Cheating at Solitaire (51 page)

“Not because it was,” Stewart said, “just because Arrow is always half convinced it's her own fault.”

“But he had to have the pictures,” Gregor said, “because he was still operating on the assumption that he was going to be able to go on as he had before. He still had a life he wanted to live. And that life included being a famous photographer.”

“You mean a famous paparazzo,” Bennis said. “I thought you told me that all this was about him being obsessed with Kendra Rhode, and wanting Kendra Rhode for himself. Do celebrities marry paparazzi?”

“Why not?” Gregor said. “They marry everybody else. Women celebrities especially. Anyway, he was always careful to have a backup plan, so he went back to the truck to take pictures, and he cleaned off the hood and the windows to make that possible, and then he left again. We found the pictures in his apartment. Some of them, at any rate.”

“Why only some of them?” Bennis asked.

“Because somebody had gotten there before us,” Gregor said. “The files had been rifled through, and a number of things were obviously missing. For instance, they contained no pictures at all of Arrow Normand, and very few of Marcey Mandret.”

“Carl Frank,” Stewart said solemnly.

“Or somebody connected to Carl Frank, yes,” Gregor said. “Not that that's going to help us any. And now Jack has what he wanted, of course. He's famous. That's what this was about all along. It was even the reason he wanted to be with Kendra Rhode.”

“He's not famous for killing Mark Anderman, though,” Bennis said. “He's famous for killing Kendra Rhode. And he isn't even going to be charged with killing Kendra Rhode.”

“Nobody can be charged with killing Kendra Rhode,”

Gregor said. “There wasn't enough left of the scene to provide any uncontaminated evidence.”

“So that leaves the question,” Bennis said. “Did he actually kill her?”

Gregor shrugged. Something happened to his bow tie. He wasn't sure what, but it seemed to have exploded. “I don't suppose it matters if he did or didn't,” Gregor said. “Contrary to what Linda Beecham wants us to believe, he was probably capable of it, if he had a strong enough motivation, and he probably did. Kendra was doing this dipsy doodle around town, trying to get in for a meeting and out again with a minimum of fuss, so she was going through back doors and in and out of alleys. One of the other things I kept forgetting was that Kendra Rhode wasn't one of the film people. She hadn't shown up on Margaret's Harbor just to make a movie. She'd been coming there here entire life. So she knew where to go if she wanted to keep out of sight. My best guess is that she thought she would cut through the hospital and then go up Birkwell Road, which is right behind it. But I'm not the best person to ask. I don't know the roads that well. But she was trying to cut through the hospital, and Marcey was admitted to the emergency room—”

“Again,” Stewart said. “That girl spent the entire picture getting admitted to the emergency room.”

“And a lot of paparazzi came with her,” Gregor said. “So, to get away from the paparazzi, she went upstairs. She was looking for a stairwell and a way out without paparazzi all over it. I don't know if she went up to see Jack in his room on purpose or if she saw him incidentally as she was passing through, but she went in to talk to him.”

“And got him so angry that he leaped out of his bed of pain and threw her down a flight of stairs?” Bennis said.

“I think he'd probably been angry for quite a long time,” Gregor said. “Angry at her. Angry at Arrow and Marcey. Angry at the entire setup, the entire thing he was involved with. Angry at not having been born at the right place in the right time to the right people. And he didn't have to throw her down a flight of stairs. He only had to fall into her at the
right angle, or push her. For whatever it's worth, I don't think he meant her to end up dead. That wasn't the idea at all.”

“Was there an idea?” Stewart said.

“Sure,” Gregor said. “It was rather like Pinocchio. He just wanted to be a real boy.”

“You're making absolutely no sense at all,” Stewart said.

But Gregor was making sense, and he knew it.

“If you hear a tree fall in the forest, but nobody notices you did,” he said, “did you hear it at all?”

Stewart Gordon looked like he wanted to brain him, but it was time to go, and they went.

