Cheating at Solitaire (18 page)

It was a good thing there was nobody much in the place. If there had been reporters, this would have been on the news channels in minutes. Marcey was not being discreet, which was not surprising, because she was never discreet. The problem was that now she was not being quiet. She was shrieking, the way Jack had heard women shriek only in the movies, and she was loud enough to be heard on the pavement.

“You're such a bastard,” she said, throwing the contents of the champagne cocktail on Jack's head.

Jack let the champagne run down the sides of his face. It didn't matter. This was Marcey acting. He had seen it before. He had seen it, and he had seen Arrow, and he had seen Steve, and he had seen Mark, and he was suddenly fed up with it all.

“You'd better get the news up the hill,” he said, “since I'm not welcome there anymore. If she doesn't want this stuff all over the tabloids, she's going to have to talk to me.”

1

Gregor Demarkian had always thought that there was something wrong with what he had been taught about “the passage of time.” In fact, the idea of time as passing was all wrong. In his experience, time didn't pass. It simply was, and then it was not. That was the way it had been with Elizabeth. Even the long year of her dying hadn't made time seem to pass. She just was, and then she was something else, and then she was not. Then there was that other one, the one that stuck in his head, because even when he'd first heard it he had thought it was both nonsensical and important: Time is the measure of change. That one would have worked better than the one about time “passing,” if only he had been aware of change. He wasn't, though. Things were, and then they were something else, and then they were not. Nobody could see time passing, and nobody could see change. One day, we all just woke up and it was there.

What got him thinking about the passage of time was the newsstand at the dock, and what got him thinking about that was a fluke. When they all stepped off the ferry there was a flurry of activity. A young man from Clara Walsh's office was there with a stack of large manila envelopes. Stewart Gordon was anxious to be off somewhere, Gregor wasn't sure where, but thought it might have something to do with Dr. Annabeth Falmer. Clara Walsh herself was suddenly nervous and distracted. Gregor couldn't see why. There really was nobody at the dock to meet them. If Oscartown was full of paparazzi, those paparazzi were not interested in him, or
even in the district attorney who would prosecute Arrow Normand if it ever came to that. The dock was empty and cold and in need of repair. Gregor found himself wondering if there was neglect here, or if this was the ordinary depredations of a long hard winter.

What got Gregor thinking about time was the fact that he himself was distracted. Since he had nothing in particular to do, he looked around at the ferry and the dock and the little newsstand that was just a few feet onshore near the place where passengers would have to embark. The newsstand was empty and closed up, but it was not out of date. Gregor wasn't sure why he had thought it would be. What struck him was the string of tabloid newspapers hanging from the top of what would be the open stall frame once the metal security door was pulled up. The tabloids were behind a protective length of dirty plastic that looked like it hadn't been cleaned or replaced in a long time. Almost all the tabloids had pictures of Arrow Normand on them, which is what he would have expected. What he did not expect was the picture of himself, above the title in the
National Enquirer
, next to the headline, in bold and in italics: “Police Bring In Superdetective!”

Well, Gregor thought. Being a superdetective was better than being the Armenian American Hercule Poirot. On some fundamental level, it was a lot less silly. He left Clara Walsh and her assistant and Stewart Gordon talking among themselves and went over to look at the paper more closely. The date was only the day before yesterday, and he was sure he remembered that the
Enquirer
came out once a week. He looked down the line at the other papers. All of them were current, or close to. He saw pictures of Arrow Normand drunk, Arrow Normand fat, Arrow Normand being brought into a police station between two large men. He tried to make out who the men were, not their individual identities but their institutional affiliations, and could not. Were these state police, or local police, or no police at all? Nobody had told him how Arrow Normand was arrested, or where.

Gregor turned back to see that Clara Walsh and the assistant and Stewart Gordon weren't getting very far with
whatever it was they were trying to do, if they even knew what that was, and he walked back to them.

“Do you mind if I ask you people a question?” he said.

