Cheating at Solitaire (20 page)

The other thing Stewart was sure of was that he did not like drama and fuss, and speaking his mind saved him from both. Almost all the drama and fuss in the world came from either trying to hide something, or trying to pretend you hadn't really meant to do something you had really meant to do. Stewart had always thought that Don Imus was a pompous jerk, but if he'd been Don Imus he wouldn't have apologized no matter what he'd said, and he wouldn't have ended up out of a job. If you were honest, you stood by what you believed, even if other people didn't like it, and you were open about who you were. That was why he was always very clear about the fact that he did not believe in God and did not approve of religion, and the fact that he thought the American government was in thrall to the most vicious kinds of capitalists, and the fact that he was not interesting in shacking up with some woman without benefit of matrimony. Back in the days when he was playing Commander Rees, the network had truly hated it whenever he gave interviews. At one point, they had even threatened to fire him if he did any more.

The one problem with this, the one thing that didn't fit, was the simple fact that there was a part of his life he was hiding. He'd been hiding it for many years, and he'd never had a problem with it until now. Well, he thought, as he strode back across town past the huge houses on their tiny lots, maybe “hiding” was the wrong word. He wasn't actively hiding it as much as he was just not talking about it. He wasn't ashamed of it. He wouldn't have been embarrassed if his secret had become public. These days, there
wouldn't even be any real consequences if it did. It was just that he had spent so long—nearly thirty years now—saying nothing on this particular subject, it no longer occurred to him to mention it even when he should.

He had told Gregor Demarkian that he was going to check up on Annabeth, and he was, eventually, but right now he was heading for his own rented house. It was a very nice house, since the production was renting it for him, and he didn't need to spend his own money. It was not, however, on the beach, because Stewart didn't like the number of hurricanes that hit the Atlantic coast of America during the season, and when they had first begun filming it was still the middle of hurricane season. This was a little overcautious. Hurricanes rarely came this far up. The ones that made it north of North Carolina tended to peter out in Connecticut. Still, he hadn't liked the idea of them. He'd asked for an interior house and gotten one, on a good acre plot, so that he didn't have to know what his neighbors were watching on television every single night.

He let himself in through his back door, took off his watch cap and threw it over one of the coat pegs in the back hall, and headed to the back of the house and his bedroom. It was too hot in here. Central heating in America was so good that it was impossible to find a decent temperature to live at. You were either freezing or boiling, and he preferred to be boiling. He took off his peacoat and dumped it on the bed. Then he took off his gloves and sat down.

The pictures were in the drawer of the little table with the lamp on it. He kept them there so that he could take them out and look at them, which he liked to do. Someday this whole thing was going to come out and people were going to say that he had abandoned his children, that he had erased them from his life and pretended they didn't exist. This was not true. He had three children, all of them by the same woman, the first woman he had ever slept with and the only woman he had ever married. He had been seventeen when he'd gotten her pregnant, and due to start at university. They had married quietly and spent the next three years trying to
negotiate his life as a student and hers as an almost-single mother. He would pack up his books and notes and go to the house she had rented in the nearest town and sit with Colin while she went to work as a barmaid. Then Andrew had come along, and Caroline, and the next thing he'd known, they were all living in London, in the worst sort of area, and he was trying to find his way as an actor.

It was the first American offer that had made him think about the name, and made Connie think about it too. They were divorced by then, but Stewart was anything but an absentee father. They lived only a few streets away from each other, and he came to play with the children three or four times a week. He also paid for things, because by then his acting career was actually getting off the ground. He had something significant to do in the West End almost every season, and enough television work to make him think about buying a house for Connie and the children. It didn't occur to him to want a house for himself. It would have seemed like too much space. Then the offer had come, and he had sat at Connie's kitchen table for an hour, turning over its ramifications as if he were studying it for a laboratory. The money had been terrific, and not for a starring role, but it wasn't the money that had bothered him.

