Feast of Murder(67)

“Jon doesn’t think it was strychnine at all,” Mark put in. “He and Tony and Calvin, too. They’ve been going around staying Charlie took sick and had some kind of convulsions and all this talk about strychnine is just Demarkian promoting himself.”

“What do you think?”

“I think Charlie Shay died from strychnine.”

Julie nodded. It made her head hurt to do it, but she nodded. “That would have been too much of a coincidence, really. The two of them convulsing all over the place and with one of them it’s strychnine and with the other it’s not. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Do you remember what we said when McAdam died?”

“We said we couldn’t be sure.”

“Oh, Mark, for God’s sake, don’t chicken out on me now. We said McAdam had enemies and it was likely. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I know we also said we couldn’t be sure and it didn’t make any sense to do anything with what we knew because McAdam was McAdam and who could tell, but now it’s Charlie Shay we’re talking about. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill Charlie Shay. Can you?”

Mark looked confused. “That’s what Jon and Tony and Calvin are saying. Charlie couldn’t have been murdered because nobody would have wanted to murder Charlie.”

Julie eased herself up a little farther on the pillows, shook her head out carefully—she felt full of fuzz, as if she’d been lined with felt—and rearranged her blankets. It was so hard to think, but she had to think, because she was the one who did the thinking in this marriage. Mark couldn’t think his way through the moves in a game of Chinese checkers.

“Look,” she said. “You’re impressed with this man Demarkian, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Julie. Of course I am.”

“All right then. It’s not like it was back in New York, back in August, when we weren’t impressed with anybody and it was just McAdam who was dead and it wouldn’t have mattered what we said to anybody or what we started because it was just going to come to nothing. Things have changed, don’t you agree?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said truthfully. “Things have changed, but have they changed that much? Aren’t you going a little overboard on this?”

“No.”

“Julie—”

“No,” Julie said again. “I’m not willing to spend the rest of my life looking across the dinner table at family parties and wondering if the person I’m talking to is a double murderer. We have to tell somebody. I say we tell Demarkian.”

“Now?”

“In the morning.”

“You might change your mind in the morning.”

“If I do, I’ll tell you about it. I won’t.”

“I don’t know. You’ve been acting really strangely on this trip, Julie, you really have.”

Had she been? Julie supposed she had, and it wasn’t just because that old woman on the street yesterday had told her what she already knew, or at least suspected. She was beginning to wonder if pregnancy caused some kind of fundamental biochemical change in the brain. It probably did.

Mark had his pajama bottoms on now, more navy background, more gold dollar signs. Julie eased herself back down on her mattress, turning her attention again to the ceiling above her head, turning her attention away from Mark. The motion of the boat was a little more pronounced now but not so effective. The steady pressure of sickness she’d been feeling since the start of dinner had begun to recede.

“Mark?” she said. “Promise me something. When it’s time for us to talk to Demarkian tomorrow, don’t chicken out.”

“I won’t chicken out,” Mark said. “I never chicken out.”

Julie closed her eyes. Mark chickened out. Mark chickened out all the time. He called it “prudence,” but chickening out was what it was and what it always would be.

Lying here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a boat without a motor or a radio, with a murderer on board and a baby on the way in the bargain, didn’t seem the right time to tell him so.





3


There was a great iron bell hooked into a bell lever on the main deck near the wheelhouse, and every hour someone from the crew was supposed to go up and ring it. The crew was a very good crew, but this was too much for them. They got distracted by serious work and forgot about the bell for hours at a time. Tonight, they forget at ten and eleven and remembered again at midnight. Tony Baird heard the gonging as he was coming out of the kitchen below. He’d gone to the kitchen for the obvious reason. He was starving. He’d eaten less than half a salad, run around like a maniac chasing a convulsing Charlie Shay all over the main deck, and then forgotten all about his dinner. Everybody had forgotten about dinner. When he finally made his way to the kitchen to see what there was to eat, he found an entire crown roast of pork with the little paper crowns still stuck onto its bones hiding under the lid of a silver serving tray. He was willing to bet they hadn’t had silver serving trays on the Mayflower, but he wasn’t willing to bet with his father. His father was a dyed-in-the-wool eccentric. Tony had accepted that long ago.