2

Sitting in the chapel, Gregor Demarkian considered the various ways in which this wedding would be very much unlike his own. For one thing, it was taking place in a religious setting, even though it wasn't religious. That was something Father Tibor could not find a way to allow, although everybody—including Father Tibor himself—wanted Gregor and Bennis to be married at Holy Trinity. Things were apparently much more relaxed among the university Presbyterians, or whatever they were, in Scotland. The wedding would take place at the altar, but be performed by some kind of government functionary, and nobody would say anything about God. Gregor thought this was good, since Stewart was likely to start lecturing if somebody mentioned God, and Stewart could lecture in a voice it was impossible to overcome.

The other way it was different was in the people who were attending, which in Stewart's case included dozens he didn't like very much but couldn't avoid inviting: agents, managers, producers, God only knew what. Marcey Mandret had found a seat with Stewart's children and Annabeth's sons. Stewart's daughter, Caroline, was an enormously sensible woman in tweeds, and she seemed to have taken on the role of mother hen to a mentally deranged chick. At least, Marcey Mandret looked mentally deranged. It would take mental derangement to show up in the middle of a snowstorm
in Scotland in a dress that barely went to the bottom of her bum and had neither sleeves nor much of anything around the neckline. The plunge of the neckline had excited the interest of all four of the young men, both of Stewart's sons and both of Annabeth's, and Stewart's youngest, the tanned one that looked like he had just come in from hunting lions, had managed to get himself right up behind her so that he could whisper in her ear. Marcey Mandret seemed to like what she was hearing, but Gregor thought that was no indication of anything. She was primed to look like she liked what she was hearing.

“Look,” Bennis said. “Your friend Stewart was right. She's got a book with her. Do you know what he said it was?”

“What?” Gregor said.

“Milton's
Paradise Lost
. Did you ever have to read that thing? It makes graduate students cry.”

“Maybe whatever his name is will explain it to her,” Gregor said.

“Colin,” Bennis said. Then she shook her head. “No, maybe that's the other one. I didn't know he had children. Did you?”

“Yes, I did. He's made a point of making sure most people don't know about it. Trying to save their privacy, I'd guess, or their sanity.”

“Is that Jack Bullard person insane?” Bennis asked. “He sounds insane. How can anybody really not know if he's really real?”

Gregor thought he had met a lot of people who didn't know if they were really real, and that those people had included all the serial killers whose cases he had ever been involved with. He wished Father Tibor were here, instead of back on Cavanaugh Street being driven to distraction by Donna Moradanyan Donahue. It was not a matter of belief in God or lack of belief in God, or of belief in an afterlife and the supernatural or the lack of it. Gregor had known murderers who were believers and murderers who were not believers. He had known saints who were believers and saints who were not believers. It was not so simple as what
sort of philosophy people had come to accept as some sort of conscious act of the will. Most people felt real, and some people just did not. The people who analyzed serial killers got it wrong most of the time. Serial killers did not think they were the only real people in the world. They didn't think they were real at all. They killed because—

“But he wasn't a serial killer,” Gregor said.

“What?” Bennis said.

“Jack Bullard,” Gregor said. “He wasn't a serial killer. Even if he did really kill Kendra Rhode, with intent, I mean. He wasn't a serial killer.”

“I'd noticed that,” Bennis said. “Or I would have, if I'd bothered to think about it. The ceremony is going to start any moment. They're fussing around at the back there for the bride to come in.”

“I was thinking of the way murderers think,” Gregor said. “There's a piece of conventional wisdom about serial killers, that each of them thinks he's the only real human being on earth. I've been thinking these last few weeks that that's exactly backward.”

“You mean that they don't think they're real themselves? Gregor, for goodness' sake, if that was what made somebody a serial killer, we'd have thousands of them roaming around the landscape. A lot of people don't think they're really real these days. That's why they'll take their shirts off for Girls Gone Wild or go on Jerry Springer and admit to sleeping with their daughter's husband. There's got to be something more to it than that.”

