by Jane Haddam
Lydia Acken took a very small bite of her toast, thought better of it, and put the toast down on her plate again. “You know, we also have Cavender Marsh to consider. He’s going to come out of that sleeping pill-induced sleep of his sometime. When he finds out what’s happened, he’s going to have a shock. Having to step over the body of the woman he’s been living with for over fifty years is going to be entirely too much for his constitution.”
Gregor took a bite out of his sausage and then another. Then he put his fork down on his plate and thought it over. He didn’t really believe that the sight of Tasheba Kent’s body would be too much for the constitution of Cavender Marsh. He didn’t think much of anything would. If there was one solid impression Gregor had come away with from his perusal of the scrapbooks, it was that all three of the principals in the death of Lilith Brayne had been narcissistic to the point of pathology. Gregor thought Cavender Marsh might be surprised to find his long-time companion dead—although he might not—and that he might even be curious about how it had all come about. Gregor did not think that Cavender Marsh would be shaken to his foundations, or in peril of having a stroke.
On the other hand, the people at this table had a point. If it was really going to be that long before they could contact the mainland and get the police out here, there was no sense at all to leaving Tasheba Kent’s body on the stairs. Preserving a crime scene was one thing. Preserving everybody’s sanity was something else.
Gregor put salt and pepper on his scrambled eggs and continued to eat. “Are you sure about that weather forecast?” he asked Geraldine Dart. “Can you trust the station you’re getting it from?”
“I can trust the source the radio station is getting it from,” Geraldine said. “I’m tuned to the same station all the fishermen use. This is supposed to be one of the worst storms we’ve seen in twenty years. There’s snow coming down a little ways north of us, and that’s bad for October even for Maine.”
“How calm does it have to be out there before we can get off the island? Or would it be easier to get somebody from the mainland out here?”
“It would be easiest to get us off the island if we had the right kind of boat,” Geraldine answered, “but we don’t. If we had something fairly big and somebody who knew how to drive it, we could probably go as soon as it actually stopped hailing. But all the boats we have here are small.”
“Would anybody here know how to drive a bigger boat if we had one?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t think so,” Geraldine said dejectedly.
“What about people coming out from the mainland to here?”
“Well, the problem with that is our dock, you see. It’s not a very good one and it’s not very well positioned. I mean, it’s as well positioned as it could be, but this is all rock out here. The area right next to the shore is very dangerous. I go back and forth all the time, and I’ve smashed up a couple of small boats over the years myself, and on perfectly clear days, too. You have to pay attention, and if the sea is at all rough, you can’t.”
Gregor took a long sip of coffee. “I see what you mean. I also accept the fact that Sunday is just too far away. We can’t leave her lying on the steps that long.”
“Oh, thank God,” Mathilda Frazier said.
“Do you have someplace we could put the body?” Gregor asked Geraldine. “Is there a study or someplace like that, someplace out of the way? It would be absolutely best if we could lock it up.”
“There’s a television room on this floor,” Geraldine said. “It’s around the back of the staircase off the foyer. Miss Kent hated television and didn’t even want to see a set around, but Mr. Marsh loves it, so we kept it back there. It’s out of sight but it’s easily accessible.”
“That sounds perfect.” Gregor finished off his coffee, wiped his face with his cloth napkin, and threw his napkin on the tablecloth next to his unused butter knife. “I’m going to have to have some help moving the body. Mr. Fenster? Mr. Pratt?”
“I’m on my way,” Kelly Pratt said, standing up.
“Count me out,” Richard Fenster said. “I have no intention of touching a corpse no matter what it died from. I most particularly have no intention of touching that corpse.”
“Oh, my, what a big man it is,” Hannah Graham said nastily.
Bennis Hannaford crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray next to her coffee cup and pushed back her chair. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’m at least as strong as he is and I’m probably more emotionally stable. And I’d do anything not to have to step over that body again.”
