Hannah now knew a number of things the rest of them didn’t know. She even knew things that Cavender didn’t know. He had expected to be in control of it all, and of her, but he had made the very worst kind of mistake.
The weapon was a thing called a warming iron, a great round blob of cast iron at the end of a very long cast-iron rod. In the days before central heating, you put the blob end into the fire until it was very hot and then put the hot end between the sheets and the blankets at the bottom of your bed to keep your feet warm on chilly winter nights. Hannah had never seen a warming iron before she came to the island, but she had read about them in books on antiques. This one had been lying on the floor of the attic when she had gone in to see what Carlton Ji was up to. And Carlton Ji had been up to no good, of course. Those people were never up to any good. Hannah Graham hated Orientals.
The weapon was in the tall narrow broom closet at the very start of the hall leading back from the foyer to the television room. The closet was too small to hold a body, so it had never been searched thoroughly even once all this weekend. It was also full of vacuum cleaner equipment and easy to hide something made of metal in. Hannah got it out and felt the weight of it in her hands. She had never been so glad of the time she had spent working out with weights.
They were all getting used to the darkness now. They were all beginning to be able to see at least a little in the gloom. Hannah still had the advantage and she knew it. She had walked around this house in the dark many times before. The rest of them had not.
“Hannah?” Cavender Marsh asked tentatively.
Hannah smiled. He was just where she wanted him to be, really. She moved closer to the stairs.
“I’m right here,” she called out. “I’m over near the stairs.”
“Hannah, listen to me,” Cavender Marsh said. “Try to be reasonable for a moment now.”
“I am being reasonable,” Hannah told him.
“I’d be careful if I were you,” Gregor Demarkian warned.
Hannah was worried for a moment, but then she wasn’t anymore. Cavender Marsh wasn’t paying any attention to Gregor Demarkian. And Gregor Demarkian was nowhere close to either Cavender or the stairs. He was way in back, near the living room door.
“What’s going on around here?” Mathilda Frazier asked.
She was way, way in the back, invisible. She didn’t want to come out and see what was happening. Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart were invisible, too. They were all hiding in the dark. They were all hoping this would just go away. Only Cavender Marsh was advancing across the foyer, walking with his hands in his pockets, as if he thought he could make himself look like Cary Grant.
“Now, Hannah,” he began.
He sounded just like Hannah’s therapist. Hannah hated her therapist.
“I’m right here,” Hannah said again. “I’m really not going anyplace.”
“Be careful,” Gregor Demarkian warned for the second time.
Bennis Hannaford rushed in again. “They are sending a helicopter,” she said in a rush of enthusiasm. “It’s coming right from some army base to the south of us. We’re all supposed to go up onto the roof and wait for it.”
“A helicopter can’t land on this roof,” Geraldine Dart said, “It’s not flat.”
“We can’t get Richard Fenster up to the roof right now either,” Mathilda Frazier said. “We probably shouldn’t move him.”
“Right,” Bennis Hannaford said. “I’ll go back and explain everything.”
Bennis Hannaford rushed out again in the direction of the living room. Hannah stayed in her place at the side of the stairs, her back against the wall, waiting.
“Now, Hannah,” Cavender said for the third time, or maybe the fourth or fifth.
“Come over and talk to me,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to have to shout.”
Cavender Marsh came. He came much too slowly and too deliberately, but he came. Even now, it seemed, he had to be a movie star. Even now he had to make entrances and exits and melodramas and foreshadowings. Hannah waited until he was almost right in front of her. Then she swung around him, to his back, raised the warming iron above her head and smashed it down on the foyer’s parquet floor.
Cavender Marsh jumped onto the first of the steps and Hannah smashed the warming iron down again, on the step next to him, cracking the step even though she hit it through the thickness of the runner carpet.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gregor Demarkian demanded.
This was not a question Hannah Graham thought she had to answer. Cavender Marsh was running as best he could up the stairs.