Cheating at Solitaire (21 page)

Cordelia was one of the people who had called over the last few days, and she had not been happy.

“I don't know what it is you think you're doing,” she'd said, her sharp-edged caw bouncing through the ether like a weapon, “but you're putting yourself in a position to get arrested, whether you had anything to do with the murder or not. You had something to do with him. You know you did. And a piece of utter brainless crap that episode was. I don't even want to think about.”

Cordelia was in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford, getting a doctorate in microbiology. It occurred to Kendra that nobody ever failed to take Cordelia's career seriously. Even their father and the lawyers took it seriously. The people Cordelia worked with sounded like they adored her, on those few occasions when they were required to sound like anything. The occasions were a matter of some animosity between Cordelia and her, because she was always the cause of them.

“What the hell do you think it makes me look like,” Cordelia would say, “when my dissertation adviser is woken up at four o'clock in the morning so that a reporter can ask him how he thinks Kendra Rhode's sister is going to
respond to her latest arrest for DUI? Or the thing with the underwear, which is, believe me, beyond utter crap.”

“Crap” was Cordelia's favorite word, and she used it in every other sentence when she was talking to Kendra. It didn't help that Cordelia was everything the lawyers and their father wanted a Rhode to be, even more so than their sister Melissandra. Melissandra just did all the things that were expected of her, like graduating from high school, and going on to Mount Holyoke for a couple of years. That wasn't as good as Cordelia's Yale, or graduating magna cum laude, or getting a doctorate, but it was something, it showed “seriousness,” as their father always liked to put it. Kendra knew they were all missing something. She was serious. She was deadly serious. She just didn't see the point of trivialities like diplomas and college degrees, when they didn't matter to anybody who didn't need them to get ahead in the first place. Kendra was already ahead, and she had every damned intention of staying that way.

The call from her father had come in just after she'd managed to get Marcey Mandret out the door, which meant she was already past the point her patience could stand. Marcey Mandret had seemed like a good idea back in California, and Arrow had too, but the longer Kendra had known both of them the more she had realized that there would be no point in keeping them around for the long haul. People said that Kendra Rhode never faced up to her mistakes, but this was not true. She'd been very young when she'd first come out to California, only just eighteen and fresh from one of those East Coast debuts that make the guest of honor feel like she's about to die of boredom or commit mass murder. She hadn't understood then that there are different kinds of fame, and that some kinds are better than others. Or rather, she had understood that, but she hadn't know which was which. Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand had looked, then, like the hottest things out there, the real players in a world where being a player was the only thing that mattered. Now Kendra understood that they were only “pop tarts,” and “pop tarts” were, by definition, ephemeral.

Besides, they had both been too easy. Arrow had been easier than Marcey, but Marcey was no pillar of integrity and common sense either. If there was one thing Kendra couldn't stand, it was people who let themselves get plowed under when they didn't have to. She also thought it was never the case that anyone “had to.”

The house keeper who came to the door to tell her that her father was on the phone was diffident. Kendra did not have rages at servants, but she did have looks, and most of the people working at the Point were a little afraid of her. This was something Kendra did not notice. She expected people to be afraid of her. That was part of being a Rhode.

She told the house keeper that she would take the call in her bedroom and went upstairs. She was glad her mother had gone back to New York, or wherever she had gone. Her parents were not on good terms with each other, and her mother wasn't on good terms with anybody else in the family. Kendra was fairly sure her mother had been a “pop tart” once, but a smart one, the kind who did not let herself get plowed under.

She let herself into her room and locked the door behind her. She didn't like being walked in on when she was making a phone call. This did not apply to cell phones, where she was required to talk in public all the time, because people always called her when she was walking to her car or in the middle of a designer boutique.

She stretched out on her bed and picked up the phone. “I'm here,” she said, and waited to hear the click on the other end of the line. Her father waited to hear it too. There was still no guarantee that one of the servants wasn't listening in, but you did what you could do, and you suffered through the tell-all memoir later.

