by Audrey Keown
“Of course.”
We strolled toward the car.
“Ugh,” he said. And turned his head to pick his teeth.
I looked away.
“Sorry,” he said. “There was, like, this one long yellow string of pineapple wound through my teeth.”
My ears pricked, and I didn’t know why. I stopped and looked around.
“What?” George said.
“What did you just say?”
“There was pineapple caught in my teeth.” He took another step toward the car.
“No.” I grabbed his arm. “You said, ‘one long yellow string wound through your teeth.’ ”
“Okay.” He looked at me like my popsicle had been spiked with something.
“That’s it. Oh my word. That’s it, George.”
I pulled the book of Browning’s poetry from my bag and flipped through.
“ ‘Porphyria’s Lover,’ ” I said aloud, and the whole picture flooded my brain. I sat down on a parking block.
The narrator waits for his lover in the dark. Porphyria comes in out of the rain, lights a fire in the hearth, and sits down with him.
I scanned the open page on my lap and read fast and loud.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around.
I paused for dramatic effect. “And strangled her.”
“What’s going on, Ivy?” He studied my face like it had sprouted polka dots.
“This book was left for me, George. Someone wants me to know that this murder was meant to look like the poem.”
“What?” George said.
“We read it in sophomore English. Do you remember?” The class had kinda loved it because before that some of us had thought poetry was all lovey-dovey nonsense. (Okay, me. I thought that.) “The long blond wig. The fire. The Victorian poetry. The strangulation with a soft, broad garrote. It all fits.”
“You’re saying this was some kind of … literary copycat murder?” George cocked his head.
“Yes!” I bounced back up to standing. “It’s why Clyde said he’d been framed. He teaches Victorian poetry.”
“Weird,” George said slowly.
“Yeah. And he admitted to tampering with the crime scene before the police arrived. I think he took the wig to keep anyone from making the connection.”
“Would they make the connection, though? Bennett’s not that insightful.”
“I don’t know. Maybe anyone so wrapped up in their field that they would stage a murder like this wouldn’t see that the metaphor isn’t obvious to everyone. For instance, I happen to know this chef who throws around terms like coulis and remouillage as if they aren’t obscure culinary jargon.” I threw him a pointed glance.
He laughed. “Busted. But what about the framing aspect? Is there any reason to believe Clyde on that?”
“Only that he led the tour, so he’s the least likely of all the gravestone society to have been able to get away at the right time.”
“And why would the killer commit the murder at a time when Clyde is the least likely suspect if their goal was to frame him?” George said.
“Your popsicle’s dripping.”
“It’s a paleta.”
I rolled my eyes and took another bite of mine. “Because it wasn’t supposed to be him leading the tour.”
“And they couldn’t change plans once they realized Clyde was substituting for him?”
“Maybe.” I said. “Or maybe the killer decided Clyde’s iron-tight alibi actually added credibility. In other words, wouldn’t Clyde plan ahead of time to cover his tracks?”
“To make it seem like he wasn’t guilty? Yeah. Smart.”
“I am smart.” I grinned annoyingly in his face. “Unfortunately, now I have to consider not only who would want to hurt Renee, but also who had a vendetta against Clyde.”
“Our suspect list just doubled.”
“And the gravestone convention ends tonight,” I said, eyeing the faraway storm cloud. “They’ll all check out tomorrow.”
A distant peal of thunder punctuated my words.
George and I left the police station for the convention center. It was a newish building adjoining a Marriott off the interstate downtown. And it was where the Association for Gravestone Studies, including the Gravestone Friends of Greater Pittsburgh, would be right about now.
Tom Truman’s name had popped into three separate conversations today, and I wanted to talk to him.
We followed the long hill of Fourth Street down to the City Center. Besides those thunderheads threatening in the distance, it was a lovely day, maybe the first nice weekend of spring, and that meant the sidewalks were crowded with merrymakers breaking free from the gloom of the long winter. Every time we stopped at a light, pedestrians crossed in front of us, some of them wearing flip-flops, as if their choice of footwear would bring on summer faster.
George parked the Highlander on the street behind the city library, a 1970s, modernish block of concrete and glass. He paid the meter, and we walked the block to the convention center, the sidewalks humming as we got closer with people enthusiastically carrying notebooks and laptop bags.
Inside, a mass of taphophiles chattered in the lobby—or what would be a better collective noun for grave enthusiasts? A cemetery of taphophiles? A graveyard of taphophiles?
Scaled for a city as small as Chattanooga, the building would be dwarfed by the convention centers of New York or even Atlanta. But this beautiful vestibule was so spacious that it made me feel like I wasn’t in my hometown anymore. The roof, which had to be thirty or so feet high, was supported by a long row of metal trestles. Dozens of strategically placed windows overhead filled the room with natural light.
Booths set up for the conference along one wall advertised ground-penetrating radar services, sold books on mapping and preservation, and offered bumper stickers that read I brake for old graveyards. The “Visit Chattanooga” tourism people were well represented too.
A café cart was set up in the lobby, its espresso machine’s roar accompanying the conference babble.
