Cheating at Solitaire(9)

“On people other people want to read about,” Jack said. “It’s no use, Linda. Not everybody has your high-minded idea about what should be news, and not everybody is more interested in George Steiner and Steven Pinker than in Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret. Maybe they should be, but they’re not.”

“It’s like high school. The people who are accomplishing something are invisible, and the people who are visible are all, well…. You see what I mean.”

“I do see what you mean. But this is a good story, Linda, and we should use it. And if we don’t use it, we should at least sell the pictures to a tabloid that’s willing to pay money for it. But I say we use it, because it really is a good story.”

“Arrow Normand falling into her car dead drunk is a good story.”

“She didn’t just fall into her car. She was with that guy she’s been all over, one of the camera crew people she took up with. Mark Anderman. That’s it. They were together.”

“I thought they were always together.”

“They are, but this time they were fighting. She kept kicking him and screaming at him that he was a bastard—”

Linda cleared her throat.

“Sorry. But that’s what she called him. Then she took her nails to his face and ripped a couple of good-sized streaks in his skin. He was bleeding. It was incredible. I got pictures.”

Linda took another long and deep drink of coffee. She liked Jack Bullard. He was young, and he was definitely from the rich people part of the island, but he was direct and without pretensions, and he didn’t try to make her something she was not. That made his obsession with the movie people all the more stupefying.

“It’s incredible that Arrow Normand scratched the face of Mark Anderman until it bled,” she said. “You do realize you’re not making much in the way of sense.”

“I’m just trying to make money. Although, I’ll admit, the whole scene was weird as hell.”

“I think the very idea of these people on the island is weird as hell. The world isn’t what it was when I was growing up. Lord, Jack, really. Thirty years ago, somebody like Kendra Rhode would no more have been seen in public with somebody like Arrow Normand than—I don’t know than what. It’s the sixties. I’m sure it is. That’s what changed everything.”

“The sixties have been over for forty years,” Jack said, “and that’s not what I meant. I meant there was something about the scene that was weird. It can’t be that she was fight-ing with him or scratching him. She does things like that all the time. It was… I don’t know. Something about the car. Truck. It was a truck. A big purple pickup truck.”

“So the scene wasn’t just incredibly vulgar, it was also incredibly tacky?”

“You talk like an etiquette book sometimes, Linda. An old etiquette book. Come and look at these pictures. We could run a story about the movie. We could talk about how it’s affected life on the island, having the movie people here. It would sell a lot of extra copies—Alice could probably even sell some extra advertising around it.”

“I’m not going to print a picture of Arrow Normand’s private parts in the Harbor Home News. Not even on an inside page.”

“I haven’t developed those pictures yet,” Jack said. “Come ahead and look at these. I wish I could get into the party tonight. That would be a coup. Kendra Rhode’s New Year’s party on the society pages of the Harbor Home News.”

“There haven’t been society pages in the Harbor Home News for twenty years.”

“Come look,” Jack said again.

She got up from behind her desk and started across the room to him, thinking that he got too enthusiastic over everything. He had yet to learn that enthusiasm, like happiness, could be dangerous.

She had just reached the point where she could see the photographs clearly—Marcey Mandret doing one of those over-the-shoulder hooded-eye poses that had been a staple of Marilyn Monroe’s; Kendra Rhode carrying her little dog into an accessories store called Mama’s Got a Brand-New Bag; Arrow Normand looking like she was about to throw up—when Jack straightened up and frowned.

“What is it?” she asked him. “Is one of the photographs that bad?”

“The photographs are fine,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stay behind today to develop those pictures. I wish I could put my finger on what’s bothering me so much about that scene. It’s like I almost saw something, but then I didn’t. I didn’t really see it.”

“You should go home and go to bed,” Linda said, and she meant it. She really wasn’t either evil-temperedor embittered. She liked Jack, and she wished him well, even more than she wished most people well. She just needed to keep herself in check, so that she didn’t do something to destroy the first resting place she’d ever found.