“All right,” he said. “Miss Dart?”
Geraldine Dart unfroze. “Oh, dear,” she whimpered. “Oh, dear. I don’t know what’s happening. I really don’t.”
“Don’t worry about what’s happening for the moment,” Gregor told her. “Answer a few questions for me, please. Is there a microphone for this intercom system in the foyer?”
“What? Oh. Oh, no. There aren’t many microphones. We didn’t need them. We just had them in the bedrooms and the bathrooms upstairs. And there’s one in the pantry.”
“In the pantry?”
“It was a mistake. We got some local man from Hunter’s Pier to put the system in and he made a mistake. And it wasn’t worthwhile to correct it. Oh, my God. The pantry.”
“What is she talking about?” Richard Fenster demanded.
“I’ve got to go,” Geraldine Dart cried.
She turned away from them and rushed down the hall to the kitchen. One or two of the others started to follow, but when they saw that Gregor wasn’t going to, they stopped. Gregor stayed where he was and waited. Screams crashed down around them, soprano-high and hysterical. Gregor was more and more sure that what he was hearing was from The Tingler. In no time at all, Geraldine Dart came rushing back, even more frightened and frantic than she had been before.
“It’s not there,” she burst out. “It’s not there. I don’t understand it.”
“Did you leave it there?” Gregor asked her. “It was—what? A CD player? A tape machine?”
“A CD player,” Geraldine replied miserably. “And of course I didn’t leave it there. I wasn’t that stupid. I took it upstairs and put it in my room.”
“Is there a microphone in your room?”
“Yes, there is. There are microphones in all the rooms on the family wing.”
“It’s probably still there, then,” Gregor said. “I think we’d all appreciate it if you went upstairs and turned it off.”
“Wait a minute,” Kelly Pratt said brusquely. “Do you mean she did it on purpose? She put some kind of record on a stereo and made us all jump out of our skins?”
“If you’d been listening to me, you’d have known that all along,” Hannah Graham said. “I told you they were setting us all up. I told you.”
“Go,” Gregor told Geraldine Dart. “The noise is getting on my nerves.”
“It’s getting on everybody’s nerves,” Mathilda Frazier said.
“But I didn’t do this.” Geraldine Dart was nearly in tears herself now. “I didn’t do this. I have no idea how it happened.”
“It doesn’t matter who did it,” Gregor told her. “It only matters that you make it stop.”
Cavender Marsh pushed forward. “It matters to me who did it.”
“She was the one who did it last night,” Richard Fenster said. “I caught her at it when she was trying to take the stuff away.”
Geraldine Dart backed away from them. “I’m going,” she said. “I’m going right away. And if it’s not in my bedroom, I’ll check all the others.”
She ran to the staircase and then up, up and up, pounding on the stairs as she went.
Gregor turned his attention back to the rest of them. Gregor had filed away quite a bit of information for future use, but he didn’t want to go into any of it now. Richard Fenster had caught Geraldine Dart removing the CD player from the pantry after the incident last night. That was interesting. In spite of all the melodramatic overreacting, Cavender Marsh’s blood pressure didn’t seem to have been raised a bit by any of this nonsense, including sudden bloodcurdling screams loud enough to shake the rafters of his home. That was interesting, too. Most interesting of all was what hadn’t happened, last night, while all that insane laughter was going on and Tasheba Kent’s body was rolling down the stairs. It was what hadn’t happened that made Gregor so sure that he was right.
Unfortunately, being right wasn’t enough. Gregor Demarkian was going to have to play this farce through right to the end, whether he liked it or not, and all the rest of these people were going to have to play it right through with him. They definitely weren’t going to like it, but there was nothing Gregor could do about that, either.
There was a sudden bounce and skip and giggle above their heads—Geraldine taking the disc off the CD upstairs and doing it badly—and then there was silence in the house again, broken only by the wind.
“I’m going to sue somebody,” Hannah Graham declared. “I’m going to sue everybody in sight.”