And One to Die On

PROLOGUE


THE ACCIDENTAL MIRROR





1


SOMETIMES, SHE WOULD STAND in front of the mirror and stare at the lines in her face, the deep ravines spreading across her forehead, the fine webs spinning out from the corners of her eyes, the two deep gashes, like ragged cliffs, on either side of her mouth. Sometimes she would see, superimposed on this, a picture of herself at seventeen, her great dark liquid eyes staring out from under thick lashes, her mouth painted into a bow and parted, the way they all did it, then. That was a poster she was remembering, the first poster for the first movie she ever starred in. It was somewhere in this house, with a few hundred other posters, locked away from sight. She had changed a lot in this house, since she came to live here, permanently, in 1938. She had changed the curtains in the living room and the rugs in the bedroom and all the wall decorations except the ones in the foyer. She had even changed the kind of food there was in the pantry and how it was brought there. She had felt imprisoned here, those first years, but she didn’t any longer. It felt perfectly natural to be living here, on a house built into the rock, hanging over the sea. It even felt safe. Lately she had been worried, as she hadn’t been in decades, that her defenses had been breached. Now it was nearly midnight on a cold day in late October, and she was coming down the broad, angled stairs to the foyer. She was moving very carefully, because at the age of ninety-nine that was the best she could do. On the wall of the stairwell posters hung in a graduated rank, showing the exaggerated makeup and the overexpressive emotionalism of all American silent movies. TASHEBA KENT and CONRAD DARCAN in BETRAYED. TASHEBA KENT and RUDOLPH VALENTINO in DESERT NIGHTS. TASHEBA KENT and HAROLD HOLLIS in JACARANDA. There were no posters advertising a movie with Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, because by the time Cavender began to star in movies, Tasheba Kent had been retired for a decade.

There was a narrow balcony to the front of the house through the French windows in the living room, and Tasheba went there, stepping out into the wind without worrying about her health. They were always warning her—Cavender, the doctors, her secretary, Miss Dart—that she could catch pneumonia at any time, but she wouldn’t live like that, locked up, clutching at every additional second of breath. She pulled one of the lighter chairs out onto the balcony and sat down on it. The house was on an island, separated by only a narrow strip of water from the coast of central Maine. She could see choppy black ocean tipped with white and the black rocks of the shore, looking sharp on the edges and entirely inhospitable.

Years ago, when she and Cav had first come here, there was no dock on the Maine side. She had bought the house in 1917 and never lived in it. She and Cav had had to build the dock and buy the boat the first of the grocery men used. They had had to make arrangements for the Los Angeles Times to be flown in and for their favorite foods, like caviar and pâté, to be shipped up from New York. They had caused a lot of fuss, then, when they were supposed to want to hide, and Tash knew that subconsciously they had done it all on purpose.

Tash put her small feet up on the railing and felt the wind in her face. It was cold and wet out here and she liked it. She could hear footsteps in the foyer now, coming through the living room door, on their way to find her, but she had expected those. Cavender woke up frequently in the night. He didn’t like it when he found the other side of the bed empty. He’d never liked that. That was how they had gotten into this mess to begin with. Tash wondered sometimes how their lives would have turned out, if Cavender hadn’t been born into a family so poor that there was only one bed for all six of the boy children.

The approaching footsteps were firm and hard stepped. Cav had been educated in parochial schools. The nuns had taught him to pick his feet up when he walked.

“Tash?” he asked.

“There’s no need to whisper,” Tash said. “Geraldine Dart’s fast asleep next door, and there’s nobody else here but us.”

Cav came out on the balcony and looked around. The weather was bad, there was no question about it. The wind was sharp and cold. Any minute now, it was going to start to rain. Cav retreated a little.

“You ought to come in,” he said. “It’s awful out.”

“I don’t want to come in. I’ve been thinking.”

“That was silly. I would think you were old enough to know better.”

“I was thinking about the party. Are you sure all those people are going to come?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Are you sure it’s going to be all right? We haven’t seen anyone for so long. We’ve always been so careful.”