Gregor was about to argue—in the world in which he had grown up, women were not forced to move corpses or do other heavy things if there were men around to do it for them—but he knew what kind of a fight he would cause if he raised his voice in protest, and he just wasn’t up for it. Instead, he nodded at the two of them. They followed him to the foyer and stood at the foot of the stairs, solemnly staring at the body of Tasheba Kent under its white linen sheet. Geraldine Dart came, too. She was the only one who knew the way to the television room.
“All right,” Gregor said. “We have to be very careful here, because the corpse is going to be very stiff. And bodies in rigor are very brittle. If you hit them too hard against a corner or a piece of furniture, it’s not impossible that pieces of them might break off.”
“Yuck,” Bennis said.
“I’ll take the shoulders,” Kelly. Pratt told her. “They’ll be heavier and harder to move. You take the feet.”
To find out where the shoulders were and where the feet were, Kelly Pratt had to take the sheet off Tasheba Kent’s body. Gregor was watching Bennis’s face, but she didn’t flinch. She just waited until Kelly Pratt got a grip under Tasheba Kent’s arms and then picked up at her end.
“Which way?” Bennis asked Gregor and Geraldine.
Geraldine scurried around and pointed them in the right direction. Gregor followed behind them as they went, past the elevator doors, off into a corner. Geraldine got the door open and the lights on. Kelly and Bennis maneuvered the body into the room and waited for further instructions.
“Lay it out on the couch,” Gregor told them. “It might as well be there as anywhere else.”
“It really is stiff,” Bennis said. “Does it stay like this forever?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t stay like that very long at all, and it’s a nuisance while it’s going on. Once you get her down, we’d better cover her up again. She’s going to begin to look fairly awful by the time Sunday comes around.”
Bennis and Kelly put the body down on the couch—much more carefully, Gregor noticed, than they needed to. The linen sheet had dropped off in the foyer. Bennis went back out to get it. She returned with it folded over her arm. For some reason, she couldn’t get it so that it hung perfectly, without showing any part of the corpse. She took it off again and went to reposition the body on the couch.
“What’s this?” Bennis said suddenly. She dropped the sheet to the floor and leaned closer to the ruffles of the negligee that rose high on Tasheba Kent’s neck. “Gregor, come quick, take a look at this.”
Gregor was feeling guilty about leaving Bennis on her own to do all these unpleasant things. After his initial impulse to act like the stereotypical sexist male, he had simply mentally relaxed and allowed her to take all the responsibility she wanted to for something that really should have been his own job. Now that she was calling for him, however, he was galvanized into action. He rushed forward much more quickly than he had any reason to, as if she had just announced an emergency.
What Bennis had, however, was not an emergency. It was a cufflink, made of heavy gold with a flat top in the shape of an old-fashioned movie camera, that she had found stuck in the neck ruffle of Tasheba Kent’s negligee.
“Look at that,” she said, handing the piece over to Gregor. “What do you think that is?”
“I know what that is,” Geraldine Dart said. “It’s one of Cavender’s fav
orite cufflinks. He was wearing them when he came down to dinner last night.”
CHAPTER 4
1
EVENTUALLY, YOU HAD TO spend a little time sleeping. Richard Fenster had tried to find a way around it, but there it was. The human body was not made to go forever without sleep. Especially when it got older—and Richard was getting older; he hated to admit it, but it was true—it needed to expend significant amounts of time horizontal, blacked out, in another place. The problem was that it couldn’t be in that place and this one at the same time. And that was dangerous.
Richard Fenster had taken the discovery of Cavender Marsh’s cufflink with a grain of salt. When Geraldine Dart had run into the dining room babbling about it, he had gotten up for another piece of toast, and let the rest of them oooh and aaah about it. Gregor Demarkian hadn’t been very impressed, either, but nobody was paying any attention to Demarkian but Richard. Geraldine had gushed out her report. Kelly Pratt had asked the questions that established the fact that they couldn’t actually see the cufflink, because Gregor Demarkian had put it away in an envelope for the police. Mathilda Frazier had advanced the first of the amateur detective theories by announcing, “I don’t believe this has anything to do with anything at all. Husbands hug wives all the time. That doesn’t mean they’ve just bashed their heads in.”
