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  MORE PRAISE FOR

  CHEATING AT SOLITAIRE

  “Haddam is at her best… presenting a glimpse into the celebrity world readers will not easily forget.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[This] series keeps getting better, each novel just a little more dramatic, more thought-provoking, and more entertaining than the last… It’s about time she gets the A-list status she so richly deserves.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Haddam is clearly having a good time skewering the obsession with aging teen starlets and their hangers-on.”

  —Charlotte Observer

  “More compelling than most mysteries, Cheating at Solitaire manages a good sense of humor and tight, sharp writing. Haddam lets us ponder celebrity and its meaning, the powerful symbiosis between stars and the public, and our own complicity in the frenzy.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  …AND FOR JANE HADDAM’S OTHER GREGOR DEMARKIAN NOVELS

  GLASS HOUSES

  One of those novels that has everything going for it: a crackling plot, an astonishing cast of characters and the best literary exploration of Philadelphia since the works of John O’Hara… Haddam has created an elegant, stylish work with great appeal.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Exhilarating.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Haddam has been writing for many years but manages to produce each time a layered, richly peopled and dryly witty book with a plot of mind-bending complexity.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  MORE…

  “Ranks among her most satisfying, not only because of its intricate plot but also because of its setting and Demark-ian’s endearingly infuriating supporting cast… Haddam’s Demarkian novels are becoming weightier, perhaps more somber, but also more intriguing—tightly crafted and polished puzzlers well worth the intellectual exercise they demand.”

  —The Strand Magazine

  “Intelligent, thoughtful… Haddam elevates this twisty whodunit far above most.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  HARDSCRABBLE ROAD

  “A captivating literate mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “This latest Demarkian tale is spot-on… there’s no slowing this sleuth down.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Outstanding.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Gregor Demarkian is as compelling and intriguing as ever.”

  —Booklist

  THE HEADMASTER’S WIFE

  “Sharp, intelligent and inventive—the kind of mysteries a Dorothy L. Sayers or Josephine Tey might have been proud to come up with.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Campus politics and intrigue intermingle with sex, suicide and possibly murder in… [this] compelling portrait of a closed society rife with sleaze under its veneer of respectability and prestige.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  CONSPIRACY THEORY

  “Devotees of strongly written, intelligent mysteries will be pleased that Haddam remains hard at work.”

  —Booklist

  “[A] fascinating study in conspiracies and those who adhere to them… The book is as up-to-date as today’s headlines.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  SOMEBODY ELSE’S MUSIC

  “Fresh… suspects and victims who are as fascinating and entertaining as her recurring cast… riveting!”

  —January Magazine

  “Dazzlingly ingenious, Jane Haddam’s novels provide style, humor, and philosophy—they’re real spellbinders, sparklingly written and smashingly plotted.”

  —Drood Review

  TRUE BELIEVERS

  “An engrossingly complex mystery that should win further acclaim for its prolific and talented author.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Haddam is a fine and compassionate writer, and Demmarkian… is one of the more interesting series leads in the mystery marketplace. It’s a pleasure to find a solid mystery combined with engaging discussions of issues outside the genre. A guaranteed winner.”

  —Booklist

  SKELETON KEY

  “Sophisticated style, excellent delivery, and riveting plot.”

  —Library Journal

  “A delightful read for lovers of classic crime stories.”

  —Romantic Times

  The Gregor Demarkian Books by Jane Haddam

  Skeleton Key

  True Believers Somebody Else’s Music

  Conspiracy Theory

  The Headmaster’s Wife

  Hardscrabble Road

  Glass Houses

  Cheating at

  Solitaire

  A Gregor Demarkian Novel

  Jane Haddam

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  CHEATING AT SOLITAIRE

  Copyright © 2008 by Orania Papazoglou.

  Excerpt from Living Witness copyright © 2009 by Orania Papazoglou.

  Cover photo of house © Gary Buss/Getty Images.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-94340-7

  EAN: 978-0-312-94340-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / April 2008

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / April 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cheating at

  Solitaire

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Epilogue

  Living Witness

  Prologue

  1

  There were things that Annabeth Falmer understood, and things she did not understand, and among the things she understood the least was what she was doing on Margaret’s Harbor in the middle of the biggest nor’easter to hit New England since 1853.