“They must be between sessions,” George said. “Maybe that will make it easier to find Tom.”
I’d told him on the way here about the mysterious calls to Selena’s phone and that I wanted to find out what Tom was up to with a woman less than half his age.
The conference commotion rivaled my own stir of thoughts. Were we getting closer to the truth or farther away? I couldn’t tell. We had so little time left, and I didn’t want to waste it.
George raised his voice over the noise. “We should split up.”
“But we’re not even dating.” I winked.
“Very funny, Tina Fey. You go one way. I’ll go the other. We’ll find Tom faster that way.”
“Right, of course.” I stepped back to accommodate two women carrying a clear acrylic box with an ancient-looking tombstone inside.
“I’ll text you.” George nodded a good-bye and disappeared into the crowd.
The conference center had a fancy map in the lobby, and I began to peruse it.
“Program?” someone said beside me.
It was Leonard Chaves, holding out a pamphlet and looking entirely unsurprised to see me. Set against the noise of the convention center, his voice seemed even softer than before.
“Uh, hi.” I took the schedule from him. “Thanks.”
“Did you get curious about our goings-on?” He wore a lanyard covered in smiley faces to hold his name tag.
“Yeah, I guess so. I’ve never known any gravers before.”
He didn’t reply but didn’t walk away either.
“You know I’m trying to figure out who murdered Renee.”
I didn’t know why I said it. He just seemed trustworthy.
He nodded and looked down.
“Do you know any
thing about the leak on Wednesday night?” I said. “It was about nine or ten o’clock.”
He shook his head.
I thought back to that night. “You ate in the dining room that night, didn’t you? And then you hung out in the drawing room a while.”
“Looking at the art, yes. You have some very fine nineteenth-century oils in there.”
The crowd had thinned around us, drawn like mourners to their next sessions.
“Have you seen Tom Truman this afternoon?” I asked.
He shook his head again, the dark widow’s peak making the movement more pronounced than it should have been.
“Well … thanks anyway,” I said, and walked away, flipping through the paper he’d given me.
There were lists of exhibits and daily schedules of presentations and classes, including evening lectures. It was nearly two o’clock, which meant the sessions on “seventeenth-century symbology,” “cast-iron gravemarkers,” and “cemetery mapping with aerial drones” were about to begin.
Yawn.
Where would I find Tom? He didn’t seem the academic type.
On the conference map, a stone-carving room was indicated well away from the lecture area. Tactile labor seemed just the activity for a burly guy.
Once I started down the right hallway, the room was easy to track down. I followed the stream of tap-tap-tapping, which I imagined was the sound of a hammer and chisel. There was a high-pitched roar as I got closer, too, like a vacuum.
I peeked through the glass in the door.
The source of the roar was a cylindrical machine in the corner with various fat, corrugated tubes running out to what appeared to be gravestone-carving stations.
I guessed they’d be called carving stations. Funny how different the meaning of that phrase would be in the context of a Golden Corral.
The workshop was empty of people except for a thin woman wearing a dust mask and safety glasses, leaning over a work bench. She turned to aim her chisel in a different direction on the headstone in front of her, and I recognized her as Autumn Truman.
I considered my options.
I’d had a plan in mind for talking to Tom, but not her. I didn’t think she had killed her own sister, but I had to admit there was a chance, and based on Clyde’s warning at the hospital, I couldn’t afford to stir up her suspicions against me.
She took a small, dry brush and swept off the stone, stood back to examine it, and then picked up her hammer and chisel again.
Heavy footsteps sounded at the end of the hallway.
It was Tom himself coming toward me and taking a bite of some kind of wrap or burrito he held with one hand.
I stepped away from the door and tried seeming nonchalant.
A look of recognition rather than suspicion crossed his face, and I felt relieved. “Hi, Mr. Truman.”
He nodded wordlessly.
“It’s Ivy.” I smiled.
He grunted and grabbed the door handle.
“I have some bad news for you, unfortunately,” I said quickly.
Tom turned around, clearly interested.
“It’s about Selena,” I said.
Tom lowered his eyebrows, more confused than concerned.
“I just came from the hospital with her,” I said. “It looks like she took some bad pills.”
Tom went rigid, and a deep wrinkle split his wide forehead in two. “She okay?”
The door opened beside us, and Autumn stepped out into the hall, hammer and chisel still in hand. “Ivy?”
She pushed her safety glasses back into her stone-dusted red hair and looked at Tom. “What’s going on?”
He shrugged.
“Selena’s at the hospital, and Clyde is with her,” I said.
Autumn watched her husband’s face. “And why are you talking to my husband about it?”
Her harshness intimidated me as much as his size. But I had to go for it. “Did you know Tom was at Clyde’s cottage at the same time you and I were yesterday?”
Her gray eyes flickered with alarm.
“And did you know that Clyde’s been threatening your wife about the money?” I asked Tom.
She stepped toward me and pushed the hammer into my chest. “What do you know about the money?”
I backed away from her and right into the privacy of the stone-carving room. My blood was a whitewater rapid in my veins. “I just mean his investment.”
