Deadly Valentine

by Carolyn G. Hart

  Max poked his head inside Death on Demand.

  “Hi, Ingrid. Anything I should tell Annie?”

  Ingrid, grinning from ear to ear, looked up from her book. Max admired the jacket, a dark brooch of five ravens lying against a bright pink chrysanthemum that rested on a dark, veiled hat. The Widows’ Club by Dorothy Cannell.

  “Tell her I’d like to turn Agatha over to the Widows’ Club as a candidate for Someone To Be Removed. That cat is deranged.” A thoughtful look crossed Ingrid’s face. “Although, to tell the truth, if Agatha hears about the functions of the Widows’ Club, she may apply for a special membership as a deserted offspring rather than as an ill-treated wife and Annie’d better watch out. Of course, so far as I know there’s no American branch.” At Max’s bewildered look, she relented. “Max, it’s the funniest book. A women’s club in England whose aim is to terminate husbands for women who choose widowhood over divorce—”

  “Can’t wait to read it,” he said politely. Honestly, he was all for women’s rights, but weren’t there any limits? “I gather Agatha’s still unhappy.”

  As if on cue, Agatha stalked out from behind the True Crime shelving, outrage apparent in the glitter of her amber eyes and the horizontal level of her flattened ears.

  “Agatha. Good cat. Nice cat.” Max bent down and reached out.

  Eyeing him warily, Agatha approached slowly, sniffed the hand, then pushed her head against it.

  Max shot a triumphant look at Ingrid and began to pet the sleek, black fur.

  There was the bare beginning of a grudging, tentative purr when a small ball of white fluff gamboled up the central corridor.

  Agatha stiffened and glared. Her tail puffed and a venomous hiss issued from behind bared fangs.

  Max, ever sensible, hastily withdrew his hand.

  Dorothy L. frolicked toward him.

  Agatha gave Max an “Et tu, Brute” look and fled into the American Cozy area.

  Max looked up at Ingrid, who nodded unhappily.

  “It’s enough to break your heart,” the clerk said softly.

  Max nodded. Thwarted love was no laughing matter.

  “Tell Annie I think I’ll take Dorothy L. home with me tonight,” Ingrid said. “I like to keep the bloodshed in the books.”

  “Okay. Everything else all right?”

  “Moving at a snail’s pace. The usual February day. Sold three of Dick Francis’s latest and a couple of Charlotte MacLeods. Oh, and forewarn Annie that Henny’s really got a bee in her bonnet this time.”

  Very little light seeped through the mullioned windows of the entry hall. As Annie and Buck stepped into the gloom, Marshall appeared from down the hall in response to Buck’s call.

  “Marshall, this little lady’s interested in what happened around here late Tuesday night. Why don’t you walk her down to the dock and tell her what you know.”

  Marshall nodded. He held the door for her, then followed her down the steps. As the oyster shells crunched beneath their feet, they walked to the side of the Tudor mansion.

  The butler’s voice was not only high and soft, it was without tonal variation. “You’ll note the open expanse between the live oaks and the house. That provides a safe corridor. An intruder can find no cover. At night, the perimeter lights are activated.”

  Annie peered up at the banks of lights appropriate for a baseball park, then surveyed the immense and lovely house, its rich rose and brown hues gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight. If this wasn’t an armed camp (and that was an interesting bulge beneath Marshall’s blazer), it obviously came damn close. The lights, of course, weren’t visible through the swath of forest that separated the properties. But the glow of light would be clear to anyone on the lagoon. She looked across the murky green water at the portions of the Houghton house visible through a mass of bougainvillea and tall, spiny ranks of Spanish bayonet. The thick shrubbery of the Houghton estate emphasized even more the barren Burger lawn. Not a single shrub dotted the thirty feet of sleek grass between the house and the thick cover of the pine forest.

  “The lights are turned on every night?”

  Marshall nodded curtly.

  “Why?”

  “Security.” Her muscular guide picked up speed. She followed him past the back of the house and the elaborate patio and pool. Despite his bulk, he moved lightly and silently. About midway down the path to the lagoon, without breaking stride, he pointed. “Dock.”