  Actually, she didn’t understand what she was doing on Margaret’
s Harbor at all, but thinking about that made her head ache, and the last thing she needed in the face of snow coming down at two inches an hour was a headache. She was only about a mile from the center of Oscartown, but she didn’t think she’d be able to make it in for a spare bottle of aspirin.

  It was two o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 31st, but it might as well have been the middle of the night. The world outside Annabeth’s window was not black, but it was impossible to see anything in. The snow was so heavy, she was in a kind of whiteout. The only visibility was to the east of her, where the ocean was, and even that was like something out of a surrealist aesthetic. She could see waves, white-tipped and agitated. She could see snow piling into drifts against the tall metal parking meters that had been set out along the beach for people who came in from the landlocked towns. Most of all, she could see the tall oceanward tower of the Point. There was a light on up there, the way there always was now that Kendra Rhode had taken up residence for the duration.

  “Who in the name of God names a baby Kendra?” Annabeth said, to the cat, who was the only one besides herself at home. She was talking to the cat a lot lately. It was probably inevitable, but it still made her feel oddly sick at the pit of her stomach. Things had not worked out as badly as she had thought they would, back in the days when she lay awake night after night not knowing how she was going to get through another week, but they hadn’t exactly worked out as a triumph, either.

  The cat’s name was Creamsicle because that’s what he looked like: oddly orange and white the way the ice-cream bar had looked in Annabeth’s childhood. She tried not to wonder if there were Creamsicles for sale any longer—everything seemed to disappear, except the things that didn’t, and those tended to be around forever—and got the cat off the ledge of the landing window. He was a small cat, less than a year old. Annabeth wasn’t sure he had ever seen snow before.

  “Trust me,” she told him, dropping him down onto the kitchen floor as soon as she walked through the door. “You only think you want to go out. It’s cold out there, and wet, and there isn’t a single cat treat for miles.”

  Then she got the cat treats out and gave him three different colored ones on the mat next to his food bowl. She was a compact, middle-aged woman, thinner than she should have been, with hair that had gone gray so long ago she couldn’t remember what color it had been before. Even so, she didn’t think she was really becoming one of those people, the ones who spent all their time by themselves and talked to their cats and knitted things they never used, the ones who were found dead after a month and a half because the neighbors smelled something odd coming out of the apartment.

  For one thing, Annabeth thought, she didn’t knit. For another, this was not an apartment, but a house, and an expensive one, and her sons called four times a day trying to make sure she wasn’t completely suicidal. It was one of the few things she didn’t mind about this nor’easter. It had reduced cell phone reception to absolutely nil.

  She filled the kettle full of water and put it on to boil. She got her violently orange teapot down from the shelf over the sink and dumped two large scoops of loose Double Bergamot Earl Grey into the bottom of it. The tea was a bad sign, but the teapot wasn’t. It hadn’t occurred to her, when she’d told John and Robbie that what she really wanted was to spend a year on Margaret’s Harbor with nothing to do but read, that she would actually spend her time worrying that she was turning into a cliché out of something by Agatha Christie.

  Or, worse, something out of Tennessee Williams, or William Faulkner. The neighbors would come in, drawn by the smell, and find not only her dead body on the floor of the kitchen, but the dead bodies of all her old lovers buried in the root cellar right under the basket of fiddlehead ferns.

  “I’m going slowly but surely out of my mind,” she said, to the cat again. The kettle went off, and she poured the water from it into the teapot. Then she got a tray, a mug, a tiny mug-sized strainer, and her copy of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Moral Imagination and headed on out for the living room. The storm could scream and moan as much as it liked. She had two industrial-sized generators. She could keep her electricity going in the middle of a nuclear attack.

  She put everything down on the coffee table, poured herself some tea through the strainer, and curled up in her big overstuffed chair. This was the way she had imagined herself, last year, when she had been talking about this to her sons. She had seen herself, comfortable and surrounded by books and cats, reading without having to think about anything else in the world. It hadn’t occurred to her that the utter sameness of it would get boring faster than watching The Sopranos had.

  The cat jumped into her lap just as she heard the first of the heavy thuds against her kitchen door. She put her hand up to stroke him and said, “I’m an ungrateful idiot, do you know that? They gave me absolutely everything I ever wanted, and some things I didn’t even think of, and I’m about ready to plug my fingers into a wall socket, it’s so out-of-my-mind dull.”

