Act of Darkness(41)

“She got Janet to invite me to that, you know, whatever it was. That dinner. Then she sat across the table and sniped at me all night.”

“It was Janet who invited you to that dinner,” Stephen said. “She was just trying to—she was—she was just filling the table—”

“She could have filled the table with one of her bloodless little friends from Bryn Mawr.”

“Did Janet go to Bryn Mawr?” Bennis’s voice asked chirpily. Gregor thought that, in that Very Old Main Line accent, chirpy sounded very odd. “What a coincidence,” Bennis went on. “I grew up in Bryn Mawr.”

Patchen Rawls looked Bennis up and down, made a face like she was smelling red meat, and then turned back to Stephen Whistler Fox. What she saw there seemed to give her pause. Stephen Whistler Fox was paying no attention to Bennis Hannaford. He was paying no attention to anything at all. He had mentally decamped for another plane of existence.

“Stephen?” Patchen said.

Stephen snapped to. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, well. I ought to go find Janet.”

“Janet,” Patchen Rawls said.

Stephen looked back at the house. “She’s very angry with me. We can’t have that. It would ruin everything.”

Anyone else would have realized he’d just said something strange. To Gregor, Stephen Whistler Fox seemed not to realize there was anyone around he might have said something strange to.

For a moment, the senator hovered. Then he turned around in a jerky full circle and headed straight for the house, walking rapidly, impervious to sweat even in 98 percent humidity. Patchen Rawls muttered a half-shocked “Excuse me” and hurried after him.

“Well,” Bennis said drily, “that was weird enough.”

Gregor said, “Mmm.”

“I suppose if something was happening to me and nobody had the faintest idea what, I’d be a little crazy, too. I want you to come to the beach with me, Gregor.”

Gregor was thinking. The word beach hit him like a bullet in the arm. “I can’t go to the beach. I never go to the beach. And I’m wearing a suit.”

“You’re half on the beach already and it’s three o’clock and I don’t want to go alone. Come on. Let’s go look at the water.”

She hooked him around the arm. Gregor found himself being dragged off the pool’s polished slate patio, onto the sand and toward the muddy restlessness of Long Island Sound. Around him, red, white, and blue accents hung damp and tired under the palpable weight of the afternoon. Once he got beyond the fence that screened the pool from the property next door, he could see people over there, listless and stiff, as if they’d come out into the sun only to do their duty to the season.

“Old money,” Bennis muttered under her breath.

Gregor stopped where he was. “It’s not true, you know,” he told her. “That nobody has any idea what’s happening to Stephen Whistler Fox, I have an idea.”

“Really?” Bennis was curious enough not to berate him for bringing a halt to their march to the sea. “What is it?”

“Well, that’s it. I have an idea, and it has to be right, but it can’t be right.”

“Why not?”

“Because symptoms or no symptoms,” Gregor said grimly, “if what was happening to Stephen Whistler Fox was what it looks like was happening, the senator would already be dead.”





[3]


Nearly two and a half hours later—two and a half of the most uncomfortable hours Gregor had ever spent—Bennis was finally convinced to march them both back into the air-conditioning. Between Gregor’s refusal to elaborate on the condition of Senator Fox and the polluted condition of the sound and the frozen stares of the people on the next property—she kept saying “old money” at them in a hiss, like a hex—she was in a thoroughly bad mood. It stayed bad as they reached the balcony of the second-floor guest wing together, Gregor sweaty but silent, Bennis cool and complaining. There had been a couple of holdups along the way—for some reason, Bennis had decided to put on her sandals to walk to the house, and had kept losing them every few steps—and by the time they got to the doors of their rooms, the clock downstairs was chiming a half hour that had to be half past five. Bennis made a face in the direction of the chime.

“It ought to be a cuckoo clock,” she said. “At least that wouldn’t make my teeth grate.”

Gregor caught one of her sandals just as it slipped off her foot. “You ought to have straps made for those,” he told her.

“If they had straps, they’d be sandals for nerds. Oh, nuts. My door’s locked.”