Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  Several reporters swapped looks of incomprehension. One took a straightforward approach. “Can you tell us how the victim died?”

  Victim. Someone hadn’t simply died but had been murdered.

  Clarista bobbed her head. “Well, first we’ve got to cover our … you know, and then we can talk about getting into that, and even then we don’t want to mislead anyone, naturally.”

  The reporters were openly annoyed now. One mouthed a solitary What? to his camera person.

  Past experience had taught me this was all we were going to get from our eccentric hotelier. Clarista’s brand of noncommunication was my every day, so seeing it fresh through others’ eyes was validating. And would be hilarious if not for the worry that gnawed at me.

  I had to know who died. Was the victim a guest? Or an employee? George had been with me the whole night, but where was Mr. Fig?

  Assuming he was unharmed, he could fill me in on what had happened. In sentences that actually ended.

  Based on the aftermath of the last death here, the drawing room would be the best place to look for him—and everyone else, for that matter.

  I darted up the outside steps and through the double doors. An eerie quiet permeated the hall. Police tape guarded the foot of the staircase. All was still except behind the front desk, where an officer rummaged through papers.

  I had nothing to hide, but I felt intruded on anyway.

  The officer behind the desk didn’t notice me cross the hall, but at the closed door of the drawing room, another stood sentinel.

  Bingo. Either the drawing room was the scene of a crime or guests and staff were behind that door.

  Think fast, Ivy. “Hi, Officer—” I glanced at her name tag. “Officer … Slatten. Excuse me. I’m back.”

  “Back? Who’re you?”

  “I just stepped out. Little girls’ room. Thanks. I can go back in and sit down now.”

  She scanned me head to toe. “No, you wasn’t in here. Who are you?”

  “Oh, nobody.” I waved my hand. “Staff.”

  “Wait here a second.”

  Uh-oh.

  She ducked her head and talked into her radio. Another officer strode over, taking her attention.

  I took the chance to disappear, winding my way through the morning room and the conservatory to the back terrace. A day’s worth of sun had wiped away every trace of snow from the stone floor, so I sprinted without fear of slipping.

  I could see the action of the drawing room lit up on the other side of the French doors, as clear as any TV screen. No one was visibly injured.

  Mr. Fig stood calmly near the wall by the piano, his hands folded neatly behind his back, ready for service at a moment’s notice.

  I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and exhaled, relieved to see him in one piece. The whole scene felt a little less dire now.

  I tried to figure out who was missing.

  Eight members of the Gravestone Friends of Greater Pittsburgh were scattered around the room, plus Mr. Wollstone, looking more like a dozing owl than a waking one at the moment.

  I realized that everyone inside the drawing room could probably see me, too, in the light of the brass lanterns on the terrace, and I stepped back from the glass. I picked up a pebble from a nearby pot and tossed it toward the French doors.

  It hit with a satisfying tink, and Mr. Fig, alert as ever, turned to investigate the sound. He crossed the room and muttered something to the officer guarding the door. She frowned, admonished him with words I didn’t understand, and allowed him to pass.

  I reminded myself to breathe and peered through the glass again to glean what I could from body language and lip reading.

  Huddled together on the settee in front of the fireplace were Velvet Reed and Deena … Deena who? It was one of the presidents … Reagan? Nixon? I didn’t know which of the ladies was which. Both octogenarians and members of the gravestone society, they drew the most attention because of the fabulous period clothing they wore—one a sapphire-blue gown with a silver beaded overlay, the other adorable high-heeled boots that buttoned up one side.

  “Sideways telephone in Lincoln’s popsicle,” said one.

  “Exit until mum sequence,” replied the other.

  I was not a great lip reader.

  A chilly breeze ruffled the ornamental cabbage in the planter outside the nearest window, and the cold helped keep me alert.

