Read Online And One to Die On by Jane Haddam - Free Book Online Page B

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.