“Why?” Gregor had barely been aware of the fact that there was somebody named Kendra Rhode until Stewart Gordon had brought his attention to her.
“Because she doesn’t get plastered,” Bram said triumphantly. “She gets other people plastered. She loves to watch them make idiots of themselves. She loves to watch them crash and burn. But she’s not stupid, and she’s not some nobody out of Arkansas who’s impressed as hell at herself for having all this money. She’s always had it, and she’s always had influence. The secretary-general of the UN came to her fourth birthday party.”
Gregor found himself wondering who had been the secretary-general then, but it was the kind of thought he had when the back of his mind was working on something else. Mike Ingleford was packing things into his pockets, getting ready to go downstairs, and Bram and Clara Walsh obviously expected to go with him.
“Dr. Ingleford,” Gregor said. “Is it Marcey Mandret down there?”
Mike Ingleford looked up. “Leslie didn’t say. She did say female, red hair, and overdose.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Clara said.
“Leslie will get the stomach pump going,” Mike Ingle-ford said. “I’d better get moving.”
“I think we’ll all get moving with you,” Clara Walsh said. “For God’s sake, what’s going on around here? I feel like Jessica Fletcher.”
Gregor stayed at the window for a moment more. The crowd was dissipating, but he was sure that was only because they had managed to get inside the building. The town beyond looked as deserted as it had when they’d been driving through it. He thought he’d seen paparazzi before. He’d had cases where the press was a constant and unyielding presence. There was something about the crowd downstairs that was new. It pulsed. He ran the word around in his head. It fit, but he didn’t know why it fit.
He walked away from the window, preparing to follow Mike Ingleford, Bram Winder, and Clara Walsh out of the room, and found himself face-to-face with Linda Beecham.
“It’s just Jack,” she said. “Up here, I mean. Date rape drug. Hand useless probably forever. But it’s just Jack.”
“I think Dr. Ingleford said he’d be all right, in the long run,” Gregor said. When his voice came out of his mouth, it was unbelievably gentle. He didn’t know why.
Linda Beecham had turned away while he’d been thinking of his voice. Now he saw only the side of her face as she stared toward the window. She wasn’t actually looking at anything. She was only not looking at him.
“It’s only Jack,” she said again. “And the funny thing is, Jack used to talk about it. About how people aren’t real anymore if they’re not on television, if the photographers don’t follow them around. He had all these ideas—has them, I suppose. He’s not dead yet. About how there’s a fundamental injustice to it, about how there’s a corporate plot. Something. I didn’t listen much.”
“I think he’ll be all right,” Gregor said again. “I think the general consensus is—”
“When I was growing up,” Linda said, as if she hadn’t heard, “people had to do something to be famous, and people had to do something really important to be really famous. People paid attention to Marilyn Monroe, but they didn’t take her seriously. Einstein was really famous. Albert Schweitzer was really famous. Presidents were really famous.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough to remember Albert Schweitzer.”
“I think he died before I was born,” Linda said, “but he was really famous. I remember hearing about him. The Mother Teresa of our time. Did you know she wrote a book?”
“Who?”
“Kendra Rhode,” Linda said. “Or rather, her dog wrote a book, theoretically. My guess is that some ghostwriter wrote the book, and got badly paid for it, and then the family had connections with some publisher. Like that record album she put out. She paid for it herself. Jack thought it had to be deliberate, the things that are going on, but I don’t think so. I don’t think life is deliberate. I think it’s all chance and circumstance.”
“All of it?” Gregor said.
“All of it,” Linda Beecham said, and now, suddenly, there was emotion in her voice, a lot of it, and none of it pleasant. “I think we invent things, religions, and philosophies, and problems, we invent them to make it seem like it all makes sense, but nothing does. It’s just chaos. We’re all like bowling pins on a big hardwood floor and the bowling balls come flying at us for no reason at all and some of us fall over and some of us don’t, and none of it means anything at all. None of it makes sense.”