And One to Die On(70)

“Oh, my God,” Gregor said.

Lydia nodded. “She was cut to ribbons. Of course, she wasn’t rendered into small pieces the way sewage would have been. The blades weren’t that strong. They couldn’t cut through bone. But still. If it hadn’t been for this fluke where her head got cut off and pitched outside the sluice by an action of the water, they wouldn’t have been able to identify her at all. I don’t think there was anything much left of her body.”

“Dear Christ,” Gregor said. “And this was in Confidential, was it?”

“I don’t remember. Confidential or one of the magazines like it. And they weren’t very friendly to Cavender Marsh or Tasheba Kent. There was a reason why Cavender Marsh never worked again after all that happened, in spite of the fact that he was one of the most popular and successful movie actors of his time before it. The hostility to him was enormous. When he and Tasheba got off the boat in New York Harbor, after Cavender had been cleared and they were allowed to come back to the States, there was a positive mob waiting for them, with eggs and old vegetables and all sorts of other things besides. One woman had a whole bottle full of urine she poured right onto Tasheba Kent’s head. The police had to be called out in force.”

“I think I’m beginning to be sorry that I never developed a taste for the gutter press,” Gregor said.

“Oh, I read that sort of thing all the time. It’s much more informative than the Op-Ed page of the Times, if you just skip all the nonsense about being kidnapped by UFOs and go straight to the murders.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Was any of that any kind of help to you? I know it wasn’t the same thing as a coroner’s report, but it was probably as well as you’d do even if you had a coroner’s report. From 1938, I mean. It wasn’t as if they had DNA tracing and all that back then.”

“It was a great deal of help to me,” Gregor said. “It was one of those details that had to be cleared up, because I didn’t dare get it wrong, and now it is cleared up. So the next thing I have to do is—What the hell is that?”

“That” was a racket in the hallway, consisting of swearing and yelling and banging and stamping, and getting louder and less coherent by the second. Lydia raised her head to listen to it, and sighed.

“That,” she told Gregor Demarkian, “is Hannah Graham, having another first-class fit.”





2


Hannah Graham was indeed having another first-class fit. Hannah was having it in the middle of the guest wing hall, and Gregor understood as soon as he looked at her that she was having it to collect an audience. He and Lydia were the first to emerge from any of the rooms to see what was going on. They weren’t left alone in their contemplation for long. Hannah was jumping and yelling and kicking her door. Then she marched down the hall and kicked every other door she came to that was still shut. When she passed by Lydia and Gregor, Gregor thought she was going to kick them. Instead, she glared at them and started to kick the walls. First Kelly Pratt, then Mathilda Frazier, then Richard Fenster emerged from their rooms. When Bennis Hannaford came out, she gave Gregor and Lydia, still standing together in Lydia’s doorway, an amused smile, then lit up a cigarette and worked on looking bored. In no time at all, Geraldine Dart came hurrying in from the family wing, blowing smoke and breathing fire.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Geraldine demanded, grabbing Hannah’s arm and jerking her to a stop. “You’re going to wake up your father. You’re going to give him a heart attack.”

“The start of World War Three couldn’t give that old goat a heart attack,” Hannah Graham snarled, jerking her arm out of Geraldine’s grasp. “And don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare. I have every intention of suing the pants off everybody in this house as soon as I get off this damn island, and I’m going to start with you.”

“I don’t care who you sue,” Geraldine Dart snapped. “I won’t have you behaving like this when there’s a frail old man in the house.”

Bennis Hannaford blew a stream of smoke into the air. “Haven’t we had this argument before?” she asked.

But it was Mathilda Frazier, more than any of them, who had finally had enough. Gregor could see it in her face, and in the way she pushed herself forward until she was standing between Hannah and Geraldine.

“Look,” Mathilda said to Hannah, “is there a point to this commotion this time? I mean, do you have something in particular you want to share with us this time or is this just another one of your periodic bids for attention?”