“You will, eventually.”
“Maybe,” Kendra said. “Maybe I’ll have a glorious great flaming flash out and become a legend. You know this idea isn’t stupid. She hasn’t done more than a fifth of what she was hired to do out here, and from what I’ve heard she’s done nothing at all otherwise. She can’t continue with the film now—”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions here, aren’t you?”
“No,” Kendra said. “You know and I know that they’re going to charge her with murder, even if they can’t make it stick. If they weren’t going to do that, they would never have held her so long in jail. And then there’s that, too. She can’t come back now. She’s been in jail long enough so that if she does come back, that will be the story, and the only story, about this movie, ever. You’d be throwing good money after bad.”
“Maybe we should just shut down the production,” Carl said. “I’ve been suggesting that for a while now.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to shut down the production for Arrow Normand,” Kendra said. “The part she had was small anyway. You’d have used a filler if you hadn’t wanted a name for the publicity value. And these days, my name has a lot more publicity value. Arrow used to be famous, but I don’t think that’s going to last very much longer. If people know who she is next year, it will just be because she’s going on trial. And nobody will care.”
Kendra Rhode disliked Carl Frank almost as much as she disliked Stewart Gordon, but where she never knew what Stewart was thinking, she always knew what Carl was. That was how she knew that she was about to get what she wanted, or at least the beginning of what she wanted. Calculation was tricky, yes, yes, but it was almost always worth it.
She felt a brush of air behind her and thought that somebody must have come into the dining room from the outside. She reached for her bag again. She had hidden it under her down coat on the way here, but now she saw no reason why she shouldn’t leave it out in full view of the public, just in case the person who had come in was somebody who might recognize her.
The best way to make sure that you didn’t get tainted when one of your friends screwed up was to give people something else to say about you, and Kendra was fairly sure she just had.
3
Back on the third floor of the hospital, Linda Beecham was waiting. She was waiting for Jack to wake up, and she was waiting for the photographers to be gone from the lobby and drive. It wasn’t that she thought anybody was interested in her—nobody ever was—but that she didn’t want the kind of trouble she could get into by not paying attention. It was one thing to say that nothing touched you anymore. She didn’t think it did, and on most days she found herself wondering how anybody could be bothered by anything, anywhere. The world was an empty place. That was how she thought of it. She was sure there had been substance to it once. She was even sure she had noticed it. She remembered long summer afternoons when she was in junior high school, sitting on the broad front lawn of her parents’ house with the spring’s crop of kittens in her lap, watching older girls drive by in their own cars and wondering what it would be like to be like them. At that point, it had never occurred to her that she would not be like them. Her life seemed to stretch out in front of her in an orderly and pleasant way: a few years in college; a job in Boston or New York; a man to marry; children. It was the life of everybody she knew, practically. It was what had happened to her own mother, and to the mothers of most of her friends. They came back to Margaret’s Harbor, eventually, because it was a good place to bring up children. Sometimes she tried to remember when she had first known that her life was not going to be like that at all, but she always came to the same conclusion: there had never been such a time. It was just that one day she woke up, and all that was gone, and it didn’t even occur to her to think about getting it back.
She looked down at Jack for a moment and then wandered over to the window where she had last seen Gregor Demarkian standing, to see what the world was like outside. The drive was still full of cars and vans. There were still men with cameras everywhere, including the kind of cameras that made film for television stations. She remembered the morning she’d realized she’d won the MegaMillions jackpot, the cold morning of a day very much like this one, with snow on the ground and clouds in the sky. Maybe it would have been different—maybe she would have been different—if it had been one of those absolutely enormous jackpots, hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just sixteen, the kind of money that not only changes your life but your very soul. As it was, she had just sat there at her kitchen table with the Boston Globe laid out against the vinyl of the tabletop, thinking that she was going to have to hurry if she was going to get in to work on time. The numbers were there, staring at her, and in the back of her mind there was a calculation going on. She would have to take her ticket over to Braintree in order to get it cashed, and she had no time to do it in. She worked six days a week. She worked as many hours as she could get anyone to give her, because that was the only way she could meet her bills, and half the time she didn’t meet them. She couldn’t take time off to go to Brain-tree. She’d end up getting fired.