Waltz Macabre

by Mary Bowers

  “No. Okay, I’m guessing. But I also know. Don’t ask me how. Somehow when I felt her come to me, more came through than she intended. I could feel inside her mind. And Robin Carteret has guessed, too. He remembers the final confrontation between Phoebe and Garrison. He kept saying, ‘You deceived me.’ I thought he was quoting his mother, but Garrison must have been the one who said it, when he realized Robin wasn’t his.”

  “Robin told you this?”

  “He thought I was Phoebe, or at least, he pretended to. I have no idea why. Or maybe I do,” I said, as it dawned on me. “Rita had just said the DNA didn’t match – she’s working with the Sheriff, and found out that the comparison of Robin’s DNA with that of the skeleton didn’t produce a match. But Robin knew, and he must want the truth to come out at last. Otherwise, Garrison will never be identified. Whatever his reason, he began to relive the fight that ended it all.”

  Ed was all the way forward on a chair, rigid with excitement. “And you got confirmation from Phoebe at the séance?”

  “I don’t know. What she actually said was, ‘Tell Geneva to leave him alone.’ Ginny’s full first name is Geneva. She has Phoebe’s old diaries. She must have learned all this, and she knows darn well who the skeleton is. But Phoebe is desperate for her secrets to be kept, and Ginny has some strange connection to Phoebe.”

  “We need to get our hands on that diary,” Ed said. “For the sake of completeness. Perhaps I can make a copy for my files.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I told him. “At least not while Ginny is still alive.”

  Michael sat back. Ed was still sitting forward tensely.

  In a few minutes, Michael said, “After all this time, what does it matter? Let Phoebe rest in her grave, and let all her secrets stay buried with her. As far as we’re concerned, Garrison Carteret was Robin’s father, and the man that was buried at Cadbury House will always remain a mystery.”

  Suddenly, I felt a burden lifted. Suddenly, the séance was over.

  Chapter 23

  After all that, I didn’t feel like holding a grudge against Rita. I was just too tired. And I was convinced by then that I knew a heck of a lot more than she did, and I wasn’t going to tell her much of it, so I felt better about it all when she showed up the next day asking to look at Michael Gordon Utley’s file on the Carterets.

  Ed said he was going back to The Bookery sometime that morning, after a night in his home office, “collating.” For the sake of completeness, no doubt. So at least we wouldn’t have to deal with him on top of Rita.

  “Come on in,” I said, sweeping her inside with a gracious move of my arm. “The main attraction is in the library. Coffee and scones to be served immediately.”

  “Hey, Rita,” Michael said.

  I pointed at him. “Mine. Hands off.”

  She laughed delightedly. She’d probably been dreading having to deal with me after how we’d left things the day before. “Don’t worry, I’ve got all the man I can handle, now that you’ve so graciously passed one on to me.”

  Michael gave me a quick look. “You’re passing out men now?”

  “I wasn’t using that one. Come on, Rita. Let’s be friends again. By the way, you’ve had your training sessions at the FBI, right? They taught you what ‘quid pro quo’ means? In layman’s terms, ‘tit for tat?’”

  She slowed her step and let her smile fall into a knowing look. “I kinda figured.”

  “Fair’s fair,” I told her, and we all went into the library where Gordon’s file awaited.

  * * * * *

  We let her read, but I for one never left her alone, even when Michael got tired of waiting for her to finish and left the room. Before she even began to read, the first thing she’d wanted was a copy, and Michael hadn’t agreed to that. I trust Rita, but she did have her cell phone, i.e. a camera, and trust becomes stupidity after a certain point.

  When she was finished, Michael came in and sat down.

  “Well, thanks for letting me see it,” Rita said. “It was very interesting.”

  I lifted ironic eyebrows. “Oh, no, dear, we’re not leaving it at that. In just what ways does Gordon’s record of events dovetail with what you’ve found out in your investigation?”

  “I’ve already told you that I have a responsibility to my client. And I have a meeting with the Sheriff set up for later on this morning. Until I’ve talked to him and gotten the go-ahead from my client, I simply can’t tell you everything.”

