Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  “Then it’s my fault,” I said. “He should’ve been giving that tour. He would’ve been, if I hadn’t been so clumsy in the kitchen” (i.e., if I’d minded my own business).

  “Look, you can’t know that.” He touched my shoulder. “There may be some other reason they suspect him. We’ll just have to wait.”

  “I’m going there as soon as I get off.”

  “What, at two in the morning?” he asked.

  “Well, then I’ll go now. I’ll ask Clarista for the night off. I’ll fake a stomach bug if I have to.”

  He leaned on the desk and brought both hands together in a fist. “They’ll be booking him, Vee, and it’s a long process. Just wait till morning. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “I wish you didn’t have a reason to know so much about the process.” I had hated the thought of George in jail so much last year that I hadn’t let myself even picture it. Now, an image of Mr. Fig, in his bespoke suit, his handkerchief wiping the seat in a dirty cell, shoved its way into my head.

  George looked at me squarely. “Ivy, you said before that you wouldn’t get involved—”

  “But that was before Mr. Fig was—George, I have to.” Sure, my schedule was already full with classes and work, and sure, it was risky, especially with Bennett’s warning. But the dramatic detective had run off the rails on this one. “Bennett’s far enough gone to arrest Mr. Fig, so he won’t let a little thing like truth stand in his way.”

  I had done this before, and I could do it again. I would find what Bennett was overlooking.

  “I get it,” George said. “And part of me’s glad you’re doing it. Just—” He pinched the corner of the bandage on my arm. “Be careful, okay?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know where Clarista keeps the gun.”

  I was half joking. After the danger last year’s investigation had put me in, she had installed a small safe below the desk to contain some kind of pistol, but I didn’t know how to use it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to.

  It wasn’t simply that Mr. Fig was the steel backbone that kept this place from sinking into bankruptcy—or worse, in his eyes at least, becoming a three-star hotel. He’d also been my personal support more than a few times. When I craved connection to the past, he was there with a story to tell, and when I clung too tightly to my own history, he had solutions for that too.

  After all the years I’d thought about my mother and wondered where she was and how she was doing, I hadn’t been brave enough to actually try to find her, and I hadn’t understood my hesitancy until last fall.

  Mr. Fig had shined a light on my motivations the first time we were together in the secret passage, the one that began underneath the conservatory.

  I’d tipped the iron heron’s wing and taken the stairs as quickly as I dared to, ending up in the dark hall where I’d been injured the week before.

  We reached the first doorway, and Mr. Fig flipped on the light.

  A long, gray coffin filled the center of the room. No, a tanning bed? I thought.

  But ancient. A gauge and fan stuck out from one side and three X-shaped handles from another.

  My eyes were still adjusting to the brightness. I blinked at the thing and then at Mr. Fig. “What is it?”

  “Sic itur ad astra,” he said. That cryptic phrase he’d used before. It meant “thus we go to the stars.”

  But I didn’t understand how that applied here.

  “It’s a full-body fever machine,” he said.

  “Well, I … what’s that?”

  “A person would lay inside, and the bed, heated by steam, would slowly raise their body temperature. The treatment was thought to cure psychosis.”

  “Whoa. And it’s here because …”

  “Mr. Murdoch had this entire hall planned out from the time the blueprints were designed in order to take good care of your great-great-grandmother. You probably know, but at the turn of the last century, treatments for mental illness were few, and families often sent their ill to asylums.” He grimaced.

  “Where the conditions were horrible,” I finished for him.

  I thought of Lillian’s heart-shaped face. Instead of picturing her in the fine dresses that the paintings upstairs captured, I saw her in a straitjacket. I shivered. “I’m thankful that she and her husband had the resources to keep her out of there.”

  “And others after her, I believe, although I have little evidence.”

  “I wish they’d found a way to stop it from spreading to the next generation,” I said.

  “Before your mother came along?” he asked.

