And One to Die On(32)

Once she was sitting up, it was easier. She got down to the floor without any trouble at all. She moved across the room at first by holding on to furniture, like a child learning to walk. After a while, it got better. The joints in her legs became operative. The muscles in her calves and thighs gained strength and determination. It was as if her body forgot how to move while she was asleep and had to learn all over again each time she woke up.

There were French doors leading to a balcony overlooking the pool terrace hiding behind long curtains on one wall. Tasheba got the curtains pulled back and the French doors open and went outside. The pool terrace seemed to be deserted, but she couldn’t see all of it. Cavender usually had a drink there every day at this time, getting a jump on the cocktail hour. Maybe he had stayed inside today to entertain their guests.

“Cavender?” Tasheba called out, hearing the high whining querulous tone in her voice and hating it. “Cavender, are you down there?”

There was the sound of metal scraping against the fieldstone of the terrace and then a cough. Cavender came into view underneath her.

“You aren’t wearing a robe,” he said, looking up. “You aren’t wearing slippers, either. Go back inside and put something on.”

“I just want to ask you a question,” Tasheba said. “It won’t take very long.”

“You don’t have to ask me any questions. Everything’s fine. Everything’s wonderful. Go back to resting up before dinner.”

“People came,” Tasheba said. “I heard them.”

“Some people came. Bennis Hannaford and that friend of hers; Lydia Acken. The reporter from Personality. Oh. And Hannah Kent Graham. It turns out that that’s what she calls herself. Hannah Kent Graham. After her mother instead of after me.”

“I think that’s very sweet,” Tasheba said quietly. “I think it’s rather—amazing that she didn’t call herself after her aunt Bessie.”

“Maybe she didn’t like her aunt. I never understood how anyone could. I didn’t talk to her, by the way. I didn’t even let her see me. I couldn’t face it. She’s grotesque.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“That’s not something that ever mattered a damn to either one of us. Go back to bed now. You’ve got a long night ahead of you. You’ve got an even longer weekend.”

“Are the rest of them coming?”

“They got held up in Boston with some problems with their plane, but they’re coming. Yes. They’ll be here as soon as they can.”

“I wish it was over and done with,” Tasheba said. “I wish I didn’t have to be so worried all the time.”

“You don’t have to be worried. Go back to bed.”

There was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean, cold but pleasant. Tasheba felt as if she could have stood on the balcony all night. But it was silly. It was ridiculous not to care now whether she lived or died, just because she was old.

I never expected to get this old, she thought, as she went back into the bedroom and shut the French doors tight behind her. I never expected to live much past the age of forty.

She stretched herself out on her bed again and stared up at the underside of the canopy.

In a way, she had died just around the time that she was forty.

She just hadn’t stopped breathing.





CHAPTER 4


1


GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD DEVISED a quick-and-easy way to determine whether a large house, owned by rich people, was run by the husband or the wife: if house guests were required to come down to dinner in black tie, the house was run by the wife. If house guests were not required to come down to dinner in black tie, the house was not necessarily run by the husband. Gregor had known his share of informal women. It was just that husbands never wanted to dress up for dinner on their own territory, unless they were having a party for five or six hundred people and inviting the president of the United States.

The instructions on the little card Gregor had found on the table beside his bed—along with an ice bucket, a glass, and a bottle of mineral water—had said, “Cocktails at seven, Dinner at seven thirty, Black Tie.” The card had been written out by hand and had nothing else on it, so Gregor hadn’t been able to pretend to investigate it. He had simply explored his bedroom for a while, decided that there wasn’t very much to see, and stretched out on the bed to read. The bedroom was a small but very high-ceilinged square containing almost all the sins of Victorian interior decoration: The furniture was made of wood too heavy and too dark to have looked graceful in anything smaller than a football field. The curtains on the windows were made of heavy dark damask. Every available surface was clogged with painted figurines in porcelain and plaster, all in varying stages of terminal sentimentality. On Gregor’s bedside table there was a porcelain group, consisting of a very large mother figure with three tiny children clutching at her knees, titled “Angel of the Home.” Gregor had to put it away on one of the bookshelves before he felt comfortable moving the ice bucket and the mineral water off the tray.