“Kendra Rhode knew it,” Gregor said. It was not a question.
“Of course,” Jack said. “I knew her a long time before anybody else did. Did you know that? She used to come here summers as a child, when we were both children. She used to play out on the beach by the Point. Her mother used to bring her into Oscartown for ice cream, along with her sisters. She always looked like that, you know. Blond and slim and tall. They don’t all look like that. Even her sisters don’t all look like that. But she did. As if she’d been created just to represent—well, whatever it was.”
“It was rich twits,” Linda Beecham said. “You were born on the Harbor. You should know that.”
Gregor was fairly sure he was now the only person who was listening to Linda Beecham. Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Jerry Young were all staring at Jack Bullard as if they’d never seen him before. Jack was not staring back. He was still looking tired, more and more tired as the seconds ticked by. He moved away from the window and sat down in the single vistor’s chair.
“It was the storm,” Gregor said. “In case you’re wondering how I knew. The storm created the opportunity, because it meant you were free of your fellow photographers. Nobody was going out in that mess if they could help it, and at the time it didn’t look like there was anything new to see. The papers had enough pictures of Marcey Mandret getting plowed and falling out of her clothes so that a few more weren’t going to be worth risking your life for. But you weren’t risking your life. You’d been in nor’easters before. You’d grown up on the island. You could follow them without that much trouble, even in the mess the weather was making.”
“She wanted him dead, you know,” Jack said. “Kendra did. She wanted him dead, or disappeared, or something. She didn’t marry him because she loved him. She was stoked on Ecstasy and in one of those moods. Well, stoked for Kendra. She’d had like half a dose. She never took whole ones.”
“She told you she wanted him dead?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Jack said. “She just talked about him. To me, at first, but then there was the picture. I had to sell the picture. I had to make enough money to cover my expenses out there. She could never understand that. She could never understand why people needed money. So she stopped speaking to me. They all did, except for Marcey, on and off.”
“So you followed them out—wait,” Gregor said. “They were who? Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman and Kendra Rhode? All together, at first.”
“Yeah. It was the middle of the morning, but Arrow and Mark had been drinking. They’d all been on the set, even Kendra, and it was going to hell because of the weather, and Arrow had something in her trailer, and they all went in there. Carl Frank went crazy trying to keep Kendra off the set, but he never could do it. Anyway, they left there and went off in the car, and Marcey had had some kind of huge fight with Kendra over something, I don’t know what, they all fight with each other all the time and it’s impossible to figure out why. And I followed them. But I didn’t follow them because I meant to, I mean, you know. I just followed them.”
“You had the gun,” Gregor said.
“I’d had the gun for weeks. I carried it everywhere after she stopped talking to me.”
“To kill her with?” Gregor asked.
“To kill him with,” Jack said. “There was this big charade going on, that he was Arrow’s boyfriend, that he had nothing to do with her, but he did. They were married. He had legal rights and things, and she liked being with him, even though she wasn’t supposed to. She liked—I don’t know what. I don’t know what any of them see in anybody. I don’t know what they see in each other. But it shouldn’t have been Mark she married out in Vegas. It should have been me. I was the one she went out with.”
“Went out to Vegas with?” Gregor said.
“Yes,” Jack said. “Three couples. That’s how we put it when we went. Arrow and Steve. Marcey and Mark. Kendra and me. Only when we got there, things went wrong. Marcey couldn’t really stand Mark, and she got too high not to show it. Then I was the one with the camera. They weren’t going to get pictures unless I took them. Then—I don’t know. I don’t know. I only know it was supposed to be me, but then it wasn’t.”
“So you followed the car and there was an accident,” Gregor said.
“She spends all her time in California,” Jack said. “She didn’t know how to drive in the snow. She skidded and went sideways down to the beach. It wasn’t a bad accident. Not bad in the way they can get, you know. She wasn’t stupid enough to try to go really fast in that weather. She wasn’t stupid at all, really. People only thought she was.”