Blood Will Tell

by Mary Bowers

“Ed, what are you talking about?”

  “The meeting! Isn’t that why you called me?”

  “What meeting?”

  “Dan, Trixie, Willa and I have been consulting. I was just going over to Dan’s house for our morning meeting. You’d better hurry, you’re going to be late.”

  He hung up.

  I sat on the floor holding my cell phone and blinking.

  “Dan, Trixie, Willa and I.” They’d left out Kip and Linda. They were probably thinking along the same lines as Gretel, and thanks to me, they were about to include her too. Everybody into the clown car.

  I looked across the aisle into the eyes of a mixed breed who was watching me intently, probably because I was sitting near the dog chow. He sat down and wagged his tail.

  “What do you think that gang is getting up to now?” I asked the dog.

  He tilted his head.

  “Blast it,” I said, hauling myself up and slamming the clipboard onto the counter, setting off an explosion of barking all around the kennel. “I’d better get over there and see what they’re doing before they all get themselves killed. Or arrested.”

  (Excerpt from The Santorini Horror, by Edson Darby-Deaver, PhD)

  Chapter 17

  I had refrained from asking Taylor the only important question regarding our confusing conversation: had she felt an irresistible urge to call me because it was important for her to attend the meeting that was about to take place? Had she tapped into that nebula of conjoined human thought that surrounds us all and received that wave of unease (so often described by psychics) which precedes received knowledge? Had her call been prompted by a paranormal nudge? I burned to know, but I dared not ask.

  She is still in deep denial about her abilities, and tends to overreact if I broach the subject, so I have learned to lay back and observe. Physically, she is one of those strong women of the Valkyrie mold, but the suggestion that she is special in any way makes her fretful. I interpret this as a sublimation of her true fears about the unknown. She projects anger, when in fact she is needy.

  Fortunately, I am always there to help.

  In addition to bringing her into the meeting, her call had prompted me to invite Gretel. Though she and Taylor were not residents of Santorini, and therefore not suspects, I realized that their input would be invaluable.

  As I walked across Santorini Drive towards Dan Ryder’s house and the planned discussion on the murder of Harriet Harvey Strawbridge, I reflected on the irony that though we had narrowed down our list of suspects, the attendance at the meeting had grown to the point where the killer, if our theory was wrong, might very well be in attendance. I usually relish such ironies, but this time I reminded myself to be on my guard.

  With the exception of Kip and Linda (our primary suspects, for reasons which will unfold presently), and Sherman and Carr, all the neighbors had been invited. Sherman, since the murder of Harriet and the dawning realization that he had been alone in the house that night with a killer who was moving about plunging knives into sleeping chests, had been in the same delicate nervous state as his nephew, Carr. A highly-strung family. Unless, of course, he had done the plunging himself, in which case it was a guilty conscience, but at the point of the meeting, we were looking in another direction: the gold-digger and her dupe (Trixie’s terminology; pithy, but apt). Still, Sherman had been alone with Harriet at the time of her murder, and his nephew was, in fact, his nephew. So we did not invite them. Later, perhaps, when our ideas had had time to ripen.

  Dan welcomed me in, offering beverages, and I opted for ice water. It was bad enough that Trixie was already there and this time she’d brought her own wine. Dan was drinking beer. Somebody needed to stay sober. I informed Dan of the two late additions to the meeting, and he nodded silently. Nothing perturbs him.

  Willa was seated on the love seat, clinging to a corner and looking washed-out, even ghostly, in a patch of direct sunlight. I went to her and she smiled at me. She had apparently refused all beverages.

  Trixie was holding the floor (verbally) with her usual banter about this and that, and I found myself compelled to call the meeting to order.

  I raised an index finger and said, “As regards the subject matter of this meeting, I have new information.”

  Trixie, sprawled artfully in an armchair, grinned at Willa and said, “Isn’t he cute?”

  Willa did not respond.

  “What information is that?” Dan asked, taking a seat in the other armchair.

