Cheating at Solitaire(32)

She had been less reassured by the other searches she had done. She had searched for Arrow Normand and for Mark Anderman, as a matter of course. She had searched for Ken-dra Rhode, who was somebody she had thought she knew something about. Finally, she had given up searching for any one of the young women who were involved in this thing and just let herself be washed by the tidal wave of items spilling across the screen. The items went on endlessly. As far as she could tell, there were dozens of people in places like Los Angeles and New York who were very young, very rich, and very stupid and who spent all their time getting their pictures taken by tabloid photographers. There were also dozens of other people—tabloid photographers and “entertainment reporters”—who spent all their time writing and illustrating articles about the first set of people. But that was not what was bothering her. She had actually known about all that, if only by rumor, and without understanding the breathtaking scope of it. There was something else going on here that made her uneasy at the base of her spine. There was something wrong, really wrong. She kept going around and around it without being able to put a name to it. It was more than outside her experience. It was outside the experience of decent people.

Her sons hadn’t cared what it was; they had only wanted her to leave the island. John, who was the cardiologist, had been merely frantic. He seemed to think that Margaret’s Harbor had suddenly become a hotbed of crime.

“You’re not going off to lend your talents to the poor,” he said. “You’re not volunteering to teach history to inner-city high school students. You’re stuck up there with a bunch of psychopaths. And don’t think they’re less dangerous just because they’ve got money.”

Annabeth had wanted to tell him that she understood they were very dangerous indeed, but she hadn’t been able to find the words for it, because she still hadn’t known (and didn’t know now) how to define the danger. It hadn’t mattered to Robbie, who was the lawyer, because the danger he saw was entirely different.

“Murder investigations are funny things,” he’d said when he called. “Not funny ha-ha. Funny peculiar. You never know where they’re going to go. I don’t like it that you found the body, and I don’t trust this guy—”

“Stewart Gordon? You don’t trust Stewart Gordon? You used to idolize Stewart Gordon.”

“I used to idolize Commander Rees,” Robbie said, “and I’m not twelve years old anymore. I don’t know the district attorney up there, or is it the public prosecutor? It doesn’t matter. I know some good people in Boston. I’ll send you a lawyer.”

“Robbie, for goodness’ sake. I don’t need a lawyer. Nobody is going to arrest me for anything.”

“You don’t know that for certain. You can’t. You found the body. The woman they’ve arrested for the murder was in your living room. You’re in this up to your neck. I’ll send you a lawyer. I’ll clear my desk and come up myself in a couple of days.”

Annabeth had gotten the impression that John was going to “clear his desk” and come up in a couple of days too, but she deliberately did not press him to make that explicit. At least Robbie understood why she couldn’t just up and leave the place right now in the middle of everything. Even Ken-dra Rhode had been told to stick around for a while.

She looked up and down Main Street. The camera trucks and the people made an almost solid line, so that it was close to impossible to cross from one side of the street to the other without weaving through equipment trucks. Every once in a while she saw a man or woman standing in the middle of the street with a microphone in his hand, filming a “report” that at this point had to be about nothing. There had been news in the first twenty-four hours. Now there was just gossip and innuendo, and lots of people who wanted to see if Marcey Mandret would come spilling out of a bar somewhere, just as drunk as she’d been the night it happened.

“I wouldn’t hang around in the middle of the road like this if I were you,” a man said.

Annabeth turned around and saw that she was facing a thin, driven, intelligent man of medium height, incongruously dressed in a very good suit and a Baxter State Parker. He had no hat on his head and no gloves. She thought he must be freezing. He held out his hand to her, formal and polite.

“I’m Carl Frank,” he said. “We haven’t met. I do public relations for the movie.”

“Ah,” Annabeth said.

“And I was telling you the truth. You shouldn’t hang around in the middle of the road like that. They have to eat to live, those people. They don’t know who you are at the moment, but they will, especially with Gordon off somewhere. You’re news, you know. You found the body.”