13

“You have a cut on your back.”

“Yes.” While Jack was raking the Japanese garden, Radliegh’s secretary, Nancy Dunbar, had come into the garden with a cup of coffee. She sat on the bench she and Jack had used the day before and lit a cigarette.

“Don’t let it get sunburned,” she said, “or you’ll have a scar there forever.”

“I know.”

It was early Saturday morning. Jack was in the shade of the garden’s wall.

“Do you have anything to tell me?” Nancy Dunbar asked.

His first time doing such a thing, Jack was trying to make an interesting design on the garden’s sand with his rake.

Did he have anything to tell her? In Nancy Dunbar’s words, “Any plans you hear anybody make; if you see people together you think don’t belong together; comments you hear people make about each other, Mr. Beauville, me, Doctor Radliegh….”

Only a few hours before, in the dark of his bedroom, he had found himself sucking his own blood from the tits of Doctor Radliegh’s younger daughter.

Jack had heard that same daughter say she didn’t care if her father was murdered; had heard Duncan Radliegh admit he had cheated to graduate from college, lied about applying to any business school, considered disobeying and selling stock in Radliegh Mirror to support his car racing interest and, Jack surmised, his drug habit.

He had seen the elder son, Chet, All-American quarter back, betrothed to Shana Staufel, demand sexual attention from the stableboy.

He knew there was a duffel bag full of beer under Peppy’s bed.

He had seen Doctor Radliegh himself and Shana Staufel sitting on a bench in a rose garden at dusk talking quietly while holding hands.

He had heard local people mock Nancy Dunbar.

“No,” Jack said. “Nothing.”

“You’ve heard, seen nothing which might be of interest to us?” Nancy Dunbar asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re making the design in the sand too tight,” Nancy said. “Loosen up.”

“Loosen up?”

“Yes. Relax with the rake. Use it as a paintbrush.”

“I’ve never used a paintbrush,” Jack said, “except to paint a garage.”

“Think of an abstract painting,” Nancy said. “Make big swirls, curves, straight lines at odd angles.”

“Oh.”

“You’re too tight.”

He started over. He didn’t know what to do with the sand around the big, jagged rocks in the garden. He sensed the lines made by the rake’s tines ought not dead-end at the rocks, but flow around them somehow.

“It’s Saturday morning,” Jack said. “Not even eight o’clock.”

“Yes.” Nancy lit another cigarette.

“You work every day of the week?”

“I’m supposed to have Saturday afternoons and Sundays off.”

“Do you?”

“Maybe once a month. This isn’t a job, it’s a living. Doctor Radliegh’s mind never stops. And when he wants something, he wants it right away. He himself keeps a very tight schedule, but he never really knows, or cares, what time of day it is, or even what day it is. It’s a little hard to understand that, at first. It seems contradictory, doesn’t it?”

“Is that all right with you?”

“That’s fine with me. I am going to be able to leave here someday reasonably young, and very rich.”

“That’s nice.”

“By the way, there’s a big party here tonight.”

“You mentioned it.”

“You’re serving drinks, whatever.”

“Drinks? Here? At Vindemia?”

“Of course. Chester can’t dictate the habits of the whole world. Show up at the kitchens of the main house about five thirty. White shorts, dress white shirt. They’ll give you a blue bow tie when you get there.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me anything odd you hear, see, tonight.”

“Okay.”

“In the meantime, you can take this afternoon off.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean, don’t plan to leave Vindemia, in case somebody wants you. Like, go for a swim, or something.”

Eric Beauville, dressed in plaid shorts and a pink short-sleeved shirt, stood in the arched gateway of the Japanese garden. He had a manila folder in one hand.

“No, you’d better not go for a swim,” Nancy said. “You don’t want that cut on your back to scar.”

Beauville said, “A gardening accident?”

Jack said, “I got scraped.”

“Sure,” Beauville said. “Did the same tree give you those hickeys on your neck and chest?”

Nancy Dunbar looked at Jack with narrowed eyes.

Laughing, Beauville sat on the bench next to Nancy.

“I’m blessed by far-sightedness.”

“Who—?” Nancy started to ask.

Beauville nudged her. “Gimme a cigarette.”

She did so, and lit it for him.

“It’s nice that ladies can carry purses,” Beauville said, inhaling gratefully. “If old Chester ever spotted a package of cigarettes on me, he’d tongue whip me for weeks, and see that my health insurance premiums tripled.” He took another deep drag. “Yet I don’t seem to be able to get off this Goddamned place without an excuse from a doctor, which I can’t get, because Chester’s got a kept doctor on the estate.”

Nancy said, “I thought you were to play in a golf tournament in Sea Island this morning.”

“‘Were’ is right.” Beauville exhaled. “I were. Our inspired leader called me at five fifteen a.m. demanding a complete review of his Will, Estate, Trusts, cash in hand …”

“You mean ‘Will,’” Nancy asked, “as in Last Will and Testament?”

“Last Will and Testicles,” Beauville said. “Nicolson is flying in from Atlanta. Clarence is on his way here from Ronckton.”

Jack asked them: “Am I suppose to disappear at this point?”

“Naw,” Beauville said. “Without even checking, I know you’re not mentioned in the Will, What’s-your-name.”

Jack said, “That’s a relief.”

“I like the design you’re making,” Beauville said. “Nice and tight.”

“Thanks.”

“And you don’t look a bit Japanese.”

“Sorry.”

“Too tight,” Nancy said.

“That’s what I can do to annoy Chester,” Beauville said. “I can put the proposition to him seriously: If he has a Japanese garden, why doesn’t he have a Japanese gardener? I’ll hint he might be charged with discrimination.”

Nancy said, “He’d take it seriously.”

“I know he would. Someday I’d like to drive him as nuts as he drives me.”

“You’re not smart enough, Eric,” Nancy said.

Beauville said, “I can try.”

“What could he be thinking?” Nancy asked. “Why the rush review of his estate?”

Beauville extinguished his cigarette against the sole of his loafer. “Maybe Jim Wilson’s being killed by lethal gas in a laboratory where there wasn’t known to be any lethal gas yesterday has something to do with it.” He handed his cigarette butt to Nancy.

“Jim must have been planning some experiments of his own.” She put Beauville’s cigarette butt into the Ziploc baggy in her purse. “Or someone else at the lab was.”

“Sure,” Beauville said. “There’s an explanation for everything.”

Dunbar said, “Things happen.”

Beauville said to Nancy. “Chester didn’t want me to play in that golf tournament this morning. He never wants me to leave Vindemia. He’s afraid someone reasonable might make me an offer to run a reasonable company and live a reasonable way of life.”

“You never would,” Nancy said.

Beauville said: “In a heartbeat.”

He stood up. “Come on. You have to help me get some papers out of one of the smaller, underground, bombproof safes.”

She collected her purse and her empty coffee cup.

Looking at Jack’s raked design in the sand, Beauville said, “It’s gettin’ too loose now. I liked it better before.”

Scurrying after Beauville, Nancy Dunbar said, “It’s still too tight.”