  “We have a new ally. Our cleaning lady, Gretel, agrees with us, for reasons she will explain when she gets here. She, too, believes that the murder was committed by Kip, under the direction of Linda.”

  “Well, of course it was,” Trixie said. “It’s obvious that he and Linda are working together. I pegged those two as a couple as soon as Linda moved in, but did they let on to the rest of us? Nooooo,” she said, using three musical notes to emphasize her point. “They kept it a secret as long as they could, and you have to wonder why. Also, they’re the only ones with a motive.”

  “What motive?” Willa asked, as if she were having trouble concentrating.

  “She thinks Harriet drove her brother Frazier into the grave,” Trixie said. “She just about said so when she finally told us she’d been his mistress. He was her sugar daddy and things were going along just fine except for Harriet, who kept scrounging for money and driving him crazy. He died of a heart attack. Linda probably figures Harriet drove him to it. So she wants revenge. And she used Kip to help her. Whether or not she’s got a thing for Kip, it’s obvious he’s got a thing for her. I’ve been watching those two, and I’m never wrong about things like that. And he’s just the type to get himself used by a woman. He’s got a wide streak of gallantry running through him. Galloping gallantry,” she added with an eruption of high notes. “He’d help a lady in distress.”

  “So would I,” I said. “But I wouldn’t go as far as murder.”

  “Well, he would,” Trixie said complacently.

  “Accepting that as a hypothesis,” I said, “you postulate a reasonable motive, there was definitely opportunity, and according to Taylor, Gretel has a theory regarding the weapon which points us in the same direction.”

  “That’s interesting,” Dan commented.

  “Indeed,” I affirmed. “When different minds reach the same destination by different routes, it adds weight to their joint conclusion, in my opinion.”

  “Say what?” Trixie said.

  “We agree that Kip did it, and Gretel’s reasons are different from ours,” I said. “Presumably. Ah, there she is.”

  Dan rose at the sound of the doorbell and let Gretel in. Taylor pulled into my driveway at the same moment and he waited in the doorway to admit her.

  And so the meeting began in earnest.

  Gretel’s line of reasoning, once I was able to grasp it, was compelling, I thought. Diffuse, but compelling. Hers is not one of those piercing intellects, which constructs a line of logic and follows it doggedly from point A to point Z. She’s one of those, “Lots of smoke, therefore, fire,” logicians.

  “You should see his house,” she said, proceeding to set forth a cloud of innuendo that led from his study to his dining room to what kind of book he had sitting on his bedside table (old, leather bound, gilt edged, therefore not something a normal person would read – her reasoning, not mine), and concluded with the fact that he collected medieval and fantastical artifacts. “Like that dagger.” (I have taken the liberty of “boiling down” the meanderings between the foregoing quotes, which might prove taxing on the reader. I know they did to me.)

  “And what do you think his motive was?” Taylor asked. She had accepted an offer of wine from Trixie, thus reducing Trixie’s eventual consumption, a tactic of which I approved. If it was a tactic.

  She had asked this question cynically, and Gretel’s voice rose in anger.

  “How should I know? You’re the great detective. Now you’ve got a head start: you know who the kill
er is. And you’d better work fast, because he’s planning on doing a bunk.” She went into a confused obbligato about the letters “BVI” appearing on his calendar, (I made a mental note to lock up my calendar on cleaning day), which I did not find convincing, but I include it in the spirit of fair play. For a man like Kip, it could have meant anything, in English, French or Latin, from any era in history. She reached her conclusion at last, directing her remarks at Taylor with a fair amount of vigor. “The weapon has to be his. So just figure out why he wanted her dead and you can go ahead and take all the credit. I don’t mind.”

  “Oh, we’ve already got the motive nailed down,” Trixie said. “Don’t you worry about that, honey.”

  She proceeded with the angry-golddigger-and-flunky-boyfriend theory, which sounded even more convincing in re-iteration. I began to feel we were definitely making progress.

  Taylor pondered upon it, sipping wine and occasionally nodding.

  Finally, she said, “I suppose that hangs together, in a way, but you’ve got no proof.”

