And One to Die On(57)
“But why would he kill Tasheba Kent? That’s what I don’t understand. I mean, I think it’s obvious that he must have done it. There isn’t any other reason for him to be missing, unless he’s—” Mathilda blanched. “Oh, dear.”
“I don’t see why he would be dead,” Hannah said, completing Mathilda’s thought. “Unless he killed himself trying to escape in the storm. I couldn’t see any reason for any of us to have killed him. None of us had ever met him before.”
“I can’t see why anybody would want to murder Tasheba Kent,” Mathilda said. “I mean, the woman was practically a century old and she spent all her time out here in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t a danger to anybody. And she couldn’t have lasted very long anyway. Why would anybody want to go to the trouble of murdering a woman who was almost a century old?”
“I don’t think of her as a woman who was almost a hundred years old,” Hannah said. “I think of her as the woman who was responsible for the death of Lilith Brayne. And it seems to me that there must be dozens of people who would want to see her dead.”
“Well, from your point of view I suppose that’s perfectly natural.” Mathilda didn’t sound as if she meant it. “I’m sorry,” she went on, “but I took two of those pills nearly twenty minutes ago, and I’m getting a little sleepy.”
“Of course.” Hannah stood up.
“I hope you’re wrong about the storm,” Mathilda told her. “I don’t want to spend another night in this house. I don’t want to spend another minute in it.”
“Well, maybe it will let up,” Hannah said.
Going back to her room, though, Hannah knew that the storm was not going to let up, not on Friday, and maybe not on Saturday, either. The man on the radio had been very explicit. This was the first of the great winter storms arriving early. They were likely to be socked in hard for the rest of the weekend.
3
Down at the end of the hall nearest the landing and the stairs, Bennis Hannaford was sitting cross-legged, writing notes in the margins of her galleys that she knew she was going to have to black out later. They had a lot of four-letter words in them, and even more sarcasm. They were the kinds of things that made copyeditors and proofreaders quit in tears, or threaten to sue. Bennis couldn’t help herself. She was exhausted. She was agitated. She wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep for hours. She had to do something.
When the knock came on the door, Bennis had just finished her fourth cigarette in a chain of cigarettes, a chain that she had every intention of going on with until she could go downstairs for breakfast. She took a deep drag of it and went to her door.
“Who is it?”
“Gregor,” Gregor said.
Bennis opened up and ushered him inside. “Come on in,” she told him. “I’m just sitting on my bed quietly going mad.”
Gregor sat down on the stool to Bennis’s vanity table and stretched out his legs.
“Stop going mad for a moment and try to concentrate,” he said. “This is important. I want you to tell me everything you know about the death of Lilith Brayne.”
CHAPTER 3
1
IF GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD had to rely on the report of Bennis Hannaford for information about the death of Lilith Brayne, he would have been up a tree without a ladder. Bennis knew the things everybody knew, and not much more. Cavender Marsh had been married to Lilith Brayne while having a very passionate, and very public, affair with Tasheba Kent. Cavender Marsh and Lilith Brayne went away together to the south of France, alone, to see if they could put their marriage back together. Lilith Brayne showed up dead and cut to pieces in a sluice, apparently after accidentally falling to her death from the stone balcony of their rented villa. The French police investigated Cavender Marsh for murder but finally decided he couldn’t have committed it. The movie magazines of two continents convicted Tasheba Kent of murder without worrying much about what evidence there was in any direction. The verdict of Silver Screen and Photoplay and their sisters was that Tasheba Kent had driven her beautiful, betrayed sister to suicide by first driving her beautiful, betrayed sister to despair.
It was the kind of information most people would have been satisfied with, but it was not the kind of information Gregor Demarkian needed. He wasn’t craving after exact times to the second or elaborate suspect location charts at this late date. He just needed some details. Kelly Pratt’s story about the missing one hundred thousand dollars was interesting, because Gregor could come up with an explanation for it—but if his explanation was true, things were much more odd here than he had expected. Before he jumped to conclusions like that, he ought to know more about what he was doing. After a while, he made Bennis get up and come downstairs with him. She didn’t want to walk past Tasheba Kent’s body, but Gregor didn’t think anybody did, and it had to be done. They searched all the bookshelves in the library and the living room and came up with nothing. Then they went upstairs again and Gregor started searching through the bedrooms in the family wing.