  I bit my lip and nodded. I took a deep breath and questioned out loud what I’d never had the guts to ask my dad. “You don’t have any idea … where my mother is now, do you?”

  Mr. Fig took a step back and stared at the floor for a long moment.

  “What is it? If you’re trying to decide whether or not to tell me, the answer is yes, you know. I deserve to know, don’t I?”

  He nodded, and for a moment, I thought I was going to get the answers I was looking for.

  “You do deserve much better than you have received, dear. I wish I could make your mother’s leaving make sense to you, and I wish I could tell you where she is now, whether she thinks about you, whether she regrets her mistakes.” His shoulders dropped. “However, I cannot.”

  My eyes burned in the corners, and tears flooded in. For a moment, while the possibility of knowing had hung in the balance, I hadn’t been sure. Some part of me did want all of those answers, and yet, as Mr. Fig was speaking, I realized that what I really wanted wasn’t to understand the present but to undo the past. I wanted to make her different—no, not just different. I wanted her to be better, to be whole. And not only for my sake, but for Dad’s and for her own.

  “As impossible as it may seem,” he went on, “I believe that a different answer, one that you did not expect, will come to you before long.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You aren’t going to tell me what you mean by that, are you?”

  His troubled smile was so full of affection that I let it go. If he was right, and he always was, I would find out eventually.

  The darkness I’d felt about my mother’s leaving had lightened a shade that day as we explored the rest of the passage and I got to know my family a tiny bit better.

  A part of me would always want to bring her back, to make her answer for her crimes. Another, more idealistic side of me hoped she would come back on her own someday, full of grace and apologies, having done her own work and ending up healthier.

  But these days I found it easier to set aside those expectations, unrealistic as they were after all this time. And for that, I had Mr. Fig to thank. I would do whatever I could to repay him.

  After all the staff went home Friday evening, I made the rounds to lock up. Mr. Fig would always do the bulk of this at the end of his shift, and I would just handle the front doors and servant entrance when I left at two. Tonight, of course, was different. There were at least ten exterior doors. It took a lifetime after a day that had already felt endless.

  I ended in the drawing room where the lights were dimmed by an automatic timer that Clarista had finally agreed to install earlier this year (against her desire to keep everything as historically authentic as possible).

  A distant giggle bounced toward me from the direction of the back terrace, and I slid over to the glass doors for a look.

  A white pixie cut belonging to either Velvet Reed or Deena Nixon (not Reagan—I’d looked it up) bobbed just above the level of the swimming pool water. The other member of the pair lay on a chaise nearby, her hair in a voluptuous French roll and her tall figure draped in a green silk caftan printed with enormous, art nouveau–style poppies.

  No part of the hotel had a posted closing time, and the pool was heated, so it wasn’t surprising to find guests taking advantage of that. Then again, it was after ten o’clock, and I wondered if the sounds would carry to the upstairs windows.

 
; This pool wasn’t the kind with a diving board, and there was no slide. The whole thing was only maybe fifteen by thirty feet and not deep enough for diving. Still, it was romantic, with the stone Gorgon heads spewing water from the height of the balustrade and the old fern planters at the corners.

  I decided to give the ladies a few more minutes before asking them to tuck in for the night and turned back toward the hall.

  One of their voices reflected off the water. “Well, Renee did give him the cold shoulder on the way to the conference yesterday morning.”

  It sounded like they were talking about other members of the gravestone group, and as far as I was concerned, all of them were suspects. I spent less than a second deciding that eavesdropping was not so unethical if it had anything to do with getting Mr. Fig out of jail. I cracked open the door enough to hear the women well and see their faces while keeping myself out of the light.

  “Only because you brought up that thing about her business,” said the one with short hair—Deena, I thought. “No, I simply can’t believe it was Clyde.” She spoke with a subtler version of that same accent I’d heard from Tom, a Pittsburgh accent evidently.