  Gretel, deeply offended, began another inventory of the increasingly sinister things Kip had around the house, and finished by saying the police were sure to find evidence if they really started to look for it, instead of relaxing in old Frieda Strawbridge’s mansion enjoying the view when all the hard work was being done by amateurs.

  “Don’t forget the cat,” Trixie said devilishly.

  It was all too obvious that she was needling Taylor. It is well known that Taylor is touchy about her cat, but she is no fool. She saw right through Trixie and rigidly controlled herself.

  “Oh, right, my cat,” she said coolly. “Bastet says we should all go home, stop talking trash about the neighbors and let the police do their job.”

  Dan’s face broke into a rare grin and Trixie rolled out something in a lyrical drawl, but Willa’s reaction brought us back to the fact that this was a serious matter, after all.

  “My cousin is dead,” she said quietly, somehow managing to pierce the noise. She commanded immediate silence. “What are we doing here, guys?” she asked with heartbreaking pathos. “I came because Ed asked me to, but honestly, what are we doing? Since this thing happened, I haven’t been able to sleep. I hear noises all the time, things that shouldn’t be there, footsteps, breathing. I see things. People pass through my room at night. People walking. They turn their heads at me and then they just go on, but they don’t have any faces! I don’t know who they are, but they’re there, and they turn their heads at me as they pass me by and then they go on and on.” She turned to me, and for the first time I noticed that her eyes weren’t quite focusing. “They won’t tell me what they want. They just look at me and they never stop. What do they want, Ed? You know all about these things. What do they want?”

  There was a thundering silence.

  Taylor had been sitting on one side of the sofa, opposite Gretel, and now she stood up and quietly came to us, lowering herself beside the love seat where Willa sat. She touched the arm with which Willa clung to the armrest.

  “I’m so sorry, Willa,” she said, murmuring only to the lady beside me. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. She wasn’t the ideal cousin, but she was all you had, wasn’t she?”

  Willa nodded. I saw tears. I felt empty.

  “Would you like me to come and stay with you for a few days?” Taylor asked.

  Willa blinked and nodded. She whispered something unintelligible.

  “I’ll pack some things and come over later today. You don’t have to spend another night alone. I’ll be there. Okay?”

  “Thank you.”

  Taylor raised misty green eyes to me and we shared a helpless moment. As a man, I felt unable to make the same offer. There would have been loose talk.

  But Trixie rose to the occasion. She set her wineglass aside and told me, “Scoot.” I left the love seat and Trixie took my place beside Willa.

  “I’m coming, too,” she told her. “If we all can’t sleep, we can play pinochle all night long, right, Taylor?”

  “And drink mint juleps until we all pass out,” she said, an obvious ploy for laughter, which was successful.

  As Willa’s face crumpled into a smile, she looked even sadder than before, somehow.

  “I don’t deserve friends like you,” she said.

  “No, you deserve better friends, but all you got is us, so you may as well get used to it,” Trixie said.

  Willa’s tragic smile finally showed some traces of happiness as she shook her head.

  Willa looked almost ghostly, a stark contrast to the vibrant Trixie. Beside her, Willa simply faded, a black-and-white image pasted into a color film.

  “I’ve spoiled everything, haven’t I?” Willa said, looking around. “The meeting. I brought it to a dead stop. I’m sorry. Gretel, why don’t you go on with what you were saying?”

  “I was done,” Gretel said.

  “No you weren’t. I’m sorry,” Willa said again. “I’d better go home. You all carry on here. I’m sure you’re going to make better progress without me.”

  “Now you just stay put,” Trixie said, physically restraining her. “You’re not going home alone, right, Taylor?”

  Taylor stood. “Right. I’m going back to Cadbury House now to pack a few things. I’ll come back here, and then you can settle me in at your house for a few nights. In the meantime, I think you should stay here, Willa. With your friends.”

  For some reason, that made Willa cry.

  As the only other man in the room, I looked to Dan for direction, since I felt myself at a loss in the face of this rampant female bonding.

