyer, and Gregor found himself shaking his head. Then the cackle started up again, and he sighed.
“The House on Haunted Hill,” Gregor said again.
“That’s the name of a movie,” Bennis told him.
“I know,” he said. “You’ve watched it at least three times in my presence, with Donna Moradanyan and Tibor. You ought to pay more attention.”
“You mean that laugh we hear is from a movie?”
“From a tape made from the movie, I think. Somebody just got a tape recorder and recorded all those laughs at the beginning and the end over and over. Can’t you hear that thing repeating itself?”
The cackle came again. Everybody was still. Finally, Richard Fenster said, “He’s right. It is repeating itself.”
“But who would do something like that?” Lydia Acken demanded. “It’s terrible. And those two old people upstairs. They could be frightened into strokes.”
“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “In fact, I think they’re probably in on it. That’s why they haven’t come downstairs yet.”
“If this is some kind of setup and they really are in on it,” Mathilda said, “there’s going to be some serious trouble.”
“But why would they do something like that?” Lydia asked. “Why? What’s the point of all this?”
Gregor had a few ideas as to the why and wherefore of all of this, but they were complicated. Instead of answering Lydia’s question, he went into the library. It was as unchanged as the living room had been, which was what he had expected. He left it and came back to the rest of them.
“All right,” he said. “I think we can be confident that we’ve done everything that we could be expected to do. The lights ought to come back on any minute now.”
“This is incredible,” Kelly Pratt said.
Gregor thought this was more than incredible. He thought it was execrable. As soon as they all calmed down, he was going to get Geraldine Dart in a corner and take her apart at the seams. He would do the same to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, but he was afraid that the sound of his voice at full volume would frighten them to death. They deserved to be frightened to death, he thought. This was the worst kind of practical joke. And it wasn’t funny.
Above their heads and on the side tables, the lights flickered. Gregor had forgotten that he had left them all on when he had come to bed. He checked his watch and saw that it was one fifteen. There was nothing more in the way of hysterical, sinister cackles.
“There,” he said, when the lights stopped flickering and came fully on. “That’s the end of that. I think we can probably all go to bed now.”
“You go. I’m going to have a drink.” Mathilda Frazier sounded irritated.
Then Geraldine Dart came running into the room, carrying a handful of flashlights and completely out of breath.
“I did it,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “I went all the way down to the basement by myself and changed the fuses, all by myself. What do you think of that?”
Gregor was about to say that it was the least he would have expected of her, but at that moment a woman’s voice came at them from out in the foyer, and it stopped him dead.
“Ger—ald—ine?” the voice called out in a singsong. “Geraldine?”
“Isn’t that Miss Kent?” Bennis asked uncertainly.
Geraldine Dart looked suddenly scared to death. “Yes, that is Miss Kent,” she said in a panicky voice. “But I don’t understand—”
“Ger—al—dine,” Tasheba Kent sang out again.
Geraldine Dart rushed out of the room, dropping the flashlights as she went. Gregor followed her. He was followed in turn by the rest of them, led by Bennis. Gregor stopped in the foyer and looked up the stairs. Tasheba Kent had come about a third of the way down from the second floor, and she was still coming. She was dressed in a royal purple negligee with ruffles down the front and royal purple slippers. Her black wig had been pulled haphazardly over her white hair so that it looked like some kind of a lunatic hat. Geraldine Dart seemed frozen at the foot of the stairs. Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he had ever seen anyone look that green.
“Ger—al—diiiiiiiiine,” Tasheba Kent sang out in a long wailing hum.
Then she blinked, and seemed to shrivel. Then she fell. At first she just collapsed against the steps and stayed put. Then she started to roll.
“Oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, my God. She’s going to break her neck.”
Gregor Demarkian was running for the stairs before he knew it. So was Kelly Pratt. They pushed Geraldine Dart out of the way and bounded up toward Tasheba Kent. They reached out to stop the old woman rolling. She slipped past their hands and went slamming into their legs. Kelly Pratt lost his balance and staggered backward. Gregor had to twist himself into knots to keep his place. He reached out to stop the top half of Tasheba Kent’s body from rolling any farther down the stairs. The bottom half of her was braced against his legs. He got her by the head and felt her wig come off in his hands. Then he reached out and grabbed her again, and this time he got what was left of her skull.
What was left of her skull.
Gregor dropped Tasheba Kent’s head and stepped back a little. Geraldine Dart started to scream.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said.
Gregor leaned down and turned Tasheba Kent’s head over, so that he could get a better look at what had happened to her.
As far as he could tell, someone had taken a large round heavy object and caved in the entire left side of her head.
