Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  I picked it up to throw it in the recycling bin, but the name Morrow in a headline below the fold caught my eye: Alderman Morrow Backs Negro Firemen Against Railroad Brotherhood.

  I flinched internally every time I read the word Negro, and I was white, so I marveled at Clarista’s ability to keep these papers around in their original forms, the nuanced way she could evidently appreciate some parts of history while knowing there was a lot of bad with it. But I wouldn’t expect any less from a woman who, against the odds, had taken this mansion from rags to riches.

  I scanned the article. The headline referred to my great-great-grandfather Murdoch. Management of the Queen and Crescent railroad had assigned three Black firemen to a part of the line connecting Chattanooga and Oakdale, Tennessee that had been staffed only by whites before. The white firemen and engineers in the union had begun their protest strike on March 9, one week and 110 years ago today. Along the train route, rural supporters of the strike were attacking trains and pulling crew members off cars to beat them. Murdoch Morrow had spoken in defense of the Queen and Crescent’s hiring decision at a council meeting.

  The article also said his son Paulus had been in attendance. I hadn’t heard the name Paulus before, much less known there was one in the family. I guessed it was just a Latin version of my dad’s plain old Paul.

  I set “yesterday’s” paper aside to take home and went to the library, where I was pretty sure I’d find “today’s”.

  Even at four in the afternoon, the library was dim. It had something to do with the book-lined walls and ubiquitous walnut paneling. And let’s face it, gunmetal gray as an accent color didn’t brighten things up any.

  Two familiar voices, thin with age, echoed in the cavernous room. Dwarfed by the high-backed armchairs in front of the fireplace, Velvet and Deena both looked up as I came in. They weren’t in period clothing today, just simple buttoned blouses and slacks more appropriate for their convention, but I hoped they would dress up for dinner again.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” I said.

  They greeted me in turn and continued their conversation.

  “Where did Autumn say he was staying?” Deena asked.

  Standing in the same room with them, I didn’t feel like I was intruding as much as I had when they were at the pool.

  “Lookout Mountain,” said Velvet.

  “Is that the one you can see from over there by the aquarium?”

  “No, that’s Signal Mountain. Lookout is the one with Rock City and Ruby Falls, on the south end of town.”

  “You’re so smart,” Deena said. “You just know everything about this place.”

  “I just know how to use the internet.” Velvet shrugged. “Sort of.”

  They dropped into conspiratorial whispers, and I focused on my mission.

  Beside the glass case of rare first editions was an ancient file cabinet, where I found the newspaper reprints. I had just laid my hand on the March drawer when Deena raised her voice again.

  “Why not ask her? She’s not biased.”

  I retrieved the paper I needed and turned their way. I could smell a thick perfume like lilacs as I got close.

  Velvet sized me up, but Deena’s eyes were on her friend rather than me.

  “Ask me what?” I said.

  “We’ve been thinking about people who could have strangled Renee to death,” Velvet explained matter-of-factly.

  Jeez. “So you don’t think it was Mr. Fig after all. I’m listening.”

  Velvet went on in that expressive voice of hers. “Apparently Deena thinks Dr. Chaves is a natural-born killer, but I told her she only says that because he’s Latino.”

  Jeez. Jeez. Wow. These two had a gift for saying out loud what most people wouldn’t.

  “But Velvet’s wrong,” said the accused. “I’m not racist. I don’t like Leonard because he speaks too little and too quietly. Plus, his acne scars make him look like Robert Davi. I never did trust that man.”

  I didn’t get the name reference, but I wasn’t sidetracked by it. In part, I could agree with Deena. Leonard Chaves had appeared quite shifty in the drawing room after Renee’s death, closing himself off with his tightly folded arms and not making eye contact with anyone. Of course, I didn’t know how he behaved at the conference, but when he was here, he ate every meal outside or at odd times of the day—in order to be alone, I imagined.

