Lucienne Ronay retired from the room in a flurry of applause and Ted Flythe reclaimed the microphone. For the next half hour, he reviewed the rules of cribbage and reminded them that a player must win four out of seven games to advance. "Double elimination. Those of you who have played our tournaments before know it takes skill, luck and stamina to play for two straight days. We'll begin with two rounds tonight and pick it up tomorrow morning at nine o'clock sharp."
The bearded young man next directed their attention to several men and women positioned around the room. All wore navy blue blazers with Graphic Games logos on their breast pockets and toothpaste smiles of helpfulness on their youthful faces.
"If there's any discussion or misunderstanding,, just raise your hand and one of our referees will come over immediately. And now, ladies and gentlemen, you may cut for the deal. Low card deals first and may the best player WIN!"
Amid the flurry of applause, Tillie shyly offered their deck of cards to Commander Dixon. She cut the three of clubs, but he turned the deuce. When he'd finished dealing and their crib cards were lying face down off to the side, she cut the deck again. Tillie turned over the top card. It was a jack.
"His nibs," he murmured happily and pegged the first two points. Maybe he wouldn't get blown out of the water so quickly after all.
The large room settled into a low murmur of voices, the riffle of cards, an occasional burst of laughter, or a smothered oath as the right-or more often wrong-card was cut before the play of each hand.
After two hands, Tillie began to relax. Commander Dixon was a skillful opponent and he sensed that she was probably a better player, but as Lieutenant
Harald had noted earlier, luck was a big part of the game and luck was keeping him slightly ahead of her skill.
Play was brisk and after only five deals, they were heading down the homestretch. She would be ahead of him when she finished pegging this hand; but he'd have first count on the next and if his luck continued, he'd win.
"I'm afraid you have position on me," Commander Dixon said ruefully as she started to peg her points.
Somehow the wooden peg slipped through her fingers, dropped on the lap of her scarlet gown, and skittered under the table.
"I'll get it," Tillie said, pushing back his chair.
Commander Dixon peered beneath the table and nudged the peg toward him with the tip of her neat satin slipper.
At that exact instant, Zachary Wolferman pegged across the finish line with a double-double run and complacently inserted a peg into the game hole to mark his win.
There was an immediate, blinding flash of blue light. The board exploded with a horrendous bang. The table splintered with the impact and Tillie was buried beneath it. Stunned silence gripped the room for an instant and then the screams began.
4
IT was a little past nine and Sigrid and her mother were already late when Anne Harald finally located her airline ticket jumbled into one of her camera cases. The editor of a large magazine was gambling that a certain elderly Peruvian poet would finally win a Nobel prize in literature and had made arrangements for Anne to do an extensive photo-interview with him before he dropped dead of old age.
They came rushing down from Anne's apartment, Sigrid feeling guilty because she'd taken advantage of her NYPD tag and parked in front of a fire hydrant. As they hurried from the bright lobby down a sidewalk shadowed by oak trees that still held their leaves in Mid-October, Sigrid noticed a young couple standing just below street level in one of the unlit areaways.
They were partially screened by a low hedge, but something in the girl's demeanor triggered a subconscious response and Sigrid hesitated at the top of the steps.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, peering into the shadows.
"N-no," the girl stammered. "N-no thing!"
Her bloodless face belied her words. There was glittering hostility in the young man's upward glance and an even stronger impression of wrongness in the way he gripped the girl's arm.
Sigrid reached into her purse for some ID even as the man was saying, "You heard her, lady, so bug off, huh?"
"I'm a police officer," Sigrid told the frightened girl. "Are you sure there's nothing-"
The filthy obscenities that streamed from the youth's mouth startled her almost as much as the flickering switchblade which suddenly appeared in his hand. Before her own hand could disengage the ID and close around her gun, he had darted up the shallow steps.
She automatically flung her arm out to deflect the slashing blade and, ash e crashed past her, the snub-nosed.38 came free. Deliberately aiming low, Sigrid sent him howling to the pavement with one shot.
Behind her, in the shadows, the girl began to scream hysterically.
With a startled cry, Anne Harald dropped her cases on the sidewalk and ran toward Sigrid, who clutched the iron railing feeling curiously giddy and light-headed.
"Oh my God!" Anne murmured and Sigrid followed her mother's eyes to her own left arm. It was still numb, but the streetlights revealed the dark stain that soaked through the thin sleeve of her jacket and dripped onto the steps. Blood also ran freely from a cut on the palm of her left hand.
All stiffness drained out of her legs and she sank down on the steps. "My radio," she told Anne as mounting waves of dizziness washed over her. "Tell them-officer needs assistance… assailant needs ambulance…"
"I don't believe this!" Anne cried. "Bleeding like a stuck pig and still you talk like a policeman."
She whirled and ran for Sigrid's car; but for once, as if on cue, a patrol car appeared when needed.
As the uniformed officers fashioned rough tourniquets for her arm and for the wounded man's leg, Sigrid tried to hold onto consciousness, but the girl's terrified cries turned into low sobs that were rather lulling against the street noises and Sigrid lost her tenuous thread of awareness before the ambulance arrived.
As the anaesthesia wore off, there was a memory of violence and pain, then an uneasy disoriented feeling of being in an unfamiliar place.
Even more disorienting was the sound of her mother's voice, angry and intense.
Her eyelids still felt too heavy to open, but returning alertness brought with it the smell of antiseptic and alcohol, so she must be in a hospital. But who else was in the room and why did her mother sound so awkward and harsh? Fear, yes. Sorrow and anger, too; but Sigrid had never heard this particular quality in her mother's voice before.
Even past fifty, Anne Lattimore Harald remained petite and slender. Short hair almost untouched with gray covered her head in a soft cap of dark curls; her skin was still soft and smooth except for the laugh lines around her luminous dark eyes and generous mouth, and thirty-five years in the North hadn't been enough to erase all the magnolia from her voice. Flirting was second nature to her. Women's Lib arrived too late to persuade Anne Harald that vinegar could be as potent as honey or that a woman shouldn't use feminine wiles to get whatever she needed.
Certainly it had helped her get her foot in the door after Leif Harald was killed, when she had struggled to support herself and her toddler daughter with camera and typewriter. These days Anne could afford to pick and choose assignments-several of her critically acclaimed photo journal pieces had won national awards-but that easy, laughing charm was still part of her professional technique. Her warmth could thaw the frostiest politicians, and the resulting photographs often revealed more than her subjects intended, to the great delight of her editors.
Sigrid had been too young at the time of her father's death to remember him clearly. She had only unconnected memories of a tall uniformed blond man who'd swung her upon his shoulder, his laughter. She had never been jealous of the men with whom her mother flirted so openly, precisely because Anne was open, her flirting never quite intimate; her quicksilver elusiveness kept men her friends and nothing more.