by Mary Bowers
“Guided?” I heard one of the men ask. “How?”
He was going to launch into the story of my magic cat. All that silliness about me being psychic – no, possessed. And in denial about it. I snapped out of it.
“I had inside information that the police didn’t have,” I said. I had re-assumed my normal voice so unexpectedly that several of them flinched, and Trixie let out a little scream.
“She also had a little help from Bastet,” Ed said persistently, gazing at me and daring me to deny it.
“Fine,” I said. We were in the entertainment biz with the Mystery Dinners, after all. I decided to let him have his way, and give my listeners a little thrill. “That’s when my cat Bastet showed up, and that’s when I put all the pieces together and realized exactly how Vesta had been killed. And here,” I said, standing near what would have been the side of Vesta’s bed and making a small, helpless gesture, “is where my friend left her body and came looking for help. I actually saw her, after she died. I’m not sure I ever told you that, Ed.”
“I . . . understood. I figured it out.”
I could sense that I was giving the group a pleasurable thrill, which was all I wanted. Outside, in the great room, I couldn’t hear the clatter of tableware anymore; the table was set, so I could get them out there for coffee and dessert and then the night would be over and with it, the tour of the house. I hoped.
“Right here,” Trixie whispered, relishing the spooky mood and gazing where I’d pointed. “Her soul left her body behind and . . . walked.”
A few people shivered.
In that shivery moment, in the murk of dimmed lamps and among the shapes of the gathered living, a small voice from the area where the head of the bed would have been said, “Help me.”
Trixie screamed.
“Turn up the lights,” one of the men commanded.
It had been Dan, and without waiting for me, he went to the office door and worked the dimmer switch next to the doorframe.
We looked about ourselves and at one another, trying to believe we had imagined it, when we distinctly heard, “Help me,” again. It was coming from the floor behind me, and I turned around and looked down.
Harriet was lying on the floor, weakly scrabbling around.
Chapter 12
We were all still blinking in the sudden brightness, and it took us a moment to believe what we were seeing.
Harriet’s face looked puffy, and the redness of it was shocking. By the time I managed to kneel beside her, Dan and Kip were on the other side of her, Dan checking her pulse, Kip trying to soothe her. She ignored them and stared at me.
“It was the food,” she gasped. “I expressly told your chef – ”
“It couldn’t have been the food,” I said forcefully, as if by simply saying it I could make it so. “Grady knows what he’s doing. There were no nuts in the food you ate.”
“Cheese. Parmesan cheese,” she said. “I can’t even touch it. My bag,” she said, looking at Willa. “I left it on the table. My pills – get my bag – NOW!”
Willa was immobilized for a moment, then with a jerk she turned herself and was gone. Watching her leave, I noticed for the first time that Bastet was in the room. She was sitting near the door, looking as perfect as a stuffed toy, coolly gazing at me across the room.
Willa came back quickly with a purple velvet evening bag. She had it open and was digging around in it.
“Give it to me,” Harriet demanded.
“This one?” Willa said, holding up a tiny pillbox. “I see another one in here.”
“I said give it to me! Water,” she added, looking at me. “Move back! I can’t breathe.”
“I’ll get the water,” Trixie said, flying from the room.
Bastet transferred her gaze from me to the bag, but I was already onto it.
Willa figured it out first. She was still holding the first pillbox she’d found, and over Harriet’s protests, she shoved the bag under her arm and opened it.
“What is it?” Sherman asked, moving closer. “It doesn’t look like pills. It’s a powder!” He looked at Harriet. “Are you taking drugs, Harriet? Is this cocaine?”
“You’ve got the wrong pillbox,” Harriet was saying wildly. “It’s the other one. The other one. Leave that one alone. Give me my purse – I’ll get it myself!”
Willa was shaking her head. She dipped her finger into it and tasted it. Then she looked at Harriet with a frighteningly blank face. “It’s parmesan cheese. She spiked her own food. Why, Harriet?”
