And One to Die On (7 page)

“The problem with people like Darcy Bentley,” Bennis told Gregor later, adding a tall glass of Drambuie on the rocks to her cigarette in an effort to calm herself down, “is that they don’t have to take anything else seriously, so they take this seriously instead. Except they take it seriously in the wrong way. I mean, there is no Zedalia. I made it up.”

“How do you know Darcy Bentley doesn’t have anything else serious to worry about?” Gregor asked her.

Bennis shrugged. “That little flower-print hippie dress of hers came from Jennifer House. I’ll bet it cost three hundred dollars.”

In the store, Gregor didn’t notice Darcy Bentley’s clothes, only her face, which seemed to have taken on an odd glow. Bennis Hannaford had arrived, and Darcy Bentley was like a moon, taking its warmth from the sun.

“Oh, we’re so excited to have you here,” Darcy Bentley kept saying, over and over again. “You have no idea. We’ve been hoping for something like this for years.”

Somewhere in the middle of these effusions, the door to the store swung open and another woman came in. She was shorter and fatter and older than Darcy, but her height and weight and age were beside the point. What struck Gregor was her outfit, which had gone beyond the bizarre and entered the realm of the flagrantly eccentric. On her head the fat woman wore a tall conical cap of embroidered jade green satin. From its point, two dark green satin ribbons fluttered down, as if she were a maypole. Her dress was embroidered jade green satin, too. If you could call it a dress. It fell to her feet and hung like a judge’s robes or a graduation gown. It was her footwear that impressed Gregor the most, though. Each of her embroidered jade green slippers had a cluster of jingle bells on the toe. The jingle bells jingled when she walked.

“Oh, Natalia,” Darcy crowed, as soon as she saw this woman come in. “I’m glad you’re the first one here. This is
Bennis Hannaford.
”

“How do you do.” Instead of holding her hand out to be shaken, Natalia dropped to one knee and kissed the hem of Bennis’s tweed skirt. Bennis nearly jumped out of her skin. Natalia struggled to her feet. “I see you’ve come in disguise,” she said. “That may have been a very wise thing. I seemed to attract some of the most peculiar reactions on the bus coming over here today.”

“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Bennis said, in a weak voice.

Natalia was perfectly happy to shake Gregor’s hand.

After that there was a lengthy silence, during which Darcy and Natalia gazed adoringly at Bennis, and Bennis cast around desperately for something to say. Gregor was just beginning to get desperate himself, when the door opened and three more women came in. Like Natalia, they were in costume, two in peaked hats and robes and one in embroidered satin trousers and an embroidered satin tunic. In Zedalia, Gregor surmised, the women of the nobility must go around exclusively in embroidered satin. Gregor had read one or two of Bennis’s books, but he could never remember what was in them. With the knights and the ladies and the unicorns and the magic, they never made any sense to him. Like Natalia, the three new women dropped to the floor and kissed the hem of Bennis’s skirt. Bennis leaned over until her lips were touching Gregor’s ear and hissed, “I need a
very
large glass of Scotch and a cigarette.”

Gregor needed the Scotch himself. He had never smoked. The three women stood up and smiled shyly at Bennis. Darcy Bentley introduced them as Katania, Melinda, and Allamanda. Obviously their names, like their costumes, had been taken from one novel or the other of Zedalian life. From what Gregor remembered, there was a companion world to Zedalia in Bennis’s novels, called Zed. Zed was populated entirely by men. He wondered if there were little groups of men somewhere who dressed up in the costumes of Zed and practiced on each other the secret handshakes and underground codes of Zed’s nobility. It was depressing to think about it, but there probably were.

“Oh, Miss Hannaford,” Katania said. “I’m so glad to meet you. There are so many questions I want to ask you.”

“We
all
want to ask you,” Melinda said.

“I want you to answer one question right away,” Allamanda said. “I just can’t wait for the answer.”

“Sure,” Bennis said recklessly. “Ask away.”

“Well,” Allamanda said, quite seriously. “Do you write your books yourself, or are they channeled?”

