And One to Die On (16 page)

“Nothing in particular,” Gregor said. “It’s a game more than anything else. I wonder if that security guard went home or if he’s sleeping in the house.”

“He’s sleeping in the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage,” Geraldine Dart said. “He got off at eleven o’clock, but we couldn’t get him back to the mainland. The storm had already started by then.”

“You mean there’s a storm?” Mathilda Frazier sounded truly frightened. “You mean we can’t get out of here?”

“It’s just temporary,” Geraldine Dart said irritably. “This isn’t Alcatraz.”

Lightning flashed past the window at the end of the hall, illuminating them all for just a second. Then the thunder hit in a rolling sharp slap. Kelly Pratt jumped a little and squealed. Mathilda Frazier rubbed the palms of her hands against the sides of her arms. Bennis lit another cigarette.

Gregor thought it was too bad that the security man wasn’t in the house. He could have used the help of someone who had not been subjected to Geraldine Dart’s ghost stories. Or maybe he had. Maybe Geraldine Dart told these ghost stories in Hunter’s Pier and everywhere else she went. Maybe they were her preferred form of entertainment.

The cackle came again. It did a crescendo that sounded calculated and false. In the middle it suddenly switched out of soprano and into bass.

“Oh, wonderful,” Richard Fenster muttered. “Something new.”

“Two ghosts.” Mathilda Frazier giggled, almost hysterical. “Isn’t that just what we need?
Two
ghosts.”

Gregor touched Geraldine Dart on the arm. “You don’t happen to have a flashlight anywhere around, do you?”

“Downstairs in the kitchen,” Geraldine said.

“You don’t keep one in your own room?”

“No,” Geraldine said. “No, I don’t.”

“Funny,” Gregor said. “I would have thought power failures were a fairly frequent occurrence in a place like this.”

Geraldine Dart started to explain herself. Then the cackle rang out again, and she stopped. Gregor Demarkian ignored both Geraldine and the cackle.

“Come on,” he told the whole group of them. “Let’s go downstairs and get this over with.”

They went in a body with Gregor at the head, like a group of kindergarten children being herded around a museum by a teacher. They went down the stairs into the foyer and looked around. There was nothing there, of course. If there had been, they could have seen it from the top of the stairs. They went into the living room and looked around there, too, but as Gregor had suspected, there was nothing there to find. Their candles cast odd shadows on the walls, and all the birthday decorations looked sinister, but that was only to be expected. The way things were right now, Gregor thought, an episode of
Leave It to Beaver
would have looked sinister.

Gregor picked up one of the smiley faces and turned it over in his hands, but it was just what it had been before, quilted crepe paper and cardboard. Nobody had slashed it up with a knife or painted it with blood or sprayed it with poison. He put it down again and picked up a silver table lighter. It wasn’t a piece he had noticed before, but he couldn’t see anything special about it, so he put that down, too. The cackle started up again, but it seemed muffled and remote down here. Nobody looked as nervous as they had before.

“What are we supposed to be doing down here?” Richard Fenster asked. “Is this some kind of treasure hunt? Are we supposed to be discovering something?”

“We’re supposed to be making idiots of ourselves in a very public manner,” Gregor told him. Then he turned to Geraldine Dart. “Why don’t you go get us those flashlights now? We’re going to need them if we ever intend to get the power back on.”

“You mean you want to go down to the basement to fuss with the fuse box right now?” Geraldine asked.

“No, not right now,” Gregor said. “Right now I’m going to go looking around in the library, which is the next logical place to look.”

“Oh,” Geraldine said. “I don’t know if I could let you do that.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Kelly Pratt said. “You said that guard went off duty at eleven. It’s got to be nearly one now. Any one of us could have come down here in the last two hours and stolen every single piece on those tables.”

“Well,” Geraldine Dart said.

“It’s too bad you don’t keep a flashlight in your bedside table,” Gregor said blandly.

Geraldine Dart blushed. “All right,” she told him. “I’m going. I’ll be right back. But for God’s sake, don’t touch anything.”

Geraldine half ran out of the room, heading toward the foyer, and Gregor found himself shaking his head. Then the cackle started up again, and he sighed.