Richard had a whole list of objections to this line of reasoning, starting with the fact that Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh had never been married, but Mathilda Frazier was already convinced that he was after her ass. He didn’t want to give the woman any more cause for conceit than she already thought she had. Instead, he got up from his chair again.
“If I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to collapse,” he told them.
They looked at him as if he had just pitched a fit in the middle of the table.
“I don’t even read murder mysteries,” he said querulously. “You people may be fascinated by all this stuff, but I’m not.”
“So go to sleep,” Mathilda Frazier said.
They had resumed their conversation as soon as he left the dining room. Richard could tell by the excited tones in their voices, and the way a giggle seemed to run just under the surface, without ever breaking into light. He looked at the stairs where Tasheba Kent’s body had lain. He found a couple of flecks of blood on the runner carpet. Nothing much.
Richard went around to the back of the staircase and past the elevators. He stuck his head into a back hall before finding the television room. The television room wasn’t much, just a small square place that might have started life as a walk-in closet, with a couch and two chairs and a Magnavox twenty-seven inch in it. There was a VCR and a couple of tapes, too, but the tapes were nothing shocking. Blade Runner. The Hunt for Red October. Like every other man on earth, Cavender Marsh liked action-adventure and good guys versus bad guys.
Richard shut the door to the television room. He pulled back the white sheet and looked into Tasheba Kent’s face. What he really looked into was Tasheba Kent’s makeup. In spite of what they had all thought last night, she was wearing quite a bit of it—just not as much of it as she had been wearing at dinner. Richard put his finger on the cold wet skin of the bridge of her nose and traced the line of the nosebone to the cartilage tip. He moved his finger to the left eyebrow and traced the line of it there. It was hopeless. Her eyebrows had been plucked. Her eyes, although free of false eyelashes now, were puffy with age and the abuse of too much paint. Her lips looked stung.
Richard got his handkerchief out of his pocket and tried to wipe some of the paint off, but it wouldn’t come. He went over to the one small window and undid the latch. With his luck, this window would be painted shut, or it would be one of those windows that was never meant to be opened. To his surprise, it opened easily. Richard stuck his handkerchief into the rain and waited until it was soaked. Then he wrung it out a little and brought it back inside.
This time, getting the makeup off was much easier. It smeared under the rainwater, but it came. Richard rubbed at the eyes until they were clear of everything but a thin black line of mascara on each eyelid. Then he went back to the window, washed the handkerchief out, and came back to do the sides of her face. The lips were hardest. Lipstick streaked and stuck and got stubborn. Richard had to go back to the window three times before he was finished with that. He got it all, though, and then he sat back to look at what he had left.
The problem, Richard thought a few minutes later, was that it was so hard to know what age could or couldn’t do to a human face. This was not the Tasheba Kent he dreamed about, the one whose great dark eyes stared down at him from his bedroom ceiling—but that Tasheba Kent was twenty-two years old. This one would have been one hundred if she had lived. Time and gravity had taken their toll. So had six decades of Cavender Marsh. Having met Cavender, Richard thought he would take a toll on anyone, even Gandhi or Jesus. Tasheba’s eyes looked smaller, but the size of them in the picture he had might have been a trick of the camera. The hands looked bigger, but Richard had never really paid attention to her hands. He had been lying when he had told Gregor Demarkian that he would never touch a corpse, and especially this one. Precisely what he wanted to do now was to touch this corpse. He wanted to put his hands on her face and feel the smoothness of her skin. He wanted to put his hands on her arms and feel them tighten into life against him. Sometimes he thought his touch was magic. If he could only lay hands on her in exactly the right way, she would not only rise from the dead but reconstitute herself. The evil witch’s enchantment would be broken. Tasheba Kent would be young again.
