Cheating at Solitaire

Prologue


1

There were things that Annabeth Falmer understood, and things she did not understand, and among the things she understood the least was what she was doing on Margaret’s Harbor in the middle of the biggest nor’easter to hit New England since 1853.

Actually, she didn’t understand what she was doing on Margaret’s Harbor at all, but thinking about that made her head ache, and the last thing she needed in the face of snow coming down at two inches an hour was a headache. She was only about a mile from the center of Oscartown, but she didn’t think she’d be able to make it in for a spare bottle of aspirin.

It was two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 31st, but it might as well have been the middle of the night. The world outside Annabeth’s window was not black, but it was impossible to see anything in. The snow was so heavy, she was in a kind of whiteout. The only visibility was to the east of her, where the ocean was, and even that was like something out of a surrealist aesthetic. She could see waves, white-tipped and agitated. She could see snow piling into drifts against the tall metal parking meters that had been set out along the beach for people who came in from the landlocked towns. Most of all, she could see the tall oceanward tower of the Point. There was a light on up there, the way there always was now that Kendra Rhode had taken up residence for the duration.

“Who in the name of God names a baby Kendra?” Annabeth said, to the cat, who was the only one besides herself at home. She was talking to the cat a lot lately. It was probably inevitable, but it still made her feel oddly sick at the pit of her stomach. Things had not worked out as badly as she had thought they would, back in the days when she lay awake night after night not knowing how she was going to get through another week, but they hadn’t exactly worked out as a triumph, either.

The cat’s name was Creamsicle because that’s what he looked like: oddly orange and white the way the ice-cream bar had looked in Annabeth’s childhood. She tried not to wonder if there were Creamsicles for sale any longer—everything seemed to disappear, except the things that didn’t, and those tended to be around forever—and got the cat off the ledge of the landing window. He was a small cat, less than a year old. Annabeth wasn’t sure he had ever seen snow before.

“Trust me,” she told him, dropping him down onto the kitchen floor as soon as she walked through the door. “You only think you want to go out. It’s cold out there, and wet, and there isn’t a single cat treat for miles.”

Then she got the cat treats out and gave him three different colored ones on the mat next to his food bowl. She was a compact, middle-aged woman, thinner than she should have been, with hair that had gone gray so long ago she couldn’t remember what color it had been before. Even so, she didn’t think she was really becoming one of those people, the ones who spent all their time by themselves and talked to their cats and knitted things they never used, the ones who were found dead after a month and a half because the neighbors smelled something odd coming out of the apartment.

For one thing, Annabeth thought, she didn’t knit. For another, this was not an apartment, but a house, and an expensive one, and her sons called four times a day trying to make sure she wasn’t completely suicidal. It was one of the few things she didn’t mind about this nor’easter. It had reduced cell phone reception to absolutely nil.

She filled the kettle full of water and put it on to boil. She got her violently orange teapot down from the shelf over the sink and dumped two large scoops of loose Double Bergamot Earl Grey into the bottom of it. The tea was a bad sign, but the teapot wasn’t. It hadn’t occurred to her, when she’d told John and Robbie that what she really wanted was to spend a year on Margaret’s Harbor with nothing to do but read, that she would actually spend her time worrying that she was turning into a cliché out of something by Agatha Christie.

Or, worse, something out of Tennessee Williams, or William Faulkner. The neighbors would come in, drawn by the smell, and find not only her dead body on the floor of the kitchen, but the dead bodies of all her old lovers buried in the root cellar right under the basket of fiddlehead ferns.

“I’m going slowly but surely out of my mind,” she said, to the cat again. The kettle went off, and she poured the water from it into the teapot. Then she got a tray, a mug, a tiny mug-sized strainer, and her copy of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Moral Imagination and headed on out for the living room. The storm could scream and moan as much as it liked. She had two industrial-sized generators. She could keep her electricity going in the middle of a nuclear attack.