Cheating at Solitaire(119)

“Kendra told me a couple of days after it happened that she’d seen Mark Anderman alive after the accident.”

“Seen him alive how?” Gregor said. “Do you mean she went to the scene of the accident and looked into the truck?”

“I don’t know,” Marcey said. “She wasn’t clear about it. She said she was in her bedroom at the Point and she looked out and she could see the truck on the beach. She could see there had been an accident. And her mother was there, helping with this party she was supposed to have for New Year’s Eve, except it never happened because of the storm. Anyway, she left the house and went out to the beach so that she could get away from her mother, which sounds like Kendra, the kind of thing Kendra would do. She said she went out on the beach and that the last time she saw Mark Anderman, he didn’t have a bullet hole in him. But she wouldn’t talk to the police about it. She said that if I told anybody she’d just say that I was lying. Or that she’d lied to me. She said she wanted to see, she wanted to see if they would give Arrow the death penalty.”

“Marvelous,” Stewart Gordon said.

Gregor Demarkian sat back. Marcey found him a very soothing person. Everybody in this house was soothing, except for her. She wished she understood why. Dr. Falmer had a big plate of cookies that she was passing around. Marcey took one when the plate came to her, and then wondered what she was supposed to do now.

She should have said something to the police when Ken-dra first told her. The only reason she hadn’t was because she was afraid Kendra would be angry at her, and when Kendra got angry enough she made you disappear.





Chapter Three


1

Marcey Mandret wanted to go back to the computer. Gregor could see that all through his conversation with her, and he thought Stewart Gordon and Annabeth Falmer could see it too. The two of them were looking the way parents would when their child was behaving oddly in a bad circumstance, and Gregor found that just a little relaxing. They were both so young, Arrow and Marcey, and they both seemed to him to be so alone. Maybe it was just the fact that he came from what had been, at least for his generation, an immigrant community, maybe it was just that he associated loneliness with middle age, but for some reason the way these girls lived looked to him to be completely unnatural, and he wasn’t thinking of the money, or of the publicity. Young girls were supposed to have parents and other relatives to look after them. They were supposed to have mothers to keep them safe and to have the suspicions they were too young to have. They were supposed to have fathers to protect them from the worst in human nature. They were supposed to have anchors to the past and to the future, so that they could keep their own lives in perspective. There was no perspective here. It was as if these girls had been born first thing in the morning and knew nothing else but the little they’d seen since.

Marcey drifted back to the computer, and Gregor followed Annabeth and Stewart into Annabeth’s kitchen. It was a beautiful kitchen, large and open to the outside. There was a solid line of windows along one wall that looked out onto the boardwalk and the beach. There were open shelves, painted white, carefully filled with multicolored crockery that had been chosen with an eye to the effect it would make. There was a long table, also painted white, with chairs to match. Stewart sat down in one of them and Annabeth headed for the kettle.

“I hope you don’t mind all this tea,” Annabeth said. “I don’t drink coffee. It’s not a thing, you know, not a matter of principle or anything, I just don’t like the flavor of coffee. I don’t even like coffee ice cream. So I tend not to have it in the house. And when I do have it, I do it wrong. Or people say I do.”

“She makes a very decent cup of tea,” Stewart said.

“Tea will be fine,” Gregor said. He went to the line of windows and looked out. On a clear day, like today, you could see quite a bit of the beach, but not far enough to catch the place where the truck had gone off the road. It was surprisingly noisy, too. Gregor wouldn’t say the surf was pounding. This was an island off Cape Cod, after all. The Cape kept the worst of the Atlantic from hitting the shores of Margaret’s Harbor. Still, the sound of the ocean was clear, as were the sounds of birds. Gregor thought the birds must be freezing to death.

Annabeth was getting tea mugs off one of the shelves and putting them down on the table. Gregor looked up and down the beach one more time, and then across, to the big house on the rocky outcropping at the end of the island.

“That’s the Point?” he said. “I didn’t realize you could see it from here.”