Cheating at Solitaire (27 page)

The waitress came back with an ordinary cup of coffee. The Oscartown Inn served cappuccino, but it was really awful cappuccino, and Kendra wasn't in the mood. She got her compact out of her purse and checked her hair. It looked the way it always looked. She looked the way she always looked, except that in better weather she wore fewer clothes.

Carl Frank was looking at her the way people did when they wanted her to talk first. It was the kind of thing that annoyed the hell out of her.

“So,” he said, finally, when he realized it wasn't going to happen. “You do understand that I'm not the right person to talk to about this.”

Kendra shrugged. “You're the only person I can talk to about this. The film's on its third director. The producer is nowhere to be found, and hasn't been for weeks. Besides, my father says that you're Michael Bardman's spy on this movie, and Michael Bardman definitely is the right person to talk to.”

“You could probably talk to him by going through your father.”

“Not really. The Rhodes don't do much with entertainment, and my father wouldn't help me with this in any case. He thinks I should find somebody he knows and settle down.”

“You will, eventually.”

“Maybe,” Kendra said. “Maybe I'll have a glorious great flaming flash out and become a legend. You know this idea isn't stupid. She hasn't done more than a fifth of what she was hired to do out here, and from what I've heard she's done nothing at all otherwise. She can't continue with the film now—”

“You're making a lot of assumptions here, aren't you?”

“No,” Kendra said. “You know and I know that they're
going to charge her with murder, even if they can't make it stick. If they weren't going to do that, they would never have held her so long in jail. And then there's that, too. She can't come back now. She's been in jail long enough so that if she does come back, that will be the story, and the only story, about this movie, ever. You'd be throwing good money after bad.”

“Maybe we should just shut down the production,” Carl said. “I've been suggesting that for a while now.”

“It doesn't make any sense to shut down the production for Arrow Normand,” Kendra said. “The part she had was small anyway. You'd have used a filler if you hadn't wanted a name for the publicity value. And these days, my name has a lot more publicity value. Arrow used to be famous, but I don't think that's going to last very much longer. If people know who she is next year, it will just be because she's going on trial. And nobody will care.”

Kendra Rhode disliked Carl Frank almost as much as she disliked Stewart Gordon, but where she never knew what Stewart was thinking, she always knew what Carl was. That was how she knew that she was about to get what she wanted, or at least the beginning of what she wanted. Calculation was tricky, yes, yes, but it was almost always worth it.

She felt a brush of air behind her and thought that somebody must have come into the dining room from the outside. She reached for her bag again. She had hidden it under her down coat on the way here, but now she saw no reason why she shouldn't leave it out in full view of the public, just in case the person who had come in was somebody who might recognize her.

The best way to make sure that you didn't get tainted when one of your friends screwed up was to give people something else to say about you, and Kendra was fairly sure she just had.

3

Back on the third floor of the hospital, Linda Beecham was waiting. She was waiting for Jack to wake up, and she was
waiting for the photographers to be gone from the lobby and drive. It wasn't that she thought anybody was interested in her—nobody ever was—but that she didn't want the kind of trouble she could get into by not paying attention. It was one thing to say that nothing touched you anymore. She didn't think it did, and on most days she found herself wondering how anybody could be bothered by anything, anywhere. The world was an empty place. That was how she thought of it. She was sure there had been substance to it once. She was even sure she had noticed it. She remembered long summer afternoons when she was in junior high school, sitting on the broad front lawn of her parents' house with the spring's crop of kittens in her lap, watching older girls drive by in their own cars and wondering what it would be like to be like them. At that point, it had never occurred to her that she would not be like them. Her life seemed to stretch out in front of her in an orderly and pleasant way: a few years in college; a job in Boston or New York; a man to marry; children. It was the life of everybody she knew, practically. It was what had happened to her own mother, and to the mothers of most of her friends. They came back to Margaret's Harbor, eventually, because it was a good place to bring up children. Sometimes she tried to remember when she had first known that her life was not going to be like that at all, but she always came to the same conclusion: there had never been such a time. It was just that one day she woke up, and all that was gone, and it didn't even occur to her to think about getting it back.

She looked down at Jack for a moment and then wandered over to the window where she had last seen Gregor Demarkian standing, to see what the world was like outside. The drive was still full of cars and vans. There were still men with cameras everywhere, including the kind of cameras that made film for television stations. She remembered the morning she'd realized she'd won the MegaMillions jackpot, the cold morning of a day very much like this one, with snow on the ground and clouds in the sky. Maybe it would have been different—maybe she would have been
different—if it had been one of those absolutely enormous jackpots, hundreds of millions of dollars instead of just sixteen, the kind of money that not only changes your life but your very soul. As it was, she had just sat there at her kitchen table with the
Boston Globe
laid out against the vinyl of the tabletop, thinking that she was going to have to hurry if she was going to get in to work on time. The numbers were there, staring at her, and in the back of her mind there was a calculation going on. She would have to take her ticket over to Braintree in order to get it cashed, and she had no time to do it in. She worked six days a week. She worked as many hours as she could get anyone to give her, because that was the only way she could meet her bills, and half the time she didn't meet them. She couldn't take time off to go to Brain-tree. She'd end up getting fired.

