And One to Die On by Jane Haddam Page B

said. Her gaze was still on the water. “This is that woman’s hundredth birthday, isn’t it? Maybe some secret admirer somewhere wants to send her a cake.”
    “You can’t get out there at all when the weather’s bad,” a voice said.
    They all turned to look at the man who had come out of the larger shack on the pier to mend his ropes. He had let them fall to the boardwalk at his feet and now he tilted his chair back to rest against the shack.
    “You can’t get from there to here when the weather’s bad, either,” he went on. “Too many rocks. Too hard to dock.”
    Hannah Graham walked over to him. She looked him up and down. “Do they ever come out, Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh? Do they ever come into town and just walk around?”
    “Not anymore they don’t,” the man at the shack said. “They did when I was a kid, but that was forty years ago.”
    Hannah Graham put her glasses back on her nose. “Somebody I knew once said that island was just like Alcatraz.”
    “A lot of people say that,” the man at the shack replied. “I don’t think Alcatraz had fifteen marble bathrooms.”
    Now, faintly, Gregor could hear the sound of an outboard motor. It was not a very powerful outboard motor—he hoped they had something bigger out there; with a hundred-year-old woman in the house, they needed it—and its hum was almost drowned out by the sound of the sea slapping against the pilings of the piers. The man at the shack was the only one to have caught it besides Gregor. He stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand.
    “There she is. That’s Gerry coming in.”
    “Who’s Gerry?” Carlton Ji asked. “Geraldine Dart. Miss Kent’s and Mr. Marsh’s secretary,” Lydia Acken answered.
    “I didn’t know secretaries knew how to drive boats,” Carlton Ji said.
    The boat was now close enough so that all of them could hear it, and see it too. It was a small launch with a sharply edged prow and a squared-off rear. Gregor tried to remember what the rear end of a boat was called. The boat looked to him like the right size for a small example of what people called a cabin cruiser, except that it didn’t seem to have a cabin.
    As they watched, the boat slowed down and began to almost drift toward one of the empty docking places. When it got close enough to the wood to actually hit it, its motor cut off almost completely. The man at the shack moved down the boardwalk and out along the dock toward the boat. A plain young woman was standing in the bow and preparing to throw a rope at a post. She threw the rope to the man from the shack instead.
    “Hello, Gerry,” the man from the shack said. “These here are your passengers.”
    “Hello, Jason.”
    Gerry grabbed the hand Jason was holding out to her and let herself be helped onto the pier. Then she stood straight and looked over at the assembled company. She’s something worse than plain, Gregor thought, but even so he liked her face. There was vitality in it, and humor, and intelligence. She had checked them out and looked them over and decided she wasn’t impressed with them at all.
    “Oh, Miss Dart,” Lydia Acken said, coming forward. “It’s very good to see you again. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Lydia Acken.”
    “I remember you, Miss Acken.” Miss Dart looked past the group to the enormous pile of luggage Hannah Graham’s driver had unloaded from the limousine. “I’m only taking people in this trip,” Miss Dart announced. “Somebody will come back for the luggage later.”
    Hannah Graham thrust herself forward. “I can’t possibly allow you to leave my luggage here. I have valuable things in it.”
    “Someone will be back for the luggage later,” Miss Dart repeated.
    “I don’t think you realize who I am,” Hannah Graham said.
    Geraldine Dart gave Hannah Graham such a withering look of contempt, it would have turned any normal human being to stone.
    “I don’t have to know who you are,” she said. “All I have to know