  On a second settee in the drawing room, the oversized Tom Truman was eating beef jerky from one hand and had the other arm curled around the thin shoulders of his wife Autumn, the stern redhead. If not distraught, she at least seemed tense. Although her slightly vacant expression could be a sign of shock more than anything else.

  It was the first time I’d seen the Trumans since they’d checked in with Clyde and Renee. I guessed they’d all been busy with the conference.

  Furnell Rogers, also from the—

  A footfall on the terrace behind me spun my head around.

  “Miss Nichols.” Mr. Fig’s angular silhouette stood outlined by fuzzy backlight. His forehead wrinkled as he glanced at my arm. “I was sorry to hear of your accident.”

  “Thanks. George told me you’d called.”

  “I wish you had stayed home and rested tonight.”

  “You know I had to come. Tell me who died. And when? And where?” I spread my upturned fingers as if I could catch the answers in my hands.

  Mr. Fig took a step back.

  I folded my hands.

  “I’ll take those one at a time, and in a sensible order, if you don’t mind.” He reprimanded me with a glance.

  If he was able to be so calm, no one we loved here could be in danger. I relaxed my shoulders a bit and tried to lean against the balustrade ever so nonchalantly. “Of course. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Dr. Borough—”

  “Clyde, right?” The lit professor.

  “Yes,” he said. “Dr. Borough returned from the club’s tour of the estate to find Ms. Gallagher—”

  “Renee?”

  “Yes—to find Ms. Gallagher dead. How, we don’t yet know, but from the angle of her head, her death didn’t seem at all natural.”

  “The angle of her head?” I asked.

  “I glimpsed her body before the police arrived.”

  “In the Achilles?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “When did she die?”

  “During the tour, it seems.”

  “What’s this?” A shadow loomed behind Mr. Fig with a familiar, gravelly voice. “You said refreshments, Fig, and I believed you. I believed you.”

  “I apologize, Detective.” Mr. Fig turned, and the light fell on a neat, brown beard and a pair of bagged eyes I knew all too well.

  “Inside,” Detective Bennett barked.

  He herded us back into the drawing room with everyone else. Several faces peered up at me with questioning looks that turned slowly to understanding as they realized I was that girl they knew from the desk, but out of uniform.

  “Interviews are done,” Bennett announced. “You can all return to your rooms—but don’t leave town.”

  “We’re here through Monday for the conference anyway, so …” muttered a guest with a dark widow’s peak. Leonard Chaves, maybe? Homer Room. His whole body seemed drawn in protectively, and he didn’t look at anyone dead on.

  Autumn Truman swiveled to look at him, her deep-set eyes glowing with disdain.

  Dr. Chaves pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and focused on it, apparently unaware of the carelessness of his comment.

  As soon as Bennett disappeared, Officer Slatten, who’d been guarding the door, stepped forward. “Uh, actually, just to clarify, we don’t have any legal means to hold any of you. But leaving town may draw suspicion if you later become a suspect.”

  This was all too familiar. I turned to Mr. Fig. “What else can you—”

  “You—uh—Ivy.” Detective Bennett had popped back in the room like a cockroach that wouldn
’t die. “You’re not done yet.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at him, disrespectfully I hoped. “Me?”

  “I have some questions for you.”

  The detective forced everyone else out of the drawing room, rested one hip on the arm of the settee by the window, and pulled a pen and a little spiral-bound notebook from his pocket.

  “I don’t know how I can help you.” I leaned on the wall by the bookshelves. “I was gone all night.”

  “People don’t always know what they know. Now then”—he flipped over a page in his notebook—“what did you think of her?”

  “Ms. Gallagher?”

  He grunted something like a yes.

  “I mean, I barely interacted with her—actually, I didn’t at all.”

  “I understand you checked the couple into the hotel last night. You didn’t have any thoughts about them?”

  “I have thoughts about everyone.”

  “And …?” He tapped his pen on his notepad.

  I shrugged. “I guess if I were you, I’d be looking at her partner, Clyde, uh, Dr. Borough.”

