And One to Die On(26)

As they watched, the boat slowed down and began to almost drift toward one of the empty docking places. When it got close enough to the wood to actually hit it, its motor cut off almost completely. The man at the shack moved down the boardwalk and out along the dock toward the boat. A plain young woman was standing in the bow and preparing to throw a rope at a post. She threw the rope to the man from the shack instead.

“Hello, Gerry,” the man from the shack said. “These here are your passengers.”

“Hello, Jason.”

Gerry grabbed the hand Jason was holding out to her and let herself be helped onto the pier. Then she stood straight and looked over at the assembled company. She’s something worse than plain, Gregor thought, but even so he liked her face. There was vitality in it, and humor, and intelligence. She had checked them out and looked them over and decided she wasn’t impressed with them at all.

“Oh, Miss Dart,” Lydia Acken said, coming forward. “It’s very good to see you again. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Lydia Acken.”

“I remember you, Miss Acken.” Miss Dart looked past the group to the enormous pile of luggage Hannah Graham’s driver had unloaded from the limousine. “I’m only taking people in this trip,” Miss Dart announced. “Somebody will come back for the luggage later.”

Hannah Graham thrust herself forward. “I can’t possibly allow you to leave my luggage here. I have valuable things in it.”

“Someone will be back for the luggage later,” Miss Dart repeated.

“I don’t think you realize who I am,” Hannah Graham said.

Geraldine Dart gave Hannah Graham such a withering look of contempt, it would have turned any normal human being to stone.

“I don’t have to know who you are,” she said. “All I have to know is that if I put all these people and all that luggage into this one little boat, it’ll sink.”

With that, Geraldine Dart turned on her heel and marched back down the pier to the boat.

“Any of you who want to go out to the island,” she called back, “come on ahead. I’m leaving now.”





2


“Hold onto the sides and hold onto them tight,” Geraldine Dart ordered a few minutes later, when they were all loaded onto the boat and it was breaking away from the dock and into the open water. “The weather is getting a little bit raw.”

It was true. There had been so much going on back there, with Hannah Graham and Carlton Ji and Jason at the shack, Gregor hadn’t noticed it. Now he saw that the wind was high and stiff and the ocean had a hostile rhythm. Above their heads, the late afternoon sky was thick with storm clouds.

“Do you suppose he was telling the truth, that man back there?” Bennis asked. “Do you suppose there really isn’t any way to get on or off the island if the weather is bad?”

“Oh, that’s true enough,” Geraldine Dart said from the wheel, not bothering to turn around to see who had spoken. “The weather doesn’t have to be all that bad, either. You don’t need a hurricane or a nor’easter. It’s the rocks, you see.”

“It does look very rocky,” Lydia Acken said worriedly.

“I think they’re making it all up,” Hannah Graham said. “I think the both of them are just trying to scare us.”

Everybody ignored her.

“I wouldn’t think this would be the optimum situation,” Gregor said slowly. “Miss Kent is very old. And Mr. Marsh, even if he isn’t as old as Miss Kent, he must be nearly eighty.”

“Just about,” Geraldine Dart agreed.

“I always forget that there’s such a great difference in their ages,” Lydia Acken said. “They’re both so old, I think of them as elderly and let it go at that.”

The boat hit an air pocket and bounced first upward, then down hard onto the surface of the sea. Gregor felt his stomach roll dangerously.

“We tried to talk them into moving into town a couple of years ago,” Geraldine Dart said. “They wouldn’t hear of it. I guess they like it out there.”

“I’d hate it out there,” Bennis said. “Just look at that place. Does Vincent Price live in the attic?”

That place was just visible now to the front of them, a tall Victorian pile with cast-iron railings around the large square of its main roof and smaller squares of the roofs on the turrets. It was at least three stories high, not counting the attic. The house rose up off the rock like the physical embodiment of the wrath of God. Gregor had never understood why the Victorians had painted so many of their buildings brown and black in that way, but this was an extravagant example of the style. The windows were tall blank sheets of glass divided into four parts and curved at the top. Bennis was right. Vincent Price ought to be living in the attic.