And One to Die On(91)

“Oh, but it is,” Gregor told him. “Your wife was killed by the one person on earth who had every reason to want her dead in a nasty and deliberate way, no matter how old or how close to death she was. Her own daughter and yours. Hannah Kent Graham.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Hannah Graham’s voice was high and hysterical. “That’s totally ridiculous. How can you possibly say something like that?”

“I can say it very easily,” Gregor told her. “It all comes down to that most famous line from the Sherlock Holmes stories, the dog that did nothing in the nighttime. You were the only one who could have fixed that CD player, the only one who could have cut the lights, the only one who could have cut the phone lines, the only one who could have done all the things that needed to be done in a very short time on the night your mother died, because you were the only one who was not in the group with the rest of us when all that was going on.”

“Of course I was there! Of course I was there! It was just dark and you didn’t see me.”

“I didn’t see you either,” Mathilda Frazier said.

“Who did and didn’t see her is not the point,” Gregor Demarkian interjected, before it became a screaming match. “The point is that I didn’t hear her. Ms. Graham, in all the time that we have been in this house, I have only twice heard you shut up for longer than thirty seconds on the subject of just who you were going to sue for what when you got out of here. One of those times was just now, when you were much too interested in what I had to say to interrupt me. The other was the night your mother died—a night, by the way, full of exactly the sort of incidents tailor-made to start you off on one of your litigious monologues. There was no litigious monologue, Ms. Graham, because you were not there to give it. You were running around behind the scenes doing your level best to distract me from noticing anything that might actually be important.”

Hannah Graham’s sticklike body was backing away down the hall, toward the foyer. She’s going to do exactly the wrong thing, Cavender Marsh thought. She’s more my child than she is her mother’s. She’s going to panic.

At just that moment, there was the sound of running footsteps in the foyer. Bennis came charging into the utility hall, waving her arms.

“Gregor!” she shouted. “Gregor, I did it! I got in touch with the mainland!”

Bennis Hannaford was running fast and not watching where she was going. She ran into Hannah and was caught up short, gasping for breath.

“Excuse me,” she said, puffing to regain her wind. Then she turned her attention to Gregor again. “It was perfect,” she said. “Absolutely perfect. I was blinking away, sure I was no good at all, and then somebody on the shore started to answer me. It was wonderful. He’s sending help right away. I told him we had a man here with a severe concussion and we needed an ambulance and everything, and he said to sit tight and he’d get somebody to come out here some way or another right away.”

“Was it Jason?” Geraldine Dart asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t give me his name. I’m going to go back and wait for more messages.”

“Did he say there were going to be more messages?” Mathilda Frazier asked.

“Just in case,” Bennis Hannaford said.

Hannah was panicking. Cavender Marsh could see it. She was backing farther and farther away down the hall, and where did she think she could go? Even if Jason or somebody else did manage to get help out here in the middle of this storm—and Cavender was by no means sure they could; that might have been Maine coast macho posturing talking—what could Hannah do then? Did she intend to jump into the sea and swim?

Cavender started forward, some vague thought in his mind of stopping his daughter before she did anything that was both stupid and irrevocable. If there was anything he had learned from the first, and real, death of Tasheba Kent, it was that you must never do anything that you couldn’t later flatly deny.

The rest of them were in a knot, talking excitedly. Bennis Hannaford had run out of the room to go back to her signal lights and Morse code. Hannah was almost to that point in her backing up where it would be feasible for her to turn and run.

And then the lights went out.





2


This time, when the lights went out, Hannah Graham knew that it was not a joke. It was not a prank. It was not a fuse. The storm had finally gotten to the power lines on the mainland and the ones that came out here. They were going to be without light for a while.

Hannah Graham’s father thought she was panicking. Hannah knew that. She had. seen it in Cavender Marsh’s eyes as he watched her back away. Not that either of them had ever thought of her as anything but a nuisance. That was why her own mother had dumped her on an aunt to come out to this island and indulge the sexual obsession she had with Cavender Marsh. That was why her own father had gone along with it all. They were a pair of prizes, those two, and ever since the moment when Cavender Marsh had contacted her in California and told her what had really happened in 1938, Hannah Graham had been making plans.