And One to Die On (14 page)

Attics, Carlton thought, can be interesting places. There might be anything at all stuffed into them. He walked across the middle of the room to the front windows, looking around as he went. This attic was not neglected. There was no carpet of dust and grit under his feet. Somebody had been sweeping the floor up here.

He got to the front windows and looked out. The sea looked angrier than it had when he had come over on the boat. The water seemed to be rising higher against the dock than he remembered it doing. The wind was rising, too. It was pressing against the side of the house the way Sisyphus had pressed against his boulder. Out there in Hunter’s Pier, everything was quiet. Lights glowed on the docks and in the windows of houses and bars. The flagpole where the flags of the United States and the state of Maine had flown when they came in this morning was bending in the wind.

Carlton had turned around to contemplate the contents of the attic, to decide where he was going to start searching for something he could use, when he heard them for the first time—except that he didn’t think of them as “them” yet, only as “it,” and what he thought he heard was the squeaking of a metal hinge in need of some 3-In-One oil. He looked back at the door he had come in through, wary. It was still shut. He looked around for another door and found it, to his right, but it was shut, too.

The squeaking, he realized, was coming from above his head. He looked up and saw nothing. It was too dark up there, beyond the reach of the light from the windows. The darkness seemed to be breathing, but Carlton was certain that was his imagination. His imagination was working so hard right now, he could have conjured up the Loch Ness monster with wings and convinced himself that it was perfectly real.

There was a big black steamer trunk in the very middle of the room, plastered over with theatrical stickers. Carlton was sure it had to belong to either Cavender Marsh or Tasheba Kent, because he was sure that no one else who had ever been connected to this house had ever had a theatrical background. He knelt down by the trunk. It was the kind that had to be padlocked, but the padlock that had once been threaded through the hasp was nowhere to be found. Carlton lifted the top of the trunk. The hinges squeaked, but they didn’t sound anything at all the way the squeaking had sounded just a few moments before. He put the top of the trunk gently on the attic floor and looked into it. On the top there was a wooden tray, lined with felt and divided into sections. In the sections were such uninteresting objects as paper clips, safety pins, and loose glass beads from long-broken necklaces. Carlton took the divider out and put that on the attic floor, too.

Underneath the divider there was the big empty space of the trunk proper. At the bottom of it were a pair of black lace handkerchiefs and a single black sock. There were also three manila envelopes, so old they had almost turned white. Carlton picked up the top one and looked inside. It was full of small black-and-white photographs, some only two inches square, of the kind taken by cheap snapshot cameras in the late thirties and early forties. Carlton pulled some out. The first one showed an easily recognizable Cavender Marsh standing in front of a car parked in front of a beach. Next to Cavender Marsh was Lilith Brayne, looking almost normal in white gloves and a big straw hat. Carlton turned the picture over and read the script on the back:
CM and LM in Nice, 1937.
That must have been the last good summer.

Carlton put this photograph carefully on the floor—it might come in handy, for his article or his book; technically he didn’t own it, but as long as nobody could prove where he had gotten it, he would be able to use it—and went on to the next one. This was a larger one, of Lilith Brayne herself, in a swimsuit. The strap of the suit went around the back of her neck and the sides came a third of the way down her thighs. He put this on the floor, too, in another stack, because he didn’t want to use it.

The third picture was the largest one yet, almost the size of the snapshots people took today, and it was a kind of family portrait. Cavender Marsh was there, and Lilith Brayne was there, and Tasheba Kent was there, too. Lilith Brayne and Tasheba Kent sat side by side on a large white-looking sofa, holding hands. Cavender Marsh stood between them and behind them, smiling determinedly at the camera. Carlton turned the photograph over.
Just the three of us in 1936.
Then he turned it back and contemplated the faces of the three people in it.

He was just beginning to wonder what it was about this photograph—something off, something wrong, the emotional tone not what it ought to be—when the first of them hit him, screeching through the air like a World War II kamikaze pilot, smacking him in the side of the head with all the force of a mugger’s cosh and a set of claws besides. Carlton put his hand up to his head; he felt the ooze of blood. Another one came at him from behind. He felt it claw the skin at the back of his skull.

