And One to Die On (27 page)

Eventually, Geraldine decided to go back upstairs to see Gregor Demarkian because it was the only way she could think of to get any peace and quiet. Mathilda Frazier and Lydia Acken were busy stripping crepe paper from chairs and folding up the quilted crepe-paper-and-cardboard sculpture. The men were sitting around complaining. Hannah Graham was with them. The sniping was awful. It had been bad all weekend, but now it was ultrafast and supernasty. It was as if they had all decided that they had nothing to lose. They might as well be thoroughly, outrageously, unrepentantly hateful. It was more fun than staring out the windows and trying too hard to be very, very nice.

“Tasheba always hated fans,” Cavender Marsh told Richard Fenster. “She said they were vampires of the spirit.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with the surgery,” Mathilda Frazier told Hannah Graham spitefully. “You look older than your father does.”

“Do you always have to act as if you were right in the middle of a Rotary Club meeting?” Richard Fenster asked Kelly Pratt. “We have two people dead here, and you’re bouncing around like you’re cheerleading for the Chamber of Commerce.”

The only people who weren’t behaving like absolute scum were Lydia Acken and Bennis Hannaford. Geraldine knew from experience that Lydia was always polite to the point of the ridiculous. She could only decide that Bennis Hannaford had decided mentally and emotionally to distance herself from the rest of them. After a little hesitation, Bennis had gone to work helping Mathilda and Lydia clean up. Prodded by comments from Cavender Marsh and Hannah Graham—“Oh, look,” Hannah had said at one point. “The great American writer knows just what to do with Scotch tape.”—Bennis behaved as if she were blind, deaf, and dumb. Geraldine wasn’t used to thinking of Hannah Graham as Cavender Marsh’s daughter except in a very formal, abstract way. Now she saw that there was nothing at all abstract about the relationship. Hannah Graham might have been brought up by an aunt. Cavender Marsh might not have seen his daughter in nearly sixty years. But it didn’t matter. They were a lot alike.

“What I don’t understand is why people with noses like yours wear their hair forward the way you do,” Hannah told Geraldine at one point. “I mean, it only makes the protuberance much more
prominent,
doesn’t it?”

Geraldine knew she had a large nose. She had heard enough about it in her life. She had stopped really minding years ago. For some reason, however, Hannah’s comment really got to her. She was piling paper party plates in a stack and nesting paper party cups together. She stopped where she was and swung around to look at Hannah Graham.

“At least it’s my own nose,” Geraldine told her.

Hannah Graham sniffed. “Not being able to afford the necessary medical attention,” she said, “is hardly something to be proud of.”

Keeping her temper would be something to be proud of. Geraldine knew that. If she stayed in this room much longer, she was going to blow up. She was going to hit somebody on their cosmetically improved nose. Carefully, she put the stack of paper plates and the nested cups at the end of the dining room table. She wiped her palms across the top of her skirt and patted her hair. She looked at Bennis Hannaford tying a dozen balloons together with a piece of string.

“Don’t look in the mirror,” Hannah Graham said. “Every time you crack a mirror like that, it’s seven years’ bad luck.”

Geraldine went out of the dining room and into the foyer. She went up the stairs and down the guest room wing. Carlton Ji’s door was open and light was spilling out. Geraldine stopped in the doorway. Gregor Demarkian sat on the bed, taking stapled sheafs of paper out of a red cardboard folder. The bed was full of other papers and other cardboard folders. One of the cardboard folders, the bright orange one, was labeled “
LILITH BRAYNE
” in tall black letters. Geraldine raised her hand to the door and knocked.

“Mr. Demarkian?”

“Come in,” Gregor said, barely looking up. “Grab the stool and sit down.”

Geraldine did grab the stool and sit down. It gave her something to do for a moment. Gregor was still looking over the papers from the red folder. Every once in a while he would nod and mutter to himself. Finally, he pushed the folder away from himself and looked up at Geraldine, for real, for the first time.

“He was writing a book,” he told Geraldine. “He’d collected some very interesting stuff.”

“About Tasheba Kent?”

“About the death of Lilith Brayne. And about that black feather boa.”

