And One to Die On(25)

“Saline implants,” Lydia Acken told Bennis in a whisper. She was staring at Hannah Graham’s chest.

“Nose job,” Bennis whispered back.

The driver had gone around to the back of the limousine and begun to unload Hannah Graham’s luggage. There was a lot of it—at least three large suitcases and two suit bags, a cosmetics case, a jewelry case, a portable shoe tree with a dozen pairs of shoes in it, an overnight case, and a pair of hatboxes. Hannah watched it being unloaded, then walked away from it. Gregor noticed that even the hatboxes were leather and part of a matched set. Every piece had the initials HK on it in flowing script, like the signet of a monarch.

“The HK is for ‘Hannah Kent,’” Carlton Ji whispered to Gregor. “She won’t use Marsh because she despises her father.”

Hannah Graham walked up the ramp to the boardwalk, put her sunglasses on top of her head, and squinted at the assembled company. She’s blind as a bat and those sunglasses are prescription, Gregor thought. Hannah Graham settled her attention on Lydia Acken.

“Are you all waiting to go out to Tasheba Kent’s island?” she asked. Her voice, like her body, was brittle.

Lydia Acken was the soul of politeness. She couldn’t help herself. “Yes, yes,” she said. “Of course we are. And you must be Hannah Graham. I’m Lydia Acken. I’m your father’s lawyer. And Miss Kent’s, too, of course.”

Hannah Graham looked out to sea. “When is the next boat expected to arrive?” she asked.

For a moment, they were all nonplussed. It was such a silly question, and she had asked it with such calm certainty.

“I’m afraid it isn’t like that, Miss Graham,” Lydia said apologetically. “There isn’t any regular boat service from Hunter’s Pier to the island. Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh keep a boat, and they’ll be sending it over to ferry us across very soon, with their handyman driving or maybe Miss Dart. I called as soon as I got here and that was half an hour ago. I’m sure it won’t be long now.”

Hannah walked back and forth on the boardwalk, still looking out to sea, a thoughtful expression on her face. She was wearing wedge-heeled, cork-soled sandals, but she was perfectly steady on her feet.

“Do you mean that there’s no way to get out to that island unless my father and that woman send a boat for you?” she asked.

“Well, I’m sure you could hire a boat at this end,” Lydia Acken told her, “but why would you want to? If you’ve been invited, you can get over absolutely free.”

“You might want to surprise them, though,” Hannah said. Her gaze was still on the water. “This is that woman’s hundredth birthday, isn’t it? Maybe some secret admirer somewhere wants to send her a cake.”

“You can’t get out there at all when the weather’s bad,” a voice said.

They all turned to look at the man who had come out of the larger shack on the pier to mend his ropes. He had let them fall to the boardwalk at his feet and now he tilted his chair back to rest against the shack.

“You can’t get from there to here when the weather’s bad, either,” he went on. “Too many rocks. Too hard to dock.”

Hannah Graham walked over to him. She looked him up and down. “Do they ever come out, Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh? Do they ever come into town and just walk around?”

“Not anymore they don’t,” the man at the shack said. “They did when I was a kid, but that was forty years ago.”

Hannah Graham put her glasses back on her nose. “Somebody I knew once said that island was just like Alcatraz.”

“A lot of people say that,” the man at the shack replied. “I don’t think Alcatraz had fifteen marble bathrooms.”

Now, faintly, Gregor could hear the sound of an outboard motor. It was not a very powerful outboard motor—he hoped they had something bigger out there; with a hundred-year-old woman in the house, they needed it—and its hum was almost drowned out by the sound of the sea slapping against the pilings of the piers. The man at the shack was the only one to have caught it besides Gregor. He stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand.

“There she is. That’s Gerry coming in.”

“Who’s Gerry?” Carlton Ji asked. “Geraldine Dart. Miss Kent’s and Mr. Marsh’s secretary,” Lydia Acken answered.

“I didn’t know secretaries knew how to drive boats,” Carlton Ji said.

The boat was now close enough so that all of them could hear it, and see it too. It was a small launch with a sharply edged prow and a squared-off rear. Gregor tried to remember what the rear end of a boat was called. The boat looked to him like the right size for a small example of what people called a cabin cruiser, except that it didn’t seem to have a cabin.