“Shit,” Carlton said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

They were all moving now, restless and angry, hundreds of them up in the rafters.

Bats.

He had to get out of there.

He got up to make a run for the door, and five of them hit him at once.

Kelly Pratt was not the sort of person who worried about what he thought of as serious things. He let himself fret about his name and his hair and his waistline, but he thought it was bad for his health, mental and physical, to get too worked up at major crises that were not his own. The missing one hundred thousand dollars that had once belonged to Lilith Brayne was a crisis that was not his own. If he followed the advice he usually gave to himself, what he would do about it was to investigate it as thoroughly as he could, come to whatever conclusions were professionally warranted, and otherwise leave the mess alone. It was not his responsibility to do now what the French police should have done then.

What made him uneasy about holding to this course of action now was the presence of Gregor Demarkian among this group of guests. Kelly knew that Gregor Demarkian was going to be here for the weekend. His name, like all their names, had been on the guest list included with the formal invitations they had all received from Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh through Geraldine Dart. For some reason, Gregor Demarkian’s name simply hadn’t struck Kelly at that time. Of course, he realized now that it should have. Those invitations were not only formal but formalities. Everybody had been invited by telephone first, and their acceptances secured, before the invitations had gone out. That left the question of why Gregor Demarkian had been invited in the first place. The cover story was that Gregor Demarkian was only here as the companion of Bennis Hannaford, but Kelly Pratt didn’t believe that. For one thing, Miss Dart had made it perfectly clear to him—and, he supposed, to everyone else—that “companions” of any kind were not welcome on this weekend. Tasheba Kent was an old woman, and too many people tired her out. For another thing, it was obvious to anybody with eyes that Gregor Demarkian and Bennis Hannaford were not “companions” in the sense that word was usually meant. Bennis Hannaford was not sexually attracted to Gregor Demarkian, and Gregor Demarkian was principally interested in the old lady lawyer. Kelly Pratt didn’t understand that. Gregor Demarkian was a successful man. He was even a famous one. Kelly himself was neither so successful nor so famous, but since his divorce fifteen years ago he’d had relationships with a number of women, and they had all been under thirty-two. Why anybody who didn’t have to would want to put up with a middle-aged nonentity like Lydia Acken was beyond Kelly’s comprehension.

Kelly might still not have approached Gregor Demarkian, on the principle that he would only be borrowing trouble, except that it turned out to be so easy. Nobody had really had the heart for drinking liqueurs after Hannah Graham’s little fit at dinner, especially after Hannah returned and insisted on talking the whole thing out over and over again. Everybody had been minimally polite for the least amount of time they could be. Then they had all drifted off to their rooms or to other parts of the house. Only Hannah Graham had remained in the living room, drinking mineral water on ice and getting sourer and more hostile by the minute.

That’s a woman who would be much happier if she’d let herself drink something serious, Kelly Pratt told himself, watching Gregor Demarkian go into the library and begin to look over the things spread out on the tables. Lydia Acken had gone to bed and Bennis Hannaford had disappeared, so Demarkian was on his own for the first time in the evening. Kelly Pratt went to the library door. Demarkian stopped for a long time in front of the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it. He picked up shoes and fans and necklaces and put them down again. He picked up a vase and read what was written on the bottom of it.

Kelly Pratt couldn’t help himself. “Is there something wrong?” he blurted out. “Is there something there that should be there?”

Gregor Demarkian looked around in astonishment. “I don’t know. I was just wasting time.”

Kelly Pratt blushed. “I thought you might be detecting something. You looked so intent. You almost looked angry.”

Demarkian turned back to the table. “I was just trying to figure out why it is people buy things like these. They had so much stuff. Beads. Fans. Shoes. Handbags. It goes on and on and on. And what for?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said.

