Cheating at Solitaire(35)

“That’s probably just Clara Walsh’s office talking,” Linda said.

Jack sighed. “It’s everybody talking,” he said. “The first really significant thing that’s happened on Margaret’s Harbor in forty years, and we’re all acting like a bunch of buffoons. They say the police told Kendra Rhode she’d have to stay put for the rest of the week. Do you think she’ll listen?”

“I don’t think it matters what she does,” Linda said.

Jack turned off the television and stood up. “Maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “But it would be good, this setup, if I wanted to write a Columbo episode. It’s got a kind of fairytale quality to it. Maybe everything on Margaret’s Harbor does. You’re wrong not to recognize the mystique of it. Everybody else does.”

“It’s not mystique,” Linda said drily, “it’s stupefaction. I don’t care how much money you have. How big an idiot do you have to be to pay sixty-five dollars for a polo shirt?”

“It’s not about the money,” Jack said.

For a moment, Linda felt ashamed of herself. Jack was young. He still believed in possibility, and hope, and the future. He still thought they were all in control of their own destinies. She always made him depressed.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve lived here too long. I don’t have the—I don’t know what to call it. The thing you all have. I don’t see the magic in it.”

“It’s not that,” Jack said. He had gone to the table near the window and started to pack up his professional gear, the cameras, the lenses, the film, everything in black leather carrying cases that had probably been as ridiculously priced as those polo shirts. Every once in a while he turned his head and looked out the big plate glass window onto Main Street. “You’d think you could do something with this,” he said. “Here they are, all these people that you never have any access to at all. Important people. People who report the real news.”

“In the real world, there really is real news,” Linda said. “But no matter what you think, stories about Arrow Nor-mand and Marcey Mandret and Kendra Rhode going to parties and getting drunk and disorderly aren’t real news.”

“These people report on other things,” Jack said. “They go to wars. They cover peace accords. They do special reports on epidemics. And they’re here. Where I can get to them. You’d think I’d be able to make something of that.”

“Maybe you will,” Linda said. “Maybe you’ll get to them with all those photographs you took. Maybe you’ll get offered a job that will take you out of here, if that’s what you want.”

“I think that when this is all over, I’m just going to go,” Jack said. “It’s not that I don’t like you. I do like you. It’s just that—I could sit here forever. I could still be here when I’m fifty. And I really don’t want to be.”

Linda hadn’t wanted to be either, but here she was, and here she was going to stay. She looked down at her desk and saw the spreadsheets from the last quarter of last year, freshly arrived. She had a new person in accounting who understood computers and liked to use them. She knew what it was to be so desperate to get out of here that you would do anything—swallow razor blades, expose yourself in Times Square—for a ticket to somewhere else, to somewhere real. She knew what it was to feel that Margaret’s Harbor wasn’t real.

“Hey,” she said. “Here’s the thing. I’ll take one picture of the crime scene, and one each of Arrow Normand and Mark Anderman, if you’ve got them, and you can sell the rest for yourself. Go show what you’ve got to CBS and see if you can get them to take you seriously.”

“Thanks. Thank you very much.”

“It’s nothing,” Linda said.

It really was nothing, but Linda understood that it would be something to Jack. He had been distracted ever since the murder happened, as if Mark Anderman’s bloody wound had really driven home the fact that he wasn’t getting any younger, and he wasn’t where he wanted to be. He would go on being distracted until he’d had a chance to give it a shot.

Linda turned back to her spreadsheets and found herself hoping that he would be luckier than she had been, that he would not end up still on the Harbor thirty years from now, with nothing to take comfort in but the uncompromising solidity of his isolation.

3

Marcey Mandret believed the world was an equitable place—or would have, if she’d known what the word “equitable” meant. The way she put it inside her own head was to say the world was “fair,” and then she tried very hard not to spell out the ways in which it was that. Here was the problem, the one she could never get out from under, no matter what she did: if the world was fair, then she deserved to have more money than other people, and more publicity; but if the world was fair, and she didn’t deserve to have these things, then she would eventually lose them. It went around and around and around. If the world was fair, she couldn’t have gotten these things if she didn’t deserve them. On the other hand, fair or not, it was possible she had cheated, maybe without meaning to, and then she would be—something. She was having that thing in her stomach again. People thought she was anorexic or bulimic, but she didn’t have to be. She only had to let her stomach get like this, knotted up, and in pain, so that it felt as if she had a knife sticking into her intestines. It was impossible to eat, and if she did try to eat anything, she threw it up. She even threw up some of what she drank.