And One to Die On(31)

Mathilda frowned. “They didn’t even look that much alike, if you ask me. Lilith had a sweeter and more regular face. And she’d just had the baby, of course, so she’d put on a little weight. She was round and sort of maternal-looking in a glamorous kind of way. Like Demi Moore now. Tasheba Kent was always the bone-thin, hawk-faced, predatory type. She looked like a vulture.”

“She was beautiful,” Richard Fenster countered. There was a slight edge to his voice. “And I think you’re putting far too much emphasis on one movie-magazine interview. In the first place, those magazines were notorious for misquoting stars and misrepresenting facts. In the second place, even if she did say exactly those specific things, I think it was perfectly understandable. Her sister had just died. The cause of death was in at least some ways connected to the affair she was having with her sister’s husband. A little rogue guilt seems to be right in order here.”

“I don’t think she was feeling guilty at all,” Mathilda told him. “I think she was having a grand old time. The tone of the whole piece is just wrong. You should have read it. Lilith is gone and now she has Cavender Marsh all to herself, but that isn’t enough, because she wants your sympathy too. Lilith may be dead, but it’s Tasheba who is suffering.”

Richard Fenster looked thoughtful. “You should get a copy of that Photoplay for the auction. I’d be interested to own it.”

“If Tasheba Kent is your idol, I’d think you’d want to destroy every copy of the thing in existence,” Mathilda said. “It certainly doesn’t put that woman in a very good light.”

“Attention,” the loudspeaker over their head blared, through a rain of static that almost made the word sound like an expletive in a Balkan language. “Attention all passengers of MaineAir flights one seventy-seven and two twenty-nine. That’s MaineAir one seventy-seven and two twenty-nine. Flights will be boarding at gate number—” more static “—in fifteen minutes. That’s—”

The static drowned the rest of the message out.

“I don’t think they’ve changed the gate, do you?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“Only way to find out is to walk that way and ask the first MaineAir person we find.” Richard Fenster stood. “Are you coming, Miss Frazier?”

Mathilda considered asking him to call her “Ms.” but decided against it. It was unnecessarily antagonistic, and it really wouldn’t make sense for her to turn Fenster into an enemy. He had collected so much stuff already. He might want to have an auction of his own one day.

Mathilda grabbed her bag and stood up.

“I’m coming,” she told him, in as pleasant a voice as possible. It wasn’t very pleasant.

In the course of having a single drink that none of them had finished, Mathilda Frazier had gone from disliking Richard Fenster to absolutely loathing him.





3


Back on the island, Tasheba Kent was lying on top of the bedspread in her four-poster, king-size, curtained-and-canopied bed. The window curtains were drawn, and had been since noon. The tray with Tasheba’s lunch on it was sitting on the vanity table, untouched. Around about eleven thirty, she had heard the sound of voices down in the foyer, as some of the guests arrived. Since then, things had been very quiet. Tasheba stared up at the underside of the canopy and wondered what was going on down there, who had come, what they were doing, what they were saying about her. The items for the auction were laid out on three long tables in the library, watched over by a man they had hired from the village. Each of the three of them had their own table, with the things that had belonged to more than one of them parceled out at random. She wondered if they were looking through those things now, pawing over them, trying to make them come right. God only knew she had pawed through them often enough herself in the last sixty years. By now she ought to know that no matter how many times she replayed the story, she could never make it come out right.

Sixty years.

She reached over to her night table and picked up the Tiffany’s brass carriage clock that she’d had at least since the year it all happened. She and Cavender didn’t get into Tiffany’s anymore. It was a good thing the clock was well made and hadn’t needed repair. Tasheba didn’t have her glasses on and the room was dark. She tilted the clock back and forth in the thin wash of grayness that seeped through a crack in the window curtains. Four fifteen, the clock seemed to say. That was a good time, four fifteen. It was Cavender’s time to be alone.

Tasheba moved very slowly, first onto her side, then almost over onto her stomach. She had to be careful. She had grown very frail. Simple things had become very difficult or even impossible. She braced herself against the night table and levered herself up into a sitting position, with her legs hanging off the side of the bed. Her big platinum and diamond dinner ring cut into the flesh of her fingers as she pushed against the night table’s edge, making her want to cry out.