  “Eh? Why’s that?”

  “I heard them arguing this afternoon.” So I could tell him something he didn’t know. I felt pretty smug. “It seemed like Clyde bullied her. Like he made the decisions, and she complied but then whined about it.”

  “Uh-huh.” He scribbled. “And … what of the other couple, Mr. And Mrs.…” He flipped a few pages back and forth. “Truman?”

  “I’ve only seen them once, really. He was quiet and tired … and snacky. She was serious and guarded. She seemed to be pretty close to Renee.”

  “How would you describe the interactions between Ms. Gallagher and Mrs. Truman?”

  “Well, they seemed friendly, like I said. After they checked in, Renee, Ms. Gallagher, kind of fell over laughing—it was late—and Ms. Truman told her she was getting slaphappy. Not the kind of thing most people would say to an acquaintance, right?”

  Detective Bennett twitched his moustache. “What was she laughing about?”

  There he went in the wrong direction again. “Oh, it wasn’t like it was important—she thought the hotel decor was over-the-top or fake or both.”

  He made a few marks, pocketed his notebook again with a flourish, and stood. “You’ve been more helpful than you know.”

  What could he mean by that? “Okay. Great.”

  I felt an uneasy rush of acid in my stomach. A fear that, like last year, Bennett would get things tragically wrong.

  After the detective released me from the drawing room, I lingered outside the door.

  There was no sign of Mr. Fig.

  I wondered if George had heard about the murder.

  An officer with a manila folder passed me on his way into the drawing room. “Coroner says the ligature was something soft. She’s not sure what yet, really.”

  Strangulation, then. What a terrible way to die. I glanced back through the door.

  Bennett snatched the folder from the officer. “Shut it, you idiot. That’s confidential.”

  I slid out of his line of sight just before he reached the door and slammed it.

  A soft ligature? Hmm. My curiosity was piqued, but I told myself not to get involved as I stepped into the conservatory to call George.

  A familiar sweetness filled the air, something I’d smelled before … but not in here.

  I scanned the cavernous space for some new blooms that would give off that fragrance and spotted them just beyond the bronze fountain in the center of the room.

  Permanently frozen middance, five naiads took turns spraying water into tiers of seashells, and behind them, a thigh-high drift of white Easter lilies picked up the moonlight.

  I’d never seen these lilies before, but I’d also never seen the conservatory through a spring.

  Left to their own devices, Easter lilies were naturally late-summer bloomers, but they were forced by commercial gardeners to do their thing early every year in order to fulfill their name’s promise.

  Had Mr. Zhang manipulated these plants to be ready for Easter Sunday in a couple of weeks, or was it some memory of their past lives that had pushed them to flower ahead of schedule?

  I had a feeling of being reunited with an old friend. I knew that this particular species had been important to the Morrows because my mother had told me so, one rainy day.

  Maybe it wasn’t just the flower but the presence of the gravestone society that brought the memory to mind.

  I must have been about seven. The three of us—Mom, Dad, and I—stood in a cemetery for the funeral of some relative. An Uncle Herbert, I wanted to say, a relative of my dad’s, not on the Morrow side of the family. It wasn’t that long before my mom left us, in my memory at least.

  The afternoon was bright, humid, and hot, like every Tennessee funeral I could remember, somehow, as if the grim reaper had conspired to get us all dressed up in our black layers of mourning just to make us sweat.

  I stood in my shiny black Mary Janes holding my mother’s hand under a tent at the graveside. Dad in his dark suit jacket, sweat running down his temples, helped the other men carry Uncle Herbert’s casket, which was blanketed with roses and mums.

  My mother bent low to whisper in my ear. “If he were a Morrow, there would be Easter lilies. Your grandmother Mary’s casket was covered with them. Yellow ones.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “You were just a baby.” She wiggled my hand and smiled.

  Did she smile at the thought of me as a baby or at the memory of her mother? Or something else?