“The
House on Haunted Hill,
” Gregor said again.

“That’s the name of a movie,” Bennis told him.

“I know,” he said. “You’ve watched it at least three times in my presence, with Donna Moradanyan and Tibor. You ought to pay more attention.”

“You mean that laugh we hear is from a movie?”

“From a tape made from the movie, I think. Somebody just got a tape recorder and recorded all those laughs at the beginning and the end over and over. Can’t you hear that thing repeating itself?”

The cackle came again. Everybody was still. Finally, Richard Fenster said, “He’s right. It is repeating itself.”

“But who would do something like that?” Lydia Acken demanded. “It’s terrible. And those two old people upstairs. They could be frightened into strokes.”

“I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “In fact, I think they’re probably in on it. That’s why they haven’t come downstairs yet.”

“If this is some kind of setup and they really are in on it,” Mathilda said, “there’s going to be some serious trouble.”

“But why would they do something like that?” Lydia asked. “Why? What’s the point of all this?”

Gregor had a few ideas as to the why and wherefore of all of this, but they were complicated. Instead of answering Lydia’s question, he went into the library. It was as unchanged as the living room had been, which was what he had expected. He left it and came back to the rest of them.

“All right,” he said. “I think we can be confident that we’ve done everything that we could be expected to do. The lights ought to come back on any minute now.”

“This is incredible,” Kelly Pratt said.

Gregor thought this was more than incredible. He thought it was execrable. As soon as they all calmed down, he was going to get Geraldine Dart in a corner and take her apart at the seams. He would do the same to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, but he was afraid that the sound of his voice at full volume would frighten them to death. They deserved to be frightened to death, he thought. This was the worst kind of practical joke. And it wasn’t funny.

Above their heads and on the side tables, the lights flickered. Gregor had forgotten that he had left them all on when he had come to bed. He checked his watch and saw that it was one fifteen. There was nothing more in the way of hysterical, sinister cackles.

“There,” he said, when the lights stopped flickering and came fully on. “That’s the end of that. I think we can probably all go to bed now.”

“You go. I’m going to have a drink.” Mathilda Frazier sounded irritated.

Then Geraldine Dart came running into the room, carrying a handful of flashlights and completely out of breath.

“I did it,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “I went all the way down to the basement by myself and changed the fuses, all by myself. What do you think of that?”

Gregor was about to say that it was the least he would have expected of her, but at that moment a woman’s voice came at them from out in the foyer, and it stopped him dead.

“Ger—ald—ine?” the voice called out in a singsong. “Geraldine?”

“Isn’t that Miss Kent?” Bennis asked uncertainly.

Geraldine Dart looked suddenly scared to death. “Yes, that is Miss Kent,” she said in a panicky voice. “But I don’t understand—”

“Ger—al—dine,” Tasheba Kent sang out again.

Geraldine Dart rushed out of the room, dropping the flashlights as she went. Gregor followed her. He was followed in turn by the rest of them, led by Bennis. Gregor stopped in the foyer and looked up the stairs. Tasheba Kent had come about a third of the way down from the second floor, and she was still coming. She was dressed in a royal purple negligee with ruffles down the front and royal purple slippers. Her black wig had been pulled haphazardly over her white hair so that it looked like some kind of a lunatic hat. Geraldine Dart seemed frozen at the foot of the stairs. Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he had ever seen anyone look that green.

“Ger—al—diiiiiiiiine,” Tasheba Kent sang out in a long wailing hum.

Then she blinked, and seemed to shrivel. Then she fell. At first she just collapsed against the steps and stayed put. Then she started to roll.

“Oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, my God. She’s going to break her neck.”

Gregor Demarkian was running for the stairs before he knew it. So was Kelly Pratt. They pushed Geraldine Dart out of the way and bounded up toward Tasheba Kent. They reached out to stop the old woman rolling. She slipped past their hands and went slamming into their legs. Kelly Pratt lost his balance and staggered backward. Gregor had to twist himself into knots to keep his place. He reached out to stop the top half of Tasheba Kent’s body from rolling any farther down the stairs. The bottom half of her was braced against his legs. He got her by the head and felt her wig come off in his hands. Then he reached out and grabbed her again, and this time he got what was left of her skull.

