High Rhymes and Misdemeanors

by Diana Killian

In white relief above the square entrance, Grecian women wept into hankies. At least they looked like hankies. Grace supposed the ancients had another word for them.

  She glanced at Peter, wondering if he would have trouble entering the confines of the crypt. She remembered his reluctance the morning of their first visit to Penwith Hall. He looked cool enough now, though stern. Meeting her gaze he gave her a crooked grin.

  “Scared?”

  Grace shrugged. “I’m getting used to it.”

  “One way or another it will all be over tonight.”

  “That’s not as reassuring as you may think.” Her eyes scanned the darkness looking for a sign that Calum and Monica were providing backup as planned.

  Ahead of them, the door to the crypt stood open. Open but not inviting. There was no light inside, no sound of voices or movement. Could they be first to arrive?

  “Ladies first,” Peter said.

  “Very funny.”

  He slipped through the black mouth and Grace followed cautiously. Inside it smelled of cold and damp, old moldering leaves and something sharp and metallic that raised the hair on the back of Grace’s neck.

  Peter’s flashlight beam played over cobwebs and stone sarcophagi, lighting at last on a body lying facedown in a pool of blood.

  Grace sucked in her breath to scream. Peter’s stillness, his lack of surprise, held her silent.

  “It’s Aeneas Sweet,” she breathed at last, taking in the disheveled mane of white hair, the giant frame now soft and boneless.

  Peter knelt, rolling Aeneas over onto his back. His head lolled. Grace closed her eyes.

  “Bugger all,” she heard Peter mutter.

  That was all the confirmation she needed. She moved, backing toward the door.

  “Not so fast,” a familiar voice said. A hard hand in the middle of her back shoved her forward. “You’ve got something that belongs to us.”

  As Grace stumbled forward, Peter steadied her.

  “Well, well,” Sid said, stepping into the spotlight of Peter’s torch. “The gang’s all here.” Grace could only see the round black eye of the gun barrel staring at her in the flashlight’s glare. To Charlie, hovering behind him, Sid ordered, “See if they’re carrying.”

  “Carrying?” Grace glimpsed Peter’s grim profile.

  “Packing. Armed.”

  Charlie, his face just as dour without the dog mask, moved toward Peter.

  “That’ll do, laddie!” Calum’s voice came sharply. He filled the doorway behind Sid, his genial face looking surprisingly tough. Grace went weak with relief. “Get their weapons,” Calum instructed Monica.

  “Don’t step in front of the gun,” Peter warned as Monica squeezed between Calum and the door frame.

  “What? Oh.” Monica edged over to Grace. “Do you believe this?” she said under her voice, and then gingerly took Sid’s gun from his unresisting hand. Both Sid and Charlie seemed dumbfounded at this turn of events.

  A new voice cried shrilly, “Cancel that! Cancel that, I say!”

  It should have been funny. There was a kind of surreptitious exchange of group glances. Otherwise, no one moved, although there was motion behind Calum’s bulk.

  “Drop that gun. Put your hands up!” The voice persisted.

  Calum started and dropped the gun. His hands went up.

  I know that voice, Grace thought, but it seemed too farcical to be true.

  “Get in there!”

  Calum crowded into the room, past Sid. Ferdy wriggled through the doorway and squinted into the flashlight’s rays. He pointed his gun at the light. “Lower it.”

  The flashlight beam dropped down. Tonight’s bow tie was black. It seemed appropriate, coordinating as it did with the funereal gleam of the small gun Sweet’s nephew held.

  In books and movies bad guys whip out guns and good guys unhesitatingly tackle them. In real life it wasn’t like that. Everyone had gone stiffer than the wall frescoes. It was so quiet they could hear the crickets outside. Aeneas Sweet’s body was a vivid illustration of what guns could do.

  “And just who the hell are you?” Calum demanded, as Sid plucked his gun out of Monica’s grasp.

  Ferdy’s gun swung toward Calum.

  “Easy,” Peter said. “Let’s think this through.”

  The gun veered back to Peter. “I’ve thought it through,” Ferdy said. His voice wavered. “You came here to rob my uncle. The old fool struggled with you and you shot him.”

  He didn’t look dangerous, Grace thought numbly. Even now he seemed more like someone out of a Wodehouse novel than Raymond Chandler. An evil Bertie Wooster? And yet, as innocuous as Ferdy appeared, something mean and cornered in his eyes did not bode well for them.

  Peter still reasoned with him in that calm, slightly ironic tone. “In the family crypt?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a bit unlikely, don’t you think?”

