Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  How interesting that he became invested in the conversation as soon as he discerned that it was about Renee. He must have been genuinely fond of her, and that went a long way coming from someone who seemed as emotive as a pet rock.

  “But I’ve told the police everything I know about that night, which is almost nothing anyway,” he said.

  “I get the sense that Renee wasn’t very sure of herself.”

  “Well, no, how could she be with a sister who second- guessed every choice Renee made? And Borough …” He shook his head.

  “What about him?”

  “God, did you see the way he treated her?” He finally looked up at me.

  “Like a child.” I frowned and nodded.

  “Yes. Between Clyde and Autumn, Renee was hardly able to think for herself.”

  I inched closer to him and lowered my voice. “You sound like you have some personal stake in the situation.”

  He twisted his head awkwardly, as if my question put a kink in his neck. “I only wanted to be friends with her.”

  “And Clyde didn’t like that.”

  Leonard kept his focus on the pattern of the rug beneath his feet. “Exactly.”

  “Thank you.” I had one more question for him. “I wanna go back a second to Browning.”

  He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes. “Yes?”

  “Did you lose a book of his poems somewhere?”

  “No.” He stared into space behind me, considering something, each new thought changing his face by a degree. “I need to go now.”

  “I can show you the book I’m talking about.”

  He stared at the floor again and shook his head as he moved toward the stairs.

  Outside the theater, Deena glanced up as Leonard walked away. She had been reapplying her lipstick and perusing a painting of Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus Caesar, which wasn’t my taste and hadn’t attracted my interest at all until last year, when Mr. Fig had told me what it meant to my family.

  I caught Deena’s eye, and she waggled her eyebrows at me as if to say, See?

  I wondered whether to believe all that Leonard had said about Clyde or if I should take his comments with a grain of simple psychology. It was possible he suffered from an inferiority complex. Or maybe avoidant personality disorder, which included feelings of incompetence and self-consciousness. People with APD often came across as stiff and distant.

  But the more psychology classes I took, the more I began to realize how much work went into a diagnosis like that. Playing around with labels wasn’t as fun for me now as it once had been. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

  Now that Leonard had brought up the poetry and reacted a bit strangely to my mention of the book, I couldn’t shake the idea of the Browning poetry being relevant, but I had no time for sifting through poems looking for clues like a literary conspiracy theorist.

  Still, I wondered if he was simply afraid to admit the book was his. And if so, why?

  XI

  Grave Digger

  When everyone from octogenarian skinny-dippers to introverted English professors had finally drifted upstairs, I put the brb sign out on the desk and pushed the golden down arrow outside the elevator.

  The doors slid back soundlessly, and I rustled inside, careful to pull my wide skirt clear of the threshold.

  In a moment I was alone in the gilded box. From the deep pocket of my dress, I unsheathed the screwdriver I’d swiped from the emergency toolbox in the office.

  There was a bump, and then the elevator creaked slowly down to the basement. I slipped the flat end of the screwdriver under the crack of the small door in the elevator wall in front of me. To the uneducated eye, it was a control panel, but when I applied a little pressure, the door popped open and revealed several rows of ancient-looking skeleton keys on pegs.

  I didn’t have a great plan for how to close the panel again. There were zip ties in the office. That would probably do it.

  I held the close-door button while I examined the rows of keys. Mr. Fig, or some caretaker before him, had labeled the pegs with tiny symbols—a piano, a bathtub, a book, a bed, the letter A, and so on.

  I couldn’t relate any of the symbols to the door marked Storage besides the S. I grabbed the key under that peg and hoped it was right.

  Thankfully, the storage room lock opened without complaint. I flicked on the bare bulbs overhead, and the memory of being here with Mr. Fig was so tangible that I teared up.

  Although he and I had talked some since about the things in this room, I hadn’t been back down here. I told myself it was because I wanted to behave more like a regular member of staff and not bother Mr. Fig with too many requests for special treatment. But I wondered if some part of me was avoiding looking at anything to do with my mom.

  I went back to the same green metal box Mr. Fig had lifted from the shelf last year, the one labeled MCMX–MCMXIX. It was heavier than it looked. Inside, I found the original blueprints once again, handling them as if they were Dead Sea Scrolls. Mr. Fig might’ve preferred that I wear white gloves, but I didn’t have any handy.

  When Clarista purchased the hotel, all of these old things in storage would have been sold along with it, right? Or did I have any claim to them as a descendant? If she didn’t know all these old documents existed, would she even want them?

  I knew as little about the answer to that question as I did about quantum physics, but I sure wasn’t going to tell Clarista all this was here for a while longer. Anyway, there was a good chance she already knew.

  I flipped open the beautiful cover of the bound blueprints with its gold-embossed sketch of the hotel and past the page of the first-floor plan. The Achilles, on the second floor, was easy to pick out because it was a good 30 percent larger than the other rooms—and of course because of the helpful Achilles written in fine, slanted cursive in the white space.

  I could see the marked openings for the room’s entrance from the landing and the doors to the bathroom and closet.

