“What do you mean the secret service tried to close them off?”
“I mean it would have been impossible. Most people in these houses don’t even know where they all are.”
3
By the time the mobile crime lab was ready to leave, it was cold in the way it can only be if the wind is high and strong. The night was so black that looking beyond the security lights onto the lawn was like staring at tar. Gregor went out to the front steps and watched as Frank and Marty bent their heads together over a pair of notebooks. There was no point in being inside. Not only did the house still make him uncomfortable—and there was a good question: What made him so uncomfortable about the house?; from what he remembered, Bennis’s father’s house hadn’t bothered him at all—but there was nobody to talk to. David Alden had sunk into a deep interior space. He responded to comments only when prodded. Marianne Ross was off somewhere in the private rooms with her three sisters. They would have been trained from birth not to come out in public during a situation that threatened their privacy. The really remarkable thing was that there was no press here. That was the good of having a gate near the road. Well, Gregor thought, the press would be here soon enough. It wouldn’t take long before one of them found out about the bridal paths. Then they’d be on the doorstep, and there would be very little the family could do about them. In fact, at least one of them probably knew about the bridal paths already—Ryall Wyndham. From what Anne Ross Wyler had said about him, Gregor was surprised he hadn’t shown up already, in the guise of a friend of the family.
Gregor went down the steps to where Frank and Marty were standing. The chalk marks were still clear on the sidewalk, but there seemed to be no barriers up. If this was a crime scene, it was one that was going to be neglected at least in the immediate future. You could throw a family out of their little raised ranch for a week or two while you went over the evidence. You couldn’t do that with a family like the Rosses or a house like this. Gregor made a face.
Frank and Marty looked up as he came over.
“We got more of them,” Frank said, shaking a sheaf of papers loose from behind the paper in his notebook. “Found it in the morning room, the one where they all were when we got here. Look at this.”
Gregor looked. It was The Harridan Report again, yet another edition from the ones he’d seen. He scanned the first page and raised his eyebrows. “Reptiles?”
“I wonder how she got it,” Marty said.
“I’d expect somebody sent it to her,” Frank said.
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t expect any of the people she knew to know about it.” Marty shook his head. “You know the people who are into that kind of stuff. They just got laid off at a mill someplace, or they’ve worked forever at a convenience store.”
“Maybe it was one of the servants,” Gregor suggested. He tried to shake off the feeling that there was something ridiculous about talking about the servants. He felt as if he’d been taken hostage in an English novel. “I wonder how they decide to employ the people they employ. They live on the premises, don’t they?”
Marty checked his notebook. “About half of them do. According to the big one—Marianne?—it’s hard to get people to live in these days, except immigrants, and they have nothing against immigrants, but there aren’t enough of them to staff a house this size. When it’s running optimally, it takes twenty-five people on full-time, fifteen of them in the house itself.”
“How big is it?” Gregor asked.
“One hundred twenty-five rooms, plus servants’ quarters.” Marty shook his head. “It’s not a house, it’s a hotel. For God’s sake. I’ve lived all my life on the Main Line. I know what it’s like. But this is insane. If I hit one of those three-hundred-million-dollar lotteries tomorrow, I wouldn’t want a place like this.”
“They’re used to places like this,” Frank pointed out. “This is the way they’ve always lived. They probably wouldn’t feel comfortable in your place. They’d be too cramped.”
Gregor tried to pull the conversation back on track. “The first thing you need to do is to find out what kind of background checks they do on the people they hire to work here, and especially the ones who live in the house. The ones who don’t still matter, though, because the chances are they’d be able to get through that gate any time they wanted to, because whoever is guarding it would regard them as having legitimate business here. Then you need to talk to the whole lot of them one by one. I’m not in love with the idea that this will turn out to be a case of ‘the butler did it’—”