  “But we can guess,” Michael said. “You know all the interrogation techniques. Let’s just say, ‘what if?’ and pretend we’re making it all up, just for fun.”

  “Okay,” she said warily.

  “You start,” Michael said.

  She thought it over carefully, and said, “What if Robin Carteret’s father wasn’t a murderer after all.”

  “What if,” Michael said deliberately, “Garrison Carteret wasn’t Robin’s father at all.”

  She was startled. “So you know that.”

  “And,” I said, “once you know that, things begin to unravel. You were hired to obtain Robin’s DNA so it could be tested against somebody else’s. And Clay Brownlee admitted that he was the one who hired you. Therefore, Clay Brownlee wants to know who Robin Carteret’s father was. Why on earth would he care if he wasn’t involved in any way. Whose DNA did you have Robin’s tested against? Not our skeleton’s. He hadn’t been found yet when Clay hired you. As long as we’re playing ‘what if?’ here’s mine: What if Clay had Robin’s DNA tested against his own? What kind of results would you have gotten? Would Clay’s mother’s maiden name happen to be Lodge? And would Clay’s full first name happen to be Barclay, in honor of his murdered great-uncle?”

  She was still guarded, but muttered, “It’s a matter of public record, I suppose. Yes, Barclay Brownlee is a Lodge. And there has always been a rumor in his family about who Robin Carteret’s father was. While there was a large estate involved, I imagine the rumor was much more interesting to the Lodge family. Once Phoebe ran it into the ground, it was just something to gossip about, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Only within the tight family circle, of course. Clay was the first one in the family who took concrete steps to find out.”

  “But Clay hired you before Robin went into the nursing home, right? You said you were hired even before Alison went missing. That was months ago, and Robin’s only been in the nursing home for a few weeks. In the nursing home, it would have been easy to collect his DNA. Just walk away with his coffee cup. In fact, that’s exactly what you did for the Sheriff. But while he was cloistered at home, with his daughter watching over him, it had to be a challenge. How did you do it?”

  But she was taking the fifth on that one. She never did admit how she did it. I wasn’t too insistent on the point. Any “chance” encounter with Robin in Tropical Breeze – The Bakery, Don’s Diner, Perks – would have given her an opportunity to snatch something he’d left a bit of himself on.

  “So Barclay Lodge definitely was Robin’s father,” I said, glad to have a solid fact at last. “He must have been murdered immediately after he got Phoebe pregnant, or the sudden marriage followed quickly by the birth of a baby would’ve caused just as much gossip as the murder. People used to like to count the months, back then.”

  “They still do. But they were much more scandalized about it back then,” Rita said. “As the years went by, the murder started getting more attention than the pregnant bride, but at the time it was like a firecracker in a henhouse: you could hear the cackling for miles. I’m more concerned with what’s going on now, in the present. I don’t see how the fact that Robin is related to Clay has anything to do with Alison’s disappearance. But as someone with experience in law enforcement, I can tell you, from the way Alison’s body was hidden and the misdirection with her camera equipment, I’m sure of one thing: she was murdered by someone she knew.” She looked at me pointedly, and I didn’t understand why.

  “She knew
Clay pretty well,” I said. “In fact, I don’t think it’s stretching it to say they were lovers.”

  “She knew her mother even better,” Rita said.

  It took my breath away for a moment. “Her mother? Wanda?”

  “You have to admit it, she’s odd.”

  “But not crazy odd,” I said. “She even hired Ed to investigate.”

  “Exactly. She hired Ed. Your daughter’s missing and you hire a paranormal investigator? You don’t think that’s odd? A P.I. would’ve been my choice, if I wasn’t satisfied with what the police were doing. Does she say her daughter is haunting her now?”

  “Not exactly. She says she senses a presence – an evil one.” Even as I said it, I felt myself shrinking. There wasn’t much to defend there. I’d gotten caught up in things and hadn’t even wondered about the logic of it all.

