Cheating at Solitaire(115)

Arrow looked from the lawyer, to her mother, to Gregor Demarkian. How did you know if somebody was a friend of yours? How did you know if they even knew you, or saw you, or—Arrow had run out of categories. She thought it might have been different if she had had a different kind of growing-up. She should have gone to an ordinary school somewhere, and had slumber parties. She should have had best friends and best enemies and days when she cried because she hadn’t been named to the cheerleading team.

“Arrow,” her mother said, sounding cautious.

“I want everybody to leave here except Mr. Demarkian,” Arrow said.

“Absolutely not,” the lawyer said. “There is no way you can talk to a member of the law enforcement team without an attorney present. There is no way—”

“I want everybody to leave,” Arrow said. “Right now.” She swung around to Gregor Demarkian. “I can do that, can’t I? I’m over twenty-one. Just over, but I’m over. I can tell them to go if I want to.”

“You can,” Gregor Demarkian said. “But your attorney has a point. Anything you say to me, I will report to the police and the prosecutor. It might be an intelligent thing to have a lawyer present.”

“I don’t care what you report to the police,” Arrow said. “I want them out of here.”

“Well,” Arrow’s mother said. “Roger, maybe, just for a minute, you could step out. I can run interference here for a minute or two—”

“I want you out too,” Arrow said. “I want just me and Mr. Demarkian. That’s all.”

“But you can’t just talk to him alone,” her mother said. “He’s, well, he’s—”

“I’ve heard all about him on television,” Arrow said. “I want it to be me and Mr. Demarkian and nobody else in here. And don’t tell me you won’t let me, because I’ve got the right, and you can’t stop me. I’ll tell the judge and he’ll make you. Get out of here.”

“I think we need to seriously consider the possibility that you should seek other counsel,” the lawyer said.

Arrow didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant, and she didn’t care. She just stood where she was, staring straight into Gregor Demarkian’s eyes, refusing to look at either of the other two. She had a prayer going on at the back of her head, over and over again, like a mantra. It went: Get them out get them out get them out. Her mother was trying to talk to her. She wasn’t listening. Her mother was putting a hand on her arm. She didn’t react. She had to stand still and concentrate. She had to focus. She had to will them out of the room.

And finally they were gone.

Arrow looked around at the empty room. She checked the door to make sure it was closed. She pulled out a chair and sat down. She felt too tired to breathe.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” Gregor Demarkian said. He came down the length of the table and sat next to her. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? Your mother has your best interests at heart. Your attorney is paid to have your best interests at heart.”

“I think my mother has her own best interests at heart,” Arrow said. “And I think my attorney mostly cares about how he’ll look in a big famous case. Neither one of them will care about me in a week. You know I didn’t kill Mark, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “I know that. If it makes you feel any better, I’m here because Stewart Gordon knows that too. He was so convinced you were being wrongly accused, he came all the way down to Philadelphia to get me.”

“Was Kendra murdered?” Arrow asked. “I listened to some of the news last night, but I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe she was murdered, and maybe she fell down the stairs.”

“Do you want to know officially, or unofficially?”

“I want to know what’s true.”

“My best guess,” Gregor Demarkian said, “is that she was killed, but not murdered. That she was pushed, and ended up dead, but not because the person who pushed her necessarily wanted her to end up dead. I’m fairly sure, however, that the same person pushed her that murdered Mark Anderman.”

“And you know who that is?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Or rather, I know what person, in what position in this thing, it would have to be. I’ve just gotten here, though. I haven’t talked to everybody yet.”

Arrow took a deep breath. “I didn’t see who killed Mark.”

“I know,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“We had an accident, in the truck,” Arrow said. “That was true, what I told that lady, the one whose house I ended up at. We’d had, you know, kind of a lot to drink, more than we should have, because it was the middle of the day. But it felt like night. Because it was so dark. It felt like the middle of the night. So we were drinking, and we had, you know, some, something to smoke—”