  I caught a whiff of chlorine mingling with the scent of the hyacinths that bloomed at the edge of the terrace.

  “Why not?” asked the one in the caftan—Velvet?

  Yeah, why not?

  “For starters, he was giving the tour the whole time. All eyes were on him.”

  That was a good point. But besides Mr. Fig at the desk, only Clyde would’ve had a key to the Achilles suite. Of course, there might be several people in the group who Renee would have simply opened the door for.

  “What I can’t figure out is how anybody could’ve got upstairs without the butler seeing them,” Deena continued.

  That was right. With the conservatory staircase out of commission, the only way to the Achilles suite on the second floor was via the main staircase, planted in the middle of the entry hall, or the elevator, just a few yards from the front desk.

  “Oh now, surely he strayed away from the desk for a minute,” said Velvet.

  It didn’t sound like Mr. Fig to leave the desk unattended. But if he’d seen anyone go upstairs during the grave tour, he would’ve told the police. Was this the sticking point for Bennett?

  I stepped out onto the terrace and pounced on their conversation. “Wait a second. What if Clyde—”

  I stopped myself midsentence.

  The one in the water was naked.

  She was swimming naked. I hadn’t seen it from inside, but I did now, yards of bare white skin, wrinkled first by time and more so by the pool water.

  “Oh, hello, Ivy,” both women said, almost simultaneously. Their faces recovered from the surprise of my interruption and shined up at me, awaiting the end of my sentence.

  I took a breath. “Um, what if Clyde killed her when you all returned from the tour?”

  “Impossible,” said the naked one. “We were standing just across the way when he flung the door open.”

  “He screamed and flew out again with his hands up by his face.” The one with the French roll pantomimed to illustrate her tale.

  “Velvet’s such a good storyteller,” said the naked one, who was therefore definitely Deena, in an aside to me.

  “Just like that painting,” said Velvet. “By Munchausen.”

  Did she mean Munch? I opened my mouth to correct her and closed it again. Arguing with white-haired people was strictly against the Southern code of conduct by which I had been raised, not to mention that it was no way to treat a guest.

  “But maybe it was before he led the tour,” said Velvet.

  “How long was the tour, anyway?” I asked.

  “Oh, an hour I guess,” said Deena. “There’s so many interesting statues in the garden.”

  She said hour like ahr, reminding me of a college friend I’d had who hailed from just north of Alabama. But the two accents were altogether distinct.

  I took a pool towel from a cabinet camouflaged into the stonework and slipped back into historic verbiage to separate myself from the situation. “Ms. Nixon, I regret disturbing your bathing time, but I must ask you to dress yourself. Period-appropriate clothing is not required here, simply clothing.”

  “I knew this was an old-fashioned place. I didn’t expect such old-fashioned values,” said Deena as she swam my way.

  I craned my head away so that I couldn’t see her body leaving the water and stretched the towel like a screen to protect her privacy. And perhaps my psyche. I liked to think I was okay with the idea of growing older, but I wasn’t immune to scares.

  “Gosh, we’d better not tell her about the weed,” stage-whispered Velvet.

  “You mean CBD,” I said. Surely they didn’t have marijuana.

  Deena shrugged her bare shoulders, smiled, and donned a robe that had been draped on the balustrade. Velvet got up slowly, revealing ankles that hadn’t aged as quickly as the rest of her, and joined her friend.

  I held the drawing room door open for them and locked it behind us. “Good night, ladies.”

  They resumed the conversation I’d interrupted as they meandered toward the elevator.

  “But my lands, what reason could anyone but Clyde have to kill the woman?” said Velvet. “Renee never hurt a fly.”

  “Well, she was a little annoying with those headaches n’at,” said Deena.

  “Not that that’s a reason to harm anybody.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Hey, doesn’t her company run security for your nephew’s building?” Velvet held the elevator door back so Deena could scoot in.

