“They wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for you,” Marcey said. “And what’s that supposed to be? We all trusted you. We did. We all trusted you and then you went off and did the one thing that—”
Mitsy Kline was back. She had a single champagne cocktail in the middle of her tray, and her face looked as stiff as cardboard.
“I want three more of those,” Marcey said. “Right now. I want to line them up on the table.”
“Of course,” Mitsy said.
Jack looked at Marcey. She hadn’t noticed anything, and her face was blurred. It didn’t seem possible for a face to be blurred, but Marcey’s was. Here was one of the differences between Marcey and Kendra Rhode, between all those people and Kendra Rhode. Unlike Kendra, their faces lacked definition. Jack took a deep breath.
“It’s not the only picture,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not the only picture. Not the only one I took on the Vegas trip. In fact, I took a lot of pictures on the Vegas trip. In a lot of places. And before you give me another lecture about how I betrayed all of you, I haven’t sold any but the one you’re all pissed about, and some of the others are a lot more interesting.”
Marcey was sitting up a little straighter. Jack could practically see her struggling to return to some kind of sobriety. He wanted to scream. She was not the person he wanted to be talking to. Carl Frank was not the person he wanted to be talking to either. He wanted to be talking to Kendra, because—because.
Mitsy came back with the three new champagne cocktails. She put them down on the table as if she wanted to break them. Then she left without saying a thing.
“Pictures of what?” Marcey said.
“You should be better to people like Mitsy,” Jack said. “Waitresses. Assistants. Secretaries. They can ruin your life.”
“Pictures of what?” Marcey said again.
“Pictures of everything,” Jack said. “Pictures of the whole damned trip and all its works. I was taking pictures all the time. You must have noticed. I’m sure she noticed. Either that, or the whole bunch of you just pose instinctively. I’ve got a ton of pictures from the Vegas trip, and Carl Frank is offering to pay me a ton and a half for any information I have that might keep the pack of you in line. And there are papers. The papers pay too. So—”
“So what?” Marcey said. She had finished the first champagne cocktail in a single long drink, and it looked like she was about to do the same with the second. She had it lifted in the air, but she didn’t drink it. “What do you think you’re going to do? You think you’re going to make us like you again by blackmailing us? That’s what you think you’re going to do?”
It was a good thing there was nobody much in the place. If there had been reporters, this would have been on the news channels in minutes. Marcey was not being discreet, which was not surprising, because she was never discreet. The problem was that now she was not being quiet. She was shrieking, the way Jack had heard women shriek only in the movies, and she was loud enough to be heard on the pavement.
“You’re such a bastard,” she said, throwing the contents of the champagne cocktail on Jack’s head.
Jack let the champagne run down the sides of his face. It didn’t matter. This was Marcey acting. He had seen it before. He had seen it, and he had seen Arrow, and he had seen Steve, and he had seen Mark, and he was suddenly fed up with it all.
“You’d better get the news up the hill,” he said, “since I’m not welcome there anymore. If she doesn’t want this stuff all over the tabloids, she’s going to have to talk to me.”
Chapter Six
1
Gregor Demarkian had always thought that there was something wrong with what he had been taught about “the passage of time.” In fact, the idea of time as passing was all wrong. In his experience, time didn’t pass. It simply was, and then it was not. That was the way it had been with Elizabeth. Even the long year of her dying hadn’t made time seem to pass. She just was, and then she was something else, and then she was not. Then there was that other one, the one that stuck in his head, because even when he’d first heard it he had thought it was both nonsensical and important: Time is the measure of change. That one would have worked better than the one about time “passing,” if only he had been aware of change. He wasn’t, though. Things were, and then they were something else, and then they were not. Nobody could see time passing, and nobody could see change. One day, we all just woke up and it was there.
What got him thinking about the passage of time was the newsstand at the dock, and what got him thinking about that was a fluke. When they all stepped off the ferry there was a flurry of activity. A young man from Clara Walsh’s office was there with a stack of large manila envelopes. Stewart Gordon was anxious to be off somewhere, Gregor wasn’t sure where, but thought it might have something to do with Dr. Annabeth Falmer. Clara Walsh herself was suddenly nervous and distracted. Gregor couldn’t see why. There really was nobody at the dock to meet them. If Oscartown was full of paparazzi, those paparazzi were not interested in him, or even in the district attorney who would prosecute Arrow Normand if it ever came to that. The dock was empty and cold and in need of repair. Gregor found himself wondering if there was neglect here, or if this was the ordinary depredations of a long hard winter.