Geraldine grimaced. “God, I’m beginning to hate that thing. Not that I ever liked it. It’s been sitting around the house for years, collecting dust. But
now.
Why do you think it was wrapped around his neck? Was something done to his neck that it was covering up?”

“Not that I could see. He may have had it with him when he died.”

“But why?”

Gregor Demarkian tapped the red folder. “He has quite a bit of documentation here about a rather odd glitch in the evidence records that exist from 1938.”

“What kind of glitch?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “on the night Lilith Brayne died, one of the things listed as being at the scene—at the general scene, you understand, in the villa, not in the water with her—was a black feather boa. That’s the only time a black feather boa is mentioned among her things. When the possessions list was made for the inquest, no black feather boa was on it. No black feather boa was ever mentioned in connection with Lilith Brayne again. But a black feather boa was worn almost every day during the investigation by Tasheba Kent, and worn very publicly, too. You can see it in every photograph of her from the time.”

“That’s odd,” Geraldine said.

“That’s very odd,” Gregor agreed. His finger absently tapped the red folder again.

“Maybe the explanation is something very simple,” Geraldine suggested. “Maybe it was just a mistake. Or maybe it belonged to Tasheba all along, and she’d left it at the villa, and Cavender sneaked it back to her after Lilith died.”

“That’s not bad. We’d have to find out if Tasheba Kent was ever in that villa before her sister died. The women I know wouldn’t have had her in the same town, under the circumstances, but movie stars seem to be unusual people.”

“Even ex-movie stars are that,” Geraldine said. She stared at her hands. “Well. Here I am. Somebody told me that if any of us had anything to tell you, we should come right up, so—”

“So you’ve come to tell me about the laughs in the night,” Gregor said.

Geraldine nodded. “But I don’t know what happened this afternoon. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“And to tell you the truth, the stuff last night wasn’t my idea, either. Well, I suppose you could have guessed that. It isn’t the kind of thing an employee does to an employer’s weekend party unless she’s looking to get fired, and I’m definitely not looking to get fired.”

“You like working here?”

“No, I don’t,” Geraldine said frankly. She sighed. “The old lady was a consummate bitch and Cavender isn’t much better. But it’s a very lucrative job. The salary is decent and there’s room and board besides. I’ve been putting quite a bit away.”

“In an attempt to retire early, I hope.”

“Very early.” Geraldine laughed. “Anyway, the idea for the ghost business was Cavender’s, and I didn’t like it much, but it seemed perfectly harmless.”

“It was just Cavender Marsh’s idea? Not Tasheba Kent’s, too?”

Geraldine shook her head. “Cavender was really worked up, you see, about what he kept calling ‘the potential for invasion of privacy.’ What he meant was that he was afraid the guests would get up here and want to talk about nothing but what had happened in 1938, and he just wasn’t going to have it. They didn’t talk about it, you know.”

“Really? Never?”

“Never while I was around. They might have talked about it when they were alone. The thing about this weekend, though, Mr. Demarkian, was that there were going to be so many people here they couldn’t control. Lydia Acken and Mathilda Frazier and Kelly Pratt don’t really count. They were all employees, in a way. They weren’t going to bring up anything Cavender didn’t want to bring up. At least, not for long.”

“No, I can see that. Especially in the case of Mathilda Frazier. She wouldn’t want to see the auction collapse.”

“The problems,” Geraldine said, “came with all the other people. Your friend Bennis Hannaford made Cavender very nervous because she insisted on bringing you. He was half sure that his uptight rich relatives had commissioned you to reopen the case and reinvestigate it and come to some final conclusions they could believe in. Cavender’s relatives never did accept the accident verdict. The ones who are still alive who were alive then just think that he’s a murderer.”

“If they do,” Gregor told her, “they haven’t said anything about it to me. And they haven’t said anything about it to Bennis, either. She would have told me.”

“Well, you and Bennis Hannaford weren’t the only problems. There was Richard Fenster, who was a wild card. There’s no telling what a fan like that will do, even a well-heeled one who can spend tons of money at auctions. And Carlton Ji was a reporter. Granted he was a reporter for
Personality
, which isn’t exactly like being a reporter for
The New York Times
, but a reporter is a reporter. The big worry, though, was Hannah. I mean, you can just imagine. Carlton was absolutely wild. At one point, he said he was going to sleep with a gun next to his bed.”