  But none of that made him a killer. “So you think I look like a person who wouldn’t judge someone based on how they look?”

  They shrugged in tandem.

  “You’re a Millennial,” said Velvet.

  I guess that explained everything. “Well, acne scars and quiet speech don’t seem like good reasons to suspect someone of murder. Is there some other basis for your suspicion, Ms. Nixon? What motive would Leonard have?”

  Deena pulled her purse, an enormous blue thing decorated with a painted peacock, onto her lap and began to dig through it. “It’s just a feeling.”

  “She gets these feelings,” Velvet said. “Sometimes she’s right, but not this time.”

  “How long have they known each other, Renee and Leonard?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Velvet said mysteriously, as if I’d asked her the meaning of life.

  “They met through Clyde. He and Leonard work together.” Like an ancient embalmer, Deena began removing the internal bits of her purse—crumpled tissues, cough drops, keys—and lining them up on a side table. “And that widow’s peak! Have you seen it, Miss Nichols?”

  I nodded. Combined with Leonard’s nearly black hair, it had a rather vampiric effect on his appearance. But George’s father had a slight widow’s peak too, and on him it was endearing. “They’re both professors, Leonard and Clyde?”

  “That’s right, at Carnegie Mellon,” said Deena.

  “Yes, they both teach literature,” Velvet said.

  “Like you did,” Deena said to her friend.

  Velvet coughed. “Oh, well, I was just a high school teacher. Not like them. They’re important men making big contributions in the world of the arts. Anyway, Dr. Chaves is quiet but kind. I think he was heartbroken by Renee’s death, in fact. I saw him in the conservatory very upset.” She began to rock in her chair, and used the momentum to push herself up to standing. “Excuse me. Must powder my nose.”

  Velvet’s accent was less Pittsburghese than Deena’s, and I wondered if Velvet had purposely lost hers when she became a teacher.

  With Velvet gone and Deena silent, my thoughts drifted back to Renee. Had she known Leonard well enough to open the door to him that night? Even if she had, there was still the issue of how he would’ve gotten from the tour outside to Renee’s room on the second floor without Mr. Fig seeing him.

  I should have asked Mr. Fig if he’d heard anyone moving around upstairs that night. If the entry hall had been quiet and the first floor mostly still, it would have been easy to hear the Achilles door open and close, since the first floor was open to the second and third. But surely Mr. Fig would’ve mentioned that to the police.

  Deena looked as if she might nod off.

  “What did you do for a living, Ms. Nixon?”

  She blinked. “I’m sorry, dear, it’s the cannabis making me sleepy.”

  An unwilling smile overtook my face. I didn’t know whether or not to take her seriously. The lilac perfume hadn’t lightened when Velvet left the room, so it was Deena’s. I wondered if she used it to cover the scent of weed or if, as I’d suspected before, she had meant to say CBD oil instead.

  “I was a mortician.” Deena’s eyes flicked up, noticing something behind me.

  Parker Rogers had just entered the library. He was about ten or eleven and must have been drug along on this trip by his dad, Furnell, either as bonding time or in lieu of finding a sitter.

  Short black twists covered his head, and he reminded me of a young Trevor Noah. He plodded, head jutting forward, to the biography and history section.

  “Good to see a young person usi
ng the library,” Deena said to me, and then louder, “Hello there, Packer.”

  Packer? Packer, then.

  The boy turned when he reached the shelves, reached out a finger absent-mindedly, and traced along the ledge at shoulder height.

  I walked over. “Hi, Packer. You’re welcome to borrow a book. Can I help you find anything?”

  He angled his head but didn’t look at me. “Parker.”

  “Oh, Parker. Sorry.”

  His finger stopped its linear path and made a right turn, sliding up the spines of three books. Stopping at the last, he pulled it from the shelf, tucked it under his elbow, and walked slowly toward where Deena sat putting all her purse accoutrements away.