He got the pictures out and spread them across the bed. There were three of each of the children, the first ones as children, the second at the age when they had left secondary school, the third more recent. They were all grown now, with families and professions, and they all liked him, as far as he could tell. He had nothing to be ashamed of in his children, except maybe that nobody on earth knew they were his children, outside the very restricted circle of themselves. Hell, every once in a while he indulged in that thing where he looked himself up on celebrity “info” sites, and most of them didn't even register the fact that he had once been married.

He thought about using the cell phone and decided against it. International calls were not always clear on cell phones. He picked up the landline and then had to go to his cell to
find the number. These digital storage devices were hell on the memory. You didn't have to remember, so you didn't bother. He got the number and punched it into the landline and waited. The phone rang three times before it was picked up, and then Caroline sounded wary. She was a psychologist. God only knew what might have gone wrong with her day today.

“Caroline,” Stewart said. “It's your father.”

“I know it's my father.” Caroline sounded relieved. “I'd recognize your voice anywhere. Anybody would recognize your voice anywhere. How are you? I was thinking about calling last week, when the news hit the papers here, but Colin said he'd called, and you sounded busy. Are you all right? Are they going to arrest you for murder?”

“No, they are not going to arrest me for murder,” Stewart said. “And I'm fine. There's a friend of mine they're bringing in up here to help with the investigation. It's not about that, though. That really doesn't matter. It's, ah. Well. Do you hear from Andrew?”

“He's in the Amazon basin,” Caroline said. “He'll check in in a day or two and we'll tell him all about it, but he probably hasn't heard any news for a week. They're doing—I don't know what they're doing. Some kind of lemur, I think. Is that what you called about? You wanted to find out about Andrew?”

“No,” Stewart said. He was finding it unbelievably hard to say what he wanted to say. He never found anything hard to say. He was proud of his children, though. Caroline was not only a psychologist but married with a child on the way. Colin was a barrister in a first-rate firm in London. Andrew was a zoologist who studied—well, Stewart wasn't sure what he studied. Nobody was ever sure with Andrew, but Cambridge had taken him on, and some American foundation kept giving him lots of money to mount expeditions to the Amazon, so Stewart assumed that Andrew was well respected in his field. He found it interesting that none of his children had been interested in being an actor.

Caroline was getting concerned. “Dad? Are you all right?

Colin said when he called your house, a woman answered. Is it something about that? I talked to Mum about it. I hope you don't mind.”

“No,” Stewart said. “No, I don't mind. And it's, well, yes, it is in a way about her, but not exactly. I mean, not directly.”

“So is she somebody important? Is she somebody we should know about? It's been a while since you've hung around with one of those six-foot Amazons with the hot and cold running neuroses.”

“She's not six feet tall,” Stewart said. “And she's not neurotic that I know of. Her name is Annabeth Falmer. Dr. An-nabeth Falmer. She—”

“The historian,” Caroline said. “Really? This is serious. She's got to be almost as old as you are.”

“Caroline,” Stewart said. It wasn't true that all his girlfriends since his marriage had been six feet tall. It was true that they had all been neurotic. He tried again. “I called because I wanted to know if you resented it. The name. If you wish your mother and I hadn't changed your name to keep you away from my publicity.”

There was a short silence on the line. “What an odd thing to say,” Caroline said finally. “Especially after all these years. And no, if you want to know, I didn't resent it, and I don't think Colin and Andrew did either. Especially not after you became Commander Rees, and it was all over everywhere. You were. I mean by then we were, what, in our teens? We weren't stupid. We could read the tabloids. I don't think any of us was interested in having that kind of publicity in our lives.”

“Some people like it,” Stewart said. “In Los Angeles, there are some people, girls especially, who, ah—”

“Who become celebrities by proxy?” Caroline said. “Do you really think I'd want to do that? Or that Colin would? Or Andrew? God, can't you just imagine Andrew in a tabloid, siccing a python on the photographers?”

