Cheating at Solitaire (38 page)

The doors at the back opened up, and Stewart Gordon came in, striding, the way everybody remembered him striding across his spaceship on that tele vision series that assumed that manned space flight to other galaxies would take place in vehicles large enough to stage a political convention in. Stewart saw Marcey Mandret and walked right up to her, leaned over, and sighed. Then he straightened up.

“She's supposed to be in the hospital,” he said. “We left her in the hospital. I talked to the doctor. She's supposed to be there for two to three days.”

Marcey jerked her head up. “Kendra's in the hospital. That's where she is. Right at the bottom of the steps. And her head is on backward.”

“What?” Clara Walsh said.

Marcey had gone back to burying her head in her arms and sobbing, except that every once in a while she seemed to be giggling. It was hard to tell. All the sound coming out of her was muffled.

Stewart Gordon tapped the reporter on the shoulder to get her to move back, then gestured to Gregor, who moved back too. Clara Walsh and Bram Winder just stood there, which was all right, since there didn't seem to be anything for them to do. Stewart knelt down on the floor and pulled Marcey up just a little.

“Calm down,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”

Marcey looked up at him. “Kendra's dead. And if Kend-ra's dead, that's going to mean that Arrow's dead, because there's going to be nobody to say that Arrow couldn't have been there when Mark was killed. I can't say it, because I wasn't there.”

“Wait,” Clara Walsh said. “Kendra Rhode could give Arrow Normand an alibi? And she didn't? Why not?”

Stewart gestured frantically at Clara to be quiet, but Marcey was talking now, and it was obvious she had no intention of stopping. “She didn't because she wanted to see if they'd give her the death penalty. Arrow. If they'd give Arrow the death penalty. She likes to get people in trouble and watch them squirm. She does. And now she's dead, right there, I saw her. She's lying there with her head on backward and she's never going to be able to say and Arrow is going to go to the gas chamber and—”

“Lethal injection,” Clara Walsh said. “And I don't think—”

“She's just lying there,” Marcey said.

Stewart was more practical than any of the people who were supposed to be practical. Gregor was gratified to see it.

“Listen to me,” he told Marcey again. “You saw Kendra Rhode with her head on backward, which doesn't surprise me a bit. It's like
The Exorcist
. Possessed by demons seems to me to be just about right. But where did you see her? When did you see her?”

Marcey looked confused. “It was just now. I told you. I was trying to get out of the hospital without everybody seeing me, and there's a way, going down these back halls and places, locker rooms, like that, and I was going around and
around and I was at the back, which was good, because there were no paparazzi around the back. I just wanted to. I want to.” She looked confused.

“We'd better get over to the hospital,” Clara said. “Or, better yet, we'd better get Jerry Young and go. If there's a body, or even if there isn't—”

“And I went through these doors,” Marcey Mandret said, “and they were the kind they have in schools, you know, with the little window with the wire in it up near the top, and there she was, there she was, at the bottom of the stairs and she had her head on backward and she wasn't breathing. I put my ear up to her chest and she wasn't breathing.”

“Call Jerry Young, but call the hospital first,” Gregor said. “It sounds like Kendra Rhode fell down a flight of stairs. I don't think we can count on Miss Mandret here to be accurate about the breathing—”

“I'm going,” Bram Winder said, and went.

“She's not a liar,” Stewart Gordon said, more than a little indignant. “She's a twit, and she's a fool, and there are squirrels with better educations, but she's not a liar. If she says she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase, she saw Kendra Rhode at the bottom of a staircase.”

“I'm sure she did,” Gregor said. “I'm just not sure she knows how to check for breathing, especially if the breathing is faint, which it can be after a bad fall.”

“Oh,” Stewart said.

“There was somebody at the top of the stairs,” Marcey said. “Way at the top, not just up at the next landing. And he was breathing very hard.”

“Did you see who it was?” Stewart asked.

Marcey shook her head. “I didn't really look. I threw up. And then all I could think of was to find somebody, and the best place to find anybody in Oscartown is the inn, so I came here. I didn't want to go to the front of the hospital and see the photographers again. I didn't want. I didn't know what. I'm sorry. I'm so cold. I want to go home. I want to go all the way home, but I can't go there, because my father.