“It is not parmesan cheese,” Harriet shouted, surprisingly strong again. “Give me my bag, you fool! That’s the wrong pillcase. I don’t know where that came from. Someone must have put it there. I need my pills. This is an outrage! And someone has to take me to the hospital immediately! I need documentation of this.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. “For your lawsuit. Were you planning to sue us, Harriet? Was that what the Mystery Dinner was all about? You need money, and you thought this might be a way to get it? Isn’t that the whole reason you moved into Santorini in the first place? To get at Willa’s money? And now . . . this.”
Grudgingly, after much hesitation, Willa handed down the bag and let Harriet dig out another pillbox, but Willa held onto the one with the powder in it. Harriet was glaring now, and still trying to claim she knew nothing about the second pillbox, but the one she had her pills in matched the one the cheese was in. It was a different shape, but made of the same unique cloisonné interlaced with gold.
Trixie, who had missed the finding of the cheese powder, handed the glass of water to Harriet and then looked around at the rest of us, puzzled, while Harriet greedily drank the pill down.
“You’ll be all right now,” Trixie said.
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” I told her. “And it’s her own damn fault she had a reaction in the first place. She poisoned herself. She was hoping to sue me.”
“And me,” Lorenzo said, standing in the doorway. “It would have been easy to look me up on the Internet and see that I’m a wealthy man.”
“And me,” Grady said, from his place next to Lorenzo. “I own a business. A lawsuit from her could have shut me down.”
“Maybe even me,” Ed said, “since she knows I brought a peanut butter sandwich.”
I threw up my hands. “Just sue everybody and take whatever you can get, was that the plan?”
Harriet looked up at her cousin and pathetically said, “You’ll back me up, won’t you Willa?”
Willa just stared at her. “I want you out of my aunt’s house by tomorrow night,” she said.
Harriet stared back with reptilian eyes. “Before you decide to move into it yourself, you’d better give it a good cleaning, and I don’t mean with a mop and broom. I mean you’d better hire your boyfriend over there,” she said lifting her chin at Ed. “The previous occupant left a stink behind her.”
Willa regarded her with icy calm. “I know Frieda’s there,” she said. “It’s her house. She can stay if she wants to.”
Ed looked intellectually interested; everybody else just looked uneasy.
After a punctuating glare at Willa, Harriet remembered that she was supposed to be having an allergic reaction. She leaned back weakly against the French door behind her – she was sitting up by then – and asked Willa, “Where do you expect me to go? I don’t have anywhere else.”
“What about your apartment in New York?”
“I had to give it up. I can’t afford it any longer.”
“There are other places,” Kip said languidly. “I know your standards are high, but I’m sure the Salvation Army can supply something with a little urban chic while you’re looking around for something more suitable.”
I could see Harriet calculating, then switching gears. It was like watching machinery move. She was about to take what I knew was the right approach, and I could just feel myself sending out waves of resistance between her and her prey.
She began to whimper. �
�Willa, I don’t have anything left. I have nowhere to go and nobody who loves me, and you’re my only living relative in the whole wide world. You’re my cousin. All my old friends are dead. I counted on my brother to take care of me always, but he betrayed me.”
“Frazier was free to leave his money any way he wanted to,” Sherman said blandly, shambling over to my desk chair and taking a seat. “And you inherited the same amount of money he did when you came of age. You didn’t have to squander it, always counting on Frazier to bail you out.”
“The Friends of Atlantis!” Harriet cried savagely. “The Ricardian Society. And then there’s some juvenile club with an unpronounceable name where grown men get together and dress up as knights, for God’s sake, and spend the night eating with their hands and getting drunk!”
“Les Preudhommes Mesnie d’Arthur,” Sherman said, rather lyrically. “It isn’t unpronounceable. It’s French.”