  I didn’t know.

  A few years later, there were Easter lilies on the casket of a coworker of Dad’s. “Look,” I told him, pointing, “like the Morrows, right?”

  He frowned at me and stared ahead, and I understood from the shift in his face, the tightness around his eyes, that I’d said something wrong. As if he wasn’t already sad enough. He clearly didn’t want to be reminded of anything to do with my mother.

  I hadn’t brought up the Morrows again to him after that. Not even when I’d taken this job. Keeping it secret from him hadn’t gotten any easier over the last nine months. But neither had the thought of coming clean. I just couldn’t convince myself to bring up my mother’s family again, to do or say anything that would cause that tension to come back into his face.

  After checking to make sure I was alone in the conservatory—or as sure as a person could be in these dim, leafy environs—I sat down on a bench under the towering date palm. Over my head, three clusters of ripening fruit dangled from its branches like unlit copper chandeliers.

  I looked at my phone for the first time since I’d arrived at the hotel. George had texted to check on my arm and see if I’d found out about Dad’s new friend.

  I called instead of texting back and worked the answers to his questions into my saga of all that had happened in the last hour.

  He groaned. “This is … strange.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year.”

  “Another murder at our hotel? And how dare Bennett show up there? That piece of—”

  “Come on. He makes a lot of noise, but he’s harmless,” I said.

  “It didn’t seem that way last year when I was the one in his sights.”

  “You’re right. Not my place to say, is it?” After a guest died at a dinner last year, George had been targeted first by Bennett and then his superior, Captain De Luna. Bennett had bothered him more because the detective refused to listen to reason.

  It was quiet on George’s end of the line. Maybe he was going to bed. I pictured him that way, in flannel pants with bare feet.

  “Anyway, I couldn’t find out much from Bennett,” I said. “I gave him an excuse for coming back to the hotel tonight and got out of there pretty quickly.”

  “What did you want to find out from him?”

  “I don’t know—who killed the woman and why. Her boyfriend is a real smooth talker, but things seem … stra
ined between them. Of course, the intimate partner is always the most obvious suspect.”

  “This is just your natural curiosity, right?” he said. “You’re not thinking of getting involved.”

  “What? No. I’m way too busy with school and everything else. And no one I love is threatened like last time.” I must have told him I loved him a hundred times in the years we’d been friends, but this time, when I said it, even in a roundabout way, my arms prickled. We said good-bye and ended the call.

  There was a rustle of leaves behind me, and I turned expecting to see one of the songbirds that lived in here.

  But it was Tom Truman, alone, his face half covered by tree limbs and towering above me. He stuck both hands in his pants pockets and ducked his head in apology.

  “Sorry n’at.” He followed the walkway past me and headed out toward the morning room. His grumble sounded more like a question than a statement.

  What? Where had he been hiding when I’d checked the room? He’d have heard everything I said to George.

  But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to get caught up in whatever was going on here.

  I’d gone to great lengths to solve a murder last year, but the tracking of a killer had exhausted me and revived old hurts, throwing gasoline on my panic disorder. I wouldn’t do it for just anyone.

  Whatever had happened to Renee, it was between the killer and the justice department.

  IV

  Girl, Interrupted

  I skipped my first class Friday, figuring that if my professor needed an excuse, my emergency room bill would be enough to gain her sympathy. I got out of Cognitive Science at three and went on to the hotel, even though it meant arriving forty-five minutes before my shift.

  I couldn’t have said why, but I felt like the hotel was the place to be at the moment—a pleasant surprise, since Fridays were usually the night I dreaded working the most. While other people were on dates or girls’ nights out, I was stuck here. At least I had George’s company.

  It was warmer outside today, so I walked through the garden one more time, checking the inscriptions of more statues but not seeing my grandparents’ names on any of them. I was distracted by the formal beds of optimistic crocuses and daffodils that behaved as if there hadn’t just been a killing freeze here … and a killing.