And One to Die On (32 page)

“Where do those stairs go?” he asked her.

“To the second and third floors and to the attic. But the doors to the second and third floors are locked.”

“But not the one to the attic?”

“I don’t know,” Geraldine said.

They could all hear the banging of that metal thing on wood, and the sounds of cracking and splintering that always followed it. Cavender Marsh and Hannah Graham were proceeding upward.

“All right,” Gregor said. “You told us last night, early this morning, whenever it was. There’s another way up to the attic?”

“Yes, there is. There’s a staircase off a utility hall behind the library.”

“All right,” Gregor said again. “I want you to go there and go on up. Take Kelly Pratt with you.”

“I’m ready,” Kelly Pratt said.

“Just the two of them?” Bennis asked. “What about the rest of us?”

“Ms. Frazier and Ms. Acken are going to stay right here on the landing in case there’s another way back that Ms. Dart doesn’t know about. You and I are going up that staircase.”

“What are we going to do if there is another way back to this landing?” Mathilda Frazier asked. “What could we do? She could kill us with that thing.”

“We’ll be all right, dear,” Lydia Acken said stoutly. “We don’t have to put ourselves in danger. We just have to observe.”

Actually, they did not have to do anything. Gregor did not believe there was another way back to this landing. He did believe that these two were the weakest ones in the group, and that they needed to be kept out of trouble. He turned to Bennis.

“Are you ready?”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s go on up.”

They left Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier huddled together on the small balcony overlooking the foyer, and started up the stairs at the back in the direction of Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh.

It had been dark in the main body of the house, but nothing like it was in this back staircase. There were windows in the walls, Gregor could see them, but they didn’t do much good. The weather outside was still awful. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but it was almost as black as night. Gregor could still hear the sounds of footsteps and crashing iron, but they were far above him now.

“What do you think she’s doing?” Bennis asked. “Is she trying to kill him?”

“At least,” Gregor said.

“Is she crazy?”

In spite of all the cigarettes she smoked, Bennis was hurrying up the stairs without a problem, never having to stop for rest, never having to gasp for air. It was Gregor, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, who was having trouble sucking wind.

“I think,” he said, “that what she really is is royally angry. You’d be angry too if you had two perfectly good parents who had dumped you on a relative and never bothered to see you again just so they could run away to an island together and—um—”

“Screw,” Bennis said helpfully.

They reached the landing for the third floor and Gregor stopped, ostensibly to check the door to the third floor proper but really to catch his breath.

“It was all Lilith Brayne’s idea, of course,” he said. “Cavender Marsh hated the woman by then, but there was nothing he could have done to get away from her once he’d murdered Tasheba Kent. He’d have gone to the guillotine for it if the case had ever been properly solved.”

“Marvelous. Didn’t Lilith worry that he’d do to her what he did to her sister?”

“Why should she? That case certainly wouldn’t have gone uninvestigated. It would have brought every cop in the state of Maine out here. It would have been asking to be arrested.”

“Even after sixty years? Why didn’t he just shove her in the sea?”

“I don’t know, Bennis. Maybe Cavender Marsh is not one of those people who can kill in cold blood. Maybe he needs to be pushed into a crisis before he can actually do away with anybody. I’m not St. Peter at the gate. I can’t see into a man’s soul. I just know what Cavender Marsh did do.”

“I don’t suppose you can call what she’s doing killing in cold blood either,” Bennis said. “Can you hear anything anymore, Gregor? I can’t hear anything.”

They were on the landing for the fourth floor now, and Bennis was right. The sounds of footsteps were gone. The sounds of smashing glass and cracking wood were gone, too. Bennis stopped.

“Maybe they went into the attic,” she said.

“We have to go up and see.”

Bennis ran up the next flight of stairs on her own. When she got to the top, she opened a door and poked her head through it. She withdrew almost immediately.

“Bats,” she told Gregor.

“What do you mean, bats?”

“Bats,” Bennis repeated. “The attic is full of them. Do you remember Carlton Ji?”

Gregor remembered Carlton Ji. He got to the attic landing and opened the door to the attic himself. On the other side of the attic, another door opened and someone coughed.