  There was another thud, and this time she paid attention. She put the mug away from her and looked around.

  “Do you think it’s an animal?” she said. “I can’t imagine it would be a person out in all that. Even Melissandra Rhode isn’t as crazy as that.”

  The third thud was heavier and more dangerous than the other two had been. Annabeth could hear the wood straining under whatever was hitting it. She put the book down and got up. You could see the ocean from the kitchen windows. Whoever had built this house had wanted to watch the waves at the breakfast table. Still, it couldn’t be the sea coming in. Not this fast. And it couldn’t be a tree branch blown loose by the wind. It sounded like something soft.

  “I should watch television,” she told the cat. “At least I wouldn’t be rewriting Freddy Krueger movies in my head.”

  She went back to the kitchen and looked around. She looked out the big windows at the sea, but it was comfortably far away, although choppy. She looked at the walk that wrapped around the house at that side, but saw nothing but untouched snow. She looked around the kitchen, and wondered what she had been thinking when she bought two complete sets of Le Creuset pots to hang from the hooks over the center island.

  “One of those is going to fall on my head one day and give me a concussion,” she said, not even to the cat this time. The cat was still in the living room, curled up on a cushion. Then there was another thud, and this time it was distinctly accompanied by giggling.

  “What the hell,” Annabeth said.

  She made her way out into the pantry, its four tall walls covered floor to ceiling with shelves. She went into the little mud area with its benches and pegs for holding outerwear so that it didn’t muck up the rest of the house in bad weather. She stood very still and listened. The giggling really was giggling, not just the wind, she was sure of it. Sometimes it sounded not so much like giggling as it did like crying. The kitchen door had no window. There was no way to tell without opening up.

  “What the hell,” Annabeth said, thinking that if there really was some half-crazed homicidal maniac out there, ready to rip her into body parts before he disappeared into the storm, she almost owed it to him to cooperate. Anybody who wanted anything badly enough to go through that storm to get it, ought to have it.

  “Not really,” Annabeth said. She missed the cat. It gave her a cover so that she didn’t have to recognize the fact that she had started to talk to herself.

  She grabbed the knob of the door, turned it to the right, yanked the door forward, and stepped back.

  She was just in time. The young woman who came falling through at her couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she fell hard nonetheless, and she fell far, too.

  It took a minute or two, but Annabeth worked it out. This was definitely somebody she recognized, even if she couldn’t remember what the woman’s name was, but that was the least of it. The most was a toss-up between the clothing—a pale blue-silver, sleeveless minidress, hiked up to beyond bey
ond—and the hair. Annabeth thought she’d go with the hair. It would have been long and blond under other circumstances, but at the moment it was black and sticky and covered with blood.

  2

  Marcey Mandret was pretty sure that Stewart Gordon was mad at her—furious, in fact—but the information made no sense, and she was too tired to think about it. Besides, what did he have to be mad at her for? He wasn’t her father, for God’s sake, or her uncle, or even her agent, and this wasn’t a working day anyway. The snow had started coming down like crazy hours ago, and everybody had just packed up and gone to what amounted to home. Marcey hated Margaret’s Harbor with a passion. It didn’t matter to her that presidents had vacationed here, or that Kendra Rhode’s family had had a summer place here since before the Civil War. Nobody cared what people like that did anymore. People cared about Kendra only because she had started hanging out with people like Marcey, although Marcey was fairly sure—there it went again, that weird zinging in her head, as if there were a live electrical wire up there somewhere—that that wasn’t the way it was playing in the papers. It made her furious, it really did, that the papers and the television stations all made it sound like Kendra was the Most Important Person in the History of the World, even though Kendra didn’t do anything except wear clothes and look really tall.

  Stewart Gordon was over there against the wall, staring at her. His head was as bald as if he’d shaved it, but people said he’d lost his hair when he wasn’tweventy years old. He was a lot older than that now. He was ancient. And he was a snob. He was always carrying around the kind of book Marcey was sure nobody actually read; they just liked to be seen carrying it because it made them look smarter than everybody else. She didn’t care how smart Stewart Gordon was. He was a loser in the only way that counted. He was getting only five million dollars for this picture, and Marcey was getting seven.