Every once in a while, she caught a show on cable called
Jackpot Diaries
. People from around the country talked about winning whatever it was they had won. They talked about elation, and the way their lives were changed, and how happy they were now that they didn't have to worry about money. What happened to her was nothing like that. She did finally figure out that she could take the day to go to Brain-tree and not worry about getting fired, but she felt no elation, and no sense that her life was changing in any meaningful way. What happened was that something inside her stopped. All of a sudden, she wasn't afraid anymore, she wasn't panicked, she didn't wake up in the middle of the night with her mind racing, wondering how she was going to solve this or that or the other financial crisis in a sea of financial crises that would never end. All of that came to an end, and what was left was what she was now, this eerily calm person, this person for whom any emotion at all was an event. Maybe she should have packed up and moved someplace else, just to put her life back on whatever track she'd thought it was on when she was fourteen. Maybe she should have done something spectacularly stupid to bring herself to her senses. She could have bought herself a fur coat, or jewelry, or something she didn't need.

The problem was that money was not the issue; money could not flx what had really been broken. She was glad she didn't have to worry anymore. She was even glad to own the
Home News
, because it structured her life and gave her a place to go every day. Other than that, she was neither sad nor glad about anything. When she woke up in the morning she only cared to note that she was still alive, and that that would have to be enough.

She went back to Jack's bedside and picked up his right hand to look at it. It was covered in bandages, but she knew where all the wounds were: the ones on the fingertips; the ones on the palms; the thick sticky gash at the very center. It was wrong for things to happen the way things had happened to her. It was wrong for things to happen to ordinary people in the world like Jack.

Suddenly she felt very cold, and very tired. It seemed to her that she had been awake for hours and hours, maybe even days. She would have hated winter and everything that went with it if she could have worked up the energy, but all she could do was want desperately to be away from here. She hated hospital rooms. She hated hospitals. She especially hated the sense of inevitability that went with them, the sense that you were going to die, we were all going to die, no matter how much we didn't want to, no matter how hard we tried not to. That was the thing she had hated most about her mother's dying, that sense that failure was assured, that failure was the only option.

She walked out into the hall and looked down in the direction of the nurses' station. Leslie would be there, at the desk, reading a book or tidying up files. She couldn't leave the ward empty while Jack was still on it. Even so, the ward felt empty. The whole hospital did. Around her and around Jack there was nothing but empty rooms, bed after bed carefully made up with fitted dust covers that would have to be taken off and replaced by real sheets if the time ever came to admit somebody. She walked into the room across the hall and looked around. Her mother hadn't been in this hospital when she died. She had been in a hospital in Boston,
where the real doctors were, and the real medical services. Margaret's Harbor was a place for house wives' knees and golfers' elbows, and the stray heart attack, the one that came in the night after the day you'd spent on your boat, the day that had been perfect in every particular. Failure was the only option. Once you knew that, you had nothing left to do in your life.

Linda went back into the hall again, and then back into Jack's room. He was fine. He was breathing normally, in spite of all the drugs he had in him. She went to the window and looked out again. She was aware that she was only pretending to have something to do. She was really only pacing, back and forth, marking time. She had done a lot of pacing in her time.

She had left her down coat on the visitor's chair, a green plastic and pressed-wood thing somebody had shoved into a corner where nobody would ever want to sit. She got the coat on and went back to Jack's bedside. His eyes were closed. His hair was dark and damp and matted with sweat. He did not seem to be sweating now. It was just his hand that was damaged. Nobody had taken a knife or an ax to his throat.

Linda buttoned up her coat and went into the hall again. If she was careful, she could get to the elevators and outside without having to stop and talk to Leslie. She hated to stop and talk to people. She never had anything to say, and they always seemed to be expecting something she couldn't give them. She didn't want to talk about Jack, or what she would do without him at the paper for the next few days. Or few weeks. She wondered about those drugs. They weren't supposed to do any permanent damage. They were only supposed to make you forget. Then again, you weren't supposed to take enough of them to pass out cold.

She got lucky. Leslie was not at the nurses' station. Maybe she'd gone down the hall to the bathroom. There were things at the nurses' station. There were folders left out on the desk, and what was probably Jack's file, open, with a pen lying across it. Linda didn't stop to look. She was going to press the button for the elevator. She decided against it.

Leslie could come back at any time. Linda went through the fire doors to the stairs instead. She could go down two flights of stairs, for God's sake. She wasn't an invalid.

In the stairwell, the hospital seemed more than deserted. It seemed like a ghost place. There were no sounds at all, anywhere, that she could hear. She wondered where this stairwell was, where she would come out when she got to the bottom. It wouldn't be the lobby or the emergency room. If she'd been anywhere near either one, she would have heard noises.

Once when she was very small, her parents had taken her on a trip to Maine. She didn't know why they had wanted to go to Maine, or what they had actually been doing there, but she remembered being taken to this big shack on the ocean where you were supposed to sit at a trough and eat clams out of their shells. The clams were in ice, and people reached into the ice to pull them out and open them up and swallow them down. This was not what her parents had expected her to do for her own dinner. They had gotten her a little cardboard dish of French fries to eat instead. She hadn't been able to eat, because she was sure that there was murder going on all around her. They were killing the clams. They were murdering the clams. The clams were being slaughtered and she could do nothing at all to stop them.

It was odd, she thought now. There was a time when she had cried for the murder of clams, and now she could work up no emotion at all for the murder of an actual human being. Of course, she hadn't known Mark Anderman—but then, she hadn't known the clams.

1

What Gregor Demarkian needed was an oasis of calm, a place where nothing was happening, and where he did not have to feel confused. That was the problem with Margaret's Harbor as he had so far experienced it. It was a mass of confusion, complete with events that came out of nowhere and went nowhere, and a Greek chorus made up of howling idiots lit up like saints in halos of flashbulb bursts. It was all well and good to tell him he needed to do something about “the case,” but there was no case. There was no real police investigation. There were no real suspects. Everything in Margaret's Harbor was in a state of suspended animation except for the photographers, and they were perpetual-motion machines.