“Who’s there?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“It’s me,” Gregor said.

“The trapdoor is open,” Geraldine Dart said. “To the roof. Look up.”

Gregor looked up. At first, all he saw was a mass of moving, black bats disturbed in their rest, pulsing and beginning to call and shriek. Then he spotted the opened square with its pull-down plywood ladder. It had been hard to find because the square was open on nothing but blackness, and because the ladder was swarming with bats.

“They must have gone up,” Geraldine Dart said. “They must have gone out on the roof. She’s going to push him off.” Her voice sharpened with fear.

“Gregor, how did they get out of here?” Bennis asked. “How did they get past all those bats?”

“They didn’t care if they got hurt,” Gregor said.

“Are we going to follow them?” Kelly Pratt called out. “Do you want me to go out after them?”

Gregor rubbed his face with his hands. He did care if he got hurt. He especially cared if he got hurt by bats, which were often rabid in the United States. He had once seen a Bureau agent take the necessary series of injections for rabies. He hoped never to see anything like that again. He certainly didn’t want to see it done on himself. I’m a desk man, Gregor told himself. If I have to be a great detective, I want to be a great detective like Nero Wolfe. I want to sit in an armchair all day and think great detective thoughts. Damn Hannah Graham and damn Cavender Marsh and damn Tasheba Kent and damn those bats. “Mr. Demarkian? Are we going to get moving?”

“Gregor,” Bennis said suddenly. “I know what to do. I know how to make it so that the bats can’t get to us.”

Bennis did not make it so that the bats could not get to them. That would have been impossible without specialized clothing. What she did do was to rearrange the clothing they did have to give the bats the least possible access to bare skin. She pulled Gregor’s sleeves down over his hands and fastened the cuffs past his fingers. She took his sweater off and wound it around his head and the lower half of his face. Then she did the same for herself and called out to Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart to do the same for themselves. There was nothing she could do about the upper halves of their faces. They needed to see.

“Look at it this way,” Bennis said. “We’d have had to have found some way through here no matter what we decided to do about Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh. We have to get out to the roof to meet the helicopter.”

“I thought we decided that the helicopter wasn’t coming. I thought Geraldine Dart said it couldn’t land.”

“She did, but it doesn’t have to land, Gregor. It just has to hover. That way it can drop some medical people off and pick some of us up.”

Gregor thought of a helicopter hovering above this roof in this weather with a human being dangling from a rope, being hauled in or let out, and then he decided not to think of it. It made him sick to his stomach. He would think about it later.

“Come on,” he called. “Are you two ready?”

“We’re ready,” Geraldine Dart said.

“Ready,” Kelly echoed faintly.

Gregor started forward across the attic, very slowly, very carefully, trying not to disturb the bats. For a while, it worked. The bats were restless, but no more restless than they had been when Gregor first came to the attic door. They shrieked and shuddered and pulsed above his head. Some of them took off and flew in great swooping arcs among the rafters. None of them came close.

“Maybe we’re going to get away with this,” Bennis said.

“We’ve still got the ladder.”

The ladder was a disadvantage Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh would not have had. It would not have been pulled down when they arrived in the attic—or Gregor thought it wouldn’t have. If it had not been pulled down, it would not have been covered with bats. Gregor approached the ladder and then stopped. Bennis stopped behind him. Kelly Pratt and Geraldine Dart stopped beside her. The ladder was carpeted in bats. Every rung had two or three. Some rungs seemed to have ten or twelve crammed in together. They were all moving incessantly. The noise they emitted made Gregor’s skin crawl.

“Now what?” Geraldine Dart asked.

Gregor looked up through the open trapdoor. He expected to see black sky and feel the rain. Instead, he saw Hannah Graham smiling at him. She had the long iron instrument raised above her head. She was bracing herself on spread legs just beyond the lip of the trapdoor. It took a minute for all the elements to come together in Gregor’s mind, and by then it was almost too late.

“Look out!” he shouted, as Hannah brought the instrument crashing down above their heads, just inside the trapdoor, on the top rung of the ladder.

