The tall young man gave his keys to the parking lot attendant without much discussion—oh, the joys of driving a car you don’t care what happens to—and walked toward them with a rolling gait that had been copied, Gregor was willing to bet, from a 1950s Marlon Brando movie. The tall young man was looking at the white Cadillac limousine just the way the rest of them had been, but unlike them he was not in awe. He had a smirk across his face.
“Hi,” he said, as he climbed over the curb. “Are you people all waiting to go out to Tasheba Kent’s island? I’m Carlton Ji.”
“Oh.” Lydia said it repressively. “The reporter.”
“Reporter?” Gregor asked.
Carlton Ji came the rest of the way to them. “Hi,” he said, sticking his hand out to Gregor. “Who are you? How much do you want to bet it’s going to take Her Highness Miss Hannah another five minutes to get down here, just so she can be sure that everybody in town has had a chance to see her?”
“Who’s Hannah?” Bennis asked.
“Hannah Graham,” Carlton Ji said with relish. “Lilith Brayne’s daughter. Everybody’s always saying that she’s Cavender Marsh’s daughter, but it takes two. I think she’s much more like her mother.”
“She’s certainly dramatic,” Lydia Acken said.
Carlton Ji suddenly realized that Gregor Demarkian was either not going to shake his hand, or had shaken his hand and then taken his own away without Carlton noticing. Whatever the explanation was, Carlton’s hand was hanging in the wind with nothing whatsoever to do. Carlton stuck it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“I work for Personality magazine,” he said to nobody in particular. “This is going to be a great weekend. I can hardly wait.”
The white-and-gold limousine had turned off the main road and begun its winding way through the narrow streets that led to the pier. There were not very many of these streets and none of them was very long, but the car was inching as carefully as if it had been crossing a minefield with a map. Maybe Carlton Ji was right, Gregor thought. Maybe Hannah Graham was making an entrance. If that was her intention, she was doing a very good job. All through the tiny town, people had come out to see the limo pass. There was even a pack of boys sitting on the one flat roof in town, above the pharmacy. The car stopped at every corner, in spite of the fact that there were neither traffic lights nor traffic. Children ran out and touched it and then raced back inside the houses and stores. Hannah Graham probably thought they were impressed, but Gregor doubted it. He thought they were laughing at her, as being another damned fool southerner who didn’t have sense enough not to spend her money on stupidities.
The car turned the last of the corners it had to negotiate to get to the pier. It bumped across a couple of potholes and came to a stop at the little ramp that led from the street to the boardwalk. The people who worked on the pier were now out and watching like the rest of town. The parking lot attendant was standing in the open door of his shack. A grizzled, middle-aged man had come out of the larger shack farther down on the pier and started to mend his ropes outside.
“This almost has to be an anticlimax,” Bennis told Gregor. “I mean, what would you need to equal that entrance? Muhammad Ali? The Charge of the Light Brigade?”
“I think you’d need the Virgin Mary on a cloud of angel dust at the very least.” Lydia Acken had a faint smile on her face.
Actually, Gregor thought that the emergence of Hannah Graham matched the grandeur of her car’s arrival—not because she was such a spectacular figure, but because she was so weird. The limo came to a stop. The driver’s door opened and a lanky black man emerged wearing a gold-and-white uniform, complete with cap. He walked around the limo and opened the passenger door closest to the curb. He leaned in and gave his arm to the woman inside. Then he helped her onto the ramp with all the care a jeweler would have taken with one of the tsarina’s Fabergé eggs.
The first thing that came to Gregor’s mind was that this woman was a walking corpse. She was too thin, too brittle, and much too frequently operated on. She had no subcutaneous fat on her at all. Her too-tightly stretched skin covered the bones of her face the way a sheet of Saran Wrap would have covered a skull. The veins in her hands looked like a system of tributary rivers suddenly sprung to life on the dead white surface of a desert.
“My God,” Bennis said under her breath. “When I get old, I’m going to let myself get wrinkled.”
The next thing Gregor noticed was the clothes. Hannah Graham was wearing navy blue silk trousers—ordinary enough, except that there were a series of heart-shaped holes running up the sides of each leg, exposing more blue veins and dead white skin. Then there was the top, a tunic arrangement entirely covered with sequins in fifteen different colors, making a pattern across her high, bouncing chest of a male and female symbol intertwined. Then there were the dark glasses, which had sequins too. Bizarre.