Act of Darkness (22 page)

“I’ve been pointing it out to you for years,” Janet said.

“You didn’t mean the same thing. You just didn’t like them, that’s all. You just thought they made me do things I shouldn’t do. It was Patchen who told me how they sucked the soul out of me.”

“What?”

“How they sucked the soul out of me,” Stephen repeated, and then turned his head to face her. There was, she saw, something wrong with his eyes. They had gotten bigger and very, very bright, as if someone had put glycerin in them. “Patchen says we were born in splinters, Kevin and Dan and I. There was supposed to be one soul in one body, but something went wrong. We ended up as one soul in three bodies, splintered. Do you see?”

“No,” Janet said lamely. “No.”

“It’s so odd now that Kevin’s dead. I feel much stronger. I know my own mind much better. I used to feel so much as if something inside me was missing.”

“Dan’s still alive, Stephen.”

“I know. But I don’t think he’ll be alive for long.”

“What?”

Stephen smiled, slowly and broadly, letting it take up his whole face. Any minute, Janet thought wildly, he would turn into a cartoon.

“It’s my soul,” he said seriously. “Mine. Not theirs.” I don’t think anybody killed Kevin. I think the splinter of my soul in him came back to me. That’s why he was so still. That’s why they couldn’t find a cause of death. There wasn’t any cause of death. He was never alive in the first place. He was just a body living on a piece of borrowed soul.”

“They’re doing tests,” Janet said tightly. “They may find a cause of death yet.”

“They won’t.”

He got out of his chair and stretched, making his shirt strain against the belt that held it to his waist. Then he pushed his chair back into place, neatly, perfectly. He had tidied up the place setting where the weight of his elbows, resting on it as he talked, had pushed it askew.

“It’s all right,” he said gently. “I have everything under control.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said. “I think you ought to go upstairs and lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down. I have things to do.”

“The most important thing you have to do is be here at lunch in an hour. That’s it.”

“I have some things to do before then.”

“Stephen—”

He was backing away from her, toward what would probably have been the dining room door if there had been a dining room door. It hit her suddenly that they had said everything they had had to say right out in the open. If there was anyone around, they must have been overheard. Every muscle in her body went rigid and her eyes darted from one direction to the other. She saw only strange angular furniture and high-ceilinged emptiness, and she relaxed.

Stephen had backed up all the way to the end of the dining room space, marked off only by a change in pattern of the hardwood floor.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I wouldn’t leave you for Patchen Rawls. She’s insane.”

Bennis Hannaford was standing in the one blind spot in the entire expanse of the center section of Great Expectations’s first floor when Stephen Whistler Fox called Patchen Rawls insane—and for a moment she was stopped there, breathless, because she wasn’t in the mood to face either the senator or his wife. It had been bad enough facing them in groups, and when she still thought Janet had no idea what had gone on all those years ago. Then she’d merely been embarrassed by her own secret knowledge and by the fear that Stephen might let something slip. He had never been discreet.

The problem, as she saw it, was that she felt guilty about everything she could think of. What was worse, she was right to feel guilty. She had not told Gregor about her once-upon-a-time relationship with Stephen Whistler Fox. She had come to Great Expectations without giving a thought to how Janet would feel if she knew. She had blithely assumed Stephen’s wife would not know. Even after it was obvious that Victoria did, she had stayed on—and, of course, stayed on too long. Last night, she had heard Janet and Victoria talking. It had taken Bennis no time at all to understand they were talking about,
her.

“Gregor Demarkian is supposed to know everything,” Victoria had said. “You can’t tell me he doesn’t know his own assistant once had an affair with the man he’s supposed to be working for.”

“He isn’t working for Stephen, Mother. And besides, you don’t know—”

“Oh, yes. I do know. It was while you were in the hospital having Stephanie, too. She’s no better than Patchen Rawls.”

“She might not have known Stephen was married, Mother. He doesn’t go around advertising the fact.”

“She was living in Washington. With this woman who was trying to be a hostess. She must have known—”

“You’re always so sure of what it is people must have known.”