  Following Parker, I got close enough to see that the woman’s key fob bore a Porsche crest. That fancy orange Cayenne in the garage belonged to her.

  Velvet returned from the restroom, and Parker followed her feet with his eyes.

  Deena tutted and shook her head, looking at her purse.

  “Did you lose something?” I said.

  “Just misplaced my blood pressure meds again.”

  “Oh, I think they’re by the sink in the room, dear.”

  The Romulus and Remus Rooms shared an adjoining bath.

  Without looking at her, the boy said to Velvet, “Where will they bury you?”

  I clenched my stomach. What a strange question. And rude to say to … well, anyone.

  But neither Velvet nor Deena reacted as if it was.

  Instead, Deena narrowed her eyes at her friend puckishly. “I think he’s tired of waiting on you to make plans, V.”

  I hoped I would still have people around to call me Vee in fifty years.

  “I still don’t know, young man.” Velvet turned a beaded bracelet on her wrist and smiled. “God willing, I have plenty of time.”

  Parker cocked his head and held it that way as he made for the door.

  I turned to the women. “What was that about?”

  “Oh, he’s an unusual boy,” said Velvet. “Very direct. Very observant.”

  “Hmm,” I mused. Parker seemed well behaved and too mature to assume he could hang his drawings wherever he liked, but if he hadn’t done them, who else could have?

  “Yes, inquisitive,” said Deena. “Reminds me of my granddaughter at that age.”

  I had to get back to the desk, but I thought of another question before I left them. “Ladies, do you happen to remember who suggested that Clyde and Renee take the Achilles suite? Was it Leonard?”

  “The what sweet?” Deena said.

  Velvet patted her friend’s hand. “She means the big bedroom they stayed in.”

  “Oh. I don’t remember,” Deena said.

  “Neither do I.” Velvet shrugged.

  “Well, thank you anyway, ladies.” I nodded good-bye.

  “See you later, Ivy,” they said in unison.

  I stopped at the door and turned back. “Hey, isn’t the conference going on now?”

  Velvet giggled. “We’re playing hooky.”

  “She really only comes along on these things to be with me,” Deena said.

  That was how it was with long-running friendships (if they were friends and not something more to each other). I often went along with George to some kind of kitchen demo show, and he came with me to shop for plants. I always ended up buying more herbs when he was with me. I found myself smiling as I placed the recovered newspaper carefully on the front desk’s ledge.

  As I went around to the other side, something new stood out to me, an apple-green hardcover book with no jacket. Robert Browning was embossed on the front inside a decorative ellipse-thing that reminded me of the stone carvings on the outside of the hotel. Cartouche, that was the word.

  Did the book belong to another desk clerk? It couldn’t be Doyle’s. Maybe Sarah’s, though. I lifted the cover but couldn’t find a name written inside. If it were part of the hotel library collection, there would be a stamp on the first page, and there wasn’t. There was no bar code for any other library either, so I dropped it in the lost-and-found bin—on top of the drawings Bea and I had found on the walls.

  I could hear Parker Rogers humming to himself in the morning room, so I grabbed the pictures and found him curled over a book on the window seat on the far side of the room.

  “Hi, Parker.” I stopped a few feet from him. “I don’t mean to interrupt your reading …”

  He didn’t look up.

  “I wondered if these are yours.” I held the drawings up so he could see.

  He glanced up quickly. “No,” he said flatly, and resumed his humming.

  Maybe he was ashamed to admit to them. “They’re lovely, but I’m afraid if they stay on the hotel walls that you’ll forget to pack them when you go back home.”

  No answer.

  “I’ll just leave them here for you.” I placed them on a table near him. “Okay, see you later.”

  A stack of paperwork waited for me in the office, along with a paper on signal detection theory that was due in my Sensation and Perception class on Monday. One of the perks of this night shift was having long stretches to study and write papers, and I’d planned to use tonight to catch up, but the work I was doing for Mr. Fig was too important.