  Annie nodded. She hurried to keep up and was glad to catch her breath when they walked out onto the small pier. Nearby, a great blue heron stalked snakes and snails and other tasty marine tidbits, placing his long graceful legs so carefully that not a ripple moved in the still water. At the sound of their footsteps, the heron’s huge wings moved and it lifted gracefully away into the sunset.

  Only rowboats were moored at the piers. There were no speedboats, of course. A restrictive covenant in the deed prohibited them. They wouldn’t, given the size of the lagoon, have been appropriate anyway. But the lagoon was perfect for a lazy row, although Annie was leery of gracing with her presence any body of water that afforded a home to as many snakes as Scarlet King Lagoon. She wasn’t even taking into account the rat snakes that delighted in climbing trees and sunning on branches, with the nasty habit of falling into passing boats. Further, there was the resident alligator. Max judged he was at least twelve feet long. Annie had no desire for any kind of close relationship with Murphy, as Max persisted in calling him. Actually, the jogging path was as close as she intended to come to the lagoon.

  “Tuesday night.” Marshall’s light golden eyes flicked toward her, then back to the lagoon. “At twelve minutes before oh one hundred hours, I heard oars shipping water.”

  Oh, my God. A rowboat in the lagoon just before Sydney was murdered.

  Dorcas. Dorcas Atwater! She’d been out in her rowboat toward the end of the party. What time was it then? Eleven-thirty perhaps? Dorcas could have returned. If she had and if she found Sydney in the gazebo—

  “Did you see anything?” Annie demanded excitedly.

  “You can’t see out from a lighted area into the dark,” he said curtly. “I ran to the bank and out onto the dock. By then the sound was gone.”

  Annie tried to visualize it, Marshall making his “circuit” and hearing the oars, the bright swath of light encircling the Burger house, the blackness of the lagoon and the forest on either side of the house. A startling revelation hit her.

  “You were down here—in this yard or on the dock—at about one o’clock?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Could anyone have used the path without your seeing them?” Shading her eyes from the sun, a blood-red ruby riding just above the feathery green umbrella tops of the pines, she pointed at the narrow band of asphalt winding out of the pines from the direction of the Atwater house, crossing the grassy bank that belonged to the Burgers, and curving into the pines en route to the Graham’s house.

  “No way.”

  But Dorcas could have come by water, had earlier come by water.

  Annie turned back to the lagoon. Shadows were lengthening as the sun began to plummet in the west. Soon, it would sink out of sight behind the tall evergreens, and Scarlet King Lagoon would be dim and cloistered. Already the air was cooling and felt much more like February than false March.

  “Could you tell what part of the lagoon the boat was on?”

  Marshall, too, looked out across the dark water. The Cahill gazebo was just visible through a stand of weeping willows.

  “Not when I first heard it.”

  She picked up on that immediately. “You heard it a second time?”

  “It was gone or maybe out of my hearing by the time I got down to the dock. I looked damned hard, I can tell you, but I couldn’t make out any movement on the lagoon. Thing is, anything that happens out there is off limits to us. My concern is any approach to this house. The rowboat hadn’t landed here. I knew that for sure. So I thought, What the hell, and started back
toward the house. I was almost around a couple more circuits, when I heard the boat again. This time I took a side approach to our landing.”

  Annie didn’t ask for a definition of a side approach, but she could imagine this tough, well-muscled man, gun in hand, moving soft-footed through the pines, ready to accost anyone docking unheralded at their pier.

  “What happened?” she asked impatiently.

  “Nothing. The sound faded away. I thought maybe I heard a thump, somebody walking on another pier. The lights at the end of the piers don’t really illuminate them. I decided somebody was out for a midnight row. That’s their business. Fine, so long as they don’t come here.”

  “There was a scream. A few minutes after one. Did you hear that?”

  It was his turn to be impatient. “Sure.”

  “You didn’t do anything?”

  Those light amber eyes were devoid of expression. “It wasn’t,” he said distinctly, “over here.”

  Someone, she wanted to say, could have been screaming for help, for life.

  But that wouldn’t have mattered to this man.

  She went at it several different ways, but Marshall didn’t have anything else to add. There had been a rowboat. Coming and going. Or maybe one rowboat going and another rowboat going. Who could say? No sight of movement. No hint of origin for the boat (or boats). And he was sure nobody had crossed the Burger grounds going from or coming to the Cahills.