PART 2
The Demonology of Ice Cream
CHAPTER 1
1
GREGOR KNEW HE HAD been wrong, terribly wrong, about everything that was going on in this house. It had all seemed so simple, and now this woman was lying against his legs, bloody and dead, and nothing made any sense at all. Outside, he could hear the wind. It was whistling through the roof gutters and making windows rattle. Inside, Mathilda Frazier had started crying in a low, steady, unrelentless way. Bennis Hannaford was patting her ineffectually on the back and looking helpless.
Gregor stepped away from the body. It had come to rest. It wasn’t going to roll anymore.
“The first thing we need to do,” he said in a calm, measured voice, “is to find a phone.”
“Right,” Kelly Pratt burst in. “That’s what we need. We need the police.”
“But we’re not going to be able to get the police over here tonight,” Geraldine Dart objected. “The storm will make it impossible.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kelly Pratt snapped. “It’s not much of a storm at all.”
Mathilda Frazier began to cry har
der. “It’s just like she said before. It doesn’t have to be much of a storm. All you need is a little rain and wind, and then you’re trapped.”
“Could we at least have some more light in here?” Gregor asked.
This, it turned out, was easy. The chandelier at the top of the stairs was on a dimmer and could be turned up. There were bracket lights on the wall next to the rising staircase. When these were turned on, Gregor knelt down next to the body. He was not a pathologist. There could be a hundred things here he was bound to miss because he didn’t know what to look for. He knew he had to look now, as closely as he could, because if he didn’t he might not be allowed to look once the police arrived on the scene. Even without being a pathologist, the situation looked relatively simple. The crater on the side of Tasheba Kent’s head was at least three inches in diameter and irregularly shaped. Gregor guessed it had been made by a golf club or something like it, with a long handle for leverage and a round thick metal or wooden piece at the end.
A check of Tasheba Kent’s body and face revealed little. The one really disturbing thing was the wig. The old woman had taken her makeup off before she went to bed. There were no bright red and black blotches anywhere on her wrinkled face. Even the blood in the crater was going dirty brown. Underneath the wig, Tasheba Kent’s hair was thick but very white, with that tinge of hard dark yellow the hair of old people sometimes gets. The wig, though. Gregor tapped his fingers against the stair rail, bothered. The wig just did not make sense.
“She put it on after she was hit,” Gregor said suddenly.
“What?” Bennis asked him.
“The wig,” Gregor explained. “She put it on after she was hit. That’s the only way it makes sense. She was very careful about her appearance. She overdid her makeup and she wore clothes that were much too young for her, but she was careful. She would never have put a wig on that way, half on and half off, without looking at it in the mirror and checking the fit, and rearranging it if she had to.”
“Maybe she did check the fit,” Richard Fenster said doubtfully. “She was a hundred years old. Maybe she looked in the mirror and her eyes weren’t any good, and she thought it did fit.”
“If that’s what she did, she would have had to have lost her sense of touch as well as her sight. There’s a good three-inch gap between where the wig ends and where her hair ends on the side without the gash, and the wig hasn’t been pulled into the gash on the side with it. Did she sleep in a bedroom by herself?” he asked Geraldine Dart. “Or did she share a bedroom with Cavender Marsh?”
Geraldine Dart looked totally confused. “She shares a bedroom with Cavender. What difference does that make?”
Gregor stood up. Tasheba Kent started to roll again. He leaned over and caught her. He wished they could move her into the living room or the dining room or anyplace else where she might stay still, but he knew they couldn’t do that. The police would want everything in place when they arrived.
Gregor stepped carefully over the body—it made him wince, but there was nothing else he could do—and started up the stairs again.
“Miss Dart,” he called back over his shoulder. “Come up here with me. I need you to show me which of those bedrooms belongs to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh.”
At first, Geraldine Dart protested. “You don’t want to wake him up out of a sound sleep for something like this,” she protested, running up the stairs at Gregor’s back. “You’ll give him a stroke. We need to find a way to break this to him gently.”
“Don’t worry,” Gregor told her. “I don’t think we’re going to have to break it to him at all tonight.”
Gregor reached the landing. Geraldine Dart rushed by him and went to a door in the middle of the left-hand wall. When she opened this, Gregor thanked her, passed inside the room, and looked around. The room was dark. The curtains that covered the windows on one wall were faintly backlit, as if there was a security light outside but not too close. The big dark bed had a canopy and a set of curtains but was otherwise a series of black lumps in the dark. Gregor reached around on the wall until he found the light switch and flicked it on. A chandelier almost the size of the one that hung over the foyer burst into light, lighting the room as cruelly as a movie set.
“Mr. Demarkian,” Geraldine Dart protested.
“Gregor? Gregor, what’s going on?” That was Bennis, coming in from the hallway. The rest of them were out there, too, moving around in a clump, because they were afraid to be alone. Gregor ignored them all.
