Cheating at Solitaire(62)
“She’s a perfectly nice woman,” Bram Winder said. He was really talking to Clara Walsh, but it was a small car, and everybody had to listen. “I’ve spoken to her dozens of times. She’s very pleasant. She’s just not all touchy-feely like some encounter-group twit trying to express her feelings.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t pleasant,” Clara Walsh said.
Clara was gathering up her things, checking through her purse, pulling out her black leather briefcase. Gregor still had the manilla envelopes he’d been handed, some of them already opened. Clara opened the driver’s-side door and got out, and when she did, the rest of them got out too. That was when the wind hit them in the face. Gregor wondered just how bad the wind chill was, since the tip of his nose had gone numb. On the curb, Linda Beecham backed up a step and waited, patiently.
“If I hadn’t know her all my life,” Clara said, “I’d think she was autistic. Not the way autistic people actually are, but the way they used to be described in my psychology textbooks. People without affect. She wasn’t always like this. She used to be a very happy person. Or she seemed to be.”
“You didn’t know her that well?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Clara Walsh said. Then she bit her lip, and there was nothing left to stop them all from going ahead with whatever was about to happen.
Gregor took a last long-range view of Linda Beecham, then followed Clara and Bram into the wind. There were flags along the street, an American one on a tall pole, several others attached to the facades of some of the little stores. All of them were whipping around as if they were in a hurricane, and yet Gregor was sure there was no bad weather predicted for Margaret’s Harbor for a week, and that hurricanes didn’t come this far north this deep into the winter season. He looked from one side to the other, at those empty vans that said CNN and Fox News on their sides, at the little stores, at the inn. Linda Beecham was definitely looking at them, and Gregor was willing to bet anything that she was definitely waiting for them, but she was not moving in their direction. She was just standing still.
“It’s not where the fishermen go,” Clara Walsh said, leaning back to be sure Gregor heard her. “Where we came in by the ferry. There’s a different wharf for fishermen. Twenty years ago or so there was a big problem out here, with the fishermen, because the pleasure boats use up a lot of space, and they pollute the water. So there was a compromise.”
“I know what kind of compromise it was, too,” Bram Winder said. “The fishermen got shoved off into some makeshift hellhole, and the yachtsmen took over all the good berths. Money is always louder than tradition.”
Gregor thought this was probably true, but it wasn’t something he could think of an answer to. They were walking carefully up the sidewalk. The Oscartown Inn, unlike the other businesses on the street, was set a little back from the road itself. There was a patch of something that would be lawn when the green came back. Up close, Linda Beecham looked even more average and middle-of-the-road than she had from afar, and if anything with even less outwardly expressed emotion. Blank people, Gregor thought, and then she was holding out her hand to him.
“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Demarkian,” Linda Beecham said. “You’re the first interesting news we’ve had here in weeks. I’m glad to see you, Clara. They said you’d be here. I figured you had to be the person I had to talk to.”
“I thought you were here meeting Mr. Demarkian for the paper,” Clara Walsh said.
Linda Beecham did not look surprised. “It was Jack who was supposed to meet Mr. Demarkian for the paper,” she said. “I don’t do the reporting. I wouldn’t know how. He was going to meet the boat, in case you were wondering. The Home News does cover murder investigations. Or we would, if we ever had any. But that’s the trouble. Jack, I mean.”
“Has he gone missing?” Clara said. “Has he run off with a movie star, or taken a job with the Weekly World News?”
“I wish he would take a job with somebody,” Linda said. “He’s not going to get anywhere hanging around here. He even knows he isn’t going to get anywhere hanging around here. I tell him and I tell him, but he doesn’t listen to me.”
“So where is he, when he’s supposed to be here?” Clara asked.
Gregor watched as Linda Beecham looked Clara very carefully in the face, as if she were looking for something in particular. He wondered what.
“Jack,” Linda said, “is out cold at Oscartown Hospital.”