Cheating at Solitaire(39)

“That’s six degrees Fahrenheit,” Stewart said. “If you people used the metric system like sensible countries, six degrees would at least be above freezing.”

Gregor let this go. They had had the metric-system-versus-English-system argument before, and Celsius wasn’t even the metric system. The boat turned out to have a large upper deck cabin filled with seats in two sets of orderly rows, like a movie theater. There were also benches along the walls, and a bar that was obviously set up to serve drinks and coffee.

“So this is the regular ferryboat,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been on it before.”

“You’ve never been to the Harbor before?” Clara asked.

“No, I’ve been to the Harbor,” Gregor said, “but it was when I was still with the FBI. We went out in our own launch, I think. If this is the regular ferry, shouldn’t it be ferrying? Won’t people be wanting to go back and forth?”

“They may want to,” Clara said, “but during the winter, if you don’t have your own boat, you only get to go back and forth at seven in the morning and six at night. That’s as often as the ferry operates. They did schedule extra runs on New Year’s Eve because Kendra Rhode was having a large party, and the Rhode family got in touch with the ferry authority. But as it turned out, the extra runs didn’t run anyway, because of the storm.”

“I’ve told Gregor about the storm,” Stewart said. He was pacing back and forth, as if he couldn’t stop moving. “Of course, the news about the storm was in all the papers, and on television, but Gregor never notices anything unless he’s looking for it.”

“You said people have private boats,” Gregor said, thinking that he ought to sit down before the boat started to move. “Did they have private boats that night?”

“I suppose they could have had,” Clara said, “but I can’t imagine anybody being able to manage it and coming out of it alive. Maybe if they were expert boatmen, and I don’t mean ‘expert’ the way people on the Harbor think of themselves as experts. I mean if they were professional fishermen or something, the guys who go out into the Atlantic in all weathers. And even some of them don’t come back when the weather is bad enough, and none of them I know of would have risked his neck just to get from the mainland to the Harbor. Well, I mean, maybe if his wife or his mother were dying and that was the only way he could get to see her. But to take somebody in, to make money on the fare? Not a chance.”

“All right,” Gregor said. He went to one of the cabin’s small windows to look out. He could see the waters of the Cape again, and some men on the deck doing he didn’t know what. He supposed it was important in getting the boat to go. He hated boats.

“So,” he said. “We can be fairly sure that the people we know of who were on the island at the time of the murder were the only people on the island at the time of the murder. Nobody could have come in and then gone out by boat.”

“No,” Clara Walsh said. She had thrown back the hood of her dark coat. Her hair was as red as Rudolph’s nose, and she had to be over fifty. “But you have to understand something. We don’t think we’ve got the wrong person. I’ve looked at the evidence. The local police have looked at the evidence. The state police have looked at the evidence. We’ve thrown jurisdiction to the winds and let everybody and his brother see the evidence. And we’ve all come to pretty much the same conclusion. Arrow Normand shot Mark Anderman in the head. We don’t know why. We do know she did it.”

“So why am I here?” Gregor asked.

Stewart cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said.

Clara Walsh ignored him. “Mr. Gordon made a fuss. A big one. And when we sat down and thought about it, we decided he was actually making a certain amount of sense. Not sense in relation to the solution of the crime. On that one, he’s talking through his hat. But the simple fact is that we have to be careful here. Everybody involved here is either a high-profile personality or a person of serious influ-ence, and I do mean everybody. It’s bad enough that we’re dealing with teen queen actresses and movie people, and the Harbor is now inundated with media. We’ve even got the BBC camped out on Oscartown’s main street.”

“And Al Jazeera,” Stewart said blandly. “Great story about the decadence of the West with a great excuse to run pictures of girls in their underwear.”

“Yes,” Clara said. “The fact is that we’re under a microscope, and we don’t want to be perceived as being amateurish, or stupid, or hasty. The local police have cause to worry about being charged with inexperience. I looked it up. The last murder on the Harbor was in 1932, and it didn’t require much of an investigation. There used to be lobstermen on the island. They couldn’t afford to live there now. Anyway, one of them killed his wife’s lover with a hatchet in full view of half a dozen people on the very dock we’re going to now. So you see, bringing in somebody who does know something about investigating a murder, and especially someone who has investigated murders with high-profile people involved in them, made a good deal of sense on a number of accounts. And, of course, we have to worry about the lawyers.”