“Does he own a gun?”

“No,” Geraldine said. “But you get the idea of what things were like around here. So you see, when he decided that we ought to create a distraction to keep the guests’ minds off past history and onto the present, I went right along with it. It sounded a lot safer than guns.” She sighed again.

“It surely was,” Gregor told her. “Were these plans discussed with Tasheba Kent?”

“Oh, yes,” Geraldine said. “I think she thought it was all very silly and unnecessary, but she went along with it. I don’t think she minded all that as much as he did. I don’t mean her sister dying. I have no idea how she felt about that. I mean all the scandal and disgrace that came afterward. Her career was already over then. His was just getting into high gear. Tasheba was already a Hollywood legend. Cavender never really had a chance to become one.”

“I think he’s legend enough because of the scandal. Everybody knows who he is and what’s gone on in his life.”

“I know, but it isn’t the same thing. People don’t remember the movies he was in or even if he could act. Anyway, it bothered him more than it bothered her, but she went along with it, and I went into Boston one day last month and bought the CD player and the sound tracks.”

“Good selection,” Gregor said drily.

“I should have bought more of the generic ones,” Geraldine told him. “You know,
1001 Sounds of Terror. Werewolves of the Movies.
You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things you can buy. I brought the stuff back here and I got it all set up in the pantry. I was going to set it up in my room, just so I wouldn’t have to go running all over the house in the dark just in case something went wrong, but Cavender Marsh said that that was too dangerous. We didn’t want anybody to find the machine where it was too obvious that I was the one who was using it.”

“So it was all set up in the pantry before any of us ever arrived on the island.”

“Days before,” Geraldine confirmed. “Then, after dinner, when all the rest of you were having liqueurs and fighting with Hannah Graham, I went into the pantry and set the timer for one o’clock in the morning.”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing,” Geraldine said. “And then I went up to bed. I didn’t go to sleep. I knew I wasn’t going to get much. I stayed up and read until all the commotion started.”

“And then you came out to us.”

“That’s right.”

“Is your bedroom next to the one that Tasheba Kent shared with Cavender Marsh?”

“Not exactly.” Geraldine sounded regretful. “They have an
en suite
bathroom. I’m on the other side of that. I couldn’t have heard anything, Mr. Demarkian, no matter what it was.”

“That’s too bad.” Gregor sighed. “What about Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh? Were they supposed to come out when the commotion started?”

“Oh, no,” Geraldine said. “That was part of the plan. They were supposed to stay right where they were. And then the next morning they were supposed to come down to breakfast and say they hadn’t heard a thing. We thought that would be spookier.”

“So the first surprise you got was when Tasheba Kent started to come down the stairs?”

“That wasn’t a surprise, Mr. Demarkian. That was a
shock.
”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Move forward a little. After we had done all the searching, after the rest of us went to bed, you came downstairs again.”

“That’s right,” Geraldine said. “I’d already disconnected the machine, you see. When we searched, I made a point of being the one who went into the pantry, and I unplugged the CD and turned off the microphone. Then I went back after everybody was asleep to remove the machine and to check it, because I knew it had been tampered with. I just knew it. I was right, too. The volume had been pushed up way too high. And there’s this push-button doohickey that you can use to tell the machine how many times you want to play something, and it had been hiked way up, into the double digits, so that the laughs just played over and over again forever.”

“You sure you couldn’t have done those things yourself, accidentally?”

“Positive.”

“Who do you think could have done them?”

Geraldine threw up her hands. “I don’t
know
,” she cried. “I just don’t know. The machine wasn’t right out in the open. It was at the very back of the pantry. It wasn’t as if somebody could have just stuck their head in there and seen it. Somebody would really have had to be snooping. And why would they be snooping in the pantry?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“Cavender and Tasheba and I were the only ones who knew about it,” Geraldine said. “And Cavender wouldn’t have fiddled with the controls himself. He would have sent me to do it. And before you ask, Tasheba wouldn’t have done it either. I’m not saying she couldn’t have. She was in incredibly good shape for a woman her age. But if she was going to do anything to that CD player, she was going to shut it off.”