Stewart Gordon straightened up. It was hard to think of Stewart being anything else but up, but he must have been. “I've got to go,” he said. “I promised Anna I'd stop in. I'll come to the press conference.”

“You're having a press conference,” Clara Walsh said.

Gregor let this go by. He had expected a press conference. There usually was one when he was brought in, because part of the point of bringing him in was usually to let the public know that “something” was being done in a difficult circumstance. He turned back toward the newsstand and gestured in that direction.

“They've got a copy of the
Enquirer
over there, with my picture on it,” he said.

Stewart Gordon snorted. “Bet it wasn't a big picture, not yet. You'll just have to get used to it. You're part of the story now.”

“I don't mind being part of the story,” Gregor said patiently. “The point is that I haven't been part of the story for very long, but the
Enquirer
on that newsstand has a picture of me on it. I would have thought that that stand would be closed in the offseason, but I take it it isn't. But it's not open now either.”

“That's because this isn't a regular run of the ferry,” the assistant said. He was a tall, cadaverously thin young man with hair so thick it looked heavier than his frame should be able to carry. “Sorry,” he said. “Bram Winder. I'm Clara's deputy. We're the whole office for the island. The stand isn't open now because the ferry isn't scheduled to go through, but he opens up for regular trips. I don't know if he finds it worthwhile, and he has to freeze to death—there's nothing for heat in that thing but a battery-powered space heater—but he does it.”

“It's because he's really local,” Clara Walsh said. “A lot of the people who own businesses in town are summer people. But this is Harry Carter's place. He runs this thing and he does some fishing and he works as a handyman in town when there's nothing else to do.”

“And he cuts cordwood,” Bram Winder said. “A lot of people on the island cut cordwood, although I don't know who they sell it to. Well, to the Point, this year. Kendra Rhode has been burning cordwood up there like—I don't know like what.”

“I've got to be out of here,” Stewart Gordon said. “Gregor, I really will be back for the press conference, but I've got to go. I'll see everybody later.”

“We could give you a ride in,” Bram Winder said. “We are going to the beach.”

“Thanks very much. I like to walk,” Stewart said, and then he was off, striding across the boards of the dock, looking just the way he had on that silly television show. For a moment, all three of them watched him go.

“He's the most remarkable person,” Clara Walsh said fi-nally.

Gregor tried to get them all back on track. “He opens up for regular ferry trips, and the ferry crosses, what, twice a day, in the morning and in the evening? Does it get much business?”

“Practically none,” Bram Winder said. “But the Commonwealth of Massachusetts insists. It doesn't want the island cut off from transportation in case there's an emergency. Although these days, you know, with medical emergencies, we've got the helicopters.”

Helicopters can't fly in all weathers, Gregor thought. Or maybe he had that wrong. Once, Bennis had taken him to a movie called
The Perfect Storm
, and in that movie a he li-copter rescued two people off a boat in the Atlantic during a major hurricane. Gregor had really hated that movie. It had primed him to expect a heroic last-minute survival victory, and instead, everybody died.

“Okay,” he said. “What about times when there are likely to be lots of people on the ferry even on a not regularly scheduled trip. Isn't that what was supposed to happen on the day of the storm? Kendra Rhode was having a party, and she got extra ferry trips to bring guests in from Boston. Would Harry Carter have opened the newsstand then?”

“I don't know,” Clara said. “But even if he'd intended to, I'd be willing to bet he didn't on the actual day. He is from around here. He'd know what a major nor'easter means. And nobody who knows would stand on the edge of the water with nothing but a space heater to keep him company.”

“I'm not too sure he'd have had any customers if he had,” Bram Winder said. “I mean, Kendra Rhode's guests wouldn't be the people who buy the tabloids, they'd be the people who are in them. Right?”

Gregor looked at the stand, and at the dock, and at the ferry. “What about people leaving the island?” he said. “These extra ferries that were put on for the party, would they have carried people away from the island and not just onto it?”

