Cheating at Solitaire(11)

A moment later, a woman appeared next to the cat in the window. She was not a particularly old lady. She looked him up and down and then withdrew. A second later, the door swung open in front of him.

“Ride ’em, horsey!” Marcey Mandret suddenly shouted.

The woman in front of him blinked. Stewart thought he was probably blushing. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse us. I’m—”

“Stewart Gordon,” the woman said. “From that science fiction thing. One of my sons used to have a poster of you on his bedroom wall.”

“Good. I don’t mean to bother you, but—”

“No, come in, come in.” The woman stepped back hurriedly. She was, he thought, somewhere in her early fifties, and very neatly put together, like Judi Dench in the best of her middle age.

Stewart brought Marcey into the front hall and looked around. It was a standard Margaret’s Harbor colonial except for the built-in bookshelves, and they were everywhere. There were even two in the hall. They were filled with books, too. He wondered if this woman owned the house or rented it.

“Excuse me,” he said again. “She’s—”

“Oh, come into the living room and put her down on the chaise. I’d put her on the couch, but here’s the thing. I’ve got one too.”

“Got one what?”

“Girl. I’ve got a girl,” the woman said. “She came to the back door about twenty minutes ago, in practically no clothes. And she looks sort of familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it. And I think she’s been raped. She’s lost her underwear.”

Stewart sighed. “She probably wasn’t wearing any. None of them do.”

“None of them?”

“The young women I’m making this movie with. Sort of. We spend an awful lot of time chasing after the young women and not much time making the movie.”

“This one has blood in her hair,” the middle-aged woman said. She was leading them into the living room, which was large and once again almost completely lined with bookshelves. It was not the room he had seen from the hall, which made him think that the dining room must be completely lined with bookshelves too. The woman pointed him toward the chaise and he put Marcey down on it. She was having a fit of giggles. Then he looked over at the couch and saw Arrow Normand, passed out as completely as it was possible to be without actually being dead.

“Arrow Normand,” Stewart said, pointing to the girl on the couch. Then he pointed to the chaise. “Marcey Mandret.”

“Annabeth Falmer,” the woman said, holding out her hand.

Stewart processed the information. It took longer than it should have, because he wasn’t used to that form of the name. “Anna Falmer?” he said. “Abigail Adams and the Birth of the American Nation? You do own this house.”

“What?”

“The bookshelves. I was wondering if you owned the house or rented it. If they were your books or if you’d rented the place from somebody—this is going around in circles.”

“No, no. I understand. Yes, I do own the house. I mean, my sons bought it for me and put the bookshelves in. I said it was a silly thing to do, just to spend a year on the Harbor, but my younger one, the one who’s the lawyer, said that buying was better than renting for some reason, I’m not sure what. Writing history doesn’t make a lot of money, you see, so I’ve never had any, and I don’t understand it. She’s got blood in her hair. And she says there’s a man somewhere, in the snow. I’ve got the kettle on if you don’t mind tea. I could put brandy in it.”

“Tea with brandy sounds wonderful. You sound like you could use it yourself. Are you all right?”

Annabeth Falmer sighed. Stewart decided that he had been right in his first impression. She was a neatly made woman, and he liked her general… way of being. He liked her books. He could see some of them, and they were not the books of a self-consciously “intellectual” person. There were intellectual books in great numbers, of course, but there also seemed to be a hefty selection of Terry Pratchett and virtually all the Miss Marples Agatha Christie ever wrote. He also liked the fact that she really had no idea who Mar-cey Mandret and Arrow Normand were, or why she was supposed to care.

She had been leading him out to the kitchen without his noticing it. He looked around and saw that there was even another bookshelf here, although it contained mostly cookbooks. The kettle was screaming. She got a clean cup and saucer out of the cupboard and a bottle of Metaxa Seven Star out of the bread box. He let that one go.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I was going to go out. I mean, I tried to call the police, but there’s no use, not in this weather, everything is such a mess and there aren’t very many police. But I should go out. Somebody should.”