It was Bennis’s guess that Victoria Harte was always too sure of everything. She wouldn’t even cafe much if she found out she was wrong—which, in this case, she was. Bennis’s relationship with Stephen Whistler Fox had been more complicated than Victoria was giving it credit for, and Bennis’s relationship with Gregor Demarkian had been (for the moment) much less open. Even so, Bennis had not wanted to face either of those women then, any more than she wanted to face Stephen and Janet now. If there had been any way to get back upstairs unnoticed, she would have gone.

There was never any way to do anything unnoticed at Great Expectations. Bennis heard a door slam somewhere down at the other end of the house,’ and then Dan Chester’s voice saying, “Victoria, for God’s sake. What do you expect me to do about these things? I’m not Stephen’s keeper.”

“Janet is very upset,” Victoria said.

“I’m not Janet’s keeper, either.”

“You ought to be.”

“Victoria—”

There was the sound of a door opening and closing, and the voices disappeared. Bennis heaved a sigh of relief, then poked her head past the edge of the dining room’s half-wall. She had expected to find no sign of Janet or Stephen at all. It was so quiet over there. Instead, she found them both, looking paralyzed. They were staring in the direction of the foyer, so Bennis decided to stare in that direction, too. God only knew why.

Unfortunately, the blind spot she was standing in was not so blind when looked at from the foyer, or the stairs. Bennis saw Patchen Rawls right away, just as Patchen saw her. What passed between them was a look of mutual dislike so intense, it startled them both.

From the other side of the half-wall, Janet Harte Fox whispered; “Well, there she is. The most extraordinary screen presence since the young Judy Holliday.”

Stephen gave out with something that sounded like choking.

Because there was no longer any way to avoid detection—Bennis didn’t believe Patchen Rawls would ever let her do that—she decided to give it up. As Patchen padded her way into the dining room space, Bennis emerged from her semi-hiding place. She had steeled herself against attack from any and every direction. She was ready to fight off Patchen, Janet, and Stephen, separately and together. She might as well not have bothered.

Patchen had noticed Bennis joining the circle. Janet and Stephen had noticed only Patchen.

Against Victoria’s custom-designed, hardwood, hard-shellacked floor, Patchen’s sandals sounded like a wrecker’s ball. Her head swiveled back and forth between the photographs hung on every available wall, from Victoria to Janet and back again. Then she came to a stop five inches from Janet Harte Fox’s nose and said, “I think you should leave here now, you know. I think you should pack your things and get out.”

Janet Harte Fox took a deep breath. Bennis bit her lip. Stephen did nothing at all. The senator might as well have been a piece of prize jewelry trussed up against a velveteen wall. Bennis was suddenly ready to strangle him.

“For God’s sake,” she said. “It’s Janet’s mother’s house.”

The two women swung around sharply to stare at her, mirror-image she-devils of light and dark.

“Nobody owns this house,” Patchen Rawls said righteously. “People don’t own things. Things own people. We’re all the communal property of the Great Cosmic Consciousness. “The only thing that’s communal property around here,” Janet said, “is my husband’s dick.”

“Oh, Lord,” Bennis said.

Patchen walked over and stroked the arm of Stephen’s jacket, as if she were checking the material for flaws.

“Do you know what they do to get cashmere?” she said. They torture goats.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked off, through the dining room, toward the back of the house. Janet swung back to the dining room table, picked up the red, white, and blue centerpiece, and put it down again. Then she swung back to Stephen and Bennis and said, “Politics. That’s what you get when you get mixed up with politics.”

A second later, she was gone, too. Bennis’ was not sure where. She was only conscious that she had been left alone with Stephen Whistler Fox, and that the situation should have been embarrassing.

In a way, it was. It just wasn’t in the way Bennis had expected it to be.

Stephen Whistler Fox was smiling at her benignly, blankly, avuncularly, with not a hint of uneasiness in his face.

“Hello,” he said, after a while, when she hadn’t said anything and didn’t seem about to. The truth was, she couldn’t think of anything to say. “You’re here with Mr. Demarkian, aren’t you? You were in the living room last night after—after Kevin died. I don’t think we were ever introduced.”

