“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
“Are you feeling ill?”
“No. Yes. Listen. I’ve got to ask you a question.”
“Ask ahead,” Clare said, and thought, Maybe Harvey’s been working the phones again, threatening the doctor with purgative revolutionary violence. That would be just like Harvey.
But Kevin Debrett’s question, when it came, had nothing to do with Harvey Gort. It had nothing to do with anything Clare could have imagined, no matter how hard she’d worked at it. It was born in left field and stayed there, like a rock that had suddenly acquired too much weight to move through air.
“What do you know,” Kevin Debrett asked her, “about a man named Gregor Demarkian?”
[3]
It was eleven in the morning, and the hall outside Patchen Rawls’s door was quiet. For a while, there had been a lot of coming and going. Dan had gone to Stephen’s room. Kevin Debrett had gone to Clare Markey’s room. Mr. Demarkian—who was supposed to be a great detective, but who looked to Patchen like a bookstore clerk who had inherited money—had arrived with a woman who was pretty, but thankfully too old to be Stephen’s type. Then Janet Harte Fox had come out of her bedroom, carrying a beach bag and a heavy hardcover book, and the coast was finally clear.
Patchen stood up, slipped into the hall, and headed for the other end. Her bedroom sat behind the set of double doors at the east end of the hall. Janet’s room sat behind the double doors at the west end. Patchen went very quietly, moving with bare feet along thick carpet and stopping at every door she knew had someone behind it, just in case.
At the west end of the hall she stood in front of Janet’s door, knocked tentatively just for form, and then tried the knob. It moved easily and she opened the door a crack, slipped inside, and looked around her. The room was dark, the shades pulled over the wall of windows that looked out on the sound, and unashamedly a mess. The bed was unmade and the vanity table was covered with powder and dribs of cream and scent. Patchen went back to the door and threw the bolt.
A second later, she headed across the room to Janet’s bathroom, hidden behind a gray steel door in the corner, just like her own at the other end of the hall. She stepped onto the small white tiles and looked around, at the towels thrown everywhere, at the smear of toothpaste in the bottom of the sink, at the open shower door still beaded with water.
There was a large whirlpool tub tucked at an angle into a corner of the room, with a triangular shelf built into the corner wall, and that was where she found it: a gray burlap laundry sack. She reached over and snatched it up and looked inside.
What she wanted was right there on top, in plain sight, like a sacrificial virgin on an Aztec altar.
It was the pair of underwear Janet had been wearing before she took her shower this morning, and it was beautifully, gloriously, perfectly stained.
FOUR
[1]
THE NOTE FROM DAN Chester was lying on the night table next to the bed when Gregor was shown into his room, sealed into a thick linen-rag square of envelope with his name written across the front in calligraphic script. The script caught his attention. Any hint of tradition would have caught it, because, as it turned out, the interior of the house was just as bizarre as the exterior. Downstairs, the first thing he had noticed was the almost total absence of walls. The foyer was separated from the living room by two square columns. The living room was separated from the dining room by a change in the pattern in the parquet floor. Standing under the angular stairs that led to the second-floor guest wing, he could see all the way across the house to its west end, where the library was a collection of steel and glass bookcases punctuated, he had thought at first, by oversize mirrors. A second later, he realized they weren’t mirrors at all. They were photographs, and not even photographs of the same person. Blown up to the nearly life-size dimensions of rock group posters and framed in polished chrome, Victoria Harte and Janet Harte Fox stared at each other across the loop-pile expanse of the library carpet, looking like twins. It smacked of expense and it smacked of obsession.
When he was able to concentrate on details instead of on the nearly hallucinatory use of space, he saw that everything smacked of expense, and much of obsession. Victoria’s three Oscars stood upside down in three hard-edged clear glass flower pots in the middle of the living room’s heart-shaped, cut glass coffee table. Around that table, narrow lengths of sectional sofa had been custom-made to allow them to be arranged in the shape of a heart as well, and upholstered in a thick red silk that looked wet. There were heart-shaped pillows made of heavy Turkish damask and a heart-shaped ottoman covered in striped, piece-dyed satin. On closer inspection, the stripes turned out to be thousands of linked tiny hearts. If it hadn’t been for the photographs of Janet that littered every available surface—photographs placed, of course, in heart-shaped silver frames—Gregor would have thought of Victoria as the ultimate egoist: a woman incapable of imagining the universe without herself in it.