He went over to the side of the bed closest to the door and looked down on the sleeping Cavender Marsh. The old man was tucked neatly under a top sheet and a pale blue blanket, both pristinely folded back and as unwrinkled as if they had been covering a doll. There was no doubt, however, that Cavender Marsh was breathing. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. His nose emitted a high-pitched, highly polite little snore.
“Why hasn’t he woken up?” Geraldine Dart asked anxiously. “Is he in a coma?”
“Of course he isn’t in a coma,” Gregor said. “He’s just asleep. He probably took a sleeping pill.”
“Mr. Marsh doesn’t take sleeping pills,” Geraldine Dart said.
“Then somebody gave him one, or more likely two or three.” Gregor went around to the other side of the bed.
At first, Gregor didn’t see anything unusual. The bedclothes were more rumpled there than they had been on Cavender Marsh’s side, but any bedclothes anywhere would have been. Gregor Demarkian had never seen anyone sleep with such perfect lack of movement as Cavender Marsh was displaying tonight. On Tasheba Kent’s side, the blanket was twisted and the top sheet was pushed down under it. Gregor pulled up the top sheet and untwisted the blanket and examined them both. They were clean. The pillow was wadded into a ball. Gregor unwadded it and found that it was perfectly clean, too. He almost thought he had been wrong in his conjectures, but then, as he was drawing his head out from between the bed-curtains, he caught sight of the ruffled border around the canopy over his head. Just at the start of the first curve, the border was soaked in blood.
“Oh, God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, God, it’s still wet. How did it get like that?”
“She probably brushed against it as she was getting out of bed,” Gregor said.
“Do you mean she was already bleeding when she got out of bed? How could she have been?”
“Very easily,” Gregor said. “People do a great deal after they’ve had a head trauma, even if they’re the next best thing to technically dead. She was sitting up when she was hit, though. If she’d been lying down, there would be blood all over the pillowcase and the sheets.”
“Sitting up,” Geraldine Dart repeated. “I don’t believe that. You didn’t know Tasheba Kent, Mr. Demarkian. A hundred years old or no hundred years old, she wouldn’t have sat there and let somebody come at her with a poker—”
“Not a poker.”
“—or whatever it was. She just wouldn’t have.”
“All right, she wouldn’t have,” Gregor said, “so that isn’t what she did. She sat up in bed and listened to this person talk, and when she wasn’t expecting it this person whipped out a weapon and coshed her on the head. Then she started acting very strangely.”
“You mean she put on the wig,” Bennis said, edging closer.
Gregor checked the wall behind the place where Tasheba Kent’s pillow had been. There was a faint stain there that might have been fresh blood. He wasn’t going to know for sure until he got some lab technicians to check it out. He walked away from the bed and looked at the carpet next to it. There were no stains there, but a little farther along, near the bed’s foot, there was an unmistakable red splotch. They would have to check the nightgown under Tasheba Kent’s negligee. There had certainly been no splotch of blood on the negligee. That meant that Tasheba Kent not only hadn’t been wearing it in bed—interesting enough, Gregor thought, if she had been talking to a visitor—but hadn’t been wearing it when she went to her vanity table, e
ither. Gregor was sure that Tasheba Kent had been going to her vanity table. There was an empty wig stand there.
Gregor traced Tasheba Kent’s possible path around the bed to the vanity table, but didn’t find any bloodstains. He sat down at the vanity table and looked over the jars and implements without really knowing what most of them were. There weren’t any bloodstains there, either. The wig stand was different. There was a big red-brown smear on the back of it, at the place on a person that would have been the start of the nape of the neck. Gregor got a Kleenex out of his pocket to protect the stand from his fingerprints and picked it up. Then he put the stand down again and sighed. Everything he saw confirmed the conjectures he had made downstairs about what had happened up here tonight, but it was impossible to get any really important information out of physical evidence without the help of the lab technicians.
“Tell me,” he said, turning to Geraldine Dart, “what time did she come up here tonight?”
“Time? I don’t know if I could pinpoint a time. It was right after dinner. Maybe nine thirty or ten o’clock.”
“It was ten minutes to ten when we all went into the living room,” Bennis said. “I checked my watch.”
Gregor nodded. “Now, Miss Dart. Tasheba Kent didn’t come up to her room alone.”
“No, no, of course not,” Geraldine Dart said. “I brought her up here myself. I used the elevator at the back of the foyer.”
“And you settled her down to sleep.”
“I helped her to get ready for bed and then I gave her her glasses and the book she’s been reading. Miss Kent always read a little before she went to bed. Of course, she didn’t read very well anymore. She could barely see words on a page. But she’d read a paragraph or two every night.”