“Why?”
“Because that girl, the one with the blood in her hair, she said there’d been an accident. She’d been with a man, in a truck, and it went down an embankment, over on the beach somewhere. I think. It was hard to get her to make sense. But she did say she was with somebody, and he’s probably still down there, and I can’t just leave him there, can I? If he’s already dead it won’t matter, but if he isn’t he needs to get medical help somehow or he will die, and—you probably think I’m a lunatic.”
“No,” Stewart said, thinking that this was one of those people with a tremendous sense of personal responsibility for everything. He recognized it because he was one of those people himself.
He took a tea bag from the box of them she was holding out to him and picked up the brandy bottle.
“Let me get some of this into myself. Then let’s go see if we can make Miss Normand make enough sense so we can find this person she thinks she left out in the snow.”
6
Kendra Rhode did not speak to people she did not want to speak to, except for policemen in patrol cars, when they thought she was both driving and drunk. The truth was that Kendra was never drunk. She was never high, either, beyond the buzz you could get from sharing a single joint. In all the tens of thousands of pictures that had been printed of her since she had first decided to make herself a celebrity, not one showed her bleary-eyed and stumbling, or fallen asleep on a table in a bar somewhere while somebody poured beer in her hair. Blood will tell, Kendra’s grandmother used to say, and Kendra thought that it was true—even if her grandmother had been trying to get something across about her mother, who was another story altogether.
Kendra’s grandmother would have said that she should have taken all three of the telephone calls that had come in in the last twenty minutes, and the other one that had come in over an hour ago, but Kendra knew something her grandmother did not. It was never a good idea to make yourself too available to people who had launched themselves into free fall. Failure was a particular thing, but it was also a cliché, and Kendra could see it coming a mile off. There were different kinds of failure too, and some of them she didn’t mind, or was at least willing to put up with. She didn’t care if a movie tanked or a song sold almost nothing or a prize went to somebody else, somebody stuffy and snotty and older, whom she wouldn’t want to know. She did care about disintegration, and she was sure that everybody on earth was capable of disintegration. She’d seen it happen. They fell over some edge somewhere, or were pushed, and then they couldn’t remember where they’d been the night before and they stopped meeting the obligations that really mattered and they got maudlin and wanted to cry on you when the night went on too long.
She stopped looking at herself in the mirror and looked out her window instead. Her bedroom at the Point was the big one with the circular extension that looked out into the Atlantic Ocean, away from the quieter waters of Cape Cod. There was nothing quiet about what she could see out there. The snow was coming down in a steady curtain. The sky had almost no light in it at all. She bit her lip and poked at the diamond barrette she had used to clip back her hair for the afternoon.
“There’s going to be trouble getting people out here from the mainland,” she said.
Her mother, sitting on the other side of the room with her legs curled into an overstuffed chair, looked up from her copy of Vanity Fair. It was Kendra herself who was on the cover, holding Mr. Snuggles up to her chest and blowing a kiss onto the top of his head.
“They’re not going to have trouble,” her mother said. “They’re not going to bother. Half your guest list is going to be stranded until the storm is over.”
“If they let themselves be stranded until after the party, they won’t be getting into the house.” Kendra went back to the mirror. Weather was boring. Most things were boring. “Some of them will make it in time, though, just watch. They know I’m keeping a list.”
“You’d really punish people for not making it to a party in the middle of a major snowstorm.”
“I’d punish people for a lot of things. They all know how important this party is to me. I’ve been planning it for months.”
“You could postpone it, due to weather. People do that kind of thing all the time.”
“I don’t. And there’s no reason to postpone it. There are plenty of invited people already on the island. It’s not like the storm is a surprise, Mother. They’ve been talking about it on the news for days. If it mattered to you to be here, you’d know that and make your plans accordingly. I can’t help it if some people don’t find my party very important, but I don’t see why I should rearrange my life to make it easier for them.”