Feast of Murder(74)

The deck immediately above seemed to be deserted. Gregor went to the cabin he was supposed to be sharing with Bennis and looked in, but she wasn’t in the one useful bunk and she wasn’t sitting in the chair and her pajamas had been neatly folded and left on top of her pillow. Gregor looked through the porthole and saw grey air and what looked like a calm sea. The boat didn’t seem to be rocking much. He poured water into the basin, washed himself off, and found some clean clothes. He also found a mason jar just like the ones that had been on the mess hall table last night, marked “Pumpkin Rind Marmalade” in that same Farmington script. The label was a little different from the ones that had been on the jars last night. It had a line drawing of a grinning turkey on it and a little orange-colored collection of generic vegetables that could have been meant to be decorative gourds and could have been meant to be corn. Gregor decided it didn’t put him any more into the Thanksgiving spirit than anything else on this godforsaken boat and put it aside. He picked up a red cotton sweater with a teddy bear on it that Bennis had given him for his “birthday,” meaning a day she and Donna had decided to call his birthday and give him a party on. In Gregor’s opinion, if letting Bennis know when his birthday was was going to result in ridiculously expensive sweaters with pictures of stuffed animals on them, he would just as soon be assumed to be coexistent with eternity.

Gregor stowed the FBI report in his suitcase and got the pair of deck shoes Bennis had also bought for him, but that he had refused to wear yesterday because he thought they were silly. They were the kind of thing people wore yachting in Southampton, assuming that the people who went yachting would have called it yachting, which they wouldn’t have. The linguistic convolutions of rich people made him dizzy. He tied the deck shoes tightly onto his feet and headed up again. If there was no one on this deck they had to be above. Just to be sure he stopped at the dining hall and looked in, but it was empty.

Actually, the main deck was empty, too, which was a surprise. Gregor supposed there was more of the boat beneath where he had been with Charlie Shay’s body—wouldn’t it have been called the hold?—but he couldn’t imagine his fellow passengers trooping down there en masse for any reason whatsoever. They didn’t like to troop en masse into dinner. He looked at the broad flat expanse of the stern and then into the wheelhouse. The stern was deserted and the wheelhouse was full of small dark men talking whatever language the man had talked to Gregor the night before. Gregor smiled and waved and went forward without trying to get a conversation started. The bow was deserted too, but for some reason Gregor found it more restful than he had the rest of the boat, and decided to stay there for a while. It was odd to think that this had been the scene of Charlie Shay’s death only hours before. It was odd to think that this had been the scene of anything violent. The wind, the rain, the body slashing back and forth against the deck—everything was perfectly calm now, the sails flat, the sea like glass. Gregor kept away from the low bow rail and went into the point of the bow itself, which was high. He looked out over the water and wondered how close they were to land. From what he could see, they could have been drifting off the edge of the world.

He had just about decided that this was an exercise in futility—and spooky, too; he was reminded of those boats found drifting and uninhabited in the Sargasso Sea—when he heard the clatter of someone coming up from the deck below, and the low polite murmur of a woman’s voice thanking someone for helping her up. Gregor turned and looked expectantly at what was still the single narrow passage in and out of the bow. He had noticed that passengers who came on deck almost always came forward. He was not disappointed this time. There was a faint squeaking of rubber soles against wet wood, and Julie Anderwahl made her way slowly into the bow.

Gregor Demarkian had, of course, seen Julie Anderwahl before. He had even spoken to her. He had never really paid attention to her. Now, while she was busy staring at her feet and trying to contain her unrelenting nausea, he examined her. She was prettier than he had realized at first, in that take-charge, faintly glamorous, New York career woman way, and she was also younger. She was not, however, as pretty as Bennis. Bennis had a sharply defined face, full of lines and angles, uncompromising. Julie Anderwahl had the sort of face that graces America’s Junior Miss year after year and shows up with regularity on prom queens from Lewiston to Tulsa. She was blond. She was blue-eyed. Her features were very regular. It was the steel in her spine and the determination in her gaze that set her apart, not the originality of her body. Bennis had originality of body. Of course, she also had steel and determination. In Gregor Demarkian’s opinion, Bennis Hannaford was altogether a woman and a half.