She got lucky. Leslie was not at the nurses’ station. Maybe she’d gone down the hall to the bathroom. There were things at the nurses’ station. There were folders left out on the desk, and what was probably Jack’s file, open, with a pen lying across it. Linda didn’t stop to look. She was going to press the button for the elevator. She decided against it.
Leslie could come back at any time. Linda went through the fire doors to the stairs instead. She could go down two flights of stairs, for God’s sake. She wasn’t an invalid.
In the stairwell, the hospital seemed more than deserted. It seemed like a ghost place. There were no sounds at all, anywhere, that she could hear. She wondered where this stairwell was, where she would come out when she got to the bottom. It wouldn’t be the lobby or the emergency room. If she’d been anywhere near either one, she would have heard noises.
Once when she was very small, her parents had taken her on a trip to Maine. She didn’t know why they had wanted to go to Maine, or what they had actually been doing there, but she remembered being taken to this big shack on the ocean where you were supposed to sit at a trough and eat clams out of their shells. The clams were in ice, and people reached into the ice to pull them out and open them up and swallow them down. This was not what her parents had expected her to do for her own dinner. They had gotten her a little cardboard dish of French fries to eat instead. She hadn’t been able to eat, because she was sure that there was murder going on all around her. They were killing the clams. They were murdering the clams. The clams were being slaughtered and she could do nothing at all to stop them.
It was odd, she thought now. There was a time when she had cried for the murder of clams, and now she could work up no emotion at all for the murder of an actual human being. Of course, she hadn’t known Mark Anderman—but then, she hadn’t known the clams.
Chapter Three
1
What Gregor Demarkian needed was an oasis of calm, a place where nothing was happening, and where he did not have to feel confused. That was the problem with Margaret’s Harbor as he had so far experienced it. It was a mass of confusion, complete with events that came out of nowhere and went nowhere, and a Greek chorus made up of howling idiots lit up like saints in halos of flashbulb bursts. It was all well and good to tell him he needed to do something about “the case,” but there was no case. There was no real police investigation. There were no real suspects. Everything in Margaret’s Harbor was in a state of suspended animation except for the photographers, and they were perpetual-motion machines.
He had demanded that Stewart Gordon take him to the Oscartown Inn and his own things, and Stewart had, without complaint. That was about an hour ago, Gregor thought, but he wasn’t sure, because he had done a very odd thing. Instead of going straight up to his room after he’d checked in, he’d gone to the little pub and ordered himself a cup of coffee. The pub was almost empty, except for a well-dressed but not particularly impressive middle-aged man sitting against the long wall. The man had a copy of the newspaper, and was paying no attention to anything else. The coffee came and was good. Gregor sat staring into the distance, thinking about what it was these people wanted him to solve. It made him uncomfortable to think that none of them were really concerned with finding out who had killed this young man. Solving the murder was a side issue. Solving the publicity problem was the real issue, and it was in nobody’s control and never would be.
Gregor drank his coffee and tried to think. He thought about Stewart Gordon. He thought about Clara Walsh. He thought about what little he knew about the people involved in this. Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret and Kendra Rhode were on tele vis ion. He’d seen them there, if not often. Annabeth Falmer was a writer Tibor talked about. It was just the murdered man, this Mark Anderman, who was a complete and utter blank.
He had just finished his coffee when a woman walked in, dressed elaborately in overbulky outerwear, and went to sit down with the middle-aged man. She started to unwind herself from her clothes, and Gregor realized that this was the infamous Kendra Rhode, right down to the thick and oddly hooded eyes that had become her trademark everywhere. If she was supposed to be incognito, she was doing it badly—but then, if reports about her were true, she never did anything incognito. The point of her life was making sure that none of it was ever lived unobserved.
Under other circumstances, with a different person, he would have gone up and introduced himself. He was probably going to have to talk to her eventually, and it was always best to talk to suspects and witnesses before they’d had time to get ready for you. In these circumstances, Gregor knew it wasn’t possible. This was a woman who talked to no one when she didn’t want to. She even had a plausible reason to refuse.