She followed me into the room, small but menacing, and Tom loomed behind her, blocking out the light of the hall.
“Whatever Selena’s told you, it’s all lies,” he said.
“So why were you calling her?” I asked.
Autumn glared at him, even more interested in the question than I was. “Were you at the cottage to see Selena?”
“Look, she’s tryin’ to blackmail us,” Tom spit out. “Linda was mad when you fired her, and she told Selena that Renee was hiring illegals.”
Autumn stiffened, and horror overtook her face. “Illegals, Tom? Why didn’t you tell me? Renee said all their paperwork was good, and I … I didn’t check. I just believed her.”
“I’m sorry.” Tom couldn’t meet her eyes. “I was gonna tell you.”
“So she’s threatening to report me to ICE?” Autumn said.
Tom nodded.
“And you were negotiating with her?” Autumn said.
He nodded again, his gaze still on her feet.
“But what leverage do you have?” Autumn dug her head forward.
“Look, I don’t have a plan really.” Tom shrugged. “I just knew I had to try to stop her.”
“Didn’t you fire Selena’s mother because you thought she was stealing from you?” I asked Autumn.
Autumn backed up and lowered her hammer by her side. “I wasn’t happy about that, especially because my sister and Clyde met through the company—but the embezzlement had to be coming from someone in the office. Linda was the office manager.”
“But the stealing continued?”
“Yes.” Autumn gritted her teeth.
“Do you think Linda would hate Clyde or Renee enough to have committed murder?” I said.
Autumn threw up a hand, exasperated. “Look, I’ve been lying awake at that hotel every night, asking myself all these questions. I don’t know about Linda. I don’t know who’s responsible.”
She didn’t break down and cry, but something in her face, set even more rigidly than I’d seen it before, made me buy that she was actually upset. Maybe she was doing all of her grieving in private. Some people had their emotions tightly reined in like that, but feelings as strong as the grief and rage she probably harbored had to come out eventually.
“Well,” I said. “what I know is that the police have arrested the wrong person for your sister’s murder, and that means the real killer is walking free.”
“C’mon.” Tom pulled her back by the shoulder, glaring at me. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
Eat? He had just downed a burrito. And why was he in such a hurry to get her away from me?
Autumn kept her eyes on me. “I’m sure there’s nothing we can do that the police haven’t.”
I worried that she was right, but I tightened my jaw. “Maybe, but I’m not giving up until I’ve tried everything.”
She didn’t respond but let her husband lead her out of the room.
I stood there, frustrated that I couldn’t get the answers I wanted.
I texted George that I’d found Tom and was headed back to the lobby.
Before I left the room, I took a peek at Autumn’s work on the headstone. She’d carved a design at the top that looked like two overlapping infinity symbols. Below was Renee’s name and the years of her birth and death. And under that was a simple line drawing still in progress, a pair of curved animal horns if I was right.
Before going to meet George, I took a picture with my phone in case there was some important symbolism here that would enlighten me later.
XVI
Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid
There was more I needed to see now at the hotel, so George drove us there next.
He pushed a button on the dash. “Hey, you should pair your phone to the car so your music can play in here.”
“Yeah, I guess I should.” We both knew I was the one with the better music collection. I smiled and got out my phone. “Listen, I need to tell you something that Mr. Fig told me at the jail.”
He eyed me seriously. “Is he retiring?”
“No,” I said, a little too defensively, and then relayed the story about the theft of the paintings, noticing the whole time how I finagled the narrative to make our manager seem less suspicious. I felt protective of him even with George.
“Well,” George said, “we always knew he had to have some skeletons hiding behind that freshly painted closet door, right?”
“Yeah.”
He was right, and he was somehow able to look at Mr. Fig more objectively than I was. I realized I’d idolized Mr. Fig like a child would a parent, like when you’re unwilling to see a person you love as fully human, as inevitably flawed.
“And now I have to figure out whether the killer started the leak to get me away from the desk so they could get to the dumbwaiter,” I said. “Or whether Mr. Fig is right that the painting thief has returned and is trying to make him squirm.”
“Do you think there’s any way Clyde could be the painting thief?” George said. “He changed his story about being at the hotel when he was a student, right?”
I shook my head. “He seems too young for that. Mr. Fig said the thief was roughly his age and named Bob, but he doubts that was his real name. It’s definitely suspicious that Clyde’s lying, though.”
“But who’s not suspicious, honestly? Bunch of weirdos.”
I laughed. “Yeah. According to Tom, Selena is trying to blackmail Autumn’s company because her sister Renee was hiring illegal workers. Autumn owes Clyde money she can’t pay, and Tom’s hiding all kinds of things from his wife, I think.”
George raised one eyebrow at me. “Pot, kettle.”
“Well … yeah, I know all about hiding things, don’t I?” I didn’t let just anyone call me out on my faults, but George had earned the privilege.
The deeper I got into these people’s lives, the more overwhelmed I was by signs that all seemed to point me in different directions. Who had given Selena those pills? Was one of the gravestone guests the thief threatening Mr. Fig? And did the thief have anything to do with Renee’s death?