The bats exploded into life. Shrieking and cawing, they wheeled into the air and made angry circles among the rafters. Gregor hit the floor with his hands over his head. A bat swooped down and tore at the sweater he had wrapped around his head. Another scratched at his thin cotton shirt.

“My God,” Bennis said, on the floor next to him. “What are they doing?”

“They’re protecting their home,” Gregor said curtly. He looked up, hoping to catch sight of Hannah Graham again, hoping to find out what she was going to do next. What he saw instead was the ladder, almost empty. The bats on the ladder had been frightened off it by Hannah’s blow. Their absence was only temporary. Gregor didn’t have much time.

“Bennis,” he said. “When I tell you to go, go. Run up the ladder. Get onto the roof.”

“Just Bennis?” Kelly Pratt asked.

“All of you,” Gregor said.

The bats were still cawing and angry. Gregor braced himself on his knees in a running crouch and got ready. They were going to have to be fast.

If I get out of this without needing a rabies shot, Gregor promised the universe, I will stay home reading Perry Mason novels for the rest of my life. I will even go to church.

Gregor launched himself forward.

“Go!” he shouted.

He hit the ladder running and scrambled ungracefully all the way to the roof, refusing to listen to the shriek and swoop of angry bats swirling around his head, refusing to look back to see how the others were doing. When he got to the lip of the trapdoor he grabbed it in both hands and pulled himself upward. A bat attacked the sweater on top of his head and he shook it off. A second later, he was out of the attic and onto the roof.

It was not a good roof to stand on. Parts of it were steeply pitched, as Geraldine Dart had said, but only parts of it. It was not a typical New England A-line. Instead, the patch of roof just beyond the trapdoor was flat, but inches away it fell off into a slope, and inches after that it began to climb again. All around the edge of it there was a cast-iron rail. There was a cast-iron rail along the widow’s walk, too. The wind was strong enough to be a gale. The rain was like marble in heat.

Hannah Graham and Cavender Marsh were both well away from the trapdoor now. The two were standing on a narrow catwalk on the side of the roof that looked out to Hunter’s Pier. They seemed to be at an impasse. Cavender Marsh had backed up as far as he could go. The old man was flat against the highest of the four square turrets that anchored the corners of the roof. His face was gray and his eyes were stiff with terror. One way or another, he was not going to get out of this alive.

Hannah Graham was at the very middle of the catwalk, standing still. The instrument was in her hands, but she was not swinging it. The wind and rain and hail were lashing against her body, but she didn’t seem to feel them.

“What does she think she’s doing?” Bennis asked Gregor.

“I think Cavender is going to die,” Geraldine Dart said tremulously. “I think she’s already killed him.”

Hannah Graham turned suddenly and stared at Geraldine Dart. A smile spread across her face. She had never looked more like a mobile skull. Her hair was thick with water. Her bright green sweater was covered with beads of hail.”

“I haven’t killed him yet,” she said. “But I’m going to kill him now. Just watch.”

If there was anything Gregor Demarkian could have done about it, he would have, but there wasn’t. They were both too far away from him over terrain that was much too treacherous. Hannah Graham had a catwalk to walk on, while Gregor would have had to climb up and down on the shingles of the roof.

Hannah Graham lifted the instrument high above her head. She swung it at the catwalk railing. The sound she made reminded Gregor of anvils. The railing shuddered but did not break, because it was made of cast iron too. Cavender Marsh shrunk farther back against the wall of the turret, but there was nowhere farther back that he could go. Hannah Graham walked toward him, still grinning.

“Gregor, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “Can’t you do something?”

“No,” Gregor told her. “And neither can you.”

The wind rose into a stiff hard gust and blew at their backs, making Bennis stumble forward. The rain began to fall more heavily, pelting against them with drops like needles. Hannah Graham didn’t seem to notice any of it.

“Here I come,” she said.

Cavender Marsh seemed about to cry out. He never got a chance. Hannah was close. She raised the instrument over her shoulder and swung out, like a batter hitting a baseball. Cavender Marsh did not retreat in time. Hannah hit the left side of her father’s head with the full center of the round blob at the instrument’s end. Cavender Marsh grabbed the wounded place on his face and staggered sideways. Hannah Graham hit him again, in the body this time, smashing into his gut.