“Do you mean you think somebody left the island that afternoon on one of the extra ferry runs?” Clara Walsh said. Then she shook her head. “No, that's not right. I told you. The ferry runs didn't happen. The storm was too bad.”

“Did Harry Carter know they weren't happening?” Gregor asked.

Clara Walsh looked nonplussed. “We can ask him,” she said. “But you know, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. This was a major storm. The sea was horrif c. There were no extra ferry runs, in or out. It doesn't matter if Harry Carter was here that afternoon, because nobody else would have been. He'd have had nobody to see coming in or going out.”

“Mmm,” Gregor said. He went all the way back to the newsstand and looked it over, front and back. It was nothing much more than a tallish wooden box. The paint was peeling on its sides and the wood was so dry and brittle Gregor could have smashed through it with his fist without seriously hurting himself, and at his time of life there wasn't much he could do that with. The fragility of the structure made the metal pull-down security window look almost poignant. Gregor wondered if Harry Carter had really had a problem with theft. What would a thief steal, and who would be that thief? If Harry Carter was leaving his cash in there—and Gregor was willing to bet he wasn't—he was an idiot.

Gregor came away from the newsstand and went back to Clara Walsh and Bram Winder. “All right,” he said. “I'd still like to know. If you wouldn't mind. Are all those manila envelopes for me?”

Bram Winder looked down at the envelopes in his hands. “Yes,” he said, thrusting them forward at Gregor. “Yes, they are. They're the stuff. You know, forensics. The crime-scene report. The depositions. There are a lot of depositions.”

“And not much of anything else,” Clara Walsh said. “The Oscartown Police Department consists of Jerry Young and whatever two locals he can pick up and deputize for the season, and this isn't the season. There was some talk in town about beefing up the force with the film people in town, but it was the oddest thing. We couldn't get anybody to take us seriously. It's almost as if they think these people are cartoons. As if they're not real people. At any rate, the town declined to spend the money, and now they're spending only enough to keep a couple of extra guards at the jail, to take the shifts, you know. I mean, you can leave the town drunk alone overnight in a place like that, but you can't leave Arrow Normand.”

“Some of it's Linda Beecham's fault,” Bram Winder said. “You wouldn't think a little weekly paper like the
Home News
would have much impact, especially since everybody here takes the
Boston Globe
, but it does. And she's been treating this whole thing, the film thing, I mean, as if it doesn't exist. If she'd run a few articles about the dangers posed by the island being full of strangers and, you know, that kind of thing, we'd probably have gotten them to put on a few guys and we wouldn't be in this mess now.”

“He means in the mess of not having enough in the way of manpower to handle a murder investigation,” Clara Walsh said. She pointed to the manila envelopes in Gregor's hands. “That's the best we could do, and it isn't very good.”

“But the state police are helping, aren't they?” Gregor said. “I'm sure Stewart said something about that.”

“The state police have a charter,” Clara Walsh said carefully, “and that charter specif cally forbids them from interfering
in what should be a municipality's jurisdiction. But yes, they're helping, they just have to be careful. And of course the commonwealth has crime labs that we can use, and we have used them. It's just—not adequate, if you see what I mean. It's not what I'd like it to be.”

Gregor made a noncommittal noise. Bram Winder gestured down the dock. “I've got a car waiting,” he said. “I can take you to the inn to clean up before the press conference, but I was thinking, Clara and I were thinking, that since it's on the way, you might want to stop at the beach and look at the crime scene. Not really investigate it or anything, you know. I know you'd need to come back and be more thorough. But we thought, ah, to—”

“To get the lay of the land,” Clara Walsh said helpfully.

Gregor had a feeling that the “lay of the land” was going to be nothing but snow, but he also thought that getting a look at it might be a good idea. He didn't know why, but he felt more than a little reluctant to go to the Oscartown Inn and check in. For one thing, he would have to call Bennis, and he wasn't ready to call Bennis yet.