It went downhill from there, way downhill, and rapidly, like a boulder falling off the side of Mount Everest. More women came in, and as they did Gregor began to realize that no one was going to show up at this reading who was not in costume. What was more, both the costumes and the behavior grew increasingly odd. At some point, the crowd reached critical mass, and they began to talk funny. Gregor caught perfectly sensible syllables, but they didn’t seem to translate into words.

“Zia dum gorno rok,”
Darcy Bentley seemed to be saying to Natalia.

“Gorno tok dem barnia beldap,”
Natalia answered.

“What’s going on here?” Gregor asked Bennis. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“Do you know what’s going on here?”

Bennis sighed. “They’re speaking Zedalian,” she explained. “There’s a chapter in
Zedalia in Winter
that supposedly outlines how to translate Zedalian into English and vice versa.”

“Supposedly?”

“Well, you couldn’t prove it by me, Gregor. I’ve never tried to make it work.”

Bennis didn’t try to make it work now, either. When people spoke to her in Zedalian, she ignored them, and when Darcy asked her if she could read in Zedalian—“We thought it might be a relief for you to hear your work in its original language; and we all understand it here.”—Bennis adamantly refused. For a moment, Gregor thought she was going to refuse to do the reading at all, but she was much too much of a professional for that. She got out the manuscript she had been working on back in Philadelphia—at readings, Bennis had explained to Gregor on the drive to Boston, the audience always prefers works in progress—and recited three pages of it with suitable vocal flourish. When people cried out “Great Goddess, hosanna,” in the middle of everything, for no reason at all, she acted as if she hadn’t heard them. When the reading was over and Natalia leapt to her feet to do a bell dance around a paperback copy of
Zedalia in Love and War
she had thrown to the floor, Bennis simply got up, went over to the desk, and took her pen out in preparation for signing books. Nobody seemed to notice that she was not participating in the festivities. Nobody seemed to notice much of anything. A lot of people had joined Natalia in her bell dance.

“What it is, I think,” Bennis told Gregor back at the hotel, while she dragged on a Benson & Hedges menthol as if it were an oxygen mask, “is that people need to identify with something, and they don’t want to identify with their families anymore. Families are supposed to be a drag. So instead, they identify with a fictional landscape, like Zedalia.”

“If you drink any more of that stuff,” Gregor told her, “you’re going to be in no shape to drive us to Maine tomorrow morning.”

“What worries me, Gregor, is that I might be contributing to the spread of schizophrenia. I might be causing schizophrenia that wouldn’t otherwise exist in the world.”

Back at the bookstore, all Bennis had been interested in was getting finished and getting out, but it hadn’t been easy. The customers had hundreds of books for her to sign, and even after she’d signed them, they hadn’t wanted to let her go. No sooner had Bennis pushed away the last copy of any of her books existing anywhere in the Cambridge Full Fantasy Bookstore, than Darcy Bentley and Natalia came running up, carrying something large between them that was covered by a sheet.

“Look,” Darcy Bentley squealed, pulling the sheet off with her left hand. “Look what we got for you. And it was just a miracle that we were able to find it.”

What they had found was a gigantic porcelain replica of a Stone Age fertility goddess, four feet high and almost as wide, with great drooping heavy breasts and a belly the size and shape of an NBA regulation basketball. Underneath the belly there were feet, but there didn’t seem to be legs. On the head there were long wild tresses of hair that stood up at the ends. Around the neck curled a long snake with flashing green eyes.

The statue had flashing green eyes, too. That’s because the eyes on the snake and on the statue’s head were tiny green light bulbs, and the whole thing was kept working by four CC batteries and a little nest of plastic-coated wires.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Darcy demanded. “We took one look at it and
knew
that
nothing
else on earth would ever come so close to expressing the spirit of your books.”

Sitting in the Hilton dining room in front of her pitcher of orange juice and an enormous fruit salad, Bennis looked more depressed than Gregor had ever remembered seeing her. She was only picking at her fresh pineapple, which was her favorite thing on earth after dark chocolate. She hadn’t touched her coffee. She had drunk most of the pitcher of orange juice, but Gregor thought that that was mostly because she was hung over. She had to be hung over. After coming back from the bookstore last night, she had put away half of a large bottle of Drambuie, and no dinner.

“Come on.” Gregor nudged her foot gently under the table. “Cheer up a little. We’ve got a long drive.”

