And One to Die On(43)

Gregor went to Bennis Hannaford’s bedroom door and knocked. There was the sound of a muffled “just a minute” and then a cascade of fluttering paper. Gregor heard Bennis say, “Oh, shit.”

Bare feet padded across the room; the door opened. Bennis stuck her head out, saw Gregor, and looked relieved.

“Come on in,” she said, stepping back. “I thought you were that idiotic Carlton.”

Gregor came into the room. Bennis was in a pair of pajamas and one of his old terry cloth bathrobes. The galleys for her latest book had fallen off the bed and scattered across the floor. She sat down cross-legged in front of them and began to put them in order.

“Listen to that,” she said. “Every time I hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, I think of Geraldine Dart, blithering away about how there’s no way off this island if the weather is even a little out of sorts.”

Bennis was right. There was thunder in the distance. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, but now that his attention had been called to it, it was perfectly clear. He went to Bennis’s window and looked out. Her room faced the back of the house, so there wasn’t much he could see, but he did catch a jagged bolt of lightning far in the distance.

Gregor sat down in the chair in front of Bennis’s vanity table. Bennis was pitching her papers onto the bed. She looked tousled and agitated and restless and tired.

“So,” she said, throwing herself on the bed as well, “what have you been up to? I’ve been trying to convince the proofreader of this book that there’s no such thing as a ‘chaise lounge.’”

“You do that every book.”

“I know, but I never win. I saw you captured by Kelly Pratt. I’m sorry I didn’t rescue you.”

“I don’t know if I’m sorry or not. He was telling me a very interesting story, a kind of minor real-life logic problem. It was all about the death of Lilith Brayne, of course.

“Because that’s all anybody around here ever talks about,” Gregor continued. “At least, that’s all they ever talk about to me. The more they talk, the more I remember about the case, or about things around the case, but I’m still no expert. You should have warned me this was going to happen. I would have boned up before we got here. It would have been more entertaining for everybody concerned. Including me.”

“I didn’t know what it was going to be like.” Bennis reached to her night table for her cigarettes, got one out and lit it with a hot red plastic Bic lighter. Then she took a deep drag and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “If you want to know what it’s been like for me, it’s been Carlton Ji. That’s not quite fair. He left me alone after dinner. But still. And if it hasn’t been Carlton Ji, it’s been Hannah Graham. She really is the most poisonous woman.”

“I agree,” Gregor said.

“Well, you should have heard her after dinner. I don’t know where she went after she stormed out, but she didn’t stay away much longer than it took us to retire to the living room for liqueurs, and then all she could talk about was her lawyer. Scaring somebody with false stories of the supernatural was a tort, whatever that means—”

“It means something defined as wrong in law,” Gregor said.

“Whatever. Anyway, what Geraldine Dart did to her was a tort and she could sue, and if Cavender Marsh had any sense at all—if you ask me, Gregor, this entire scene was played for the benefit of Cavender Marsh—where was I? Oh, yes. If Cavender Marsh had any sense, he’d make Geraldine Dart apologize. It was really awful and it was weird, too, like one of those conversations that are really taking place in code except you don’t know how to decipher them. If you know what I mean.”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said drily.

Bennis sighed. “I don’t know what I mean either, I guess, but you can imagine what it was like. Everybody went upstairs as quickly as they could, but I kept getting caught. I wish I could be like your friend the lawyer. She cut Hannah Graham off right in the middle of a sentence and said, ‘Excuse me, I have to go to bed now.’ And then she just left.”

“I was in the library looking over the collection of things that are supposed to be auctioned. I don’t know anything about the auction of this sort of thing, but I wouldn’t think Halbard House would be interested in being part of it if it wasn’t going to be profitable. It isn’t what I expected, though. There are a lot of shoes.”

“What did you think there would be?”

Gregor shrugged. “Jewelry. Expensive knickknacks of the kind people used to have all over their houses when I was younger, clocks in the bellies of Indian elephants and ashtrays made out of sharks’ teeth welded together with gold. There’s something good you can say about the ’60s. It put a stop to all that.”