  Rita was looking at me skeptically. “She doesn’t need a paranormal investigator. She just might need a psychiatrist, but she doesn’t need Ed. Or Teddy Force, for that matter. Look, I know you like Ed. I’m not trying to dis him. I’m just saying, you’re spending a lot of time over at that house, and you don’t know a thing about Wanda, except that she’s been mixed up in a murder.”

  Even Michael looked concerned now.

  Having set both of us back on our heels, Rita went on. “I’m much more interested in figuring out the identity of the man who was buried out by Cadbury House. Now that we know Garrison wasn’t Robin’s father, the DNA is out the window. I think it is Garrison, but from what’s in these notes,” she said, tapping Gordon’s file on the desk, “that’s out the window, too. Garrison went to New York.”

  “We have an explanation for that, too,” Michael said, glancing at me for the go-ahead. I nodded. He explained the theory that Cary Jessop assumed Garrison’s identity and went to make a new life for himself in the north.

  Rita took it all in, looking satisfied. Then she said to me, “Have you put it all together yet?”

  “Yeah. I have. It flips everything over the other way. Once you’ve committed a murder, the next one is easier.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Michael said.

  “Barclay Lodge wasn’t killed by Garrison Carteret or Cary Jessop,” I said, still trying to swallow it myself. “Phoebe Wilkinson killed him, and when her husband accused her of deceiving him and threatened to expose her as a murderess, she killed him too. Then she bribed Cary Jessop to go north and impersonate Garrison so people like Michael’s grandfather wouldn’t suspect that Garrison was actually dead.”

  “But why would she kill Barclay, the man she really loved – oh.” He came to a sudden stop as the final penny dropped.

  “When she realized she was pregnant,” I said, “she demanded that Barclay marry her immediately. She probably managed a secret rendezvous in the gazebo so she could give him the news. Even though her family had company that night – Garrison – she needed to see Barclay instantly, once she was sure she was pregnant. When he refused her, she shot him. Meanwhile, Garrison was wandering around in the dark looking for her and heard the shot. When he found her, she probably made something up about Barclay trying to assault her, and he helped her cover it up. So she must have brought a gun along with her to the rendezvous. She must have decided ahead of time what she was going to do if he let her down. She must have also . . . .”

  Rita wasn’t squeamish about finishing the thought. “She must have also taken steps immediately to make Garrison think he was responsible for her pregnancy. The woman was cold.”

  “Then Garrison let people go ahead and suspect him of the killing,” Michael said, “because he thought he was protecting his wife.”

  “You may as well know this too,” I said to Rita. “The body we found at Cadbury House was buried by Jasper’s father. He admitted it to us. But his father didn’t have anything to do with the murder, he didn’t know who he was burying, and I don’t think Jasper knows anything else about it, except that his father never got over it.” I turned to Michael. “Are we still keeping Phoebe’s secrets, now that we know how damning they really are?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t see what we can do about it now.”

  I turned back to Rita. “Have you investigated Wanda at all? Does her family go back in this area as far as the Carterets and the Lodges? After all, why did Wanda and her husband decide to retire here, of all places?”

  It was a new thought to her, and she found a scrap of paper on the desk and started writing a note to herself.

  “You’re not thinking . . . ?” Michael said.

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking. But why would Alison Wickert have been murdered right around the time Clay Brownlee hired Rita to start snooping around for him?”

  “One thing may have nothing to do with the other,” Rita said. “But I think I’d like to check it out anyway.”

  “Good,” I said abstractedly. “Good. I think we’ve got the general shape of things, but I can’t help thinking that we’re still missing something. Something very suggestive, that got lost in the fog when it was said.”

  “By who?” Rita asked.

  “I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately,” I told her as I mulled it over. “And they’ve been telling me a lot of things. I can’t quite get it, but it’ll come to me.”

  We all began to rise, and I accidentally stepped on Bastet’s tail. I hadn’t even noticed her coming into the room. She let out a screech and took a swipe at me, leaving parallel red lines on my bare calf.