“I know we do,” Bennis said. “But do you know what I was just thinking?”

“No.”

“I was just thinking that they aren’t alone. Those people at the bookstore last night. They’re more colorful about it than most people, but most people are crazy.”

“Are they?”

Bennis nodded gloomily. “Take the people we’re going up to Maine today to see. Cavender Marsh. Do you remember Cavender Marsh?”

“Movie star from the ’30s,” Gregor said. “Had an affair with his wife’s sister. Wife died, possibly a suicide. He ran off with the sister. We’ve been through all this before.”

“I know we have. I know we have. But bear with me. In the first place, his name isn’t really Cavender Marsh. It’s John Day. He was—what? My mother’s first cousin once removed?”

“He was your mother’s second cousin. Your mother’s first cousins once removed were the children of her cousins. Your mother’s second cousins are the children of your mother’s parents’ cousins. And there isn’t anything crazy about a man changing his name when he becomes an actor. People do it all the time.”

“I think you’d have to be from the Main Line to understand how a connection like my mother’s second cousin could get me into a mess like this,” Bennis said. “I’m from the Main Line and I barely understand it.”

“I was just trying to point out that, your pessimism notwithstanding, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the lunatic fringe here yet.”

Bennis speared a piece of pineapple and bit off the end of it. “I think there’s enough on the lunatic fringe in this thing to satisfy a psychiatrist for a decade. Her name isn’t really Tasheba Kent, by the way. It’s Thelma.”

“Kent?”

“That’s right. And her sister called herself Lilith Brayne, but her name was really Lillian Kent. Can you imagine anyone wanting to name themselves Lilith, especially in the United States in the ’20s, with all that Bible-thumping and anti-Darwin stuff going on?”

“Sure. It was probably worth its weight in publicity.”

“Well, if it was, it was the wrong kind of publicity,” Bennis said. “Tasheba was the sexy bad-girl one. Lilith was the ever-pure virgin who got tied to the railroad tracks by the villain. They used to have Tasheba Kent-Lilith Brayne film festivals when I was in college.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them in the movies. I don’t even remember the case, although I was alive at the time. I think I was five.”

“The case was absolutely huge,” Bennis said, “and it was crazy even if nothing else was. I mean, Lilith Brayne was ground up by a hacksaw or something—”

“She fell into an irrigation sluice and was battered by the steel wire grate,” Gregor corrected mildly. “Why do you do things like this? You always make the gore more gory than it was.”

“It was pretty gory, Gregor. There was an article about it a couple of years ago in
Life,
one of those retrospective things. It said that not much was left of her but her face.”

“They were probably exaggerating,” Gregor said.

“And then the two of them that were left ran off to that island, and they’ve never come out and rejoined the world. Don’t you think that’s lunatic enough? Tasheba Kent was all washed up, but Cavender Marsh still had a pretty important career going. And he just walked right away from it.”

“I doubt if there would have been much of it remaining when the scandal died down,” Gregor said. “There’s only so much you can get away with, even if you’re a Hollywood actor. Wasn’t there a child involved?”

“They ditched her on a relative. She was three months old, and Cavender Marsh never saw her again. She’s supposed to be out at the island this weekend.”

Gregor frowned. “That’s not a very good idea. This will be the first time she’s seen her father since all that happened in 1938?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe they’ve been corresponding,” Gregor said, “or talking on the phone.”

Bennis shook her head. “There’s been nothing like that at all. I asked my brother Christopher about it. He always knows everything about everybody we’re connected to. He says Cavender Marsh has never said so much as a single word to his daughter in all this time, never even sent her a birthday card or a Christmas present, and it wasn’t his idea for her to come to the birthday party, either. His lawyer insisted. It has something to do with selling their things at auction, just like having me there does. The lawyer insists on having a representative of the heirs on each side of the family there to oversee what goes into the sale. Although why any of us on our side are supposed to care is beyond me. You know how the Main Line feels about Hollywood. After Cavender Marsh became an actor, my grandmother wouldn’t have him in the house.”

“I wish your brother Christopher could have taken your place on this weekend. Then I wouldn’t have had to come up myself. Eat your fruit salad, Bennis. I want us to get started in plenty of time. I don’t want us to be late for that boat.”