Still, drunk and disorderly was bad, but it wasn’t fatal. People came back from that. They went to rehab. They rebuilt careers. They took on the coloration of people who had had religious conversions, and went on Larry King Live to talk about how terrible they had been before they’d confronted their addiction. No, the thing that really killed you, the thing that colored you so that you could never get clean again, was the legal system.
She had gone out the back door, toward the ocean, and walked along the little stone path that skirted the edge of their private beach. On another day, one of the photographers might have been walking back and forth along the fence and seen her, but today she was fairly safe. Not only was just about everybody staking out the little jail where the police were still keeping Arrow Normand, but the last thing Kendra had seen on television before she came out was a report that Marcey had ended up in the emergency room with some kind of overdose. Then there was that Gregor Demarkian person, whom the police were bringing in to help with the investigation. There were a lot of diversions, in other words. She would be able to get where she was going with the minimum amount of fuss, and only be photographed after, when she was ready.
The easiest way into town from the Point was the footpath they’d used to call the Road to Oz because it was made of sort-of yellow bricks. Kendra had dressed up like an Eskimo in a parka and high shearling-lined boots, and she imagined that she looked like anybody else would look, walking into town, except that she was taller. Town seemed to be deserted when she got to it too, which was both satisfying and a little annoying. There was nobody from the media hanging out on the porch of the Oscartown Inn, and nobody at the door of that little bar everybody went to because there was nowhere else to go. It occurred to Kendra that Marcey Mandret might have died, which was more interesting than it might have been under other circumstances.
Carl Frank was waiting at a table in the main dining room. It was not a private table, in a private room, but there was no help for that. The only private rooms at the Oscar-town Inn were the bedrooms upstairs, and the last thing Kendra needed at this point was a rash of stories about how she’d gone to some PR person’s room. PR people were people you hired, and when they screwed up and you had to fire them, you gave interviews where you said things like, “Suzi wasn’t just my PR person, she was my friend, and as a friend the best thing I can do is urge her to go to rehab.”
Everybody went to rehab these days. It was like everybody going to church when she was a child.
She made her way to Carl Frank’s table and sat down. He had carefully positioned himself facing the doors to the room, so that if any photographers did arrive looking for something to shoot, they’d get the back of Kendra’s head and maybe a few minutes of confusion before they knew what they were about. Kendra sat down and gave the waitress who came over a faint, meant-to-be-self-deprecating smile. It didn’t quite come off, because the waitress was somebody she recognized. That was one of the odd things about Margaret’s Harbor. Kendra didn’t know the names of practically anybody who lived here, but she knew most of them by sight because she’d spent every summer of her childhood on the island. Unlike some of the other people who grew up summering here, though, Kendra had never wondered what became of the children who stayed behind for winter when all the real people went back to the city. She’d known from the beginning what happened to them. They grew up to be waitresses at the Oscartown Inn.
The waitress came back with an ordinary cup of coffee. The Oscartown Inn served cappuccino, but it was really awful cappuccino, and Kendra wasn’t in the mood. She got her compact out of her purse and checked her hair. It looked the way it always looked. She looked the way she always looked, except that in better weather she wore fewer clothes.
Carl Frank was looking at her the way people did when they wanted her to talk first. It was the kind of thing that annoyed the hell out of her.
“So,” he said, finally, when he realized it wasn’t going to happen. “You do understand that I’m not the right person to talk to about this.”
Kendra shrugged. “You’re the only person I can talk to about this. The film’s on its third director. The producer is nowhere to be found, and hasn’t been for weeks. Besides, my father says that you’re Michael Bardman’s spy on this movie, and Michael Bardman definitely is the right person to talk to.”
“You could probably talk to him by going through your father.”
“Not really. The Rhodes don’t do much with entertainment, and my father wouldn’t help me with this in any case. He thinks I should find somebody he knows and settle down.”