“Daddy?” she said.

Kendra hated talking on landlines. They always felt to her as if the person she was talking to was much farther away than he would be on a cell. This made no sense, and she knew it, so she let it go. You had to be very careful what you said in public. The media would make you sound like an
idiot even if you weren't one. It was so easy to take a sound bite out of context.

“Daddy?” she said again.

“I've been talking to Tom Marquand in New York,” Kenneth Rhode said. “He says you're refusing to leave the Point?”

“I'm not refusing to leave it,” Kendra said. “I'm just not leaving it at the moment. I will in a couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks could be too late. You know, nobody is trying to scare you here. We're being absolutely honest with you. Local prosecutors have reputations to make, and prosecuting a Rhode for murder would make a reputation.”

“They're not going to prosecute me for murder,” Kendra said. “They've got Arrow in jail. I asked Tom about it and he said it really was odd that she was still in there. He said any decent lawyer could have gotten her bail in a couple of hours. He said—”

“I know what he said. He said it to me, too. That doesn't change the fact that you're sitting there in the middle of everything, reminding people that you're a part of that mess. That's what I don't like. Granted, given the way you live, you can't seem to stop reminding people that you exist, although that would be the better course of action. Go out to Hawaii and stay at the place there. It's the most secure one we've got; we can keep the reporters away indefnitely. Drop out of sight for a while and let events take their course.”

“I don't want to drop out of sight for a while,” Kendra said. “I don't want to drop out of sight at all. I know you're not interested in taking me seriously, Daddy, but I really do want a career. A real career. And dropping out of sight won't get me that.”

“No,” Kenneth said. Kendra made a face. She could practically see him rolling his eyes. “If you can't drop out of sight, and I admit I didn't expect you to, the least you could do is change the context. You're just sitting out there, right where that man was killed, and people not only notice you, they put two and two together. Pack up your stuff and go back to California. Get your picture taken at clubs. Do
whatever it is you have to do so that people will stop connecting you to—”

“They don't connect me to it, Daddy,” Kendra said. “They don't even connect me to Arrow anymore. They know we had a falling-out, weeks ago. It was in all the papers, and on MTV.”

“The district attorney may not read those particular pa-pers,” Kenneth said. “And I'll bet you anything she doesn't watch MTV. If you keep this up, I'm going to order the Point closed so that you have to get out of there.”

“If you do that, I'll move into the Oscartown Inn, or rent a house. Or move in with Marcey. There's always going to be something I can do. I'm not going to leave here until the movie is finished filming.”

“Why? You're not in the movie.”

“I've been in movies,” Kendra said.

“You've been in two,” Kenneth said. “In one you had one line, in the other you had none. Oh, and that doesn't count the tape, which—”

“Which was not my fault,” Kendra said, “and you know it. That was a private tape, it was just between the two of us—”

“Well, it's not between the two of you anymore,” Kenneth said. “And how you failed to anticipate that would happen is beyond me. What was that guy anyway? He makes sex tapes. He calls them something else, but that's what he does. Your tape was just a little harder core than his usual. You're not in this movie. There's no reason why you should hang around a murder scene until the movie is finished shooting, which I understand is a bit iffy anyway. With Arrow Normand in jail, they're going to have a hard time getting it into the can.”

Kendra hated it when her father tried to use media slang. He got it wrong. He always got it wrong. She looked down at her bare feet. She had had little American flags painted on her toenails, she couldn't remember why. American flags were for the Fourth of July. Usually, she was very careful about these things.

“If you close the Point, I'll move into town,” she said again, because the easiest way out of any conversation with her father was to repeat things until he couldn't stand to hear them anymore. “And I have to go. I've got things I've got to do.”

“What things?”

“Things,” Kendra said.

