Feast of Murder(65)

“I hope you told him where I was,” Jon said, “right across from Charlie Shay and passing out the food and the salad dressing. Although he ought to have known that already. He was sitting right next to me.”

“He mentioned that. I don’t know if he got a lot of answers that mattered, anyway. Tony stormed right off practically as soon as Mr. Demarkian got there.”

“Just Tony? Not Calvin?”

“Calvin was huffy,” Sheila said. “Every time anybody asked a question, he gave a little lecture about how they had no right to ask him any questions. You know what Calvin’s like.”

“I do know that, yes.”

“Is that important business you’re working on? All those papers? It seems to me that ever since you got home from jail you’ve just been surrounded by papers.”

Jon was sitting up on the bunk covered with blankets as well as papers, like a child in a sandbox who had started to bury his knees. Sheila had her own bunk on the other side of the cabin, but she didn’t want to get into it. She didn’t think she could sit still long enough to make a pretense of going to sleep. She went over to Jon’s bunk and looked down at the computer printout, but it was like all the computer printouts. There were long columns of numbers. They meant nothing to her. She picked up a loose page, squinted at it, and put it down again. Jon chucked the papers off his knees and looked up at her.

“I’ll take all this into the next room if you want to get to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got a little more work to do before I can go to bed.”

“That’s all right. I’m not sleepy. I’m going to make myself a drink. Do you want one?”

“Yes. A Scotch. A straightforward Scotch. When you start making something for yourself, try to remember we don’t have any ice on this boat. It won’t keep.”

“I know it won’t keep.” Sheila moved back to the outer room and went for the glasses and bottles they kept in a cupboard near the inner room door. Then she reached into the cupboard above and got down a bottle labeled, “S. Baird. One before bedtime as needed.”

“Jon?” she said. “Were you serious downstairs? Do you really think Charlie just had some sort of fit and wasn’t murdered at all?”

“Of course I was serious.”

“But why couldn’t he have been murdered? All that jumping and twitching around. And Demarkian saying it was strychnine.”

“So?”

“So Donald McAdam died from strychnine. Isn’t that too much of a coincidence?”

“It would be if Charlie died from strychnine. But Charlie didn’t die from strychnine. That’s just Demarkian running his private nut.”

“I’ve never known Charlie to have a fit before. And I asked Julie. She’d never known him to have a fit either. He wasn’t an epileptic.”

“What difference does that make?”

“I don’t know. It’s just like I was telling you. It’s strange. And it makes me feel creepy.”

“Well, don’t feel creepy while you’re still holding onto my drink. All this will be cleared up when we get the body to a competent medical authority. They’ll do an autopsy and they won’t find any strychnine and that will be that. Give me my Scotch.”

“Right away.”

Sheila put the bottles back in the cupboard, including the small one with her name on it, and closed up. Then she picked up a drink in each hand and walked back into the inner room. Jon was sitting up expectantly, no longer poring over papers, no longer oblivious to anything but numbers on a page. What did it mean, when a man became more eager for practically anything on earth except for sex?

“You ought to get yourself involved in a really good book,” he told her. “Read something exciting. That way you won’t be worried too much by all this stupidity Demarkian’s putting out.”

“Mmmm,” Sheila said, and handed over his Scotch. For a moment, the amber of the liquid was caught in the light from a dozen candles. It looked as clean and pure as the water pouring from a spring in an ad for Evian. It made Sheila feel much better, because there wasn’t a trace left of the sleeping pills she’d put in there at all.





2


Julie Anderwahl had always thought that morning sickness was just that, a sickness that came in the morning. The only other time she’d had a chance to find out otherwise, she hadn’t given herself a chance to find out otherwise. She’d been seventeen years old and scared to death. Because of the way the laws on parental consent were written in her state, she’d had to go over the state line to get a private abortion. Later she would wonder why she had wanted to go over the state line at all. She got along very well with her parents. They were both conservative and traditionalist, but they were not doctrinaire, and they weren’t naive, either. What was she hiding from them for? She’d had no answer to that, and she’d had no answer to the other question that had come up almost as soon as the abortion was finished and her life was supposed to go back to normal: What exactly had she done? She had expected the answer to that one to be easy. She had thought it would be like the final disposition of the one that went: Is there life after death? You died. If there was life after death, you knew it. If there wasn’t, you knew nothing. Surely, she’d thought, it would be the same way with abortion. You had one. Then, if the antiabortion people were right, you sank down under a crushing weight of guilt. If they weren’t, you felt—nothing.