Cheating at Solitaire(7)

“It didn’t matter in Hollywood anyway,” Carl said. “Even then.”

“What?” Michael said.

“I was thinking about the Great Depression,” Carl said. “People were scared to death that there was going to be a violent revolution. Rich people were. So they hired public relations experts to keep their names out of the newspapers. But it wasn’t like that in Hollywood even then. Stars ran around looking rich in public. They always do.”

“Social Security. The Great Depression. I think you’re cracking up.”

“I’m going to crack up if you don’t do what I tell you. Find some way to get Kendra Rhode out of here before she pushes those two right off the edge of the world and brings down your movie with them. She does it deliberately, Michael. I’m not making this up. She likes to see people crash and burn. I think it’s the only thing on earth that doesn’t bore her.”

“Shit—” Michael said.

And that was all he said, because the service had cut out. Carl folded up his phone and put it in his pocket. He liked the Oscartown Inn. Marcey and Arrow complained about how stodgy it was, and Carl was sure the inn’s management complained about them, but he just found the place comfortable, and that was all he needed to be satisfied. It did occur to him that there had been a time, not all that long ago, when he had needed a lot more to be satisfied, but it was like the man said. You can’t always get what you want.

He took his empty drink glass across the lobby and through the tinted-glass, mahogany-lined doors of the inn’s bar. He went up to the bar itself and sat down on a stool. The bar had the television on, which was a miracle. The cable company up here had to be the best on the planet. The set was turned to a news channel. A woman reporter was standing in the snow in a pastel green parka with fake fur around the hood, talking into a microphone and shivering.

“You want another one of those, Mr. Frank?” the bartender said.

The bar was dark, the way so many bars were. It was as if most people couldn’t really drink in the full light of day. The people around him, sitting at the little tables, all looked like the kind who nursed a single drink for an hour and then went home. Some of the women had tote bags next to their chairs with books peeping out of them. Over on the far wall there was a huge fireplace that went through to the common room on the other side, the fire in it fully stoked and blazing. Carl had seen Stewart Gordon down here some nights, all by himself with a book of his own. There had to be something better he could be doing with his life than what he was actually doing with it. The problem was, he couldn’t think of what.

He made a gesture at his glass and said, “Give me a double this time. I think I’m in for the night.”

4

There were people on Margaret’s Harbor who said that Linda Beecham was a living history of the island. If you needed to know who fell down sloppy drunk on Main Street on Christmas Eve in 1924, or who was and wasn’t at the Montgomery’s Gold and Silver Ball in 1933, all you had to do was to ask Linda. She wouldn’t even have to look it up. She sat there on the second floor of the Harbor Home News Building, looking out her big plate glass window at the people of Oscartown, and it was as if the island had its own fairy godmother, the Spirit of Christmas Past in chinos and fisherman’s sweaters and big clanky suede snow boots that she’d certainly never bought in any place you could get to without driving over water.

The thing was, though, that any picture of Linda Bee-cham as the Spirit of Christmas anything had to come from people who knew her very little, and then mostly as a decoration. It was true enough that she knew everything there was to know about the island. She had been born and raised there, which was incredibly rare, at least until recently. For most of the world, Margaret’s Harbor was a place to take a vacation or to own a second house. People came up from Boston and New York in the summer and sat in the hole-in-the-wall coffee places with copies of Forbes and the New York Review of Books, and even their waiters were from off-island. There were times when it was possible to think that there was no such thing as a native of Margaret’s Harbor. The whole place was just a repository for old New England money, new New York money, and the families of presidents too famous for their own good.

Linda’s family had been fishermen, back when she’d had any family, and some of them had owned stores in the small towns in the island’s center, away from the ocean, where property was expensive. If she bothered to remember it—and she almost never did—she could feel the air on her face biking out to Oscartown to see the rich people when she was still in grade school. The girls had all looked to her like space aliens because they were nothing like the girls she knew, and nothing like the girls she saw on television. Back in those days, Margaret’s Harbor got exactly two television stations, both of them out of Boston. They showed the standard sitcoms and westerns and game shows and the Boston nightly news, which made even less sense to her than the rich people did. The only thing that did make sense to her was her plans for the future. None of those plans had included spending the rest of her life on Margaret’s Harbor.