Then she put the phone back on the receiver and lay back across the bed, staring at the underside of her canopy. When she was growing up, all the girls at school had had canopies on their beds, and one or two of them had had bed curtains. Kendra hadn't understood the idea of bed curtains at all. You closed them and then you were in a small space with no air where nobody could see you. Why was that supposed to be a good idea? Kendra had had the same problem with English literature, and biology, and especially mathematics. She hadn't understood why anybody would want to know anything about them, never mind why she should be required to. She still didn't understand why most people wanted the things they wanted, unless they were also the things she wanted.

What her father didn't understand was that the things she wanted were not optional. They were like oxygen. They were the only way it would be possible for her to survive.

1

Gregor Demarkian did not think of himself as old in any absolute sense. He thought of himself as older—older than Tommy Moradanyan Donahue, for instance, who had more energy than Gregor ever remembered having, and older than Bennis, as a matter of principle. He even thought of himself as “old-fashioned,” by which he meant that he respected education and patience more than brilliance and speed. “Old” was a word for people who were failing, and not even all of them. Elizabeth, struck down by cancer when she was only forty-three, had never been old. She had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong genes, in a world where education and patience had yet to find the answers to the questions she needed to ask. Old George Teke-manian was failing from sense to sense and year to year, but somehow he managed to live in the present. Maybe that was the def nition he wanted. Maybe “old” was a word for people who lived in the past, and Gregor Demarkian had never allowed himself to live in the past.

He had allowed himself to think about the past, often, and it was the past that slapped him in the face as Clara Walsh's car pulled up to the curb next to the small, neat form of a woman who seemed to be waiting for them. For a moment, he thought she was someone he had known in some other part of his life. There were a lot of those people scattered across the landscape: witnesses in investigations so old he had to look at his notes to remember what the crime was; victims and the family members of victims; peripheral characters
whose backgrounds had to be checked and rechecked, just in case, because not to check was to risk disaster. Clara Walsh seemed to be taking forever to get the car parked. The wind was rising all around them, and the street on which they sat looked like the stage set for a movie about New England. There was too much white clapboard, everywhere. The Oscartown Inn had a big, deep porch with tall columns all around it. Up at the end of the street, Gregor could see what he thought was the start of a town green, with a big gazebo for band concerts. He turned his attention back to the woman at the curb. The more he thought of it, the more he was sure that this woman was none of those things. It wasn't the woman herself he recognized. It was the—it was the aura she seemed to carry around her.

Gregor brushed away the very accurate image he had of the glee Bennis and Donna would display if they ever found out he'd even considered the word “aura,” and tried to give his full attention to the woman on the curb. She was middle aged, middle height, middle weight, not striking in any way at all, except that she was. Gregor thought again about those people you just had to look at whenever they were in the room, the “people who glowed in the dark,” as somebody in his childhood used to say. This woman was one of those, and like so many of them, there was nothing objective he could find to explain it. She had dark hair going to gray that she had pushed up under a navy blue snow hat. She was wearing one of those quilted down coats that made anybody who wore one look like a mushroom in heat. The coat was navy blue, like the hat. Her hands were stuffed into the pockets of it.

Clara Walsh had finished her seesaw parking maneuver. “Oh, my God,” she said. “That's the woman I was telling you about. Linda Beecham. The woman who owns the
Home News
.” Then she saw the look on Gregor's face and coughed a little. “Linda is a little disconcerting,” she said. “In person, if you know what I mean.”

Gregor did not know what she meant, but he was willing to wait and see. He had been a little worried that he would
find a circus when he arrived. He'd been on high-profile cases before, and cases that involved celebrities, and those tended to bring with them all kinds of crazy media attention. Still, there was nobody on the curb but Linda Beecham, and although there were media vans along the street, nobody seemed to be in them. If Gregor hadn't already seen this story a hundred million times on CNN and Fox, he'd have wondered if Clara Walsh had managed to keep a lid on it. That would have made Clara Walsh not just a genius, but something on the order of the Angel of Everything.