  And then there was a smaller opening marked D along the interior wall of the room. But why? Why an opening in the wall, and how could it be accessed? Was it simply a niche to hold a small sculpture? Or perhaps a narrow laundry shoot? Judging by the scale, this opening took up no more than half the width of the room’s other doors.

  Whatever it was, I was going to find out.

  Moments later, as I climbed the stairs back to the first floor, I thought I heard some kind of music in the air, too faint for me to identify either the tune or the instrument. Maybe a guest was playing it from their phone.

  Like swimming in the pool, music late in the evening wasn’t expressly forbidden, but if the noise kept up much longer, I’d need to put a stop to it just to protect the peace and, selfishly, to help people fall asleep. The earlier they did, the sooner I could leave the desk and get back into the Achilles suite.

  The sound had stopped by the time I reached the desk, so I sat down in the office to catch up on paperwork and pass the time.

  In a few minutes, I heard voices, and the music started back up. Both came from the direction of the drawing room. The thin somber whine of a violin was easy to pick out now.

  On the drawing room bookshelves, where most inns might keep board games, Clarista displayed old instruments. I knew she’d put a sign on the grand piano when she’d moved it into the drawing room at Christmas that said, in Clarista’s typically drawn-out way, Dear guests, please kindly refrain from playing the piano unless you know how and have received the express permission of the staff beforehand. Sitting on the piano bench without using the instrument is also discouraged.

  (I’d started to wonder if she used so many words because she thought it seemed more old-fashioned.)

  But there was no sign by the violin, trumpet, or other instruments on the shelves. I’d assumed they were mostly decorative, too old to be put to use, but maybe someone had decided to give it a try.

  The playing continued for another quarter hour, and as much as
I was enjoying it, it was almost ten o’clock, and my job required that I make it stop.

  From the doorway of the drawing room, I could see the violinist. He sat facing the fireplace with his chin angled to pinch the end of the violin, so all I could see was the back of his slender head, clipped in a fade that revealed the deep golden brown of his skin. It was Furnell Rogers, Parker’s dad.

  I couldn’t place the melody, although I’d heard it before, but I could tell by the way he played that he was on a first-name basis with the piece.

  Now that I was close, the music was liquid glass, too beautiful to be interrupted.

  Furnell must have heard the swish of my dress, because he paused and turned toward me. “Sorry, is this all right?”

  “Please, yeah, go ahead,” I answered on instinct, then thought better of it. “Well, actually, sir, you should probably stop in a few minutes. We try to have quiet after ten o’clock. Your playing makes me wish that wasn’t our policy, though.”

  His lean face drew up to a smile, and he nodded toward the middle of the room. “That’s all right. Just killing a little time while my son sketches.”

  I took a few steps forward.

  Parker sat on the floor using the coffee table like a desk. Was this the moment I would catch the little Banksy, crayon in hand?

  Although I got close enough to look over his shoulder, he didn’t look up at me. He wasn’t coloring, though—he was indeed sketching, as his father had said.

  I was the weak link in a family heavy with artistic talent, so I was far from being a critic, but to me his drawing was pretty impressive, a realistic representation of an overhead view of the rear garden and the river. The perspective from their room on the third floor, I realized. The confidently sketched shadows of the statues lay on the lawn at convincing angles, and everything was detailed and in proper proportion.

  Nothing like the cartoonish, simplistic pictures I’d found on the walls.

  “Does he always work in pencil?” I asked his dad.

  He laid the violin on the sofa table behind him, a tall, narrow thing with fat, shapely legs. “Eh, sometimes pen, sometimes whatever they require at school.”

  “I like your work, Parker,” I said.

  He murmured back without lifting his face from the drawing.

  “He’s a man of few words, you may have noticed,” said Furnell. “Parker is on the autism spectrum.”

  “Okay, cool.” I nodded. I understood the kid’s behavior a little better now. “It’s nice that you could bring him along with you for the convention. I mean, a lot of kids would complain about being here, right?”

  “Hmph, other way around, actually. He brought me with him.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  “No, seriously. He’s the graver. I’m just his chaperone.”

  “Oh, wow. Graver, huh? I haven’t heard that term.”

  “Taphophile,” said Parker. “From the Greek táphos.”

  He was an adorable nerd. I wished we could keep him around.

  “Yeah,” Furnell continued, as if agreeing with my unspoken thought. “We had no idea how interested he was until he started checking out books only about graveyards and tombstones and drawing all these pictures. Went and found ’em in his room one day, and I was like, this kid is obsessed!”

  “So what do you do while he’s in the conference all day? You go with him?”

  “I check in between sessions, but otherwise, I’m a free man.” He stretched his arms and put both hands behind his neck.

  I had to appreciate the hard work that put those muscles in his arms. “Good. How have you been occupying your time?”

  “You know we’ve been here since early Wednesday, so I’ve been to all those shops and stuff at the Choo-Choo and down Main Street, I went hiking and hang gliding off the side of one of your mountains, and tomorrow I’m going stand-up paddleboarding.”

  “You’re high-energy. But tomorrow’s the last day, right?”

  “Yeah, there’s some big party that goes on kinda late Sunday night, but we probably won’t do that. Parker’s not much for parties.”

