Cheating at Solitaire(2)

She put everything down on the coffee table, poured herself some tea through the strainer, and curled up in her big overstuffed chair. This was the way she had imagined herself, last year, when she had been talking about this to her sons. She had seen herself, comfortable and surrounded by books and cats, reading without having to think about anything else in the world. It hadn’t occurred to her that the utter sameness of it would get boring faster than watching The Sopranos had.

The cat jumped into her lap just as she heard the first of the heavy thuds against her kitchen door. She put her hand up to stroke him and said, “I’m an ungrateful idiot, do you know that? They gave me absolutely everything I ever wanted, and some things I didn’t even think of, and I’m about ready to plug my fingers into a wall socket, it’s so out-of-my-mind dull.”

There was another thud, and this time she paid attention. She put the mug away from her and looked around.

“Do you think it’s an animal?” she said. “I can’t imagine it would be a person out in all that. Even Melissandra Rhode isn’t as crazy as that.”

The third thud was heavier and more dangerous than the other two had been. Annabeth could hear the wood straining under whatever was hitting it. She put the book down and got up. You could see the ocean from the kitchen windows. Whoever had built this house had wanted to watch the waves at the breakfast table. Still, it couldn’t be the sea coming in. Not this fast. And it couldn’t be a tree branch blown loose by the wind. It sounded like something soft.

“I should watch television,” she told the cat. “At least I wouldn’t be rewriting Freddy Krueger movies in my head.”

She went back to the kitchen and looked around. She looked out the big windows at the sea, but it was comfortably far away, although choppy. She looked at the walk that wrapped around the house at that side, but saw nothing but untouched snow. She looked around the kitchen, and wondered what she had been thinking when she bought two complete sets of Le Creuset pots to hang from the hooks over the center island.

“One of those is going to fall on my head one day and give me a concussion,” she said, not even to the cat this time. The cat was still in the living room, curled up on a cushion. Then there was another thud, and this time it was distinctly accompanied by giggling.

“What the hell,” Annabeth said.

She made her way out into the pantry, its four tall walls covered floor to ceiling with shelves. She went into the little mud area with its benches and pegs for holding outerwear so that it didn’t muck up the rest of the house in bad weather. She stood very still and listened. The giggling really was giggling, not just the wind, she was sure of it. Sometimes it sounded not so much like giggling as it did like crying. The kitchen door had no window. There was no way to tell without opening up.

“What the hell,” Annabeth said, thinking that if there really was some half-crazed homicidal maniac out there, ready to rip her into body parts before he disappeared into the storm, she almost owed it to him to cooperate. Anybody who wanted anything badly enough to go through that storm to get it, ought to have it.

“Not really,” Annabeth said. She missed the cat. It gave her a cover so that she didn’t have to recognize the fact that she had started to talk to herself.

She grabbed the knob of the door, turned it to the right, yanked the door forward, and stepped back.

She was just in time. The young woman who came falling through at her couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she fell hard nonetheless, and she fell far, too.

It took a minute or two, but Annabeth worked it out. This was definitely somebody she recognized, even if she couldn’t remember what the woman’s name was, but that was the least of it. The most was a toss-up between the clothing—a pale blue-silver, sleeveless minidress, hiked up to beyond beyond—and the hair. Annabeth thought she’d go with the hair. It would have been long and blond under other circumstances, but at the moment it was black and sticky and covered with blood.

2

Marcey Mandret was pretty sure that Stewart Gordon was mad at her—furious, in fact—but the information made no sense, and she was too tired to think about it. Besides, what did he have to be mad at her for? He wasn’t her father, for God’s sake, or her uncle, or even her agent, and this wasn’t a working day anyway. The snow had started coming down like crazy hours ago, and everybody had just packed up and gone to what amounted to home. Marcey hated Margaret’s Harbor with a passion. It didn’t matter to her that presidents had vacationed here, or that Kendra Rhode’s family had had a summer place here since before the Civil War. Nobody cared what people like that did anymore. People cared about Kendra only because she had started hanging out with people like Marcey, although Marcey was fairly sure—there it went again, that weird zinging in her head, as if there were a live electrical wire up there somewhere—that that wasn’t the way it was playing in the papers. It made her furious, it really did, that the papers and the television stations all made it sound like Kendra was the Most Important Person in the History of the World, even though Kendra didn’t do anything except wear clothes and look really tall.