Cheating at Solitaire(110)

“I’m sure she did,” Gregor said. “I’m just not sure she knows how to check for breathing, especially if the breathing is faint, which it can be after a bad fall.”

“Oh,” Stewart said.

“There was somebody at the top of the stairs,” Marcey said. “Way at the top, not just up at the next landing. And he was breathing very hard.”

“Did you see who it was?” Stewart asked.

Marcey shook her head. “I didn’t really look. I threw up. And then all I could think of was to find somebody, and the best place to find anybody in Oscartown is the inn, so I came here. I didn’t want to go to the front of the hospital and see the photographers again. I didn’t want. I didn’t know what. I’m sorry. I’m so cold. I want to go home. I want to go all the way home, but I can’t go there, because my father.

My father doesn’t talk to me. He says it’s all my fault. And it is. That’s the worst of it. It is.”

“What’s she talking about?” Clara Walsh demanded.

“We’d better get over to the hospital,” Gregor said. “We’d better find Kendra Rhode before the reporters do.”

2

Gregor liked to think that if he had really understood what was going on on Margaret’s Harbor, he would have behaved differently, that they all would have behaved differently, in the face of what really was a stampede. As it was, only Stewart knew what was going on, and he was frantic. He was so frantic, Gregor and Clara Walsh both moved instinctively to calm him down, as if what was needed in this circumstance was patience and deliberation.

“You don’t understand,” Stewart kept saying. “They do know where she is. They do and we don’t because it’s what they are. If we don’t get there immediately there’s not going to be a crime scene. There’s not even going to be a body.”

It seemed self-evidently true that the paparazzi couldn’t “know” where Kendra Rhode, or Kendra Rhode’s body, was. They hadn’t even stayed long enough for Marcey Mandret to give away any of the details. Bram Winder was calling for backup just in case, but Gregor thought they needed only to follow Marcey’s lead to get in before most of the photographers did, if not all of them, and he said as much.

Stewart Gordon threw up his hands and threw back his head—a classic Commander Reesgesture, if there ever was one—and took off on his own.

Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Gregor started in the direction of the hospital, which was less than a city block and a half away, with Marcey as their guide. They got to the intersection of Main and Bell and turned right. They got to the intersection of Bell and Chabron and—

The hospital was on Chabron, set back from the road. The front door and its curving entryway were deserted, but the sliding glass doors at the emergency room entrance to the side had been broken. Little pellets of safety glass lay all over the sidewalk and the asphalt drive. Marcey Mandret blanched.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have come to the press conference, it was just that I couldn’t find anybody anywhere, everybody was gone, even Stewart was gone and—”

“What in the name of God is that sound?” Clara Walsh said.

Gregor couldn’t place the sound either, but it was more feral than otherwise and it seemed to be coming from the back. He stepped through the broken glass to find the emergency room’s waiting area completely deserted. He followed the sound and came upon Mike Ingleford looking crazed.

“I called the state police,” he said. “I told them we had a riot. It’s worse than a riot. There’s a woman in there. I think they killed her.”

“They killed her?” Gregor said.

Gregor stepped past Mike Ingleford, turned the corner in the corridor, and stopped. There were dozens of them, at least, maybe over a hundred. He tried to remember if there had been this many at the press conference. He thought there were more here. He had no idea where they had come from. They were everywhere in the corridor, blocking the doors to the rooms, shoving equipment on wheeled carts into the walls and breaking some of it, overturning some of it. Gregor pushed his way through the crowd, inch by inch, person by person, but it was a struggle. The men around him were just as determined as he was, maybe more so, and they fought to hold their places and to get ahead into the crowd.

That was when Gregor first heard what he was sure was a woman crying, and then, a second or two later, a low scream. “Don’t,” the woman was saying. “Don’t. Don’t. Please don’t.”

Gregor thought the voice sounded familiar, but that was beside the point. If Marcey Mandret was right and this was Kendra Rhode, then Kendra Rhode was not dead, but in trouble. If Marcey Mandret was wrong and this was not Kendra Rhode, then somebody else was in trouble. Ofcourse the voice sounded familiar. He must have heard Kendra Rhode’s a thousand times, without being aware of it, on television.