Gregor was sure that there did have to be something more to it than that, but he didn't know what, and Annabeth Falmer was proceeding up the aisle carrying a big bouquet of hot house flowers. The organ was playing, too, and he didn't know when it had started. He tried to imagine his own wedding to Bennis in a few months' time, but realized that there was too much he just didn't know. Was there going to be an organ? Were the bridesmaids going to be in special, hideous dresses? Annabeth had no bridesmaids at all, and she looked just fine.

“You'll notice,” Gregor said, whispering into Bennis's ear much as Stewart's son was whispering in Marcey Mandret's. “It took them a few weeks, and it's a lovely wedding.”

“Tell that to Donna Moradanyan,” Bennis said. “And then duck.”

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1

If Ann-Victoria Hadley had been forced to tell the truth—and she never had to be forced; she always told the truth—she would have had to admit that this was not the first time she had been the most hated person in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. In fact, for most of her ninety-one years, she had made something of a hobby of it. It had started in 1926, when she was ten. That was the first and last time she had ever entered the Snow Hill Historical Society's annual Fourth of July Essay Contest. The winner of the contest got to read her essay from the reviewing stand at the end of the Fourth of July parade.

“Right in front of everybody!” Annie-Vic's fifth-grade teacher had said, as if that was the most important thing in the world—doing whatever you did “right in front of everybody.” The teacher was old Miss Encander, a creaking wreck of medical problems held together by nothing but her own smugness. It had seemed to Annie-Vic, at the time, that everybody in Snow Hill was held together by smugness, and that not even the oppressive June heat that always accompanied the last week of school could excuse Miss Encander for requiring her class to enter that contest. Besides, it wasn't fair. In elementary school, the hill kids were still mixed in with the kids from the town. They sat at the back of the classroom in stolid, silent rows and stared at their hands if the teacher called on them. The essay that won the contest was always called something like “Today We Thank Our Founding Fathers.” What did the hill kids have to be thankful for?

There was no plumbing up there in those shacks, and no electricity either, and once or twice a year one of the men died from drinking the stuff they made in a still they kept out of sight in an abandoned mine.

“It's better when they die,” Annie-Vic's father had said, at the dinner table, to Annie-Vic's mother. “It's worse when they go blind or crazy and there's nothing you can do for them.”

Annie-Vic's father was the one “real” doctor in town, but he had wanted to be a lawyer. Then his older brother Thomas had decided to be a lawyer himself, and their father, Annie-Vic's Grampa Hay, had decided that there wasn't enough room for two lawyers in Snow Hill.

“It would never have occurred to him that I could pack up and move away and be a lawyer somewhere else,” Annie-Vic's father said. “It never even occurred to me.”

Annie-Vic called her essay “Patriotism,” and that was accurate. It was an essay about patriotism. Mostly, it was an essay about why patriotism was bad for you, and why they should give up celebrating the Fourth of July until they'd cleaned up everything that was wrong with the country. Annie-Vic had mentioned the hill kids, but she had also mentioned Music and Art and Learning, which were so much more advanced in Europe. That was why old Miss Encander had ended up calling her not just a Communist, but a snob.

These days, people were calling Annie-Vic an atheist, or—worse yet, in the eyes of most of them—a secular humanist. Annie-Vic had never heard the term before all this fuss started, and she'd ended up having to look it up on the Internet. Annie-Vic had a cable Internet connection on her computer at home and a wireless card in her laptop, for when she was traveling. She did a lot of traveling. Her last trip had been just last July, to Mongolia, to see a total eclipse of the sun. She had gone with an AAVC tour group and had her picture taken with her arms around a yak.

“Asinine,” Annie-Vic thought now, looking down the long straight line of Main Street. She was thinking of the
now, of course, but she was also thinking of that long-ago fuss with Miss Encander. She had known even then that she could have written a much more insulting essay. She could have written one titled “Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, The Town with the Stupidest People in the World,” or “Miss Encander Should Learn Something Before She Tries to Teach It.” It was a testament to Annie-Vic's mother that Annie-Vic could never force herself to be that rude.