Gregor let Bennis go back to looking around the dining room and went out into the foyer. From there he could see Lydia Acken making her way down the utility hallway to the kitchen, hesitantly opening door after door and peering inside. Every time she opened a door, she seemed to shudder. Every time she closed one she looked relieved. Gregor went up to her and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Oh,” she said, jumping. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to squeak. I’ve just been looking in these closets, and every time I open a door I’m just sure I’m going to find—well, and then there’s another one, you know, another hallway like this, on the other side of the house. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stand it.”
“You don’t have to search the other hallway as well as this one,” Gregor told her. “You can let somebody else do that. Are these all closets?”
Lydia laughed thinly. “They’re all specialty closets. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s one with nothing but baseball equipment in it. There’s another one with nothing but rubber rain boots. This is an incredible place.”
Gregor opened the next door down and found a closet full of sets of flatware. They were stacked in boxes on the floor and the shelves. He opened the next door after that and found what appeared to be chauffeurs’ uniforms, all separated neatly into sizes. Lydia Acken laughed again.
“Oh, dear,” she said, somewhat shrilly. “Oh, dear. Do you think the two of them were insane? Or do you think these things were left over from a previous tenant? What would anybody want with so many chauffeurs’ uniforms?”
“I think I want to give up on these closets for a minute and go look into the kitchen,” Gregor said. “Do you want to come with me? We can get back to this hall later.”
“I want to come with you,” Lydia Acken said quickly.
Gregor motioned her along the hallway and they went, Lydia staying just a little behind, as if she were sure a lion was going to jump out at them, and she didn’t want to be in the way of an attack. In spite of the fact that Gregor had said what he’d said about the closets, he looked in a couple more of them as they went along. One was full of old books that had not been cared for and smelled of mildew. One was full of plastic cat feeder dishes. They came to a heavy swinging door and Gregor pushed it open. Beyond it was a brightly lit room that was obviously a kitchen, but so large and well-equipped it could have served a small hotel.
“Here we are,” Gregor said—and then he saw it, stuck to the wall next to the refrigerator, a perfectly ordinary everyday plastic phone. Gregor couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this relieved. He couldn’t remember another time in his life when he had been this desperate to get in contact with the local police.
“Just a minute,” he told Lydia Acken.
He strode across the room to the phone and picked up the receiver. He dialed 0 for Operator and stood back to wait. A few seconds later he hit the disconnect bar and started all over again.
The reason it took so long for Gregor to realize what was going on was due to his own disbelief. It was such a cliché, he was sure that it couldn’t have happened. It was such an obvious next step in the drama, he was positive that no self-respecting twentieth-century murderer would have indulged in it. It was the kind of thing that happened in books but never in real life to real people with real things to worry about—except, of course, that it had.
The phone was dead.
CHAPTER 2
1
THE PHONE CORD HAD been cut at the side of the house just outside the kitchen window. Somebody had climbed up onto the sink and leaned out the window there to get at it, using a smooth-edged slicing blade from the knife rack and leaving it—the blade covered with bits of black rubber—on the drainboard when the job was through. This was not the worst of what was going on. It was just the thing that upset Geraldine Dart the most. For some reason, unlike the bloody death of Tasheba Kent, unlike the sight of Cavender Marsh in his peaceful uninterruptable sleep, the slashed phone cord made it clear to Geraldine that everything had now gone permanently and irretrievably wrong.
It was almost dawn by the time they were all able to go upstairs, and even then Geraldine had to herd them there. She would have left them alone if Gregor Demarkian had asked her to. She was glad he didn’t, because the thought of the bunch of them loose in the downstairs rooms of this house made her skin crawl. One of them had smashed something round and heavy into the side of Tasheba Kent’s head—or Carlton Ji had, and to Geraldine that amounted to the same thing. One of them had given Cavender Marsh a lot of sleeping pills and cut the cord on the phone, too. Then there was the record, which had been played much too loud and much too long. Somebody must have gotten into the pantry and changed the settings.