  I went down to her and told her how sorry I was, wanting to make sure I hadn’t hurt her, but she was furious with me, as if I’d done it on purpose. She streaked off, leaving me looking down at the scratches on my leg.

  It was the first time she’d drawn blood from me. It hurt my feelings more than it did my leg, somehow.

  Chapter 24

  I had a difficult hour or two after that, before I got too busy to think about it. I felt abandoned by Bastet, and I finally let myself realize how much I missed her support. She’s always been there in times of trouble, and in her own way, she’s been a comfort. But this time, in this matter, she was angry and distant.

  And in her place, I felt the return of the menacing presence we’d raised at the séance. Michael was fascinated by all the possibilities, and kept going over and over them, adding a nuance and subtracting a detail, but I listened to him with a morbid feeling hanging over me, as if I were being pulled back and forth in time. It made me feel half-alive, somehow, and also half-dead. I’d had that feeling before, kind of a séance hangover, where the cold unreality of it all smothers me until I feel as if things will never be the same if I don’t DO something, and I don’t always know what.

  But I knew where I needed to go to try to sort it all out, and I really, really didn’t want to go there.

  The Bookery. That’s where it had all started. Where I’d seen Phoebe and Garrison and even Barclay, locked together in their eternal dance, imprisoned by the music and the bad decisions they had made in life:

  Betrayal. If Barclay Lodge had done the honorable thing and married Phoebe, she’d never have killed him – probably. More than ever, she needed him.

  Deceit. If Phoebe had told Garrison the truth, he might have married her anyway. After all, he wanted her family’s estate. Who knows? He might actually have been in love with her. But instead, she deceived him.

  Murder. Her first crime might have been the sudden impulse of a desperate woman, but the second was deliberate murder for selfish reasons.

  In spite of my revulsion, I began to understand what had already permeated my mind: Phoebe’s sins couldn’t be left buried and forgotten. She didn’t deserve that. And Garrison Carteret deserved to have his reputation cleared and his body given a decent burial, with his name on the tombstone above him.

  Even if Phoebe’s murders had nothing to do with Alison’s death, they needed to be exposed and explained. And there was only one way left to do that.

  I needed to get t
hat diary. It was the only proof. And if Phoebe had written about all her secrets in it, Ginny knew everything. I needed to convince her to do the right thing and bring it forward.

  I began to try to work out how I could get Ginny to The Bookery.

  And then I needed to convince Barnabas to play Valse Triste one last time.

  * * * * *

  “You’re not even listening to me,” Michael said at last.

  I looked up. He was right. I’d been maundering around inside my own head, feeling clammy and unsettled. I apologized and stood up, saying, “I’ll go make us some lunch.”

  “No, honey,” he said, coming to take me by the arms. “Let’s go out. But let’s make a promise first: no talk of murder while we eat.”

  “Deal,” I said, feeling a little better already.

  We decided to walk over to Don’s Diner. Anyplace else, we’d have to drive, and neither one of us felt like driving.

  We made an effort to talk of other things along the way, but it all sounded forced, and when we walked into the diner and saw Wanda, I realized that the fates were against us.

  She was excited to see us, and as we came in, we saw that she was facing Ginny and Robin in a booth. I picked up the vibe of the little group at once: Wanda was the only one who’d been happy and talkative. Ginny looked bored, and Robin looked far, far away.

  They hadn’t met Michael, and I introduced him. In the end, Wanda slid over and invited me in, and Michael grabbed a chair and sat down at the end of the table.

  “I’m going to be visiting you regularly now,” Wanda said teasingly to Robin.

  “How nice,” he murmured blankly.

  “Your daughter said I could, so when I saw the two of you coming out of your house this morning, I moved like lightning. You do remember me, don’t you?” she said when she realized she was getting no reaction from Robin.

  He was dressed the way old people go to funerals: in an old suit that was vaguely out of style and didn’t fit him well anymore. At a certain time in your life, you stop buying new clothes for special occasions because you’re not having special occasions much anymore.