Feast of Murder(90)

“We’re not going along,” he told Mark Anderwahl. “We’re going to Candle Island. We can get hold of the Coast Guard or the police or whoever from there.”

“It’ll be hours before we get to Candle Island at least,” Mark said stubbornly. “It may be a day or more. We haven’t had any wind for hours. We hardly have any now.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” Calvin insisted. “Charlie’s dead. It isn’t as though we had to rush him to a hospital. There’s nothing to get all worked up about.”

“There’s Julie,” Mark said.

“Julie?”

“Julie’s pregnant.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mark looked exasperated. “How can you not understand what it means to be pregnant?” he demanded. Then he turned around and began walking down the passage again, calling back over his shoulder, “I’m going to find the kitchen and get some baking soda. We need flares.” He reached the stairs to the deck below, started down them, and was gone.

Calvin Baird had a very straightforward mind. He believed in doing what you were supposed to do when you were supposed to do it, which was not the same thing as believing in staying within the law. First and foremost there was loyalty to family. In this family, loyalty meant loyalty to Jon. Calvin Baird didn’t believe that any of this nonsense should have a claim on his valuable attention. Charlie Shay and Mark Anderwahl and strychnine and flares were no more serious to him than the midnight creature feature shows the theaters held on Halloween. He wanted to go back to his cabin and work over his numbers one more time. He felt constrained by what he was sure he owed to the family enterprise. He did go back to his cabin—after eating a corn muffin and wishing he’d got to the food before all the other kinds were gone—but all he did there was put his papers back on the table and lock up behind himself after he left.

Then he went where he should have gone to begin with, which was straight downstairs. He should have realized. No matter how much Jon wanted to be the first one in and out of the showers, the first one cleaned and ready to take up the business of the day, he much less wanted to leave these people alone with Charlie Shay’s dead body.





2


Actually, Jon Baird was not particularly worried about leaving these people alone with Charlie Shay’s body. As far as he could tell, the only person who wanted to be left alone with it was Gregor Demarkian, and Gregor Demarkian was up and about, wandering around the boat somewhere. Jon had seen him leave the cabin where the corpse was kept much earlier. It was possible to see the door to that cabin from where Jon was standing only if you bent over and leaned sideways. Unlike the deck above, the passage down here was not straight. Jon spent a fair amount of his time scrunched into that position. He wanted to know what was going on. The answer turned out to be simple enough. Nothing was going on. By the time it was his turn under the water, everyone else had gone upstairs and the coast was clear.

Most of the rest of the people who had taken showers this morning had taken very short showers. The position they had to stand in and the temperature of the water were both uncomfortable. Jon almost enjoyed himself. He’d noticed as soon as he’d taken the first sip of the drink Sheila had handed him last night that the drink was drugged—with Sheila’s sleeping pills, naturally, the woman had no imagination—but he’d tossed off about a third of it anyway, before he’d “lost” the rest in the cabinet drawer beside his bed. He’d thought he could use the relaxation. He’d never taken a sleeping pill before. He thought now that they were probably a mistake, at least for him. He woke up with a fuzzier head than any he’d ever gotten from a hangover.

He was just coming out of the shower when Tony came downstairs, and he wrapped the towel around his waist and waited while his son came up to him. A lot of the men he knew reveled in the fact that their sons looked exactly like them. Jon Baird didn’t understand that at all. To him, Tony was an idealized form of Baird, the happiest kind of accident. Bairds were usually either tall and beautiful and stupid or short and ugly and smart. God only knew, both Calvin and their sister, Mark Anderwahl’s mother, fit the “tall and beautiful and stupid” description to perfection. Tony was tall and beautiful enough for anybody, but he was also smart. He came down the passage, looked blankly at the door to the cabin where Charlie Shay’s body lay, and came the rest of the way to his father.

“Look at this,” he said. “He knocked a tooth loose.”

“Who?” Jon asked him. “Demarkian?”