“French!” Harriet shouted, gesturing around to us as if this proved her point. “His will left everything to a list of fraudulent, childish organizations, and nothing for his only flesh and blood. Good grief, a bunch of English knights speaking French!”
“In medieval times, the language of the English court was French,” Sherman said calmly, “although I think the club may be carrying the point too far with that name. It means ‘The Chivalrous Men of King Arthur’s Retinue.’ Loosely translated, of course. And the Ricardian Society actually found the bones of King Richard III. I happen to be a member of the Society myself. I’m rather proud of it. The Society is hardly fraudulent and far from childish.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Harriet snapped. “Nobody really cares about those things. And to abandon your own flesh and blood without a penny!”
“He didn’t abandon you,” Linda said, causing heads to turn in surprise. “He died. Nobody does that on purpose. When he was alive, he always took care of you and gave you good advice, and constantly warned you what would happen if you didn’t handle your money more responsibly. In return, you gave him nothing but aggravation.”
Harriet looked at Linda as if she had just oozed out of a crack in the wall. “What the hell do you know about it?”
“I know all about it.” Linda walked across the floor and relaxed into a chair next to my desk, looking cool and elegant. Kip went to stand beside her. “I was his mistress for the last eight years of his life. You never met me, because he wanted to protect me from you. He knew you’d make our lives a living hell if you knew he had a woman in his life. You would have considered me a rival, and attacked me constantly, any way you knew how. I must say, now that I’ve met you, I can see that he was right.”
“Liar!”
Linda went on, unperturbed. “It’s why I bought a house in Santorini. You were never really a sister to him, Harriet, but I knew the family’s open secret: that he also had a cousin, Willa. I wanted to get to know her, see just how much of a Strawbridge she really was. Toward the end, Frazier talked about her more and more. How she was the love child of Frieda’s brother, and the family had treated her mother so badly. He was haunted by it. Frazier had always wanted to reach out to her, but he knew how his parents felt. Still, they’d been dead for years, and he had just gotten a serious diagnosis from his cardiologist. It made him decide to finally get in touch with you,” she told Willa. “But before he could, his time ran out. He wasn’t sure how to approach you, after all these years, and while he was hesitating, the final attack came. We thought he’d have more time.”
“I never saw you before in my life!” Harriet declared. “You never knew my brother at all. You’re just spinning a story out of facts anybody could have found out about him. You’re a grifter, trying to get money out of Willa. Well, you’ll have to get through me first! Don’t worry Willa, I’ll handle this bimbo.”
“He did get in touch with me,” Willa said to Linda, ignoring Harriet, who began to fizz and bubble with outrage. “And he mentioned you.”
“He did?” Linda seemed genuinely surprised. “He never told me. Of course, those last few weeks . . . and maybe he was afraid you’d reject him, so he didn’t say anything to me.”
Nobody even tried to listen to what Harriet was now growling about. The idea that her sainted brother had had anything to do with the family mongrel had brought out the animal in her. She was inarticulate with rage.
Willa was nodding. “I’ve known all along who you are. I just figured when you were ready to open up to me, you’d choose your own time. I was looking forward to learning more about Frazier, and getting to know you better.”
“When did Frazier call you? Or did he write to you?”
“He got my e-mail address from my trustees. Then he wrote to me and asked if there were still any hard feelings about – you know – the way his parents had treated my mother. I e-mailed back, saying I had no hard feelings towards him at all and would love to meet him, but I never got an answer. And then I saw his obituary in the newspaper and realized why. I would have liked to have met him,” she added wistfully.
“You would have liked him,” Linda said. “He was a charming man, if I do say so myself. Anybody else would have cut Harriet off altogether a long time ago. As a heart patient, he didn’t need the stress she caused him.”
Harriet, from being prostrated, was suddenly well enough to stand up and look fierce. “You knew nothing about him,” she shouted. “Neither one of you. I was his sister. He owed me!”