My father doesn't talk to me. He says it's all my fault. And it is. That's the worst of it. It is.”

“What's she talking about?” Clara Walsh demanded.

“We'd better get over to the hospital,” Gregor said. “We'd better find Kendra Rhode before the reporters do.”

2

Gregor liked to think that if he had really understood what was going on on Margaret's Harbor, he would have behaved differently, that they all would have behaved differently, in the face of what really was a stampede. As it was, only Stewart knew what was going on, and he was frantic. He was so frantic, Gregor and Clara Walsh both moved instinctively to calm him down, as if what was needed in this circumstance was patience and deliberation.

“You don't understand,” Stewart kept saying. “They do know where she is. They do and we don't because it's what they are. If we don't get there immediately there's not going to be a crime scene. There's not even going to be a body.”

It seemed self-evidently true that the paparazzi couldn't “know” where Kendra Rhode, or Kendra Rhode's body, was. They hadn't even stayed long enough for Marcey Mandret to give away any of the details. Bram Winder was calling for backup just in case, but Gregor thought they needed only to follow Marcey's lead to get in before most of the photographers did, if not all of them, and he said as much.

Stewart Gordon threw up his hands and threw back his head—a classic Commander Reesgesture, if there ever was one—and took off on his own.

Clara Walsh, Bram Winder, and Gregor started in the direction of the hospital, which was less than a city block and a half away, with Marcey as their guide. They got to the intersection of Main and Bell and turned right. They got to the intersection of Bell and Chabron and—

The hospital was on Chabron, set back from the road. The front door and its curving entryway were deserted, but the sliding glass doors at the emergency room entrance to
the side had been broken. Little pellets of safety glass lay all over the sidewalk and the asphalt drive. Marcey Mandret blanched.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have come to the press conference, it was just that I couldn't find anybody anywhere, everybody was gone, even Stewart was gone and—”

“What in the name of God is that sound?” Clara Walsh said.

Gregor couldn't place the sound either, but it was more feral than otherwise and it seemed to be coming from the back. He stepped through the broken glass to find the emergency room's waiting area completely deserted. He followed the sound and came upon Mike Ingleford looking crazed.

“I called the state police,” he said. “I told them we had a riot. It's worse than a riot. There's a woman in there. I think they killed her.”

“They killed her?” Gregor said.

Gregor stepped past Mike Ingleford, turned the corner in the corridor, and stopped. There were dozens of them, at least, maybe over a hundred. He tried to remember if there had been this many at the press conference. He thought there were more here. He had no idea where they had come from. They were everywhere in the corridor, blocking the doors to the rooms, shoving equipment on wheeled carts into the walls and breaking some of it, overturning some of it. Gregor pushed his way through the crowd, inch by inch, person by person, but it was a struggle. The men around him were just as determined as he was, maybe more so, and they fought to hold their places and to get ahead into the crowd.

That was when Gregor first heard what he was sure was a woman crying, and then, a second or two later, a low scream. “Don't,” the woman was saying. “Don't. Don't. Please don't.”

Gregor thought the voice sounded familiar, but that was beside the point. If Marcey Mandret was right and this was Kendra Rhode, then Kendra Rhode was not dead, but in trouble. If Marcey Mandret was wrong and this was not Kendra Rhode, then somebody else was in trouble. Ofcourse
the voice sounded familiar. He must have heard Kendra Rhode's a thousand times, without being aware of it, on television.

He pushed at the crowd and made progress. Determination, concentration, and the conviction that a live person needed help ramped up his progress. He saw Stewart Gordon maybe four feet ahead of him, moving and pushing as well, that bald head bobbing and weaving among the dark-haired ones around it, tall enough to act as a beacon. Gregor pushed. Stewart pushed. Suddenly, he seemed to pop right out of existence, and the next thing Gregor heard was his deep, classically trained actor's voice saying, “Get the bloody hell away from her.”

