Cheating at Solitaire (22 page)

“I wish she had more expression in her face,” Clara Walsh said suddenly. “I really do. It's the eeriest thing. It's like a machine that's talking to you. Or a corpse. It's as if one day when nobody was looking, she had all the emotion drained out of her.”

Clara bumped the car one more time, as if she were docking a boat instead of parking, or as if she had no trust at all in her ability to line up at the curb. Then she turned the engine off. Gregor looked back at Linda Beecham and thought that he had it, finally, the thing that compelled him to look at her, the thing that would compel everybody to look at her. Then he wondered if she had been one of the people who glow in the dark before whatever had happened to her to cause her to go blank like this. Maybe she had been, or maybe she hadn't been. It didn't matter. Blank people always made the people around them want to look at them.

“She's a perfectly nice woman,” Bram Winder said. He was really talking to Clara Walsh, but it was a small car, and everybody had to listen. “I've spoken to her dozens of times. She's very pleasant. She's just not all touchy-feely like some encounter-group twit trying to express her feelings.”

“I didn't say she wasn't pleasant,” Clara Walsh said.

Clara was gathering up her things, checking through her purse, pulling out her black leather briefcase. Gregor still had the manilla envelopes he'd been handed, some of them already opened. Clara opened the driver's-side door and got out, and when she did, the rest of them got out too. That was when the wind hit them in the face. Gregor wondered just
how bad the wind chill was, since the tip of his nose had gone numb. On the curb, Linda Beecham backed up a step and waited, patiently.

“If I hadn't know her all my life,” Clara said, “I'd think she was autistic. Not the way autistic people actually are, but the way they used to be described in my psychology textbooks. People without affect. She wasn't always like this. She used to be a very happy person. Or she seemed to be.”

“You didn't know her that well?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Clara Walsh said. Then she bit her lip, and there was nothing left to stop them all from going ahead with whatever was about to happen.

Gregor took a last long-range view of Linda Beecham, then followed Clara and Bram into the wind. There were flags along the street, an American one on a tall pole, several others attached to the facades of some of the little stores. All of them were whipping around as if they were in a hurricane, and yet Gregor was sure there was no bad weather predicted for Margaret's Harbor for a week, and that hurricanes didn't come this far north this deep into the winter season. He looked from one side to the other, at those empty vans that said CNN and Fox News on their sides, at the little stores, at the inn. Linda Beecham was definitely looking at them, and Gregor was willing to bet anything that she was definitely waiting for them, but she was not moving in their direction. She was just standing still.

“It's not where the fishermen go,” Clara Walsh said, leaning back to be sure Gregor heard her. “Where we came in by the ferry. There's a different wharf for fishermen. Twenty years ago or so there was a big problem out here, with the fishermen, because the pleasure boats use up a lot of space, and they pollute the water. So there was a compromise.”

“I know what kind of compromise it was, too,” Bram Winder said. “The fishermen got shoved off into some makeshift hellhole, and the yachtsmen took over all the good berths. Money is always louder than tradition.”

Gregor thought this was probably true, but it wasn't something he could think of an answer to. They were walking
carefully up the sidewalk. The Oscartown Inn, unlike the other businesses on the street, was set a little back from the road itself. There was a patch of something that would be lawn when the green came back. Up close, Linda Beecham looked even more average and middle-of-the-road than she had from afar, and if anything with even less outwardly expressed emotion. Blank people, Gregor thought, and then she was holding out her hand to him.

“I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Demarkian,” Linda Beecham said. “You're the first interesting news we've had here in weeks. I'm glad to see you, Clara. They said you'd be here. I figured you had to be the person I had to talk to.”

“I thought you were here meeting Mr. Demarkian for the paper,” Clara Walsh said.

Linda Beecham did not look surprised. “It was Jack who was supposed to meet Mr. Demarkian for the paper,” she said. “I don't do the reporting. I wouldn't know how. He was going to meet the boat, in case you were wondering. The
Home News
does cover murder investigations. Or we would, if we ever had any. But that's the trouble. Jack, I mean.”

“Has he gone missing?” Clara said. “Has he run off with a movie star, or taken a job with the
Weekly World News
?”

“I wish he would take a job with somebody,” Linda said. “He's not going to get anywhere hanging around here. He even knows he isn't going to get anywhere hanging around here. I tell him and I tell him, but he doesn't listen to me.”

“So where is he, when he's supposed to be here?” Clara asked.

Gregor watched as Linda Beecham looked Clara very carefully in the face, as if she were looking for something in particular. He wondered what.

“Jack,” Linda said, “is out cold at Oscartown Hospital.”

“What?” Clara said. “Why? For God's sake, don't tell me somebody shot him.”

“Nobody shot him,” Linda Beecham said, and Gregor realized she was still studying Clara Walsh's face, as if it were a cryptogram she was going to have to solve. “And I thought about it, and of course we did call the police, but
you know what Jerry Young is like. It's Margaret's Harbor. Nothing ever happens here. He doesn't have the experience. And besides, I couldn't find him. So I thought I'd come get you, and maybe Mr. Demarkian here.”

“For God's sake,” Clara said. “What happened? Is he all right? Is he dead? Don't you ever just let yourself go long enough to show a little emotion?”

Linda Beecham ran her eyes up and down Clara Walsh's face, but there was still almost no expression on hers. “He's not dead,” she said. “If he was I'd have said so. I don't know about all right. Somebody went after his right hand with a small, very sharp little ax.”

2

Linda Beecham didn't really know that Jack Bullard had been attacked with “a small, very sharp little ax.” That was one of the first things Gregor found out on the way to the Oscartown Hospital, along with Jack's last name and the fact that Clara Walsh didn't trust Bram Winder to drive a car.

