And One to Die On(78)

Eventually, Geraldine decided to go back upstairs to see Gregor Demarkian because it was the only way she could think of to get any peace and quiet. Mathilda Frazier and Lydia Acken were busy stripping crepe paper from chairs and folding up the quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard sculpture. The men were sitting around complaining. Hannah Graham was with them. The sniping was awful. It had been bad all weekend, but now it was ultrafast and supernasty. It was as if they had all decided that they had nothing to lose. They might as well be thoroughly, outrageously, unrepentantly hateful. It was more fun than staring out the windows and trying too hard to be very, very nice.

“Tasheba always hated fans,” Cavender Marsh told Richard Fenster. “She said they were vampires of the spirit.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with the surgery,” Mathilda Frazier told Hannah Graham spitefully. “You look older than your father does.”

“Do you always have to act as if you were right in the middle of a Rotary Club meeting?” Richard Fenster asked Kelly Pratt. “We have two people dead here, and you’re bouncing around like you’re cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce.”

The only people who weren’t behaving like absolute scum were Lydia Acken and Bennis Hannaford. Geraldine knew from experience that Lydia was always polite to the point of the ridiculous. She could only decide that Bennis Hannaford had decided mentally and emotionally to distance herself from the rest of them. After a little hesitation, Bennis had gone to work helping Mathilda and Lydia clean up. Prodded by comments from Cavender Marsh and Hannah Graham—“Oh, look,” Hannah had said at one point. “The great American writer knows just what to do with Scotch tape.”—Bennis behaved as if she were blind, deaf, and dumb. Geraldine wasn’t used to thinking of Hannah Graham as Cavender Marsh’s daughter except in a very formal, abstract way. Now she saw that there was nothing at all abstract about the relationship. Hannah Graham might have been brought up by an aunt. Cavender Marsh might not have seen his daughter in nearly sixty years. But it didn’t matter. They were a lot alike.

“What I don’t understand is why people with noses like yours wear their hair forward the way you do,” Hannah told Geraldine at one point. “I mean, it only makes the protuberance much more prominent, doesn’t it?”

Geraldine knew she had a large nose. She had heard enough about it in her life. She had stopped really minding years ago. For some reason, however, Hannah’s comment really got to her. She was piling paper party plates in a stack and nesting paper party cups together. She stopped where she was and swung around to look at Hannah Graham.

“At least it’s my own nose,” Geraldine told her.

Hannah Graham sniffed. “Not being able to afford the necessary medical attention,” she said, “is hardly something to be proud of.”

Keeping her temper would be something to be proud of. Geraldine knew that. If she stayed in this room much longer, she was going to blow up. She was going to hit somebody on their cosmetically improved nose. Carefully, she put the stack of paper plates and the nested cups at the end of the dining room table. She wiped her palms across the top of her skirt and patted her hair. She looked at Bennis Hannaford tying a dozen balloons together with a piece of string.

“Don’t look in the mirror,” Hannah Graham said. “Every time you crack a mirror like that, it’s seven years’ bad luck.”

Geraldine went out of the dining room and into the foyer. She went up the stairs and down the guest room wing. Carlton Ji’s door was open and light was spilling out. Geraldine stopped in the doorway. Gregor Demarkian sat on the bed, taking stapled sheafs of paper out of a red cardboard folder. The bed was full of other papers and other cardboard folders. One of the cardboard folders, the bright orange one, was labeled “LILITH BRAYNE” in tall black letters. Geraldine raised her hand to the door and knocked.

“Mr. Demarkian?”

“Come in,” Gregor said, barely looking up. “Grab the stool and sit down.”

Geraldine did grab the stool and sit down. It gave her something to do for a moment. Gregor was still looking over the papers from the red folder. Every once in a while he would nod and mutter to himself. Finally, he pushed the folder away from himself and looked up at Geraldine, for real, for the first time.

“He was writing a book,” he told Geraldine. “He’d collected some very interesting stuff.”

“About Tasheba Kent?”

“About the death of Lilith Brayne. And about that black feather boa.”