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And One to Die On(94)

By:Jane Haddam


“Of course.”

“Then let’s go on up.”

They left Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier huddled together on the small balcony overlooking the foyer, and started up the stairs at the back in the direction of Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh.





2


It had been dark in the main body of the house, but nothing like it was in this back staircase. There were windows in the walls, Gregor could see them, but they didn’t do much good. The weather outside was still awful. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but it was almost as black as night. Gregor could still hear the sounds of footsteps and crashing iron, but they were far above him now.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Bennis asked. “Is she trying to kill him?”

“At least,” Gregor said.

“Is she crazy?”

In spite of all the cigarettes she smoked, Bennis was hurrying up the stairs without a problem, never having to stop for rest, never having to gasp for air. It was Gregor, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, who was having trouble sucking wind.

“I think,” he said, “that what she really is is royally angry. You’d be angry too if you had two perfectly good parents who had dumped you on a relative and never bothered to see you again just so they could run away to an island together and—um—”

“Screw,” Bennis said helpfully.

They reached the landing for the third floor and Gregor stopped, ostensibly to check the door to the third floor proper but really to catch his breath.

“It was all Lilith Brayne’s idea, of course,” he said. “Cavender Marsh hated the woman by then, but there was nothing he could have done to get away from her once he’d murdered Tasheba Kent. He’d have gone to the guillotine for it if the case had ever been properly solved.”

“Marvelous. Didn’t Lilith worry that he’d do to her what he did to her sister?”

“Why should she? That case certainly wouldn’t have gone uninvestigated. It would have brought every cop in the state of Maine out here. It would have been asking to be arrested.”

“Even after sixty years? Why didn’t he just shove her in the sea?”

“I don’t know, Bennis. Maybe Cavender Marsh is not one of those people who can kill in cold blood. Maybe he needs to be pushed into a crisis before he can actually do away with anybody. I’m not St. Peter at the gate. I can’t see into a man’s soul. I just know what Cavender Marsh did do.”

“I don’t suppose you can call what she’s doing killing in cold blood either,” Bennis said. “Can you hear anything anymore, Gregor? I can’t hear anything.”

They were on the landing for the fourth floor now, and Bennis was right. The sounds of footsteps were gone. The sounds of smashing glass and cracking wood were gone, too. Bennis stopped.

“Maybe they went into the attic,” she said.

“We have to go up and see.”

Bennis ran up the next flight of stairs on her own. When she got to the top, she opened a door and poked her head through it. She withdrew almost immediately.

“Bats,” she told Gregor.

“What do you mean, bats?”

“Bats,” Bennis repeated. “The attic is full of them. Do you remember Carlton Ji?”

Gregor remembered Carlton Ji. He got to the attic landing and opened the door to the attic himself. On the other side of the attic, another door opened and someone coughed.

“Who’s there?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“It’s me,” Gregor said.

“The trapdoor is open,” Geraldine Dart said. “To the roof. Look up.”

Gregor looked up. At first, all he saw was a mass of moving, black bats disturbed in their rest, pulsing and beginning to call and shriek. Then he spotted the opened square with its pull-down plywood ladder. It had been hard to find because the square was open on nothing but blackness, and because the ladder was swarming with bats.

“They must have gone up,” Geraldine Dart said. “They must have gone out on the roof. She’s going to push him off.” Her voice sharpened with fear.

“Gregor, how did they get out of here?” Bennis asked. “How did they get past all those bats?”

“They didn’t care if they got hurt,” Gregor said.

“Are we going to follow them?” Kelly Pratt called out. “Do you want me to go out after them?”

Gregor rubbed his face with his hands. He did care if he got hurt. He especially cared if he got hurt by bats, which were often rabid in the United States. He had once seen a Bureau agent take the necessary series of injections for rabies. He hoped never to see anything like that again. He certainly didn’t want to see it done on himself. I’m a desk man, Gregor told himself. If I have to be a great detective, I want to be a great detective like Nero Wolfe. I want to sit in an armchair all day and think great detective thoughts. Damn Hannah Graham and damn Cavender Marsh and damn Tasheba Kent and damn those bats. “Mr. Demarkian? Are we going to get moving?”