Cheating at Solitaire(113)
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Gregor said.
Jerry Young came into the now-open central area next to the body. “We ought to secure the area,” he said. “This is a crime scene, no matter what the difficulties. We need to putup tape and get some people in here who can at least attempt to collect evidence.”
“You should collect evidence on them,” Stewart said, jerking his head in the direction of a generalized outside. “It can’t be legal, what they did. It can’t be legal.”
“It’s not legal, but my guess is it also isn’t going to be possible to pin any of it on anybody in particular,” Gregor said. “And I agree with Jerry. This is a crime scene and it ought to be secured. But the damage has been done now. If somebody murdered Kendra Rhode we’re never going to know it and we’re never going to put that person away. We’d better hope that if somebody did murder Kendra Rhode, it was the same person who murdered Mark Anderman.”
“Why?” Leslie said, looking confused.
“It’s because he thinks he knows who killed Mark Anderman,” Bram Winder said, coming in from the rear and looking more disheveled than Gregor would have suspected he could get. “He thinks he knows right now, already. He hasn’t even talked to anybody, and he thinks he knows.”
“I don’t just think,” Gregor said. “I know, and after all this I’m positive. But for the moment we need to let Jerry Young and the people he’s brought—”
“Sheriffs from the other towns on the island,” Jerry said. “I just called everybody, and I called the state police, and I said emergency, and I said hurry, and here we are. We’re not much, but we did some good.”
“You did a lot of good,” Gregor said, which was the truth. He had the horrible feeling that if the riot he’d just been involved in had gone on much longer, the rioters would have torn Kendra Rhode into pieces. “Now the rest of us should get out of your way. Stewart?”
“Christ on a crutch,” Stewart said.
There was a rustle in the crowd, and Marcey Mandret came through, still looking wild, still looking not quite sober. Then she started laughing, and couldn’t seem to stop.
“I told you so,” she said. “I told you so. Look. She’s got her head on backward.”
Chapter Two
1
Arrow Normand could not have explained how she knew the things she knew, but she knew them, and she didn’t have to wait that long for her information. She knew that Kendra Rhode was dead before dinner on the night it happened, and she knew, waking up the next morning with the sun streaming in through the small window at the top of the wall of her cell, that she would be leaving jail soon. She was much calmer, if not perfectly calm. Too much of her life was about to be over for her to be perfectly calm. She kept wishing there were a way to avoid all the things she would have to go through now. It would be much better if life were more like a dotted line than like a real line, with everything all connected. She thought she wouldn’t mind so much having to leave California and her house and her cars and those big blown-up pictures of herself that she had on all her walls, if she could just wake up some morning, just like this one, and be without them. It was the process she was really afraid of. People would yell at her. Her mother would yell at her, and try to fix things, which would be worse. Nothing was fixable. Then there would be the stories, the photographers in her driveway while she moved her things out, the auction—she was sure there would be an auction, because it was what people did; they didn’t put all their things in the trash, they sold them—and finally all the weeks and months and years of watching people talk about her as if she weren’t really there. She wondered if it was possible to have cable TV without having either MTV or VH1. She didn’t want to see herself in one of those half-hour programs about “where are they now.” She didn’t want to think about the people she knew, the people who were really not her friends, and the things they would say about her when she was gone. Maybe they wouldn’t say anything at all. Maybe, when you didn’t belong in the places where she had belonged until now, maybe it was just as if you had never been.
The guard who was on this morning was named Marcella, a new one, brought in from another town on the island. Arrow didn’t know if she had ever been in any of the other towns on the island. She thought she must have. They’d been filming here for months. They’d been driving around in cars. It was hard to think. She wished her usual people were here, the ones who knew her, the ones she could trust to like her, at least for the moment. When you didn’t have money and you weren’t famous, people had to like you “for yourself,” and Arrow didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. She had a self, but it was all bound up in this, in what she was on the set of a movie or on a stage when she sang. There were people who said she didn’t sing very well, and secretly, she had always known they were right. If she sang well, they wouldn’t have to tech up her voice all the time, to make it stronger, to make it not so obvious when she couldn’t hold a note or got the melody wrong.