Act of Darkness(57)

She had opened her door and set up watch at six o’clock. At six forty-five, she’d seen what she’d been waiting for: Stephen coming out of his room (with Dan Chester) and going downstairs to the first floor. He had been talking about Janet. Dan Chester had been talking about Kevin Debrett.

She had everything she needed in a bag at her feet. She stood up and tugged the bag under her arm.

Malign, malign, malign, she thought. That was why things were going wrong. This house and everything in it were malign.

Patchen let herself out into the hall, looked around to make sure nobody was watching her, and walked down to Stephen’s room. He had left the door shut, but she knew it couldn’t be locked. It would be very easy to get inside.

Once she was inside…

He was going to be ready to kill her at first, of course, because he wasn’t really very enlightened. But she was only doing this for his own good. He would see that, eventually. They all would.

She was just as sure that her mother had seen it, before she was swallowed into the Great Consciousness and made ready for her next incarnation.





FOUR


[1]


BENNIS HANNAFORD SPENT THE early hours of the morning on the phone to Philadelphia. Gregor Demarkian knew that for two reasons. In the first place, he heard her, pacing across her floor, talking in the agitated, curiously defenseless voice she used only when speaking with Donna Moradanyan. That voice was muffled by the wall that came between them, so that Gregor didn’t hear what she actually said, but he could guess at it. Kevin Debrett. The police. A possible murder.

The second way Gregor knew that Bennis had called Philadelphia was because he heard from Philadelphia himself—not from Donna Moradanyan (who would never have thought of calling him), but from Father Tibor Kasparian. The call came in at quarter to twelve, after what Gregor had to admit had been a very frustrating morning. He had risen at seven in spite of his lack of sleep, and showered, and gone downstairs. Just as Bennis’s brochure had promised, there was breakfast laid out in the dining room. The long rose glass table had been set with mats and silverware and rose linen napkins. The rose, glass sideboard had been set with covered silver serving dishes and covered urns for coffee and tea. The scene was eerily like the scene at breakfast in Bennis’s mothers house on the Main Line, except that Bennis’s mother’s house was still part of the nineteenth century, and this was too angular even for the twenty-first. Gregor thought the serving dishes must have been custom-made, because they were so plain and sharply angled. The coffee urn reminded him of the Chrysler Building, complete to the scaly surface and the point.

He had hoped to find the guests assembled, but he didn’t. Maybe they, like Bennis, had been up too late, and now were sleeping in. Maybe they were awake but in their rooms, or in other parts of the house. The mere fact that there had been a death in the house should have been enough to keep at least some of them awake. The possibility that that death had been murder should have taken care of the rest of them. It had certainly taken care of him.

He was practically sleepwalking, and he came to standing at the door of Victoria Harte’s dining room, staring at the table and the sideboard and the silverware, feeling sheepish and annoyed. Then he looked down the line of empty chairs to the occupied one at the far end, and smiled. Victoria Harte was there, by herself, hanging over a cup of coffee. There were bags under her eyes and creases at the sides of her forehead. She hadn’t had any more sleep than he had. She had, however, had the presence of mind to pay some attention to her dress. Her sapphire blue caftan was immaculate, and the heart-shaped ruby on it winked as if it had been polished. It didn’t pull at the caftan’s material at all.

She saluted his arrival by sitting back, squaring her shoulders, and lifting her cup of coffee. The big red ruby winked and rippled in the dim light sent down by the overhead tracks.

“Well, Goddamn,” she said. “Of all the people in this house who might have had sense enough to be worried, the only one who shows up for breakfast is you.”





[2]


Victoria Harte was not a woman Gregor thought he could ever like. From the beginning, she had seemed to him defensive, brittle, bitchy, and just plain nasty. Then, too, there was a feminine quality about her he was no longer used to, because it had passed out of style ten years ago or more. Gregor supposed it might never have been in style. Women like his Elizabeth had never had much respect for women like Victoria Harte, although the Elizabeths of his world had been “feminine” too in a way that was no longer fashionable. It was a different kind of feminine. Elizabeth had been gentle and indirect, drawn to comfort children in tears and men in pain—but very sure of herself, and with a seam of self-respect that was deeper and wider than any he’d ever seen in a man. Victoria Harte, Gregor thought, wasn’t sure of herself at all, and she had let her self-doubt fester into narcissism. This was the sort of woman men had once described as being like a cat—insinuating, sexual, and in love with the sharpness of her claws.