Cheating at Solitaire(16)

Marcey was suddenly very still. “You know how that works,” she said. “Kendra’s getting ready for the party. She’s not going to let anyone in there while the setup is going on. You know what she’s like.”

“She’s supposed to be our friend. We should be able to go there if we’re in trouble.”

“What trouble? I get drunk all the time, Arrow. It’s not like I committed a felony.”

Felony. That was one of those words. Arrow wished that the air would stop moving. Her chest really did hurt. Really, really, really. All her muscles hurt too. She didn’t know what “felony” meant. People used it all the time, but she had always been too embarrassed to ask. If she asked Stewart Gordon, he would call her stupid stupid stupid. That was always, too. Out there in the snow with the window open on her side of the truck, she had been able to see the sea. It was not the same sea as the one she saw in California, and it didn’t feel the same. It was angry and dark. The beach was full of rocks.

“I have to get to Kendra’s house,” she said stubbornly. She was sure that was the right thing. She was sure of it. “I have to get there now.”

“If you try bursting in on her when she doesn’t want to see you, she’ll cut you off. You know she will. She cuts people off all the time.”

“I have to get there now,” Arrow said.

She stood all the way up. Her legs felt like water. The skirt of her dress was hiked. She could feel a cold breeze between her legs. There was something about that, about having that part of herself exposed. There was something deeply shameful about it, no matter what Kendra said, but it was one of the conditions, it really was. The snow was coming in the window of the truck and the wind was very strong and very cold and then there was blood in her hair. There was blood everywhere, but there was especially blood in her hair.

“I have to get to Kendra’s,” she said.

And then she passed out cold.

8

Jack Bullard’s life had been an exercise in delayed gratification. If being about to work and wait was what it took to be successful, he thought he was due to overtake Bill Gates before he was thirty-five. Underneath it all, he had never really believed it. It didn’t seem to him that people who succeeded did it by working and waiting. A lot of them were, like Kendra Rhode, just born to it, and anybody who had grown up on Margaret’s Harbor could name a dozen more like her. The trick, some of the people on the island joked, was to know how to pick your great-grandparents, and that was the only trick they wanted to know. The other trick, the one that ended up making multimillionaires out of people like Mar-cey Mandret and Arrow Normand, was not the kind of thing you were brought up to believe was worthwhile if you lived on the island.

Right now, Jack was having a hard time knowing just what was and what was not worthwhile, and he was covered with snow. Everything was cold. This was the largest nor’easter he’d seen in years. There were people on the island who said it was the largest in a century. whatever it was, he kept going out in it, and that was not a good idea. He was behaving like a tourist. The tide was coming in too, he was pretty sure of it, and this house—his parents’ house, the one he’d grown up in—was too close to the water. If this had been a summer storm, he’d have been pumping out the basement for weeks.

He put his gear on his kitchen table and went to the window to look out. The curve of the beach was visible in the darkness mostly because of the streetlamps that lined the road that ran along it. He could see, on the other side, what looked like a car and people moving among the rocks. He stared at them for a while and then dumped the contents of his backpack on the table. The house was not the way he had remembered it. Once his father died, it was as if the old place had given up. It had been in the family, after all, for over a century. It was odd to think that Kendra Rhode’s grandparents and his own had come to the island at the same time, or at least built houses there at the same time. He wondered what Kendra Rhode’s family had thought of it, in the beginning. It was one of the things he liked least about rich people. They liked to go where the primitive was. They liked to think they were roughing it.

He went right up to the kitchen window and looked out again. There were people moving along the beach. His throat felt very tight. He had a chill. There didn’t look as if there were any police lights there. Oscartown did have its one police cruiser, complete with lights. It didn’t look as if there were any ambulance lights, either. Maybe it was one of the movie people moving around, seeing something strange, poking at it to see what she found—but Jack did not believe that. The movie people were just too stupid. They were stupid to the point of stupefaction. Jack had never really believed the publicity that came out of the entertainment magazines, that actors and singers and entertainment people were all morons, that the entire celebrity world was just a grown-up version of high school, but there they were. He couldn’t deny it anymore. He had file cabinet after file cabinet of pictures to prove it.