  “Did either Mr. or Mrs. Burger come out?”

  “No way.”

  So the Burgers had an alibi—if Marshall could be believed.

  And somebody—Dorcas Atwater?—rowed a boat on Scarlet King Lagoon—if Marshall was telling the truth.

  Annie looked up at the stolid-faced butler. “You know that Mrs. Cahill—Sydney Cahill—was beaten to death in the Cahills’ gazebo Tuesday night.”

  “I read about it. In the paper. That’s when I told Mr. Burger about the boat.”

  He stood with his back to the setting sun, his face in shadow.

  “Did you know Mrs. Cahill?”

  Her words hung on the soft night air.

  “No.”

  Annie wished she could see his face. Could any man have lived so near Sydney and never thought about her, never made an effort to meet her?

  “I’m part of the workin’ stock. I don’t fool with the gentry.”

  Was her face that readable?

  “Of course,” she said quickly to hide her confusion. She thanked him then for his cooperation.

  Cool golden eyes looked at her emptily from an immobile face.

  Annie turned away, glad to be leaving. She headed for the path to the Atwater house. She could feel Marshall’s eyes—his impersonal, alert eyes—on her back as she stepped into the clammy dimness of the shrub-choked pinewoods. She shivered.

  But not from the cold.

  Thirteen

  THE PALE PINK stucco house, aglow in the final wash of crimson from the setting sun, should have been enchanting. The white columns seemed touched by fire. Pink silk panels in the Palladian windows matched the rich hue of the stucco. Deeper pink tiles crowned the roof.

  At first glance, the house delighted the eye, a confectionary design celebrating sun and marsh and pines. But, as Annie drew closer, signs of neglect spoiled the lush holiday impression.

  Stubborn sprigs of grass poked up from the shell walk.

  Paint peeled from the Ionic columns.

  An ugly rust stain scarred the chimney.

  A shutter hung askew on the second floor.

  Rainwater simmered with a rich island brew of insects in a long-neglected child’s plastic wading pool.

  Mud streaked the front steps.

  The windows were dark. Not a single light shone, upstairs or down. Dusk was falling. The rooms would be dim. Obviously, Dorcas Atwater wasn’t home. Annie almost turned on her heel, then shrugged and pushed the doorbell.

  Faintly, she heard a muffled peal. Another. And another.

  No one came.

  Frustrated, she retraced her steps. Oyster shells crunching beneath her shoes, Annie continued her puzzled survey. This place was going to seed. Was Dorcas Atwater broke? Why didn’t she sell? The house was well worth half a million.

  An owl hooted mournfully from the stand of pines. Annie’s neck prickled. It sounded wild and forlorn, like the laughter Jane Eyre heard in the corridors of Rochester’s home, like Dorcas’s eerie laughter the night Sydney died. Damp earth smells wafted on the cooling evening breeze. She hesitated at the entrance to the undergrowth-choked woods. It wasn’t, of course, that she was frightened.

  But it was dusk and last night a woman had been bludgeoned to death not far away. And Annie was all the way across the lagoon from home.

  The tiny seed of unease flowered into fear. She plunged into the woods, walking fast, then faster, finally breaking into a run. The occasional lights in the pines only made the growing dark more ominous.

  She burst, breathless, into the corridor of light circling the Burger mansion and was halfway across the lawn before she noticed the Burgers’ soft-voiced and soft-footed butler-watchman. He was watching her, his stance alert, his right hand slipped within his blazer.

  She was well into the stretch of ill-lit path leading to the Grahams before it dawned on her that Marshall was prepared to draw the pistol that nestled in a shoulder holster.

  My God.

  It was a relief to reach the Grahams’ property. Lights glistened in the swimming pool and cheerful oblongs of brightness marked the windows of several rooms, upstairs and down. There was neither the sense of a brilliantly delineated no-man’s-land as at the Burgers nor the feeling of forlorn abandonment at the layers of darkness that swathed the Atwater grounds.

  Annie slowed to a walk. Max would probably be home and she didn’t want to appear disheveled and out of breath. Max. Her steps quickened once again.

