Cheating at Solitaire(102)

“Well,” Carl Frank said. “I’ll go. Have a good day.”

3

Over at the Oscartown Memorial Hospital, Jack Bullard was considering the possibility that he had just made the biggest mistake of his life—except that he really couldn’t be said to be considering anything, because that would have taken too much energy. He was out of bed. He had been out of bed for minutes, or maybe hours. He didn’t know. He was out, and on his feet, and he should never have done it. Never. He thought he was going to throw up.

The bed was a long way away. It was across the floor, on the other side of the world. He was in the hallway. He couldn’t remember exactly how he had gotten there. He was just so angry at being confined, so angry at his body for not working, and in the end he couldn’t just lie where he was and not move. His hand hurt. Both of them did, but the right hand, the one with the bandage on it, was killing him. It was not a pain he felt directly. If he had felt it directly, he would have died. Instead, the pain was out there somewhere, wandering around, teasing him. His head hurt too. His right hand was bleeding. He thought he might have stitches. He thought he might have ripped them open. There was blood everywhere.

It was lying there holding the styrofoam cup of ginger ale that had done it. He remembered looking at the cup and the way it seemed to float above him, the way his own left hand seemed to float there too, but weigh a million pounds, and then the silence of the corridor, the silence that should have had footsteps in it.

And then the silence wasn’t the silence. There was noise. He could hear it. There was noise from downstairs and noise in the stairwell and everything, nothing, it didn’t matter. He could hear himself calling out. His voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. He wondered where the nurse was. He wondered why nobody had seen him. He thought he had been moving very fast, moving against the pain, moving and moving and moving until it was all over, and now the stitches on his hand were torn and there was blood and he was passing out in the middle of the empty corridor, with the emptiness and the ghosts all around him.





Chapter Seven


1

Gregor Demarkian had been to press conferences before, more than he could count. He had even been to press conferences where there was a certain amount of fame involved. What he hadn’t done, and what he hadn’t had time to consider the ramifications of, was to be at a press conference where the object of interest was himself. Even now, checking his tie in a mirror in the men’s dressing room off the Ivory Room of the Oscartown Inn, he was thinking more of Arrow Normand than he was of Gregor Demarkian. He had noticed the crowd of people making its way into the Versailles Room—what did it mean, that an inn in one of the oldest parts of New England, an inn that could trace its continuous operation to before the American Revolution, named its largest and most prestigious ballroom after a palace of decadence in pre-Revolutionary France? The crowd looked as if it had blood on its hands, and there were too many photographers, but Gregor chalked it up to the level of competition involved in this thing. For reasons he would never fully understand, news outlets around the world would pay thousands of dollars for the right kind of pictures of people who had done little or nothing in their lives. Arrow Normand, Marcey Mandret, Kendra Rhode, even that silly woman Anna Nicole Smith, who was constructing her life as a parody, could make a man a quarter of a million dollars in a single day if only he could get them where he wanted them and get them alone. It was the alone that mattered. It was exclusivity that brought in the real cash. It was something that made Gregor Demarkian wonder why these people wanted to pay any attention to him at all.

“It’s the dead-air problem,” Bram Winder said helpfully while he waited for Gregor to stop fussing with himself and let them all get on with it. “In a story like this, there are a hundred different important things that happen, but they happen in clumps. The rest of the time, there’s nothing, there’s no news. But these people can’t handle the prospect of no news. They’ve got to have something. So they take whatever they can get.”

“Can they always get something?” Gregor asked. “Isn’t there ever a point where there’s just no news at all?”

“All the time,” Bram said. “Then they just blither. They get up there on television and talk about what happened, then they talk about why they’re so obsessed with it happening, then they talk about why the public is so obsessed with it happening, which is a little off if you ask me, because the public wouldn’t be so obsessed with it happening if the news media wasn’t obsessed with it happening. If you know what I mean.”