  He was placidly drinking beer from a can, watching the ladies interact without intervening in any way. Very wise. I adopted the same strategy, sipping my ice water, maintaining a manly exterior, and saying nothing.

  Taylor exited, muttering.

  After thus committing herself, she had probably realized that once again she was being blown about by the whimsical breezes of Fate, when all she really wanted to do was go home and feed the dogs.

  (All remaining chapters taken from the typescript of Taylor Verone)

  Chapter 18

  All I wanted to do was go home and feed the dogs.

  But what else could I do? Willa was unravelling right there in front of us, and somebody had to do something. If Trixie had jumped in first, I would have let her, but that’s me – I gotta be the one to charge in head-first.

  When I got into my car I took a moment to bang my head against the steering wheel a few times, just to get the marbles back in their holes. They’d been rolling around loose long enough. Now I had to think through some logistics. I decided I wouldn’t need to call in volunteers to cover for me at the shelter. I’d only be gone at night. Hopefully, Willa would stop seeing ghosts after one night of pinochle and booze, but I had my doubts. She’d looked pretty bad.

  But I was going to poll the neighborhood and make sure everyone was aware of Willa’s mental state and would watch out for her during the day when I wasn’t around.

  Really, a witch like Harriet Harvey Strawbridge didn’t deserve to be mourned to the point of delusions. But that was Willa, I thought as I put the SUV in gear. She’d spent her life as an outcast, and to someone so lonely and downtrodden, even a creature like Harriet Harvey Strawbridge had looked like something to hang onto. And then, so soon, she was gone.

  I explained the whole thing to Michael when I got home, and he agreed that I’d done the right thing.

  “I don’t think she should be left alone with Trixie, either,” he said. “She’s a lovely Southern lady, but she can be a bit much. I think if I was in extremis, for whatever reason, a person like Trixie would drive me straight out of my mind. I’d rather have somebody sweet and sympathetic around, like you.”

  He’d caught me off-guard. I like to think of myself as a tough old broad. Hearing myself described as sweet didn’t compute for a moment.

  He read my mind, and smiled. “You really are
a very nice lady, you know,” he said. “Not everybody would volunteer to spend the night with a woman who says she’s seeing things. I mean, Willa is a friend, but you’ve never been really intimate friends, have you?”

  “I like her,” I said with a negligent shrug.

  He kissed me on the forehead. “You’d do the same for anybody. That’s what I love about you.”

  “Oh? I thought it was the hot body and the piercing intellect.”

  This time he aimed lower with the kiss. “Those, too. Come on, let’s get you packed.”

  * * * * *

  I only needed pajamas and a toothbrush. And face cream and eye cream and lip balm, and shampoo and conditioner and clothes to wear tomorrow, and my e-reader in case Willa went to sleep and I didn’t, and a deck of cards in case Willa didn’t have any, and it began to look like I was mobilizing to circumnavigate the globe when I finally stopped trying to think through every little thing and called myself to order.

  “Enough!” I said, zipping up my overnight bag while Michael laughed.

  He carried it out to the car for me and put it into the cargo bay.

  “Have you got your phone charger?” he asked.

  “Check. And my e-reader charger, not that I’ll need it.”

  “Anything else?” he said, looking back to the house to visualize better. Then he straightened up and said, “Well, my, my, my,” causing me to turn and look. “Won’t Ed be thrilled?”

  I slumped against the car, muttering, “Are you kidding me?”

  Then, accepting the inevitable, I said, “Get the cat food, Michael. I’ll go round up her litter box and water bowl.”

  Bastet leaped weightlessly into the cargo bay and waited by the pet carrier until I opened the door for her. Then she stepped daintily in.

  “She never gets into that thing without a fight,” I said, closing the carrier door behind her.

  “Be sure to mention that to Ed,” Michael said.

  “Oh, stop.” I hurried off to get Bastet’s things together. The car was in the shade and we left the cargo door open, but it was past noon by then, and I have principles against leaving pets in unattended cars, even in the shade.