  Hmm. So he skipped out on club activities and he had a sporty physique. Could he have climbed up to the second floor somehow? “Did you take the tour with the group around the hotel’s gravestones Thursday night?”

  “I did.”

  So much for that theory. “Did everyone stay the whole time? Or did you notice anyone getting bored and drifting off?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Can’t say I did. Clyde seemed to hold our interest pretty well.”

  But I already knew that Deena had slipped away for a bathroom break, and if Furnell hadn’t seen her leave, then couldn’t someone else have disappeared without the group noticing too?

  “How ’bout you, though?” Furnell said. “You must like this kind of stuff—working at a place like this.”

  “Um.” It was hard to respond without knocking his son’s interest. “I like history. I’m probably only interested in graves of family members, though.”

  Actually, they hadn’t been an interest either until this group had showed up and rubbed off on me.

  I had taken the time before falling asleep early this morning to look for my grandparents’ obituaries in the online archives of the local paper. I’d prepared myself for disappointment, but when I found each of their write-ups, they had left me more mystified than sad. Both obits talked briefly about basic facts and accomplishments, but neither listed any surviving children. My mother would have still been in town during those years. Had she sent in the copy to the paper and purposefully left herself out? And if so, why?

  “Monuments are for the living, not the dead,” said Parker. “Frank Wedekind.”

  Furnell shrugged, as if to say, See?

  Whoa. I didn’t even know who Wedekind was, and this kid could quote him. I wondered if Parker had also cataloged the graves out back. “Hey, Parker, while you were checking out the graves here, did you happen to see any with the names Hortensius Morrow or Mary Quinn Morrow?”

  “No,” he said.

  If I hadn’t found those headstones and he hadn’t found them, maybe they simply weren’t here. Did that mean something?

  I shoved down my questions. “Well, I’ll get back to work. Good to see you again, Parker.”

  Although he didn’t look up, he craned his head in my direction, and I knew he was getting ready to speak to me.

  I waited.

  “Where will they bury you?” he asked.

  A chill skipped down the backs of my arms. I didn’t have an answer for him.

  XII

  What Ivy Found There

  I locked the door of the Achilles behind me and tiptoed through the alcove into the heart of the suite. The house had been built sturdily, but a singing floorboard here or there wasn’t entirely out of the question. I was much more aware now than I’d been the night before of the rhythmic rush of my breathing after climbing the stairs.

  I had to be extra careful tonight. If Renee’s killer was the intruder who had found me in here before, they might already suspect I was on their trail. Whether they had watched and followed me into the room last time or if our simultaneous presence here had been merely coincidence, I didn’t know, but if we met again in the dead of night, well, who knew what they might be tempted to do.

  I understood well enough from last year’s experience that murderers didn’t have scruples about little things like killing again.

  I estimated that the mystery opening I’d spotted on the second-floor blueprint was seven feet ahead of me along the right wall. The burgundy settee and matching armchairs were at my left in front of the fireplace, and straight ahead was the bed on the far side of the suite.

  Glancing to my right, I saw an obvious problem. The heavy armoire in which I’d hidden last time spanned five feet, and it was pushed right up against the flocked wallpaper. I swooped past it and checked the wall on the other side. No, there was nothing but a framed picture that wasn’t nea
rly large enough to conceal an access point.

  I rechecked the picture of the blueprint on my phone and measured the wall by walking toe to toe along the baseboard.

  It was impossible.

  Maybe the room had been built with some kind of opening here, but I couldn’t see how Renee’s killer could have used it.

  Unless … what if the intruder who surprised me in the armoire had indeed been the killer, and what if their reason for opening it had had nothing to do with me?

  I grabbed the knob of the massive door and nearly pulled it off its hinges in my eagerness. Leaning inside, I could just reach the back wall of the armoire if I extended my arm under the half-dozen empty hangers. In the light of my phone, the wood was one solid piece, but I ran my fingers across the cool grain, and my fingernail caught on a crack.

  I sucked in a breath and followed the crevice until it turned ninety degrees three times and my hand was back where I started. The crack formed a long rectangle about four feet by three. A tiny drop of hardened glue glistened in the left corner.

  This had to be it. This was the killer’s access point.

  I knelt inside the armoire, put both palms against the wood, and shoved. With a pop, the rectangular panel broke free of its gluey hold. All hail Ivy Nichols!

  I couldn’t stop the panel from dropping into the dark valley between the armoire and the bedroom wall or the resulting thud and smack of wood. I feared the noise would wake Mr. Wollstone in the next room, but my risk paid off when the light of my phone revealed a small sliding door on the wall behind the section of armoire I’d removed.

  Mr. Wollstone in the next room. Could the rats he thought he’d heard on the night before Renee was murdered actually have been the sound of the killer sawing this panel? Or of someone moving around inside the wall behind it?

  The door I’d revealed was set in a gilded frame in the wall, some kind of cabinet, I supposed, and judging by the acacia—no, acanthus—leaf carving on the frame, whatever it was had to be original to the house.

  I reached through the hole I’d reopened and slid the door to this strange, new cabinet upward, shining the light from my phone with my other hand. But behind it was just another wall.