What was
left
of her skull.

Gregor dropped Tasheba Kent’s head and stepped back a little. Geraldine Dart started to scream.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said.

Gregor leaned down and turned Tasheba Kent’s head over, so that he could get a better look at what had happened to her.

As far as he could tell, someone had taken a large round heavy object and caved in the entire left side of her head.

G
REGOR KNEW HE HAD
been wrong, terribly wrong, about everything that was going on in this house. It had all seemed so simple, and now this woman was lying against his legs, bloody and dead, and nothing made any sense at all. Outside, he could hear the wind. It was whistling through the roof gutters and making windows rattle. Inside, Mathilda Frazier had started crying in a low, steady, unrelentless way. Bennis Hannaford was patting her ineffectually on the back and looking helpless.

Gregor stepped away from the body. It had come to rest. It wasn’t going to roll anymore.

“The first thing we need to do,” he said in a calm, measured voice, “is to find a phone.”

“Right,” Kelly Pratt burst in. “That’s what we need. We need the police.”

“But we’re not going to be able to get the police over here tonight,” Geraldine Dart objected. “The storm will make it impossible.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kelly Pratt snapped. “It’s not much of a storm at all.”

Mathilda Frazier began to cry harder. “It’s just like she said before. It doesn’t have to be much of a storm. All you need is a little rain and wind, and then you’re
trapped.
”

“Could we at least have some more light in here?” Gregor asked.

This, it turned out, was easy. The chandelier at the top of the stairs was on a dimmer and could be turned up. There were bracket lights on the wall next to the rising staircase. When these were turned on, Gregor knelt down next to the body. He was not a pathologist. There could be a hundred things here he was bound to miss because he didn’t know what to look for. He knew he had to look now, as closely as he could, because if he didn’t he might not be allowed to look once the police arrived on the scene. Even without being a pathologist, the situation looked relatively simple. The crater on the side of Tasheba Kent’s head was at least three inches in diameter and irregularly shaped. Gregor guessed it had been made by a golf club or something like it, with a long handle for leverage and a round thick metal or wooden piece at the end.

A check of Tasheba Kent’s body and face revealed little. The one really disturbing thing was the wig. The old woman had taken her makeup off before she went to bed. There were no bright red and black blotches anywhere on her wrinkled face. Even the blood in the crater was going dirty brown. Underneath the wig, Tasheba Kent’s hair was thick but very white, with that tinge of hard dark yellow the hair of old people sometimes gets. The wig, though. Gregor tapped his fingers against the stair rail, bothered. The wig just did not make sense.

“She put it on after she was hit,” Gregor said suddenly.

“What?” Bennis asked him.

“The wig,” Gregor explained. “She put it on after she was hit. That’s the only way it makes sense. She was very careful about her appearance. She overdid her makeup and she wore clothes that were much too young for her, but she was careful. She would never have put a wig on that way, half on and half off, without looking at it in the mirror and checking the fit, and rearranging it if she had to.”

“Maybe she did check the fit,” Richard Fenster said doubtfully. “She was a hundred years old. Maybe she looked in the mirror and her eyes weren’t any good, and she thought it did fit.”

“If that’s what she did, she would have had to have lost her sense of touch as well as her sight. There’s a good three-inch gap between where the wig ends and where her hair ends on the side without the gash, and the wig hasn’t been pulled into the gash on the side with it. Did she sleep in a bedroom by herself?” he asked Geraldine Dart. “Or did she share a bedroom with Cavender Marsh?”

Geraldine Dart looked totally confused. “She shares a bedroom with Cavender. What difference does that make?”

Gregor stood up. Tasheba Kent started to roll again. He leaned over and caught her. He wished they could move her into the living room or the dining room or anyplace else where she might stay still, but he knew they couldn’t do that. The police would want everything in place when they arrived.

Gregor stepped carefully over the body—it made him wince, but there was nothing else he could do—and started up the stairs again.