Everything in Bennis Hannaford froze. She had imagined a thousand scenes, crazy and awkward, if she and Stephen Whistler Fox were ever left alone. It had never occurred to her that he would simply fail to recognize her.

She hesitated, wondering if it was an act. His face was so open and bland, it didn’t seem possible that it could be.

“My name,” she said carefully, “is Bennis Hannaford.”

Stephen gave her a wide politician’s smile. “Hannaford,” he repeated. “Are you from Philadelphia? Are you one of those Hannafords?”

“Yes, I am.”

“What a fine family,” he said. “What a fine, fine family. You must be very proud of your history.”

It wasn’t an act, Bennis realized with shock. Her name meant nothing to him. Worse than that, her family’s name meant nothing to him beyond the commonplace vague impressions of nineteenth-century railroad money and Main Line prominence. Six months ago, her family had gone through a catharsis that had landed them on the front pages of every newspaper and the covers of half a dozen magazines. Stephen Whistler Fox, a U.S. senator, a man who was supposed to be competent and informed, knew nothing about it.

Bennis began to back away in a semicircle, out of the dining room, away from Stephen Whistler Fox and everything he represented. It scared her, this obliviousness. It did more than scare her.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got—I’ve got something—”

“Busy, busy, busy,” Stephen said cheerfully. “I’ve got to find my wife myself.”

“Right,” Bennis said.

Then she bolted, toward the beach room, toward nowhere in particular.

She had never been so humiliated in all her life. He hadn’t even remembered her
name.

I
T WAS TIME GREGOR
Demarkian had decided, to ask some questions—and better yet, to ask some questions that made sense. Speculating on the possible uses of curare—or synthetic curare, as Tibor had pointed out to him toward the end of their conversation on the phone—wasn’t getting him anywhere. He’d learned long ago that it didn’t matter what a detective had figured out. It only mattered what he’d been able to prove.

The problem was, it was never easy to find anyone in this house when you wanted to find them. Only when you wanted to be left alone did you have them cluttering up the landscape like dust bunnies. Like murder suspects everywhere, this bunch was distinctly uncooperative.

Because he had already scoured the first floor for signs of life and been disappointed, he wandered toward the beach room, the Mondrian study, and the great wall of windows at the back. Out there, the rain was still coming down and the red-white-and-blue decorations looked limp. If they had been made of crepe paper like everybody else’s, they would have been ruined.

He was just beginning to wonder if he should get hold of a bullhorn and get Bennis’s attention that way, when Clare Markey came out of one of the other doors on the short hall. She was dressed in a white silk shirt and a pair of the kind of “casual” pants that never look right unless they have just been dry-cleaned. Her hair, on the other hand, was loose to her shoulders and more than a little uncombed.

She swung into the hall and then between the pair of couches that marked out the western boundary of the space that led to the deck, turning automatically south, not watching where she was going, or even seeming to care. A second later she slammed into Gregor’s chest, nose to sternum. Gregor thought with surprise that it had been a long time since he had been made so aware of how tall he was. Clare Markey was a tall woman, at least five foot ten. Right up against him like this, she looked minuscule.

She bounced away from him and blushed and said, “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” Then she looked at him, realized how absurd that must have sounded, and blushed again. “Excuse me. I sound like an absolute idiot today.”

“Not at all,” Gregor told her. “You were thinking about something else. I do it all the time.”

“I’m not supposed to do it at all. That’s part of being a lobbyist. You’re supposed to know what’s going on at all times.”

“And do you? Usually?”

“I used to.”

“Do most lobbyists?”

Clare Markey shrugged. “Believe it or not, I never thought about ‘most lobbyists,’ not before this weekend, anyway. I never thought about me as a lobbyist, either, if that makes any sense.”

“It does if you’re becoming dissatisfied with your work.”

Clare shot him a swift, startled look, then burst out laughing. “Oh, dear. Dissatisfied with my work. Do you know how old I am, Mr. Demarkian?”

“Twenty-eight or twenty-nine?”

“Twenty-nine. Do you know how much money I made last year?”

“I have no idea. I know lobbyists are supposed to be well paid.”