And One to Die On(33)

What there wasn’t, in this room, was any sign of the life Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh had lived before coming to Maine. In fact, as far as Gregor could see, there was very little of that part of their lives anywhere in the house. Maybe their private rooms were full of the memorabilia of Hollywood and the movies. Downstairs and in the guest wing, there was only a long line of movie posters climbing the wall of the main staircase. There weren’t even any books about the movies lying around. Gregor had gone into the library after lunch; all he had found were books on gardening and the complete works of Agatha Christie.

Of course, there were three long tables full of memorabilia, meant for sale at this auction. Those things might once have been scattered around the house and then been collected up to be sent to New York. Gregor didn’t think so, because he never seemed to run into any feeling of absence anywhere. There were no blank shelves anywhere that he could see. There were no empty, unfilled places on coffee tables or sideboards. These little figurines were very old, even if they were maudlin and not very valuable. They hadn’t been bought last week to be shoved into the gaps left by cigarette lighters and rhinestone-encrusted minaudières.

Gregor tried to check the set of his tie in a mirror that was more elaborately carved frame than glass. Fat cupids chased even fatter maidens around the edges of a silver lake. He could see one side of his tie or the other, but not both at once.

Gregor went to the door of his bedroom and looked out into the guest room hall. All the other doors on this corridor were closed, as they had been all afternoon. He heard no noise. Either his fellow guests had gone down to cocktails early, or they were being very quiet about getting dressed. Gregor knocked on Bennis’s door and got no answer. He tried the doorknob, found that it turned easily, and poked his head inside. It was impossible to get Bennis to take security seriously. She left doors open and suitcases unlocked and checkbooks and credit cards lying around on tables. The only precautions she would take had to do with her car, and that was more because she was overprotective of the car than that she believed she could be the victim of a carjacking. Bennis was not in her room. There was a mess of papers on the bed—she had been working—and a pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray on the bedside table, but Bennis herself was gone.

Gregor retreated into the hallway, nonplussed. Maybe he had read the card wrong. Maybe there was a code to messages like that one to which he wasn’t privy. Gregor was not an unsophisticated man. In spite of the fact that he had grown up poor in the days when Cavanaugh Street had been not only an Armenian immigrant conclave but something of a slum, his career since had brought him into contact with more rich people than any sane man would want to know. He had been to dinner at the White House (twice, under two different presidents) and on a long weekend in the Virginia hills where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were spending a vacation. Granted, during that weekend he had been part of the security force, not one of the guests, but that hardly mattered. Gregor Demarkian knew how to operate in the world. It was only around people related to Bennis Day Hannaford that he began to suspect conspiracies and to believe that whatever social occasion he was involved in was really a trap, meant to make him look like an idiot.

He was still standing in the hallway, staring at Bennis Hannaford’s bedroom door, when a door down the corridor opened and a woman came out. Gregor looked up and saw Lydia Acken locking up very carefully behind herself. The lawyer wore a long pearl white dress in plain, unadorned taffeta. There was a string of pearls around her neck. She had her white hair brushed back into a neat chignon designed to let little curling tendrils escape around her face. She had pearl stud earrings in her ears and a small white taffeta handbag in her hands. She looked, Gregor thought, almost unbelievably attractive.

Lydia finished locking up and came down the hall to him. He was, after all, standing at the head of the stairs.

“Are you waiting for your friend?” she asked him pleasantly. “I noticed her especially on the pier. She’s really quite beautiful.”

“Bennis?” It was true, of course, that Bennis Hannaford was beautiful. It was just that Gregor never noticed it. “I don’t know,” he said now, “I suppose I’ve known her so long, it just doesn’t register anymore.”

“Maybe that’s why she’s holding you up.” Lydia nodded at Bennis’s closed door. “Maybe she feels she’s being taken for granted, and she’s making you wait, so you’ll appreciate her more.”

“Bennis?” Gregor said. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it’s not—we don’t—it isn’t like that, you see—we’re—”