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Well. You were always very sensible children.”

“We're not children anymore, Dad. Colin is forty-five.”

“I know that.” He looked at the pictures on the bed again. Then he gathered them up and put them back in the drawer. Maybe the time had come to keep them out and around and not care if people saw them. There was no chance anymore that any of the three of them would be plagued by schoolyard bullies because he had his picture all over American television.

He had one of those rare but desperate moments when he wished he still smoked cigarettes. It passed. “I did something stupid,” he said. “Not deliberately, you understand, but it was stupid. And now I'm not entirely sure what to do to make it right.”

“whatever did you do?”

“It's what I didn't do. I didn't tell Annabeth about the three of you.”

“You never tell any of your girlfriends about the three of us. I think the last one I met, I was introduced as your niece. And I was fourteen.”

“Yes,” Stewart said. “Well.”

The pause on Caroline's end of the line was longer this time, and when it was broken it was broken with an explosion of laughter. “Good grief,” she said. “You're serious. You're serious this time.”

“Possibly,” Stewart said.

“Well, but, how long have you known her? What's she like? Is she gorgeous—but she couldn't be as gorgeous as the girlfriends, could she, because she must be in her fifties. Have you asked her to marry you? Are you going to?”

“I've known her for a week,” Stewart said, “and I'm not going to ask her to marry me before I ask her to, ah, yes, that's none of your business.”

Caroline was giggling helplessly. Stewart could hear her.

“It really isn't that funny, you know. And I have to somehow explain why I didn't mention the three of you, never mind your mother.”

“Oh, I've got to tell Mum. This is wonderful. And Andrew. He'll laugh for a week. We're all grown now, though, so we expect to be invited to the wedding, especially if
you're telling her anyway. And you'd better tell her. If she finds out after you're married, she'll have your head, and quite rightly, too.”

“Caroline,” Stewart said.

But it was no use. Caroline couldn't stop laughing, and Stewart couldn't stop feeling that he had, in his old age, become a figure of fun to his own children.

2

For Kendra Rhode, the days since the murder of Mark An-derman had been a raging annoyance, of a kind and duration she hadn't been required to suffer through since she'd been in high school. Today alone, a day on which nothing much was happening, she had had to take two telephone calls from family lawyers, one from the firm in New York, which was furious at her, and one from the firm in Los Angeles, which was ready to chew her head off. The consensus was complete. Nobody understood what she was still doing on Margaret's Harbor. She had nothing to hold her there, no obligations she was required to meet, and by staying where she was she was putting herself and possibly other members of the family in jeopardy. Kendra had been told all about the police when she was very young, and about “ordinary people,” who were not so much ordinary as full of resentment against people like the Rhodes.

“You must never forget,” one of her aunts had told her, at one of those insufferable family “receptions” her father was always making her mother put on, “no member of the public understands who you are, or what you are, or what you're going through. They think you have an easy life.”

“Of course we have an easy life,” Kendra's sister Cordelia had said later, up in her bedroom, where she and Kendra had both gone to hide from the aunts. “What does that woman think? That it isn't easy not to ever have to worry about paying the bills?”

Kendra had been about nine at the time, and she had found it difficult to know where her sympathies should lie. She hadn't much liked that aunt—she didn't like any of her
aunts; her aunts were all “horse people,” which Cordelia said meant they looked like their horses, and sounded like them too—but she hadn't liked Cordelia, either, and still didn't. If anything, she found her aunts easier to understand. The ordinary members of the public didn't know what she was going through. They thought she was brainless and spoiled and shallow, and she was really none of those things. She had emotions like anybody else. Some of them ran very deep. Some of them were painful. She had insecurities. Then there was the simple fact of her career, which had not gotten off the ground, and was having a hard time getting, because nobody would take her seriously. When you were born with money, people treated anything you wanted to do as if it were a hobby. You didn't need the money, so you didn't need the career. They believed that, and then they laughed at you.