Geraldine grimaced. “God, I’m beginning to hate that thing. Not that I ever liked it. It’s been sitting around the house for years, collecting dust. But now. Why do you think it was wrapped around his neck? Was something done to his neck that it was covering up?”
“Not that I could see. He may have had it with him when he died.”
“But why?”
Gregor Demarkian tapped the red folder. “He has quite a bit of documentation here about a rather odd glitch in the evidence records that exist from 1938.”
“What kind of glitch?”
“Well,” Gregor said, “on the night Lilith Brayne died, one of the things listed as being at the scene—at the general scene, you understand, in the villa, not in the water with her—was a black feather boa. That’s the only time a black feather boa is mentioned among her things. When the possessions list was made for the inquest, no black feather boa was on it. No black feather boa was ever mentioned in connection with Lilith Brayne again. But a black feather boa was worn almost every day during the investigation by Tasheba Kent, and worn very publicly, too. You can see it in every photograph of her from the time.”
“That’s odd,” Geraldine said.
“That’s very odd,” Gregor agreed. His finger absently tapped the red folder again.
“Maybe the explanation is something very simple,” Geraldine suggested. “Maybe it was just a mistake. Or maybe it belonged to Tasheba all along, and she’d left it at the villa, and Cavender sneaked it back to her after Lilith died.”
“That’s not bad. We’d have to find out if Tasheba Kent was ever in that villa before her sister died. The women I know wouldn’t have had her in the same town, under the circumstances, but movie stars seem to be unusual people.”
“Even ex-movie stars are that,” Geraldine said. She stared at her hands. “Well. Here I am. Somebody told me that if any of us had anything to tell you, we should come right up, so—”
“So you’ve come to tell me about the laughs in the night,” Gregor said.
Geraldine nodded. “But I don’t know what happened this afternoon. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“And to tell you the truth, the stuff last night wasn’t my idea, either. Well, I suppose you could have guessed that. It isn’t the kind of thing an employee does to an employer’s weekend party unless she’s looking to get fired, and I’m definitely not looking to get fired.”
“You like working here?”
“No, I don’t,” Geraldine said frankly. She sighed. “The old lady was a consummate bitch and Cavender isn’t much better. But it’s a very lucrative job. The salary is decent and there’s room and board besides. I’ve been putting quite a bit away.”
“In an attempt to retire early, I hope.”
“Very early.” Geraldine laughed. “Anyway, the idea for the ghost business was Cavender’s, and I didn’t like it much, but it seemed perfectly harmless.”
“It was just Cavender Marsh’s idea? Not Tasheba Kent’s, too?”
Geraldine shook her head. “Cavender was really worked up, you see, about what he kept calling ‘the potential for invasion of privacy.’ What he meant was that he was afraid the guests would get up here and want to talk about nothing but what had happened in 1938, and he just wasn’t going to have it. They didn’t talk about it, you know.”
“Really? Never?”
“Never while I was around. They might have talked about it when they were alone. The thing about this weekend, though, Mr. Demarkian, was that there were going to be so many people here they couldn’t control. Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier and Kelly Pratt don’t really count. They were all employees, in a way. They weren’t going to bring up anything Cavender didn’t want to bring up. At least, not for long.”
“No, I can see that. Especially in the case of Mathilda Frazier. She wouldn’t want to see the auction collapse.”
“The problems,” Geraldine said, “came with all the other people. Your friend Bennis Hannaford made Cavender very nervous because she insisted on bringing you. He was half sure that his uptight rich relatives had commissioned you to reopen the case and reinvestigate it and come to some final conclusions they could believe in. Cavender’s relatives never did accept the accident verdict. The ones who are still alive who were alive then just think that he’s a murderer.”
“If they do,” Gregor told her, “they haven’t said anything about it to me. And they haven’t said anything about it to Bennis, either. She would have told me.”