Cheating at Solitaire (2 page)

Or, worse, something out of Tennessee Williams, or William Faulkner. The neighbors would come in, drawn by the smell, and find not only her dead body on the floor of the kitchen, but the dead bodies of all her old lovers buried in the root cellar right under the basket of fiddlehead ferns.

“I'm going slowly but surely out of my mind,” she said, to the cat again. The kettle went off, and she poured the water from it into the teapot. Then she got a tray, a mug, a tiny mug-sized strainer, and her copy of Gertrude Himmelfarb's
The Moral Imagination
and headed on out for the living room. The storm could scream and moan as much as it liked. She had two industrial-sized generators. She could keep her electricity going in the middle of a nuclear attack.

She put everything down on the coffee table, poured herself some tea through the strainer, and curled up in her big overstuffed chair. This was the way she had imagined herself, last year, when she had been talking about this to her sons. She had seen herself, comfortable and surrounded by books and cats, reading without having to think about anything else in the world. It hadn't occurred to her that the utter sameness of it would get boring faster than watching The
Sopranos
had.

The cat jumped into her lap just as she heard the first of the heavy thuds against her kitchen door. She put her hand up to stroke him and said, “I'm an ungrateful idiot, do you know that? They gave me absolutely everything I ever wanted, and some things I didn't even think of, and I'm about ready to plug my fingers into a wall socket, it's so out-of-my-mind dull.”

There was another thud, and this time she paid attention. She put the mug away from her and looked around.

“Do you think it's an animal?” she said. “I can't imagine it would be a person out in all that. Even Melissandra Rhode isn't as crazy as that.”

The third thud was heavier and more dangerous than the other two had been. Annabeth could hear the wood straining under whatever was hitting it. She put the book down and got up. You could see the ocean from the kitchen windows. Whoever had built this house had wanted to watch the waves at the breakfast table. Still, it couldn't be the sea coming in. Not this fast. And it couldn't be a tree branch blown loose by the wind. It sounded like something soft.

“I should watch television,” she told the cat. “At least I wouldn't be rewriting Freddy Krueger movies in my head.”

She went back to the kitchen and looked around. She looked out the big windows at the sea, but it was comfortably far away, although choppy. She looked at the walk that wrapped around the house at that side, but saw nothing but untouched snow. She looked around the kitchen, and wondered what she had been thinking when she bought two complete sets of Le Creuset pots to hang from the hooks over the center island.

“One of those is going to fall on my head one day and give me a concussion,” she said, not even to the cat this time. The cat was still in the living room, curled up on a cushion. Then there was another thud, and this time it was distinctly accompanied by giggling.

“What the hell,” Annabeth said.

She made her way out into the pantry, its four tall walls covered floor to ceiling with shelves. She went into the little mud area with its benches and pegs for holding outerwear so that it didn't muck up the rest of the house in bad weather. She stood very still and listened. The giggling really was giggling, not just the wind, she was sure of it. Sometimes it sounded not so much like giggling as it did like crying. The kitchen door had no window. There was no way to tell without opening up.

“What the hell,” Annabeth said, thinking that if there really was some half-crazed homicidal maniac out there, ready to rip her into body parts before he disappeared into the storm, she almost owed it to him to cooperate. Anybody who wanted anything badly enough to go through that storm to get it, ought to have it.

“Not really,” Annabeth said. She missed the cat. It gave
her a cover so that she didn't have to recognize the fact that she had started to talk to herself.

She grabbed the knob of the door, turned it to the right, yanked the door forward, and stepped back.

She was just in time. The young woman who came falling through at her couldn't have been more than five feet tall, but she fell hard nonetheless, and she fell far, too.

It took a minute or two, but Annabeth worked it out. This was definitely somebody she recognized, even if she couldn't remember what the woman's name was, but that was the least of it. The most was a toss-up between the clothing—a pale blue-silver, sleeveless minidress, hiked up to beyond beyond—and the hair. Annabeth thought she'd go with the hair. It would have been long and blond under other circumstances, but at the moment it was black and sticky and covered with blood.

