Cheating at Solitaire(127)

“Tea,” she said. “I never drink tea. It tastes like piss. Don’t you have any coffee in this house?”

“>She’s already told you she doesn’t have coffee,” Arrow said, sounding so exasperated now she was almost crying. “She doesn’t drink coffee. Why don’t you ever listen to anybody?”

“Everybody drinks coffee,” Mrs. Normand said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink coffee,” Annabeth said. She was being polite. She was being so polite it was killing her. “I have orange juice. And I think I have mineral water, in, you know, little bottles. But maybe not, because it always seems to me to be rather silly to buy water.”

“God, this place gives me the creeps,” Mrs. Normand said. “It really does. All these books. And what kind of books are they?The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. Who reads a book like that?”

“It’s a collection of essays,” Annabeth said. “By Lionel Trilling. Essays about literature, mostly.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Normand said. “Litrachur. Aren’t we all important around here. And that painting. That awful painting. How can anybody live with a painting like that? People don’t want to be reminded of death and pain and misery. People want to have fun.”

“That’s the point,” Marcey Mandret said. She was sitting all the way up now, and Annabeth thought she looked like an entirely different person. She looked like an entirely different person from the one she’d been just this morning. It was an odd thing to see.

“It’s called The Flagellation,” Marcey said, “and I don’t remember the name of the man who painted it. It was somebody from the Renaissance, in Italy. And that was his point. That people like to look at the young and the beautiful and the rich, but it’s that kind of selfishness that killed Christ. It wasn’t the Romans who killed Him, it was ordinary people, and ordinary people’s sins, because ordinary people don’t help the poor and the helpless, they only care about money and fame. They only care about celebrity.”

Annabeth poured herself a cup of tea and counted to ten in her head. She had no idea what to make of this at all. She had said something to Marcey once about The Flagellation, but not all this. She couldn’t imagine that Marcey had thought it through for herself, although she was willing to entertain the possibility that the girl was brighter than she’d thought at first. Right now, Marcey seemed both bright and desperate.

“Don’t tell us you’ve become one of those Christians,” Mrs. Normand said. “Don’t tell us we’re all going to have to listen to sermons from you on a regular basis.”

“You don’t have to be a Christian to understand it,” Marcey said. “The part about torturing Christ and putting him on the cross is, it’s a—”

“Metaphor?” Annabeth said helpfully.

“Yes. Thank you. It’s a metaphor. Stewart told me. When we care only about money and fame and youth, we don’t just hurt ourselves, we hurt all humanity everywhere, we make the world a worse place than it could be. And we make ourselves worse too. We make ourselves trivial. We make ourselves morally trivial people, and we waste the life we’ve got, we waste it on—oh, hell. We waste it on Kendra Rhode.”

“I’d be careful what you say about Kendra Rhode,” Mrs. Normand said, her face screwed into a triumph of spitefulness that seemed almost violent in its intensity. “The police haven’t ruled out murder yet, you know, and you were the one who was there, weren’t you? You were right there in the hospital. If you don’t watch out, you’ll end up in the same jail Arrow was in, and there won’t be anybody to get you out.”

Marcey got up off the couch, as if she didn’t want to be on it while Mrs. Normand was still there, and paced across the room to the windows that looked out on the beach.

“I don’t care if they do think I killed her,” she said. “Somebody has to start telling the truth about Kendra Rhode.”

2

From the way the light was coming through the windows, Jack Bullard thought it had to be nearly noon—and that, considering how much time had passed since he first woke up, was very disturbing. He was not the kind of mess he had been the day before. The effects of whatever the drug was that somebody had given him had worn off, and aside from that he had only the painkillers to worry about. His hand hurt, but not as much as it might have. That was the blessing of Demerol. He felt very relaxed and tired. That was the blessing of Demerol too. He did not know what he was supposed to feel about the things that were going on or the things that had happened to him, and that was something no Demerol could help. He could sit up and get himself juice and water if he wanted. It felt like too much trouble. He could go to the bathroom on his own, which he did when it was necessary. He could walk down the hall and talk to whomever had taken Leslie’s place for the day. None of this felt to him as having any point at all. He had been watching television for hours, and the television said the same things over and over again, and none of it made any difference. He wondered what would happen now. Maybe there would be a big public funeral, in New York, where Kendra was from. Limousines would line up outside the church in which she had been baptized, even though she hadn’t been inside it since. Men and women would walk up the church steps as if they were walking down the red carpet. Maybe that wouldn’t happen at all. Maybe the family would revert to type, and the funeral would be private, and there would be no press allowed at the service or the grave. Jack knew what he would want at his own funeral. He would want the limousines, and the long procession to the cemetery, right there on CNN. He would want the commentators on Fox to talk about what a bad influence he had been, because the commentators on Fox always pretended that it was better to be obscure and prissily “moral” than to be famous and sane. He would want Katie Couric, too, if Katie Couric was still working. It was so hard to think about time. Time came and went. It slithered. In fifty or sixty years, when he was ready to die, Katie Couric would probably already be dead.