I am losing my mind, Richard thought in a sudden panic, backing away from the corpse. Now he hurried over to close the window, unhappy to see that a thick patch of damp had formed on the carpet. He went back to the couch and stared at the ancient face again, the wrinkles and folds and ugly slackness. Everybody always said that age brought individuality, but it wasn’t true. Tasheba Kent at twenty-two had had individuality. This woman was simply Old, made up of the bits and pieces of generic age, no different from dozens of other old people from one end of the country to the other. There was nothing here to prove that she had once been the most desirable woman alive.
Richard pulled the linen sheet off the corpse. The body that appeared to him stuffed into the ruffled negligee was a lumpy mess. It had no shape at all. Richard ignored it and went right to the feet. The feet had slippers on them, dyed to match the negligee, with a little heel, the kind of thing Richard associated most with movies in which Jean Harlow received visitors in her boudoir. Richard took the slippers off and examined them. Then he dropped them to the floor and looked over the naked feet.
The feet were like the rest of the body in a lot of ways. They were old and puffy, not the slim small elegant things of Storms of Love. The toenails were dry and yellow and cracked. In Island Melody, they had been shaped and painted—bright red, according to the magazines. Richard picked up the slippers and put them back on Tasheba Kent’s feet. He was thinking furiously.
Feet feet feet, he kept telling himself, as he picked the linen sheet off the floor and draped it back over the body. There’s only so much that can be done about feet.
Now that he knew what he wanted to do next, he felt much better, not really sleepy at all.
Down in the library on the tables with all the things to be auctioned there were shoes, dozens of shoes.
What he had to do now was to get his hands on some of them.
2
Mathilda Frazier knew that Gregor Demarkian wanted to talk to her. She had known, since last night, that he would want to talk to everyone. She didn’t even object to talking to him, in principle. Lately, Mathilda had been congratulating herself on not being a woman like Hannah Graham. She didn’t go looking for excuses to go on the offensive. She didn’t throw monkey wrenches into other people’s plans just because she felt like being contrary. She understood why Geraldine Dart and Kelly Pratt and the rest of them wanted to let Demarkian do some invest
igating before the police arrived. She was no more interested in facing a full-scale murder inquiry than anyone else was. It was just that Gregor Demarkian made her so damned nervous.
He came up to her just as everybody was filing out of the dining room after the discovery of the cufflink—an event that Kelly Pratt, at least, was treating like some episode in a Sherlock Holmes story—and it couldn’t have been a worse time. The sleeping pills she had taken hadn’t really worn off. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have been knocked out for hours yet. Apparently, watching an old woman die in front of you made a difference. Instead of conking right out, Mathilda had lain on the top of her bed and tossed and turned. Every once in a while, she’d had very disturbing dreams with dead bodies in them and old women floating on a sea of chiffon. Every once in a while, she had come awake, too, which never happened with these particular pills. That’s why she kept getting the prescription refilled. Eventually, she had just given it up and come downstairs. She hadn’t wanted breakfast and she hadn’t wanted company, but she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of staying alone in her room one moment longer.
Obviously, the same sort of thing had happened to Hannah Graham. Hannah always looked awful, but now she looked awful and ready to disperse into molecules. She wasn’t as quick with the nastiness, either. This morning she seemed to be a beat behind the beat.
Why couldn’t Gregor Demarkian want to talk to Hannah? Mathilda asked herself grumpily, but Demarkian was paying no attention to Hannah, and Hannah had already said that she would refuse to talk to him anyway. Gregor Demarkian was waiting patiently at the dining room door and smiling in her direction.
“I don’t suppose it would work if I said I absolutely had to fall asleep right this minute,” Mathilda said. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I was about ready to pass out.”