Feast of Murder(44)

“Well,” Fritzie said. “I heard you talking about unicorns. I didn’t think anybody talked about unicorns any more.”

“Bennis writes about unicorns,” Tony said, leaving Fritzie to wonder what that meant. “This is Bennis Hannaford. And this is my mother, Frieda Baird.”

“How do you do?” Bennis Hannaford said.

“Are you related to the Bryn Mawr Hannafords?” Fritzie said. “I did quite a lot of volunteer work with a woman named Cordelia Hannaford, before I moved to New York.”

“Cordelia Hannaford is my mother,” Bennis said.

“Ah,” Fritzie said.

“Are you all right?” Tony asked. “You look a little unsteady on your feet.”

Fritzie felt a little unsteady on her feet, unsteadier by the minute, in fact. The motion of the boat seemed to be getting to her, even though she’d never been seasick a day in her life. She wondered how far out to sea they were. She’d grown up with sailboats. She knew how fast they could move. How fast they could move when they were built like this was beyond her, but—

But her mind was wandering again, the way her mind always did these days. If she gave it a chance, it would be planning the holiday again, the holiday that was really Sheila’s to plan. It was just too bad that Sheila didn’t seem to understand what was really involved. The island. The cooking. Was Sheila taking care of any of that? Fritzie retreated into the hall and stretched her smile wider, unable to decide whether she was happy this woman was a Bryn Mawr Hannaford or not. Surely she had to be much too old to be interested in Tony.

“I’m going up on deck now,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll see you both later.”

“We missed you at lunch,” Tony said.

“I slept through lunch. I’ve been very tired lately.”

“Mother?”

Fritzie didn’t answer. She went quickly to the staircase and climbed up, making the best time she could in spite of the fact that her legs felt like sand. With her head stuck up into the wind she felt cold. Once she got her shoulders through, she felt frozen. There was a stiff wind blowing in off the water, filling the sails over her head and chilling her body. She was wearing a turtleneck and a wool sweater and a jacket as well, but she could have been naked. She’d become very sensitive to cold over these last few years, anyway. Tony and Jon and Calvin and Julie would all be sitting around pouring sweat, and she’d be ready to get under a good wool blanket.

She got herself all the way up on deck and looked around. There were men in the rigging, but no one she knew. She knew the man at the helm, but he was just the captain Jon had been hiring since he bought his first boat more than twenty years ago. She moved carefully up the deck and looked into the bow. It had been cleared of all the things that filled it that morning and now looked like nothing more than the front part of a boat, well-polished but littered with lines. She retreated again, feeling stopped.

In the beginning, she had wanted to find Tony and talk to him. She had found Tony, but she hadn’t been able to talk.

After that, she had decided to find Jon, and she was still looking for him. She had thought he would be standing on deck, the way he often did for hour after hour on the first day of a sail. Instead, he was nowhere to be seen, and that left her with two possibilities. Either Jon was relieving himself, sitting on one of those terrible forklike things and hanging off the back of the boat like the bait for a whale. If that was the case, she only had to sit still and she would find him soon enough. If he wasn’t there, though, the situation was hopeless, because it meant he was down in his cabin. Jon never spent daylight in his cabin unless he had something serious and secret going on. When he had something serious and secret going on, he didn’t want to talk to her.

He never wanted to talk to her.

She started to think it all through again, working out the options one by one, in case she’d missed anything, and then she heard a noise. She looked up, half-hopeful she would find either Jon or Tony, and was surprised to be confronted by a wooly mammoth version of Mr. Demarkian instead. Wooly mammoth was really the only description of it. He had on a thick coat and a scarf wound three or four times around his neck and even a hat, although that only seemed to be half on. Fritzie backed up a little and tried her smile again. It was silly to be so disturbed by this. Mr. Demarkian was a guest on this boat. She was likely to stumble across him more than once in the next ten days. It was entirely natural.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it’s Mr. Demarkian, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I was just going to do something very foolish. I was going to ask if I could help you with anything. But you must know this boat much better than I do.”