And One to Die On(54)

Cavender was fine. Even standing right next to him, Geraldine couldn’t find anything, no matter how small, to worry about. There was no hitch in his breath. When she laid her ear on the covers above his chest, she heard no murmur or stumble in his heart. Stop being ridiculous, she told herself. You’re just trying to postpone the inevitable.

It was true, too. The last thing Geraldine Dart wanted to do right now was to walk back down those stairs past Tasheba Kent’s body, but it had to be done. She left Cavender Marsh’s room and went out into the hall, but she didn’t turn toward her own bedroom door. She went out to the landing and looked into the guest wing. Everything seemed to be quiet over there, perfectly silent, dead. All the doors were closed and no lights were showing under them, even in the two cases where Geraldine knew the doors were out of true.

Geraldine went down the stairs, quickly at first, then slowing down as she got near the bottom. Tasheba’s body was lying on a diagonal, so it wouldn’t roll anymore, but it still took up most of the steps it touched. Geraldine scooted around Tasheba Kent’s feet so quickly, she almost lost her balance and fell. By the time she got to the foyer, she was running. She turned to look back, but there was nothing to see but a sheet. Gregor Demarkian had said that leaving her where she was didn’t mean they couldn’t cover her up. Geraldine thought he had been stretching things a little.

Whatever he had been doing, she was past it now. She didn’t have to go upstairs again if she didn’t want to. There were couches all over the first floor that she could sleep on. Earlier tonight, she had gone around to the pantry by the back hall. Now she didn’t want to waste the time, or spook herself going through all those dark hallways, so she went straight from the foyer to the kitchen. The utility hall that connected these two was short and very well lit. Getting to the kitchen, Geraldine turned on all the lights she could and tried not to look at the knives in the knife rack next to the stove. To get to the pantry, she had to go all the way across to the door that led to the way out at the back. Then she had to cross an almost unheated little mud room, climb four steps, and let herself through another door into the back utility hall. This hall was not well lit. The principle that seemed to have been operating when this house was wired for electricity was that servants were able to see in the dark.

Geraldine left the door between the mud room and the back hall open, as she had left the door between the kitchen and the mud room open, so that some of the kitchen light would filter through and help her do what she was doing. The pantry door was two doors in from the mud room door, just past the beginning of the back stairs. Geraldine didn’t look up there any more than she had looked at the knives in the kitchen. She hated those back stairs. They were like something out of a novel by Alexandre Dumas. They should have belonged to a dungeon or a torture chamber. The two or three times Geraldine had been forced to climb those stairs, she had taken a flashlight and been careful to wear the plain gold cross she had been given in Bible class at the Hunter’s Pier First Full Gospel Baptist Church.

Now she hurried into the pantry, leaving the door open behind her. At the last minute, just to be cautious, she took a can of peas and a can of kidney beans and propped them against the open door. Then she went back in among the cans of vegetables and the sacks of flour and the big jars of honey and maple syrup and looked around. The CD player was just where she had put it in the first place, back around midnight. Its speakers were still aimed at the square mesh microphone that was connected to the intercom system. The microphone had been turned off, but there was no mystery about that. Geraldine had done it herself, that last time she had come in here, looking for Carlton Ji or his body. If she hadn’t, her breathing or her footsteps would have gone bouncing around the house just the way the cackling laughter had, although they would have been quieter.

Geraldine looked over the facing of the player, checking out the settings. As she had suspected, the volume had been turned way up, into the reddest part of the red zone. The program had been fiddled with, too. Instead of being set for one play-through of the disc on the turntable, it was set for seven. If it had been set for ten or eleven, Geraldine might have thought she had made the mistake herself. She had been nervous and jumpy. Her hand might have shaken as she was punching the instructions into the machine. She could guarantee that she hadn’t been calm enough to be paying full attention. She did know that she hadn’t pushed “seven” though. She could remember putting her finger down on “one.”