  “Oh, yes. They do a darn good job too. Autumn’s company, actually. Renee works for her—worked.”

  Velvet swiped a hand in the air. “Anyway, she’s not the kind of person anyone would want to murder who wasn’t jealous or something like that.”

  “No, it’s just like the old movies, I think,” Deena said. “The butler did it.”

  What was this n’at word several of them were using? Some kind of Pennsylvania lingo?

  I liked these ladies. They asked a lot of good questions.

  But they didn’t know that Mr. Fig was incapable of murder. He was a consummate rule follower, and I’d be shocked if he’d ever had so much as an overdue library book. Felony was out of the question.

  I just had to prove it.

  Even if he had a gravestone-solid alibi, Clyde was Renee’s partner and therefore an obvious suspect—maybe too obvious, George would say. But statistics were on my side. Not only was he the only other person with a key to the Achilles, but something like half of female murder victims were killed by intimate partners these days.

  If Clyde was guilty, then one of the following was true—either he’d killed Renee right before the tour, or he’d found some unlikely moment while everyone was in the garden and he could leave the group. But how had he slipped past the desk unnoticed?

  VI

  Ivy Looks Into a Wardrobe

  Since I couldn’t talk to Mr. Fig until tomorrow, I switched gears for now.

  I needed to see the crime scene if I was going to investigate this murder properly. It was really unfortunate that I hadn’t been able to take a look last night, and I was unlikely to hear any more leaked info from police.

  I wished I had the relationship with Detective Bennett that I had with his boss, Captain De Luna, who I felt owed me one since I’d given her the goods to clear George’s name last year. But homicide was Bennett’s department, not hers, so I wasn’t likely to see her this time around.

  I couldn’t at this point examine the body—not that it would tell me much, since I had no kind of expertise with corpses. (I made a mental note to start watching more CSI in my off hours.) I did have expertise with Google, though, and would’ve especially liked to have seen the victim’s neck.

  My only hope was that police had left some evidence behind that didn’t need to be taken in or couldn’t be. Stains on the carpe
t, that kind of thing.

  It was worth a look.

  I popped another pain pill for my arm and propped the brb sign (whose text was Clarista’s novella-length explanation for the attendant’s absence) on the desk, hoping no one would actually need me in the middle of the night (they never did). It was after twelve, which gave me two-ish hours to the end of my shift, if I should need them.

  I climbed to the second floor and locked the door of the Achilles suite behind me, leaving the lights off as I stepped through the alcove and into the heart of the suite. If anyone was outside in the garden, I didn’t want them noticing a lit window where one shouldn’t be. No one needed to know I was here, including the killer. I’d learned last year how dangerous it was to let a murderer know you were onto them.

  My phone was handy as a flashlight and in case I needed to photograph anything. Keeping it with me on shift used to be against Clarista’s rules, but the events of last fall had changed that.

  The room was large and daunting, considering I had no idea where the body had been found. There was no dramatic chalk outline on the floor. I hadn’t seen the police do one last year either, so I started to suspect they weren’t as common as the movies would have you believe.

  Judging by the smudged mirror at the dressing table and the personal items here and there, it was clear that neither Bea nor anyone else had cleaned the room yet. Maybe there hadn’t been time between the police releasing the crime scene and the end of Bea’s shift today. That was lucky.

  I wondered, too, what Clyde was using as clothing at his new hotel, since his suitcase was still by the bed.

  I knew enough Sherlock to understand that if Renee had died on the floor, she’d have left the carpet fibers mashed down somewhere on this plush Persian. I got on all fours and held my flashlight beam parallel to the carpet, working my way across the room. I congratulated myself on finding a footprint but saw nothing like the outline of a body.

  Could Renee have been strangled in the bed? That would seem to point toward Clyde, or another lover, if she had one. Tom came to mind. He was attractive (if you liked that fill-up-the-doorway look) and close to her age, and since they’d arrived here together, they seemed to be friends.