Nobody cared to even comment on that. Looking around, I saw that Carr, Dan, Lorenzo, Grady, and even my cat Bastet, had quietly left the room.
The whole farce seemed to be over. As we all straggled out of the room, I heard Harriet say from behind me, “You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,” but I wasn’t really worried.
* * * * *
“It must have been when we were all looking into the kitchen at Grady’s wife Cindy, after they finished eating,” Michael said later. “Trixie’s little joke about her husband and his spatula.”
We finally got everybody out of the great room, the kitchen, and anywhere else in the house, and by midnight Myrtle, Michael and I were sitting at the foot of the banquet table, drinking the coffee the guests hadn’t wanted. Dessert was in the fridge; no way I was wasting Grady’s strawberry pie. We hadn’t been able to settle down and go to bed. Of course.
I thought back over the night and nodded. “It was the only time everybody was looking into the kitchen, after Harriet had complained about how her steak had been cooked and Trixie told her to hush up. Harriet was at the far end of the table and everybody else was looking the other way, even Grady. The people in the kitchen were too far away to see what she was doing. She would have had the pillbox handy, waiting for her chance, and that’s when she must have quickly taken a pinch of the cheese.”
“We should have made Willa give us that pillbox,” Myrtle said.
“With ten witnesses who can swear to what she found, I don’t think there’s going to be any lawsuit,” Michael said. He was a lawyer. He should know. “Oh, she’ll probably give it a try, but no lawyer is going to touch it. And look on the bright side. With her outed like that, she’ll never try it again, and we just may be rid of her for good.”
He was right about that, but not the way he meant it at the time.
We were rid of her for good because by morning she was dead.
Chapter 13
Gretel found her.
By rights, it should have been Sherman, since he was staying in the house and was used to Harriet being around when he got up. He was a late riser. She was always up early. But when Gretel showed up to clean, Sherman let her in and told her all about what Harriet had done the night before, and said he was still so disgusted by it he didn’t really want to see her, so when she wasn’t around, he hadn’t gone looking.
Ed called me as soon as he found out, and he wanted me to come right over. Since she’d died after having an allergic reaction at one of our Mystery Dinners, I decided I’d better get over there quick, re
gardless of the fact that we could prove she’d poisoned herself.
When I got there, there was the usual official commotion at the far end of Santorini Drive, outside of Frieda’s house where Harriet was staying, and several neighbors, including Ed, were standing in the middle of the driveway. When he saw my SUV, he broke away from the group and came back to his house to meet me.
“Was it the cheese?” I asked him.
“Inside,” he said, and he swept me up to his door and into his office.
When we were properly seated, he folded his hands on the desktop and looked at me.
“Okay, what was it?” I asked. “Cheese? Nuts?”
“Neither. It wasn’t an allergic reaction. Gretel found her. She said she saw blood on the sheets, and when she touched her face, she was cold.”
I sat back, stunned. “She was bleeding? What happened?”
He was patting the air with his palms, tamping me down. “It was murder. She was stabbed through the heart while she was sleeping.”
“Stabbed? Oh, my God. For someone like Harriet Harvey Strawbridge, that shouldn’t be shocking, but somehow, it is.”
He took his wire-rimmed glasses off, set them on the desk and rubbed his eyes. “Exactly.” He put his hands back on the desk and blinked at me nakedly. Without his glasses, he always looked so vulnerable.
“What happened here in Santorini after you all left Cadbury House last night? Did anybody get into a fight with her, that you know of?”
“We were all furious with her, but no, there was no fighting. Nobody was even speaking to her. She came out into Santorini Drive as soon as Sherman got his car into the garage and started calling to us. She wanted somebody to drive her to the hospital, and Sherman had refused. We all just walked away, and eventually Sherman did take her, but then he brought her right back home again when they wouldn’t even admit her. And of course, now that she’s dead, we’re all feeling properly ashamed of ourselves.”
“Why? I can’t blame you for saying no, after what she’d done.”
