Cheating at Solitaire(33)

“Ah,” Annabeth said again, surprised. “I think that’s amazing.”

“What?”

“That you knew who I was.”

“We’re not all Marcey Mandret,” Carl Frank said. “Some of us actually finished our educations. I went to the University of Texas, myself. I once managed to have American Revolutions assigned to me twice in a single year, once for a history course and once for a course in political science.”

“I’m surprised they were willing to use a popular book. University departments usually prefer academic scholarship.”

“They were courses for nonmajors, and I was in marketing. I think the professors were hoping to hell they could get us interested somehow. You got me interested. I’ve become one of those old farts who sit around reenacting the battles of the Civil War.”

“From the union   side or the Confederate?”

“I try not to take sides. It’s good practice for my work. If you take sides in the celebrity wars, you get squashed flat by rampaging egos. Except it isn’t really ego. They’ve got no sense of self, most of these people. They’re all flash and dash and surface. Before I got into the work I do, I used to think that was an illusion, that if you got to know them you’d find they were real people inside. And that’s true for some of them, of course. Stewart Gordon, for instance. But for most of them?” Carl shrugged.

Annabeth looked up and down the street. Nobody was paying any attention to them, but it occurred to her that if this man was right, if she was considered to be “news” when Stewart was away, the quickest way to get their attention would be to stand here talking to a man they probably all knew.

The same thing seemed to have occurred to Carl Frank. “Well,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. I’ll get you into a lot of trouble. Do you think you could do something for me?”

“Oh,” Annabeth said. “Well—”

“It’s nothing huge. It’s just that I’d appreciate it if you told our Mr. Gordon that I was asking about him, and mentioned that it might not be outside the bounds of reasonableness for me to wonder if he could bother to check in every once in a while. I am still responsible for the publicity on this thing, as long as it lasts, which may not be very long. But until the brass pulls the plug, here we are.”

“Oh,” Annabeth said. “All right. Yes, of course I could do that for you.”

“They blame you for it, you know,” Carl said. “When there’s bad publicity on a picture, they blame you for it. I don’t know how they’re going to find a way to blame me for the fact that Arrow Normand decided to kill her latest toy boy, but they will. You’d better get going. It was very nice talking to you.”

“It was very nice talking to you, too,” Annabeth said. Then she watched him walk quickly down the street in the direction that led away from the center of town, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets.

The news crews and equipment vans were still where they had been when she had stopped to talk, and the wind was worse. Annabeth pulled her coat collar high on her neck over the cashmere scarf from Harbor Halls that Robbie had bought her at Thanksgiving and headed for the supermarket again. She supposed that Gregor Demarkian would stay at Stewart’s house, or at the inn if there was any room, which there probably wasn’t. Still, she needed coffee and cream and a lot of other things men liked that she didn’t keep around anymore unless the boys were home, and then the boys would probably be coming too.

In all the strangeness of this situation, the very most strange was this: the longer it went on, the more it felt as if she were preparing for a family holiday.

2

If Linda Beecham had had someone around that she could talk to—if she had had the kind of friends most people have—they would have known that she found everything surrounding the murder of Mark Anderman to be oddly satisfying. It wasn’t the murder itself that made her feel almost triumphant in self-satisfaction. She knew nothing at all about the young man who was dead, but she had no reason to think he was any better or worse than anybody else. She supposed he had family somewhere, and people who cared for him, but maybe not. She hadn’t realized until she was closing in on middle age just how alone most people were. Still, she had no reason to think badly of him, and no reason to wish him dead. She could be sorry enough about that without being a hypocrite.

What struck Linda Beecham was what had happened because the murder had happened, and what was happening still. It had infected everybody. The movie people were behaving the way they had to behave. They put on brave faces for the cameras and spoke earnestly into microphones about how they were sure Arrow Normand had had nothing at all to do with killing their dear friend, this nice boy who had had everything to live for. Then they went back to their rented houses and made phone calls to California. The film-ing had been stopped dead in its tracks. Linda wasn’t even sure it could resume with Arrow Normand in jail, since she was playing a part in it. That thin, nervous man who did the public relations spent all his time in the bar at the Oscar-town Inn, not always drinking. Linda had always been sure, deep down inside herself, that this movie would never come off. It was just the kind of harebrained silliness Bitsy Win-thorp was prone to. Margaret’s Harbor was never going to be a haven for movie people. The weather was bad, and the natives didn’t like the intrusion.