“We can make sense of some of it,” Gregor said. “I can make sense of what happened to your friend Jack, if I look at the problem long enough. I can make sense of what happened to this man Mark Anderman. Crimes get solved. Crimes are deliberate.”
“They’ve all gone,” Linda Beecham said. “You’d better go after them, or you’ll get left behind.”
2
What was downstairs was not “the press” as Gregor had known it. It wasn’t even “the celebrity press” as Gregor had known it. Apparently, the kind of reporters and photographers who followed heavyweight personalities like national news anchors and presidents of the United States were different from the ones who followed people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand—which made a lot of sense, but Gregor had never had a reason to consider it before. He wondered if he should have taken Stewart Gordon more seriously than he had. Stewart fulminated. He did it a lot. He was doing it even when they were both twenty-two-year-old nobodies in army uniforms. Gregor tended to take the fulminating in the same spirit he took old George Tekema-nian’s head shaking about the younger generation. It began to occur to him he might have been wrong.
Leslie O’Neal turned out to be a young and ferociously competent-looking woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s cap, as if she’d stepped out full-blown from a movie about Cherry Ames. Gregor saw her for the first time as he came through the fire doors at the bottom of the stairs he had taken to get to the emergency room, and with her he saw Stewart Gordon, his peacoat unbuttoned, looking frazzled. Gregor assumed that Clara, Stewart, and Dr. Ingleford had taken the elevator, since he hadn’t heard them on the stairs, but when he pressed the button for the elevator himself it seemed to be stuck on the ground floor. Once he got through the fire doors he saw what might have been the reason. There was another set of fire doors on the opposite end of the hall he stepped into. They were being held shut by a plank of wood threaded through their handles, and the woman in the nurse’s cap was Scotch-taping thick blue paper across the small windows near the top center of each one.
“It won’t do any good,” Stewart said, seeing Gregor come through. “They’ll just find a heating duct to crawl through. It’s worth a small fortune to get a picture of the body.”
“Body?” Gregor asked. “Is she—?”
“Of course she’s not dead,” Leslie O’Neal said. “She’s not even OD’d, not really. She’s just a silly girl who took a bunch of crap and passed out, and now we have to stop everything and deal with it. Honestly. These people. You two look big enough, though. You can hold the fort while I go help Dr. Ingleford.”
“I called nine-one-one,” Stewart said. “I had to call nine-one-one. I couldn’t get her to talk to me.”
Leslie O’Neal turned her back on all of them and hurried away down yet another corridor. Gregor looked around. There was a lot back here, more than you would think there could be given what the lobby looked like. What there wasn’t was any sign of people.
Stewart was looking at the fire doors Gregor had come through. “We’d better secure those,” he said. “They’ll figure it out sooner rather than later. There’s got to be another piece of that wood around here somewhere.”
“Is it always this deserted?” Gregor asked. “It’s the oddest thing. It’s like a ghost town.”
“It is, really, during the winter,” Clara Walsh said. “I remember it growing up here. There are all these houses and stores and restaurants and I don’t know what, and not a tenth of them can operate without the summer people. I suppose it would be sad, except that it’s always been this way as long as I’ve been alive. You’d have to go back to the nineteenth century to find a Margaret’s Harbor that was mostly about the people who actually lived on it.”
“They’re in the stairwell,” Stewart said. “I can hear them. We’d better do something before this gets very bad.”
They did something, Stewart directing. Gregor did not mind that. Stewart had always been good at directing, and good at doing the sensible, straightforward thing. They found another plank of wood in a room that seemed to have been given over to the collection of junk. Stewart pawed through piles of boxed paper and old molded plastic until he came up with something suitable, and then said something under his breath about what the hell anybody had ever wanted it for. They got the door secured just as the first of the photographers came down the stairs from the second floor. Gregor found himself wondering if there were patients up there, or staff, or anyone, that these people might be disturbing. Stewart had a handful of printout paper. He slammed it against the windows in the door and began to Scotch-tape it up.