2

Marcey Mandret was pretty sure that Stewart Gordon was mad at her—furious, in fact—but the information made no sense, and she was too tired to think about it. Besides, what did he have to be mad at her for? He wasn't her father, for God's sake, or her uncle, or even her agent, and this wasn't a working day anyway. The snow had started coming down like crazy hours ago, and everybody had just packed up and gone to what amounted to home. Marcey hated Margaret's Harbor with a passion. It didn't matter to her that presidents had vacationed here, or that Kendra Rhode's family had had a summer place here since before the Civil War. Nobody cared what people like that did anymore. People cared about Kendra only because she had started hanging out with people like Marcey, although Marcey was fairly sure—there it went again, that weird zinging in her head, as if there were a live electrical wire up there somewhere—that that wasn't the way it was playing in the papers. It made her furious, it really did, that the papers and the television stations all made it sound like Kendra was the Most Important Person in the History of the World, even though Kendra didn't do anything except wear clothes and look really tall.

Stewart Gordon was over there against the wall, staring at her. His head was as bald as if he'd shaved it, but people said he'd lost his hair when he wasn'tweventy years old. He was a lot older than that now. He was ancient. And he was a snob. He was always carrying around the kind of book Marcey was sure nobody actually read; they just liked to be seen carrying it because it made them look smarter than everybody else. She didn't care how smart Stewart Gordon was. He was a loser in the only way that counted. He was getting only five million dollars for this picture, and Marcey was getting seven.

Money. Liquor. The dress was coming off, again. The straps kept sliding down her shoulders. She was the only person in here with straps. Everybody else was dressed as if they were about to pose for an L.L. Bean catalog. Who bought things out of the L.L. Bean catalog? It was all such clunky stuff, and that other place, Harbor Halls, was even worse. All those pastels and twin sets and espadrilles, except in the winter, like now, when it was parkas and snow boots. Marcey had never worn a pair of snow boots in her life, and she didn't intend to start now.

She got the strap adjusted on her shoulder and made her way slowly in the direction of the bar. She wasn't walking very well. Her head hurt, and she was very dizzy. She tried to remember the number of champagne cocktails she'd drunk since they'd shut down filming at eleven, but she couldn't do it. They'd shut down filming. She'd come over here with Arrow Normand and Kendra and some other people. She'd started drinking and then she'd started watching the snow. Kendra was gone now. Arrow seemed to be gone too. Arrow's boyfriend—Marcey looked around, and blinked. The only other person from the film who seemed to still be here was Stewart Gordon, and she would swear on her life that he was still nursing the same big mug of beer he'd bought when he first walked in the door.

There was a bar stool in front of her. This was good news. She sat down on it and tried adjusting her strap again. She was fairly sure she could not be really drunk, because Kendra had told her that it wasn't possible to get drunk on
champagne. She felt drunk, though, and her right breast seemed to be completely exposed. She pulled at the strap again. The bartender had started pouring another champagne cocktail without being asked. He wasn't much older than she was and he was looking straight at her nipple.

Somebody squeezed in against the bar between her stool and the one on her right. She looked up and saw Stewart Gordon handing her cocktail back to the bartender.

“Do something about your dress,” he said.

“Why is it that everybody on this island wears bow ties?” Marcey asked him. “Have you noticed that? They all look like Porky Pig.”

“Have you been running a tab?”

“It's okay,” the bartender said. “That guy from the film comes over once a week and settles the tabs. You know, the guy—”

“Shit,” Stewart Gordon said.

“I bet you don't run tabs,” Marcey said. “I bet you pay for that beer right when you get it and then you drink only one. You can't take my drink away. You're not my father.”

“Your problem is that nobody is your father, not even your father.”

