Cheating at Solitaire(10)

She looked at the easel and the photographs pinned to it, the pictures of people who did not matter in any serious sense but who would always matter more than they should in every other sense.

Then she told herself she really ought to start spiking her coffee with gin.

5

Stewart Gordon thought of himself as a sensible man, and he was certainly sensible enough to know that different nationalities had different ways of dealing with common problems. That was the kind of thing they had taught him at St. Andrew’s, and that was the kind of thing he stuck to when he experienced the inevitable collision between Scottish sanity and Hollywood lunacy that hit him every time he worked in the States. This time, though, things had gotten far beyond out of hand. If he had been the parent or guardian of any of the spoiled brats being paid hefty seven-figure salaries to work on this project, he would have locked them up on food and water for a year, long enough to beat some sense into their heads. As far as he could tell, though, none of these people had parents or guardians. They had fathers who were off somewhere—in at least one case, in prison—and mothers who hit the bars as hard as they did. And they all hit the bars. Stewart Gordon liked his ale, and he liked his Glenfddich even better, but he’d never understood why anyone wanted to get drunk enough to suffer through the headache on the following morning.

Not that he hadn’t suffered through a few in his time. He had. He was normal. But that was it. He was normal. These people were—

“Stupid,” he said, out loud, and on his back, Marcey Mandret giggled.

It was still the middle of the afternoon. There were lights on here and there, but that was only because the cloud cover was so thick that everything was hazy. He could have gone right down Main Street and deposited the woman in the lobby of the Oscartown Inn, but he was uncomfortably aware that Marcey’s behavior had attracted an audience. There would be photographers out any minute, if there weren’t already, and that was all he would need. He did not get his picture in the tabloids. He didn’t hide. He didn’t surround himself with forty people whose only purpose was to run interference between him and the press. He just went around living his life, and people mostly left him alone. People did not leave Marcey Mandret alone, mostly because she spent so much time getting their attention.

He looked around. He was off the track, he was sure of it. He was too close to the water. The girls had rented a house, and he’d thought he knew where it was, but now he was slogging through snowdrifts and he could hear the sea. He was cold, too. He’d wrapped his jacket around Marcey’s ass when he’d first hauled her onto his shoulder—why didn’t these women wear knickers? why?—and even his wool commando’s sweater wasn’t much help in this weather.

The houses around him looked mostly closed up. He always had to remind himself that most of the people with houses on the island used them only as vacation homes, in good weather. There was the Point, but not only was it too far away, he didn’t like the idea of asking Kendra Rhode for anything. The only other house with lights on was a relatively small one, and it had lights on everywhere. He made a calculation. In his experience, Americans were pretty good in an emergency. They took you in and dried you off and warmed you up and gave you a phone. He could only hope that the house with the lights on had an American inside, and not some visiting twit from Paris.

It was hard to figure out how to get where he needed to go. The snow was high enough to be obscuring the sidewalks. He tried a direct route, moving carefully, hoping that he would neither fall nor provoke Marcey Mandret into another bout of vomiting. My God, that girl could spew it out. He stumbled a little here and there, but the house continued to come closer, and he started to worry that he would look too threatening for even an American to let in. Of course, the American might recognize him, which was usually a good sign—but it happened less often on Margaret’s Harbor than in other places he’d been, because Margaret’s Harbor was Sophisticated.

He started to come up to what was obviously the walk to the house’s front door, and the first thing he saw was a small ginger cat sitting in the window. Cats were good. He liked cats. He plowed along, judging his way by the indentations in the snow, and the cat stood up and stretched. It was like the start of some kind of silly movie: there’s a knock on the door, and you open up to find this enormous muscled bald man carrying a half-naked girl to your doorstep.

There was no proper porch. They didn’t do much with porches on Margaret’s Harbor. He thought about knocking and found the bell instead, which at least wouldn’t have connotations out of horror movies. He rang once, and waited. He rang a second time. Maybe there was an old lady in there, peering at him from somewhere upstairs, too scared to open up.