  I sat down behind the desk and let my mind shift.

  Deena seemed a little flighty but seasoned. I didn’t want to discount her intuition just yet, so I added Leonard Chaves to my mental list of people to be interviewed, which also included Selena, Tom because he was Renee’s brother-in-law, and Clyde’s ex-wife, if I could get to her.

  I hoped there was nothing intensely scientific about this case. It was against my personal code to ask help of a rival, not that Bea was one necessarily. George had room in his life for both of us. It just annoyed me that she might be toying with him. He was slow when it came to bonding with people, and I didn’t know if her interest in him had more in common with Super Glue or those removable 3M strips.

  It was Bea’s day off, but I should get my head straight for when we were both back here together. I had a fleeting idea that, equipped with a microscope, she might be able to tell me something about those hairs I’d found in the Achilles. I’d wait to see if I could puzzle out their source on my own first.

  I heard the swinging door to the kitchen swoosh open, and George slipped through the black curtain behind me.

  “Hello, stranger.” I smiled.

  “Getting anywhere, Detective?”

  “Well, the field of suspects is pretty swampy.” I drummed my fingers against the desk. “And I still haven’t figured out how anyone got to Renee’s room that night.”

  “It’s confusing. This crime was clearly planned in advance. But strangling is a crime of passion.” His eyes were locked on mine.

  Had he said passion emphatically? No, that didn’t make any sense. But why did he keep staring at me?

  I turned away from his gaze to stack up the comment cards. “Right. It would have to be premeditated if the killer knew how to get to the victim without being seen.”

  “But how would the killer know they were going to have an opportunity to find her in her room alone?”

  I shrugged. “It sounds like she had headaches like that a lot and maybe used them to skip out on the group’s events sometimes.”

  “Mm, yes, so the killer had to have known her habits. And must have hated her at least a little.” He leaned his elbows on the desk a few inches from me and rolled a pencil between his fingers. “Or been jealous of her, or some other dark motive.”

  George smelled like basil and butter today. It occurred to me that there weren’t a lot of people to whom I could stand close enough to smell without it being weird.

  “That still makes Clyde the most obvious choice, especially given that there was trouble between them,” I said.

  “Looks like you’re making progress.”

  “I hope so.” I watched his fingers as he doodled on someone’s check-in paperwork.

  “How a
re you sleeping?” He nudged me in the arm, well above my bandage.

  “Okay, so far.” Several times a night, I’d roll over onto my sore arm, making my skin scream as if the burn were fresh. I loved that he asked, but there was no sense in worrying him any further.

  “Good,” he said, lifting his weight off the counter. “Don’t hide from me, all right? Keep me updated.”

  I nodded. It was nice to be on his watch list.

  “I gotta get back to dinner.” He yawned.

  “Save me some.”

  “You won’t like it—it’s spicy,” he called as he went through the swinging door to the kitchen.

  I smiled, thinking of that time we’d walked from school to the Thai restaurant and I’d let him order for me. He’d thought I could handle the panang at the three-chili level, but my heartburn was so bad, we’d had to call his mom to pick us up.

  Alone again in the little office, I looked Clyde up on a professor-rating website. We all used it to dish not only about classroom experiences but also the character of our teachers.

  Clyde had a great overall rating, and students weren’t commenting on his personality except to say that he was helpful.

  Well, some people left it all on the field at work and had nothing to give at home.

  Autumn hadn’t wanted Clyde for a brother-in-law, and his relationship with Selena was rocky. But they each had their own biases. I needed to track down another source.

  X

  Spies, Lies, and Alibis

  The springs of Dr. Larsson’s chair squealed like a hungry gerbil through the receiver of the front desk phone. The professor had been easy to find in the college’s online directory but not as easy to catch at his desk. He’d finally answered on my third try.

  Clyde had described Dr. Larsson as a friend, but like Clyde, he was a professor of literature, so I figured he must have been a classmate or a colleague at some point too.