And One to Die On(45)

“I thought your ghost never said a word,” Gregor told her.

“This isn’t my ghost,” Geraldine Dart replied. “This is nothing like my ghost.”

Gregor decided to let it pass. The cackling giggle was shrieking through the house again, sounding ever louder but ever more banal. Gregor went back to the guest wing with Geraldine Dart in tow and said, “I think we’d better all go downstairs. It’s not going to stop until we do what we’re supposed to do.”

“How do you know we’re supposed to go downstairs?” Bennis demanded.

“Because downstairs is the only place we can go,” Gregor said. “I suppose there’s an upstairs—”

“Two more floors and an attic,” Geraldine Dart said.

“Can we get up there?” Gregor asked her.

Geraldine Dart thought about it. “The doors to the wings up there on this staircase are all locked,” she said. “and there’s no access to the attic from here. There are a back family staircase and a servants’ staircase. They both have access to the attic. I don’t know what’s locked on them and what isn’t. We never use those staircases anymore.”

“I wouldn’t want to go upstairs anyway,” Mathilda Frazier said. Her voice was shaky. “That—that noise is coming from up there.”

The noise came again, almost hiccuping now. Gregor saw Lydia Acken shiver again.

“The point,” he told them, “is that we’re supposed to investigate. It’s not going to stop until we have investigated. We really can’t go up, it’s much too complicated, so we’ll have to go down.”

“But what will we find when we investigate?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“Nothing in particular,” Gregor said. “It’s a game more than anything else. I wonder if that security guard went home or if he’s sleeping in the house.”

“He’s sleeping in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage,” Geraldine Dart said. “He got off at eleven o’clock, but we couldn’t get him back to the mainland. The storm had already started by then.”

“You mean there’s a storm?” Mathilda Frazier sounded truly frightened. “You mean we can’t get out of here?”

“It’s just temporary,” Geraldine Dart said irritably. “This isn’t Alcatraz.”

Lightning flashed past the window at the end of the hall, illuminating them all for just a second. Then the thunder hit in a rolling sharp slap. Kelly Pratt jumped a little and squealed. Mathilda Frazier rubbed the palms of her hands against the sides of her arms. Bennis lit another cigarette.

Gregor thought it was too bad that the security man wasn’t in the house. He could have used the help of someone who had not been subjected to Geraldine Dart’s ghost stories. Or maybe he had. Maybe Geraldine Dart told these ghost stories in Hunter’s Pier and everywhere else she went. Maybe they were her preferred form of entertainment.

The cackle came again. It did a crescendo that sounded calculated and false. In the middle it suddenly switched out of soprano and into bass.

“Oh, wonderful,” Richard Fenster muttered. “Something new.”

“Two ghosts.” Mathilda Frazier giggled, almost hysterical. “Isn’t that just what we need? Two ghosts.”

Gregor touched Geraldine Dart on the arm. “You don’t happen to have a flashlight anywhere around, do you?”

“Downstairs in the kitchen,” Geraldine said.

“You don’t keep one in your own room?”

“No,” Geraldine said. “No, I don’t.”

“Funny,” Gregor said. “I would have thought power failures were a fairly frequent occurrence in a place like this.”

Geraldine Dart started to explain herself. Then the cackle rang out again, and she stopped. Gregor Demarkian ignored both Geraldine and the cackle.

“Come on,” he told the whole group of them. “Let’s go downstairs and get this over with.”





3


They went in a body with Gregor at the head, like a group of kindergarten children being herded around a museum by a teacher. They went down the stairs into the foyer and looked around. There was nothing there, of course. If there had been, they could have seen it from the top of the stairs. They went into the living room and looked around there, too, but as Gregor had suspected, there was nothing there to find. Their candles cast odd shadows on the walls, and all the birthday decorations looked sinister, but that was only to be expected. The way things were right now, Gregor thought, an episode of Leave It to Beaver would have looked sinister.

Gregor picked up one of the smiley faces and turned it over in his hands, but it was just what it had been before, quilted crepe paper and cardboard. Nobody had slashed it up with a knife or painted it with blood or sprayed it with poison. He put it down again and picked up a silver table lighter. It wasn’t a piece he had noticed before, but he couldn’t see anything special about it, so he put that down, too. The cackle started up again, but it seemed muffled and remote down here. Nobody looked as nervous as they had before.