Cheating at Solitaire(116)
“Marijuana or cocaine?”
“Marijuana,” Arrow said. “I don’t. I mean. I don’t know. Cocaine scares me. It does bad things to people.”
“True enough.”
“And we had an accident,” Arrow said. “The car went off the road. It just went careening off, over the rocks, onto the beach, and it was dark and there was all this snow, and he fell on me.”
“Who fell on you? Mark Anderman?”
“He fell on me,” Arrow said again, “and I hit my head, and he did, and there was blood everywhere, and I couldn’t get him to move. He didn’t answer me. He just lay there on me, and I had to wiggle and do things to get around him, because the truck was on its side and I had to climb over him, and my hair got full of blood.”
“And you walked to Annabeth Falmer’s house?”
“I just walked out onto the beach,” Arrow said. “And I walked around. And I was still really high, you know, but I was dizzy, too, I was so dizzy I thought I was going to pass out, but that scared me. I thought if I passed out I was going to lie down in the snow and die of the cold. That happens a lot. You hear about it on the news. So I was scared and there was this house with lights on and I headed for that, and the lady was very nice. She gave me a blanket and she tried to get me to drink some tea.”
“And that’s it?” Gregor Demarkian said. “You didn’t see anybody else near the truck? You didn’t hear gunshots?”
“No,” Arrow said. “I thought Mark was dead, though. I thought he was dead and I was going to die too, you know, because I’d been driving. It’s one of those things, you know, that you can’t do. Kill somebody when you drive drunk. Your career is over after that.”
“And that’s why you’ve sat in jail for days?” Gregor said.
“Didn’t anybody tell you that Mark Anderman didn’t die in the accident? He died of a gunshot wound to the head.”
“Yes, I know. No, that wasn’t why I stayed here. I stayed here because it was quiet. I really wanted to be quiet.”
“You’re going to be considerably quieter at home,” Gregor said. “For one thing, you’re going to have better security.”
“I don’t think so,” Arrow said. She looked around the room. It wasn’t much of a room. It was less than a movie set. In the conference rooms she was used to, everything was thick and expensive, the carpets, the furniture, even the decorations on the walls. There weren’t many decorations on these walls. She took a deep breath. “When I heard about the gunshot wound, I thought Kendra had done it, because she was the one who should have done it. Did you know about that? Did you know that Kendra married Mark Anderman that weekend in Vegas?”
2
The pictures were all over the Internet in no time at all. Marcey Mandret saw them first thing the next morning as she was sitting at the computer at Annabeth Falmer’s house, dressed in baggy sweat clothes and drinking something called “double spice chai” tea, into which Dr. Falmer had put a ton of honey but no milk. Marcey did not know if that was because Dr. Falmer didn’t know how “chai” was supposed to be made, or because she didn’t have any milk, which was possible, since lots of people were lactose intolerant. The pictures made Marcey want to heave, but that wasn’t difficult, since she’d been wanting to heave for hours. She had the mother of all hangovers. Her head pounded. Every single muscle in her body ached. Dr. Falmer had brandy, but Stewart Gordon had already told her she wasn’t going to get any of it.
She looked at the photographs on the screen again, and again. Different Web sites had different collections of them, but every Web site she’d visited had had what she now thought of as the Picture, the one of Kendra naked and spread-eagled with somebody’s hand up her… up her… Marcey didn’t usually have trouble with words, not even vulgar words, but this morning she couldn’t make the word for that one come into her head. There was something… weird about the pictures she was seeing… creepy… something. She wished she knew if there were words for the things she was thinking. It was like the pictures were a prophecy, as if she had seen her own death plain. But that wasn’t quite right, because her own death could come while nobody was looking, or even wanted to look. Her own death could come after she had ceased to exist.
She heard a car outside and stiffened. Dr. Falmer came hurrying in from the living room and gave her a pat on the shoulder.
“It’s quite all right, Miss Mandret, it’s not the paparazzi. It’s Gregor Demarkian. I think the paparazzi are all over at the jail. Arrow Normand’s just been released.”