  Ferdy waved the gun impatiently and his accomplices, eyes on the barrel, shifted uneasily. “We’ll clean this up and move him into the house naturally.”

  Peter’s eyes never left the gun. “And what about the other four bodies? How do you plan on hiding a massacre?”

  “Shut up!”

  “Actually, I’d rather discuss it now, while I’m still breathing.”

  Ferdy looked to his henchmen for guidance. Sid said staunchly, “What’s the problem? We’ll leave ‘em here in the crypt and lock the door. No one comes here, right? None of the regulars is going to object, eh? They could be here for years and who’s the wiser?”

  “Are you crazy?” demanded Monica. Perhaps it was rhetorical; no one answered her.

  Grace, shaking off the horror that had gripped her from the moment she had spotted Sweet’s body, spoke at last.

  “So it’s all about money? You killed him for money?” Her voice cracked.

  Ferdy snapped back, “What else would it be? Who the hell cares about bloody Byron or his buttons? I’ve got a Japanese buyer who can pay three million pounds for these trinkets.” Ferdy nodded at the metal case Peter held.

  “He’s daft,” Peter said to Sid. “You know how it works.”

  “Sure, I know,” Sid drawled. The look he cast Ferdy did not promise a long working relationship.

  Ferdy burst out, “For years I’ve listened to this…twaddle! Byron’s lost manuscript, Byron’s jewels, Byron’s—”

  “Manuscript?” Grace, Monica and Calum echoed.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” Ferdy fired at the ceiling. Something whined past Grace’s ear and, beside her, Charlie keeled over.

  One glance at his face told her all she needed to know. One glance was all she had time for. Monica screamed, her voice joining the reverberations of the bullet, rolling around the stone confines of the tomb. Peter swung the metal briefcase and clobbered Sid, who crashed into Ferdy. They went down like dominoes.

  “Go!” Peter pushed Grace out the door.

  “But—”

  “Run!”

  She ran. Her feet pounded across the wet grass. A glance over her shoulder showed a light flitting like a firefly in the crypt. The sound of pandemonium echoed through the woods. More shots rang out.

  Oh God, Grace prayed. Please don’t let anyone else be killed.

  She faced forward in time to avoid plowing into a tree. She had no idea where she was going—or what she would do when she got there.

  She thought she was headed in the right direction, but before long she slowed, then stopped. She was lost. She had no idea where the cars were. And Peter still had the keys.

  Intently, she listened to the night sounds. To her left she could see the tower lights still flickering through the trees. She could try to call the police from the Hall, perhaps. She didn’t have many options at this point.

  Then she heard it.

  Something—someone—was moving toward her. Grace recognized the crackle of leaves, the snap of twigs. She turned and banged into another body.

  Hands fastened on her shoulders.r />
  “Where are they?” Ferdy shrieked. In the glimmering light his face looked pale and inhuman. His breath was hot on her skin.

  “In the case!” Uselessly, she tried to twist away.

  “They’re not! I looked!”

  Where was Peter? Where were Calum and Monica? What had those other shots meant? How had Ferdy had time to check the case?

  “I dropped them!” Even as she said it, Grace realized she should never have admitted to carrying the cameos, but reason didn’t seem to be something Ferdy would listen to.

  “Where?” Ferdy’s fingers bit into her shoulder muscles. He was stronger than he looked. “Show me.”

  “I don’t know where. Back there. They’re gone, that’s all!” But she was stumbling forward, urged on by Ferdy’s grip. He was a small man, but he was enraged and scared and apparently believed he had nothing to lose. All in all, a bad combination— made worse by the gun he was jamming in her side.

  “Where’s Peter?” she asked dully. She was afraid of the answer.

  “Sid’s taking care of Mr. Fox,” Ferdy said, his breath coming in little gasps that sounded close to childish sobs. Apparently he was in worse physical shape than she was. Or a lot more upset.

  “Did you kill Danny Delon?” In books they always kept the murderer talking to give the cavalry time to show up. Was any of the cavalry left in one piece? Grace had no idea.

  “Who?” Ferdy’s foot slipped on the grass and the gun jammed harder against Grace’s side. She cringed away, terrified his finger would slip on the trigger. He kept his grip on her, using her to steady himself. “Oh, that creature. I spotted him for what he was when he came here to meet with the old man. It wasn’t hard to figure out their stupid little scheme.”

  “What scheme? He was just going to buy the cameos from Danny Delon, wasn’t he?”

  “With my inheritance!” Ferdy’s voice shook with outrage. “Do you know what it’s been like watching him squander it all away, year after year? And he wouldn’t have sold the bloody things. Oh no, he’d have locked them up in his cabinet to gloat over while the place fell to rack and ruin around him.”