It was a deep voice, and it stopped time, if only for a moment. Gregor was just able to push through a few more layers before they started agitating again, and everybody started yelling again, but it was enough. He didn't have far to go to the front. They were crammed against a doorway; that was the problem. He could see now that what he had thought was a wall was a doorway. He grabbed at the jacket of the man immediately in front of him and pulled him back. He hooked the leg of the next man up and pulled him to the side. There was the doorway and what seemed to be a single layer of men to go, and in a second he was past it, into the stairwell, into the center of the mess.

And it was not empty. There was no space. The people here were thicker than they had been outside. Flashbulbs were going off at a rate that Gregor was sure must make it impossible for any film to come out. Stewart seemed to be in the process of socking somebody in the jaw. A small woman—Leslie? Gregor had met her before; she was a nurse—was lying on the floor near the stairs, splaying her body over something Gregor couldn't quite make out, and openly crying.

“Stop,” Leslie kept saying. “You've got to stop.”

Nobody was stopping, and Stewart couldn't knock out enough of them to cause any serious dent in the insanity. Gregor was pinned in place. He squirmed and kicked and
tried to maneuver, but he'd gotten as far as he could get for the time being. There were so many people in the small space, it was hard to breath. There were people all around him and there were people above him, on the stairs, snaking up into the second floor. For all Gregor knew, they might have come from above.

Two pairs of hands came out of nowhere and lifted Leslie up off the floor. She was flailing and screaming, and the hands were not gentle. They tossed her to the side, into the crowd, against the wall of men stuck in that corner there, and suddenly Gregor saw whateverybody was trying to get to. The body of Kendra Rhode was lying on the floor, its neck broken clean through, its head, yes, almost slightly backward. There was no way the woman was alive, but there was no way to know when or how she had died either. She could have been dead when Marcey Mandret found her or she could have died since, at the hands of these people, these people who seemed to want nothing and to care about nothing except the picture, the picture and the person who was not a person, the person who was—

Going to be torn apart, Gregor realized, with alarm. The photographers weren't just taking pictures of the body. They were grabbing at the body, tearing at it. Somebody came forward and ripped a huge length of material off the front of Kendra Rhode's dress. Somebody else pulled at the parka she was wearing until it came all the way off. Gregor was close enough to realize that Kendra Rhode had not been wearing underwear. Her legs were wide open and they were taking pictures of that, too, over and over again. Stewart Gordon was bellowing. Gregor could barely hear him over what had become the crowd's droning roar.

Somebody grabbed at Kendra Rhode's arm and pulled it. Somebody else grabbed at her leg. There was suddenly a tug of war going on, people on one side with the left arm and people on the other with the right leg. Hands kept coming out of the crowd and grabbing more and more clothing, more and more clothing, so that Gregor was sure that at any moment there would be no clothes at all. There would be
just the naked body and maybe not all of that, because it wasn't impossible to pull a body apart if you had enough people and they were willing to go ahead with it. A hand came out of nowhere and went up between Kendra Rhode's legs and then up into her, all the way inside her, as if this were a snuff film and they'd gotten to the part where the actors got to sexually assault the dead body. Stewart Gordon saw it too, and lunged forward. Gregor saw the hand and arm jerk away from Kendra Rhode's body as if they were a light plug being pulled out of a socket.

“Goddamn it to bloody hell,” Stewart Gordon said.

And that was when they first heard the sirens.

3

There weren't as many sirens as there had seemed to be. Gregor and Stewart would find that out in no time at all. In the circumstances, it didn't matter much, because the sirens acted like heat on ice cream. They melted the crowd away. It happened so fast, Gregor could not tell anyone, later, just what the sequence of events had been. One moment, the stairwell was crammed tight with people. Stewart was holding on to the photographer who had put his hand into Kendra Rhode's body and was getting ready to hit him. Gregor had pushed all the way to the body itself and was knocking back other people who were grabbing, poking, kicking, snatching, anything to get a piece of her, anything to touch the dead flesh, anything to take away a souvenir, although by then there were no souvenirs left. Then the sounds started and suddenly, it was over. Done. Finished. The crowd had ceased to exist. There was no way to tell where it had gone. There was only Gregor, and Stewart, and Leslie on the stairs, sobbing. Kendra Rhode's body was stark naked and bent in ways no live body ever could be.