“At least not a car with me in it,” Clara said, staring straight ahead as she sat at the wheel. Bram was in front with her. Gregor was in back with Linda Beecham, who seemed not to have any other form of transportation. Gregor found it hard to orient himself geographically. Oscartown was small and on the ocean. Beyond that, he remembered almost nothing else about it. The very little he did remember belonged to another era, with other people in it.

Clara drove on what seemed to Gregor to be side streets and secondary roads. She did not head down toward the glimpse of town green he had seen. She did not head into built-up residential areas. Clara drove past houses that seemed to have been planted in the sand on their own, without a single consideration being given to convenience, or civilization.

They drove and drove, so long Gregor wondered if they would come out on the other end of the island and take another ferry. Instead, after a while, civilization began to creep up on them, in the form of architecture, most of it precious.

There were more enormous houses on very small lots. Oscartown seemed to specialize in those. Most of these houses were new. All of them had gates and multiple announcements of security systems. There were no people on the street, anywhere. It was like traveling through a Stephen King novel.

“It's the summer people,” Linda Beecham said, beside him. Her voice was so unexpected, Gregor experienced it as sudden, although it wasn't really. It was just flat. He turned to look at her and saw that she was looking out at the houses, not at him. “Nobody who lives in this neighborhood really lives here,” she said. “They live in Boston, or New York. They come up for the summer and drive the prices of everything right through the roof.”

“There were always summer people,” Clara said firmly. “Even when we were children.”

“There were fewer of them then,” Linda said. Then she turned slightly in Gregor's direction. “There were a lot fewer of them. And they were a different kind of person. Without this mania for display. The old summer people had money. The new summer people have money and want to make sure you know about it.”

“The film people aren't summer people,” Bram Winder said. “They're not even winter people. Nobody knows what they are.”

They were pulling up to the back of a large, low brick building. Just past it, Gregor could see the beginnings of what might be another town, including the green with the flagpole, straight along the street. Just past the green he could see cars and vans parked every which way, as if there were a parking lot there, although he was sure there couldn't be. He thought they might just have come out on the other side of Oscartown.

“Welcome to my world,” Clara said, pulling into a parking space at the side of the brick building. She had followed the line of Gregor's sight. “There are probably a thousand people up there, but with any luck they don't know there's any reason to be here. Do they know, Linda?”

“I don't see that there is any reason,” Linda said. “It's not about the movie people. It's about Jack.”

“Right,” Clara said.

She got out of the car, and the rest of them got out of the car with her. Gregor looked around. If this was the hospital, it was very small. He had no idea how well equipped it was.

“It's very good with heart attacks,” Linda Beecham said, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Other than that, you could die here.”

“It's not bad for delivering babies, either,” Clara said. “For God's sake, Linda. You turn me into a tour guide. You're so damned negative.”

“I'm not negative,” Linda said, but it was automatic.

They had been walking along the side of the building all the time they were talking. Now they turned a sharp corner and Gregor found himself looking at what had to be the front of the hospital. There were columns, the kind of columns that appeared at the front of stately brick houses meant to be Old, and Greek Revival, but the columns weren't holding anything up but a little triangular facade. There was a curving drive, wider than the usual, that was meant to allow more than one car at a time to have access. There was a little offshoot of the drive marked emergency, with one ambulance parked in the three-space section right before the door.

“If you need serious medical attention, you go to Boston,” Linda Beecham said.

Then she strode past them and walked through the hospital's plate glass front doors, a compact, solid little figure in sensible shoes and that ridiculous coat.

Gregor followed Clara and Bram because that was what gave him the most time to look around. The front foyer was clean enough. In fact, it was almost too clean. It was also very empty. The little gift stand was closed. The woman at the reception desk was reading a paperback romance novel with a picture of a boat on the cover.

Clara went up to the reception desk and cleared her throat. “Elyse? Linda came to get us at the ferry.”

Elyse put down her romance novel. She had to be well into her seventies. “Oh,” she said. “Miss Walsh. He's up on the third floor. It's awful, if you ask me. I mean, there isn't anybody at all on the third floor. But Dr. Ingleford said the second floor had all those flu cases, and flu was catching. So there he is.”

“That's fine,” Clara said. “He can't be all alone, though, can he? There must be a nurse up there.”

Elyse considered this. “I think Sheri may be up there with him. One of the aides, at any rate. I don't know if they mean to keep him or not, but if they do, they're going to have to move him off that floor. It's creepy up there. It's too quiet.”

“Does he have a television?” Clara asked.

“He may have, but he can't watch it, can he, when he's not awake?” Elyse looked indignant. “But Dr. Ingleford said I wasn't to say it was a coma, because it isn't one. It's just something in his system. It's just hypnotol. Or something like that.”

Gregor had not been paying much attention to this particular exchange. He had been looking at the out-of-date magazines in the window of the gift shop, and at the way the chairs set out in a square in the waiting area looked as if nobody had ever sat in them. Now he looked up and gave Elyse his full attention. She was not playing around. If anything, she was working very hard to give Clara Walsh her full attention.

Clara looked mildly annoyed, and nothing else. Gregor came closer to the reception desk. “Just a minute,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Could you by any chance have gotten the name of that drug wrong?”

“Oh, honey,” Elyse said, “I get everything wrong. It's a good thing I'm just the receptionist. It would be dangerous having me work in a hospital if I was doing anything else.”

“Would you know the name of the drug if you heard it again?”

“You could try me,” Elyse said. “I couldn't promise you anything. I hate to be around sick people. Did I tell you that?

Doctors and hospitals. They do good work, but I hate to be around sick people.”

“How about Rohypnol?” Gregor asked. “Could it have been Rohypnol?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Clara said. “They wouldn't have given him Rohypnol. Nobody would have given him Rohypnol.”