And One to Die On(55)

Geraldine checked the timer, but that hadn’t been tampered with. She had set the machine to go on at one. Whoever had fiddled with it had left it to go on at one. The disc had not been changed, but Geraldine would have been shocked if it had been. She had brought no other discs to the pantry. The rest of the collection was up in Cavender Marsh’s bedroom, tucked away on the top shelf in Tasheba Kent’s closet. Obviously, somebody had either followed her to the pantry when she had come to set the machine, or they had stumbled into the pantry while they were snooping around and decided to take advantage of what they found. Was that last scenario actually possible? Geraldine supposed it was. With the exception of Gregor Demarkian, Geraldine wouldn’t trust any of the people in this house as far as she could throw them.

The thing to do now was to get this silly machine out of here, before anybody else had a chance to use it. Since she’d put it here herself, she couldn’t see why it would be “tampering with evidence” for her to remove it. She wasn’t trying to hide anything. She had every intention of telling Demarkian and Dick Morrow and even the state police just what it was she had done and why.

Geraldine opened the door to the turntable and took out the disc. The plastic case the disc belonged in was lying across three cans of Campbell’s pork and beans on the shelf above the player. Geraldine got it down and put the disc inside. She closed the turntable door, unplugged the machine, wrapped the cord around her hand four times to make sure it wouldn’t dangle, and put the player under her right arm the way a running back would carry a football. Then she turned around and started to leave.

It was a moment that made her believe, forever afterward, that she had no instinct of self-preservation. She was standing in the doorway to the pantry, not five feet from where she had been just a moment before, and she had not felt his presence. She had not heard him walk up. She had not heard him breathing. He was a complete surprise, and as soon as she saw him, Geraldine felt the breath knocked out of her. Never mind the fact that he was grinning in a furious and nasty way that made him look deranged.

“Well, well, well,” Richard Fenster said, shifting his weight a little to the right. Now he was blocking the entire doorway. There was no way Geraldine could get out without pushing against him. “What is it we’re doing here?”

Geraldine nearly dropped the CD player to the floor. “Oh, for God’s sake. What is it you think you’re doing?”

“I think that what we’re going to discuss here is what it is you’re doing,” Richard Fenster said. “Don’t you agree?”

Geraldine Dart agreed. She had to agree. She wasn’t getting out of this pantry until Richard Fenster let her out.





2


Hannah Graham did not believe in taking pills if you didn’t have to, but she did think there were a lot of circumstances under which you had to, and one of those was if she couldn’t get to sleep at night. Sleep was very important, because lack of it could make you wrinkled. Lack of it could also make you crazy, because the only way anybody could hold onto her sanity was through dreams. This was all a little fuzzy, but Hannah knew what she meant, and what she was afraid of. Right now, she was scared to death that she would lie on her bed for hours and not be able to relax at all. Unfortunately, although she had brought a small suitcase full of nothing but medication, none of the medication she had brought was sleeping pills. She had twenty-two different kinds of vitamins, including liquid vitamin E to rub on her hands and face to keep them from aging. She had six different kinds of tranquilizers to meet every need from mild upset to major emotional breakdown. She had enough different kinds of painkillers, both over the counter and bootleg prescription, to open her own Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. But she did not have a single pill to put her to sleep. Not one.

The bed in Hannah’s room had a canopy that arched up into the darkness at the top of the room like a gently rolling hill. On the wall next to the window was a steel engraving of a Victorian lady sitting at her boudoir, frowning into a mirror that was not telling her what she wanted to hear. On the vanity table there was a tortoise-shell brush and comb and hand mirror set, with the handles carved into swirling ribbons and fat little bows. Hannah thought about taking a tranquilizer, but a tranquilizer wasn’t what she wanted. A tranquilizer would calm her down enough so that she could go to sleep, but it would block out all her dreams. She would wake up fuzzy and nauseated and not alert, which she couldn’t afford. Hannah knew this from experience.

Hannah got out of bed and checked herself in the vanity table mirror. She looked all right in a dim light, and there were nothing but dim lights in the hall and the bedrooms of this wing. Even in the gloom, though, she could see the start of a sag at the corner of her jaw. It was time to go in and get herself seen to again. This was what came of putting yourself through too much stress, and drinking wine and eating ice cream to calm yourself down. For Hannah, ice cream was the root of all evil. It jumped out of refrigerators at you. It ambushed you in stores. Its entire reason for existence was to make the upper-middle-class women of America look fat.