  Then she paused.

  There was a light in the Grahams’ garage apartment. Joel was home! As she started across the hummocky ground, a gunmetal-gray Mercedes roared up the drive and jolted to a stop in front of the garages.

  “Damn,” Annie swore softly, coming to a stop. She could scarcely ask Joel whether he had lusted after Sydney with his father present.

  Graham slammed out of the car.

  The front door of the garage apartment burst open, and Joel Graham ran lightly down the outside steps.

  “Dad, hey Dad! I’ve got to talk to you about last night.” His voice was husky with strain.

  In the light that spilled downstairs from the open door to Joel’s apartment, George Graham’s face mirrored the shock that Annie felt.

  Moving as quietly and quickly as she could, Annie ran lightly toward the garages to a huge pine only a few feet away from the father and son. The smell of pine resin mixed with the fading fumes from the diesel car.

  There was no trace of the island’s most affable dentist in the tightly drawn features of the man beside the Mercedes. Graham looked every year of his age and more.

  Joel stopped at the foot of the garage apartment stairs, hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, his eyes averted. “Jesus, Dad. I don’t know what the hell to do. Listen, last night, I …”

  “Stow it.” The words shot out like a steel door clanging down to meet concrete.

  Joel’s head jerked up. “Oh God, Dad—”

  “Keep your mouth shut, Joel.” There was no disguising the fear beneath Graham’s anger. “Listen to me, that goddamned Cahill’s got all the money in the world. You can bet they won’t get him. But I don’t intend to be the goat. So you tell the cops—if they ever ask—that you went to bed about midnight and you don’t know a damned thing.”

  “Dad, please, we’ve got to talk. I—”

  “Nobody left our house Tuesday night. Nobody.”

  “Dad—”

  “Goddammit, Joel. Keep your mouth shut.” Graham turned on his heel and strode away through the darkness toward the light cascading down the steps of
the Victorian back porch.

  Joel took a couple of steps as if to follow, then whirled to his left and broke into a stumbling run. At the jeep, he yanked open the driver’s door.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

  The jeep roared to life, jolted backward, then U-turned and accelerated up the drive.

  Annie ignored the flash of the message light on the phone’s answering machine, and dialed Frank Saulter’s number as fast as she could. No answer. Damn, he needed to know that something happened late Tuesday night at the Graham house. And it wouldn’t do a bit of good to call Posey. He wouldn’t listen. She glanced up at the clock. Almost six. Where was Max? He would surely be home soon. And no trace of Laurel.

  Laurel!

  She punched the Play button on her answering machine.

  “Annie—if I may—rather than Mrs. Darling. I do feel that tragedy removes formal barriers. We of the Scarlet King compound must face what has happened together. This is Eileen Houghton, General Houghton’s wife.” The voice was smooth and controlled. She sounded extremely competent and capable. So why identify herself as the general’s wife? Wasn’t her own identity enough? Did she perhaps feel that Eileen Houghton had no clout, no reality, except as a wife? “I know that you and your husband have had some experience in matters of this sort. I’m hoping that you will feel, as the general and I do, that the mere idea of suspecting Howard Cahill of murder is totally and patently absurd. Surely the police can’t continue to hold him! If you would be so kind as to return my call at your convenience, the general and I would appreciate it. The number is 555-1314. Thank you.”

  Annie scratched the number on a pad.

  A bleep. The second message: “One bloody nose—Dorothy L.’s; one bloody hand—mine; one renegade cat—Agatha; two broken mugs (courtesy of Agatha)—The Footprints on the Ceiling by Clayton Rawson and Murder Against the Grain by Emma Lathen; one terrified customer—identity unknown—who fled when a streak of black fur—Agatha—tore down the center aisle, flew up on top of the Thriller section, and knocked down four books.”

  Irritation sharpened Ingrid’s voice. “Some of our best books: The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim, Brass Target by Frederick Nolan, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth and The Tamarind Seed by Evelyn Anthony. Dented the Oppenheim. Anyway, I’m closing early. Henny assures me that Agatha won’t really kill Dorothy L., but I’m not convinced. I’m taking Dorothy L. home to spend the night. Only thing to do.”