  “So you killed him. And you killed Danny Delon.”

  Ferdy concentrated on his footing for a moment before saying off-handedly, “That was an accident. He should have just handed the damn things over to me. I explained the situation to him. Instead he tried to double-cross me. He went straight to Fox. I followed him. I watched him break in, and I followed him inside.”

  An accident? With a battle-ax? Who, besides Vikings, had accidents like that?

  “Then why didn’t you find the cameos? You knew about the secret passage.” Grace’s questions were motivated by genuine curiosity as much as the conviction that she needed to keep this unbalanced twerp talking.

  “There wasn’t time!” Ferdy sounded irate, whether from Grace’s lack of understanding or the situation itself. “The phone kept ringing and then that stupid girl showed up. Alley Oop or whatever her name is. The old hag’s niece. She kept snooping around, and cars kept driving past to see if the shop was open. It was intolerable.”

  “So who wrote Astarte in…” Grace swallowed hard, “blood.”

  “Me, naturally.” Ferdy was smug for a moment. “And a very nice touch it was, too. A nice little warning to hand over the jewels.”

  Except that no one had understood his message, which is the downside of cryptic messages in blood. And also the downside of trying to deal with psychopaths.

  “This is where they fell,” Grace said, stopping in her tracks. She pretended to search the grass. “There! What’s that shining by the tree root?”

  Ferdy peered at the ground. Grace shoved against him with all her might, and he toppled forward, letting go of her.

  She whirled and ran, zigzagging through the trees, boots stamping the damp earth. Every moment she expected to hear a shot ring out. Her legs were shaking, making it hard to run; her heart thundered against her ribs. She gulped the damp night air in great gusts that burned in her lungs.

  Why didn’t he shoot? Why didn’t she hear him? Not that she could hear anything above the blood pounding in her temples. She ran on, narrowly avoiding tripping over a tree root. A low branch slapped her in the face.

  Where was she? Where were the others?

  And then abruptly, Grace knew where she was, pulling back in time to save herself from falling over the ledge above the sunken garden. She had managed to double back. That meant the crypt stood behind that copse of trees, and that Penwith Hall was only a few yards away if she could make it without bumping into Ferdy or his cohorts.

  But that was what Ferdy and his pals would expect her to do. They would be waiting for her to try to reach the Hall and its relative safety.

  Grace paused at the head of the steps, panting. She remembered Peter clowning by the poolside just a few days before.

  “In mossy skulls that nest and lie, ever singing, ‘Die, oh! Die.’”

  She pulled out the handkerchief in her jacket pocket. It chinked as she dropped it into the tall stone urn at the head of the stone staircase.

  Softly she crept down the stairs into the overgrown garden. The brackish water lay like black oil in the shifting moonlight. The waist-high weeds swayed gently in the night breeze. They wouldn’t look for her here; she could take a few minutes to catch her breath. She needed time to think, to figure out her next move. Peter, Monica, and Calum’s lives might all be depending on her.

  Sticking close to the long stone wall, Grace moved down the length of the garden. At the sound of a foot scraping the stairs above, she froze. She flattened herself against the rough surface.

  She could see him, silhouetted against the moon. An incongruously sinister figure in a bow tie. Slowly, he came down the steps.

  Grace held her breath.

  She could see him scanning the bramble-choked yard. She knew the moment he spotted her, by the way his body relaxed.

  “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  Grace turned and ran for the pool. It was instinct, but it was not a good instinct. She splashed into the water, slipped on the slimy bottom and went down on her knees. It wasn’t deep—certainly not deep enough to hide in—where had she got the idea it would be?

  Ferdy laughed and pointed the gun at her.

  “Get out. Now.”

  She crouched there a moment, shivering, trying to think. Nothing came immediately to mind.

  Movement on the ledge above caught Grace’s eye. A black figure launched itself from the precipice onto Ferdy who pitched from the stairs with a squeal and hit the ground like a thunderbolt had struck him.

  Peter, landing on top, reached for the nearest weapon. It turned out to be the half-shattered stone head of the Grecian statue still resting beside the mossy pool. He brought it down hard on Ferdy’s head and the other man went limp.

  “I thought—I was afraid—I didn’t know—” Grace heard herself and quit babbling. Bad enough to feel this way without dribbling it all over Peter Fox.

  Peter got to his feet, breathing hard. He reached a hand down to Grace, drawing her out of the pool. She squelched onto the bank. Full circle, she thought.

  “Why, it’s the Lady of the Lake,” said Peter.