“It’s interesting to look at the differences in their taste, too,” Demarkian said. “They were sisters. From what I understand, before the royal mess over Cavender Marsh, they were even fairly close. But they didn’t begin to like the same things.”

“They liked Cavender Marsh,” Kelly pointed out.

Demarkian laughed. “That’s true enough. And they both liked him too much, if you ask me. I don’t understand the things people do for what they call love.”

“I don’t either,” Kelly Pratt said. He was feeling much better now. There was something about the way Gregor Demarkian had laughed that had taken the sting out of him. In fact, Kelly couldn’t remember now why he had thought that Gregor Demarkian was such a formidable and dangerous man. He really didn’t look like much, once you got close to him. Tall. Broad. Running to fat. The face was a horror story. Big-nosed and almost painfully ethnic, it was the kind of face that any man with real ambition would have worked on these days. If Kelly Pratt had had that face, he would have signed himself into a clinic in Switzerland as soon as he was able to afford it.

Kelly walked over to the table of Lilith Brayne’s things. Lilith Brayne seemed to have favored lilac and old rose in her personal life. The things on Tasheba Kent’s table were much more of a piece: all black, all vampy and fussed up with beads and jet.

“So,” Kelly Pratt said. “Tell me. Do you have any idea what really happened to Lilith Brayne?”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. “Don’t tell me. You think I’m out here to investigate that, too.”

“Well, you must be out here to investigate something. That’s what you do.”

“I also take vacations sometimes. I also take time off and read books. Sometimes I even write articles for law enforcement journals.”

“You wouldn’t want to take a vacation here. And you could read books anywhere. This place has terrible light.”

“As far as I know, there isn’t even any reason to question how Lilith Brayne died,” Gregor Demarkian said. “We’re talking about an investigation by a perfectly qualified police force that took place in 1938. It’s not as if new evidence had leapt into public view that we now have to take account of. It’s not as if we could go back and look at the evidence they had then, either. It’s all finished and done with. There’s no point in going on with it.”

Kelly Pratt went over to the table with Cavender Marsh’s things on it and looked at that for a minute.

“Tell me something,” he said. “If somebody did have new evidence, or if they knew something nobody had noticed at the time, what would you tell them to do?”

“It would depend,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“On what?”

“On what he wanted to use the new evidence for. You have to understand, right away, what you couldn’t do with such evidence. Even if you were able to prove now, conclusively and without loopholes, what the police tried and failed to prove then—meaning that Cavender Marsh murdered his wife—you still wouldn’t be able to do anything about Cavender Marsh. The man is almost eighty years old. Even if you could convince the French government to retry him, you couldn’t convince the United States government to extradite him. And my guess is that it would be a billion-to-one against getting the French government to retry him, especially since the French government that tried him in the first place was the one that existed before the Nazi invasion, which is related only in theory to the one that exists now.”

“You mean you think it would be a waste of time,” Kelly Pratt said.

“Not necessarily,” Gregor Demarkian said cautiously. “Sometimes, in old cases like these, there is someone—a son or daughter, a surviving spouse or a particularly close friend—who feels that advertising the truth of the case will clear the name of someone who was falsely accused or maliciously misrepresented. Sometimes corrections of that kind are absolutely necessary for the sake of justice.”

“And in this case?”

Gregor Demarkian shrugged. “The death of Lilith Brayne was pronounced an accident, not a suicide. As far as I can tell, it was also Lilith Brayne whose reputation came out best after all the publicity. If you leave things just the way they are, Lilith Brayne looks good—and if you have something against Cavender Marsh, you don’t have to go on with it either, because half the people who do read the story will be perfectly willing to believe that he killed his wife and got away with it without your producing any new evidence at all. The only reason I could see why anybody would want to fiddle with new evidence in this case—except for some disinterested third party who’s decided to write a book about it and could use the publicity—well, the only reason to go on with it would be to try to clear Cavender Marsh once and for all, wouldn’t it? And I can’t think of a person on earth who would want to do that.”