Fortunately, Kelly Pratt did not take long. He came back carrying three dissimilar glasses—a tall one for the beer, a stemmed one for the wine, a squat one for his whiskey and soda—and spread them out on the table. Mathilda looked at hers and decided that the wine looked like urine. She took a sip and decided that it tasted like urine, too. Normally, Mathilda did not drink house wines. She ordered from the wine list and made sure she got the proper year.
Kelly Pratt took a long swig of his whiskey and then looked around the table happily.
“You don’t know how pleased I am to run into you two,” he began. “I hate flying on these small planes. They make my stomach ache. And going up to Maine.” He shrugged. “Either of you ever been up to this Hunter’s Pier place before?”
Mathilda and Richard shook their heads.
“I should have gone up when we were first in negotiations for the auction,” Mathilda said. “It’s almost unheard-of for us to schedule a major auction of this kind without some representative of the company physically checking out the material. But we tried and tried and—they’re extremely secretive.”
“Oh, yes,” Kelly Pratt agreed. “You never see them. I’ve never been out to the island, and they’ve never been in to my offices in New York. When I have something I need them to sign, I have to send it Federal Express. Or by messenger.”
“I don’t think secretive is really what they are,” Richard Fenster said. “I think it’s more like gun-shy. You forget what it must have been like for them, when the scandal broke. And the death, too. It would have been bad enough if Marsh had just left his wife for Tasheba Kent. But with Lilith Brayne dying or committing suicide or whatever it was in that awful way…” Richard shrugged.
“I think their behavior was peculiar in spite of all that,” Mathilda said. “Back at the office we have these pictures of them, taken at the time, that one of the researchers found and put up all around our section. You know, newspaper pictures, black-and-white things, taken during the investigation. And there she is, Tasheba Kent I mean, with this big black thing wrapped around her neck—”
“A black feather boa.”
“A black feather boa,” Mathilda ignored Richard’s interruption, “and these dark glasses, huge ones, covering up the entire top half of her face, and if you ask me, that’s no way to be inconspicuous. I look at those pictures and all I can think of is that she was doing it on purpose. Dramatizing herself. Getting her picture in the paper as much as possible.”
“Oh, I don’t think that can be right.” Kelly Pratt shook his head. “We do the accounting for them now, you know. I’ve seen all the records. Even the old ones. I can tell you right off that these are very private people. Have been, from the beginning. If you ask me, they spend more time hiding their affairs than they really need to.”
“Maybe they do now,” Mathilda said crisply, “but I think then was a different story. Was your firm doing the accounting for them then?”
“Well, now,” Kelly Pratt admitted. “Our firm wasn’t even in existence then. I wasn’t even born then.”
“I think they were trying to pull it off,” Mathilda said. “I think they thought that if they made it enough of a big glamorous deal, a kind of love story for the ages, they might be able to come out on the other side of it without Cavender Marsh’s career being permanently ruined. Do you know what else we’ve got in our office, besides all those pictures?”
“Haven’t a clue.” Richard Fenster hadn’t touched his beer.
“We’ve got a copy of an interview Tasheba Kent gave to Photoplay magazine about two weeks after Lilith Brayne died. It was a telephone interview, by the way. According to the text, Miss Kent was in seclusion, prostrated with grief over the tragedy. Well, she may have been prostrated with grief, but it hadn’t affected her voice. She certainly did talk a lot.”
“What did she say?” Kelly Pratt asked curiously.
Mathilda tried another sip of her wine. It was just as bad as it had been the first time.
“Well, the thing that struck me the most was this long monologue she gave about the course of love. About how she and her sister were never really two separate people, but two halves of a single person. And now that one half was gone, the half that was left was not just devastated, but emotionally on the brink of death herself.”
Kelly Pratt looked confused. “Do you mean they were identical twins?”
“No,” Richard Fenster said. “Tasheba Kent was a year older than Lilith Brayne.”