“I make more money than he does. I make more money than you do. You can't tell me what to do.”

The bartender was standing right there, holding the champagne cocktail in his hands. Marcey leaned across the bar and got it. Then she tilted her head back and swallowed almost all of it in a single long gulp. This was not the best thing she could have done. She hadn't realized until she did it just what kind of a mess her stomach was in. She was probably going to throw up. This was all right, since she always threw up, but she preferred to do it without an audience. It was practically the only thing she preferred to do without an audience.

“Arrow does everything in public,” she said, looking at the third button on Stewart Gordon's dark blue chambray shirt. God, the man was tall. He was enormous. “She even vomits in public. Don't you think that's pathetic?”

The bartender coughed. Stewart Gordon took what was
left of the drink out of her hand. It didn't matter. Marcey had won this round. She'd drunk most of it. Now if she could just stand up and get another one. She could go home, or up to Kendra's, but she didn't want to. The party wasn't due to start for hours. There would be nothing to do up there.

“It's New Year's Eve,” she said.

“I know,” Stewart Gordon said. “And you're going to keel over before the ball drops. Do you have a coat?”

Marcey waved into the middle of the room. “I've got my jacket. You know. My blue jacket.”

“Your blue jacket is made of glitter and silk thread. Do you mean to say you came all the way out to New England in the middle of the winter without a decent winter jacket?”

“I hate coats,” Marcey said. “They make me look fat.”

Somebody came up with the jacket. Marcey didn't see who it was. She really wasn't seeing much of anything. Stewart Gordon handed it to her.

“Put it on,” he said. “At least it will cover your breasts, one of which, at the moment, is waving in the breeze, to the enormous satisfaction of half the people in this room. And only most of them are men.”

“It's not just the breast,” Marcey said. “Don't you know? Kendra and Arrow and I made a pact. We're all going commando for the whole year. This year. Until midnight. We're all going commando to show that we're, that we're—”

“Ass,” Stewart Gordon said. “Kendra Rhode got a one-hundred-million-dollar trust fund the day she was born. She doesn't need a career. You do. And you're not going to have one by the time she's through with you.”

“Kendra Rhode is my friend,” Marcey said. “She's my best friend. We'd do anything for each other.”

“Kendra Rhode is a psychopath who likes to play with people's heads. Button that jacket and I'll take you home.”

“I don't want to go home. There's nothing to do at home. And besides, I'm supposed to be out at the Point for a party. You weren't invited to the party, were you? Kendra invites only the best people to her parties.”

“Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let's go.”

Marcey looked around the bar. There were a lot of people there, and most of them were looking at her. That was reassuring. That really was. Sometimes, when she got drunk enough, she began to feel as if she were trying to walk on water. It was all right as long as she didn't notice that that was what she was doing, but when she did she suddenly realized that she couldn't, and she was way out over the ocean and about to drown. She hated that feeling, that about-to-drown feeling. It made all her nerves go crazy and it made her want to cry. She wanted to cry right now. Crying seemed to be the best thing she could possibly do. Crying had substance, and she had no substance. Everybody said so. There was something coming up her throat. It might be vomit, but it might be something else. If she didn't get Stewart Gordon away from her, he would start giving her a lecture about how she should have gone to school.

“School isn't important,” she said, leaning very close to him. Leaning was not good. Leaning was like falling. “What does school get for people? Jobs in offices. That's it. Jobs in offices. Or mechanics. Or things. School—”

There always came a point when the air looked slick and solid, when it could ripple. It was rippling now. It made her think of mayonnaise, and of the first time she had ever been in a movie, when she was seven years old. Her mother was always sitting in one of those folding chairs at the edge of the set, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, tense. Everything was always tense. That was the year she had been interviewed by Katie Couric. She had been given a big solid chair to sit on, and her legs had dangled from the seat without reaching the floor.

“I can't walk on water,” she said, as loud as she could, past Stewart Gordon to the room at large.