Max cupped his hands and bellowed into the darkness. “Laurel, Laurel!”
The unmistakable husky voice flowed back across the water. “Max dear, I hear quite well. How are you this evening?”
“Fine, sweetheart.” He peered into the impenetrable darkness. A thick cloud cover. No moon. Black water. “Listen, aren’t you going to come in for dinner? Annie and I are getting ready to go to the club. Mulled-down shrimp.”
Max smiled at Annie, who nodded abstractedly. Annie looked a little peaked. She must be overdoing. She’d barreled out of the woods like a bat out of hell. Certainly, they should make it a point to relax this evening. Perhaps they shouldn’t even discuss the crime. After all, everything was under control right now. He’d spotted Howard’s car in the turnaround as he passed the Cahill mansion, so he was safely home. And Laurel meditating in the middle of the pond suited Max just fine. Dampish, but so nicely removed.
“So thoughtful of you dear children to remember me. But I’m just in the midst of my meditations. And I’m drafting quite a lengthy petition to Saint Jude.”
Annie made gestures.
“A food cooler?” Max whispered.
“Full,” Annie retorted, succinctly.
“One cannot be concerned with base appetites at such a moment,” Laurel caroled.
Annie avoided looking at Max. She scooped up a pinecone and tossed it from hand to hand.
“Very dedicated of you, Mother.”
Annie’s left eyebrow lifted sardonically.
“We’ll check with you when we get back,” Max called reassuringly.
Annie waited until they were in the midst of dessert—Max had cheese and crackers and Annie a French pastry with shaved chocolate on top—before she told him about Saulter’s call and her confrontation with Dorcas Atwater.
She shivered. “Max, she’s really spooky. And—and scary. And terribly sad. The night of the party was the second anniversary of her husband’s death. Don’t you know how awful that must have been, to look across the water and see all the lights and hear the music? Oh Max, I can see her bashing Sydney, bashing and bashing and bashing. But,” she added fairly, “it wasn’t Dorcas who told the police. It was the general. Max, he snoops!” And she described the general’s window-watching activities, as related by Dorcas.
“The jerk,” Max said crisply, putting down his knife. His normally equable face—Annie did enjoy those dark blue eyes, that clean-cut chin, those lips—looked stern. “What’s with this trespassing? I won’t have the foul-minded old lecher prowling around my property first thing in the morning.”
“Foul-minded is right,” she retorted, and she told him of the general’s interpretation of her call on Joel Graham.
Max progressed from stern to outraged in an impressive matter of seconds. Then he paused. “In a towel?”
“Yep. And ready to drop it at the first hint of sociability on my part. Joel likes married women.”
As she said it, she and Max forgot dessert, forgot the general, forgot their vow to relax.
They both spoke at once.
“Married women!” she cried.
“Sydney!” Max exclaimed.
They looked up at the dark windows of Joel Graham’s garage apartment.
“You don’t suppose he’s already asleep?” Annie asked.
Max snorted at that and ran up the outside steps to knock at the door.
They gave up finally because there was no telling when Joel would return. Obviously, he had no real supervision.
“We can catch him in the morning before school,” Annie said reassuringly, as they walked quietly through the dark tunnel of the pinewoods toward home.
The path curved. In the light of Max’s flash, a gray fox, a marsh rabbit clamped in its jaws, paused for an instant, then bolted into the undergrowth.
“Oh my gosh,” Annie cried, grabbing Max’s arm.
“Not a good evening to be a marsh rabbit,” Max observed.
As they walked up to their patio, a cheerful and welcoming oasis of light in the darkness of the night, Annie said determinedly, “We need to be just like that gray fox. He’s a stalker, creeping up on his prey, then pouncing. That’s exactly what we need to do.”
Of course, it is never easy to get underway with any project. So many things to do.
A last check on Laurel.
“Ma, are you sure you want to stay out there all night?”
“Oh, quite sure.”
“Isn’t it uncomfortable?” Max persisted.
“My dear, comfort is in the eye of the beholder. When one thinks about dear Saint Osith! Marauders attacked her monastery and cut off her head! Why, I can’t complain about a few earwigs.”
“Of course not,” Annie agreed heartily.
A delicate pause. “Of course, my sojourn might be even more effective if you and Annie should care to join me.”
Blue eyes and gray exchanged horrified glances.
“We wouldn’t dream of it, Laurel,” Annie called. “In no way do we feel that our powers of meditation are on a level with yours. Why, Max and I might even interfere with your meditation.” Annie felt a bit muddled. Was it something like radio waves?
Max was even more emphatic. “Some are called and some are not.”
Annie murmured, “And when you’re hot, you’re—” She broke off at Max’s chiding glance.
Laurel’s husky voice exhorted, “Do give some thought to our great Saint Peter, my dears.”
Annie was reluctant to ask, but she was a dutiful daughter-in-law. “Why Saint Peter, Laurel?”
“He always encourages us to persevere despite our inadequacies. Good night. God bless.”
Then Dorothy L. was insistent. Annie put down a second serving of Braised Beef Tips. “You’re too little to eat this much. You’re going to be all stomach. Believe me, you’ll never make your way in this world if you are all stomach.”
Dorothy L. merely ate faster and purred harder.
And it took time to collect their papers and arrange themselves comfortably in the garden room. Max seemed to think it was better for them to share the wicker chaise longue. Annie popped up once to put TV trays on either side, a second time to get each of them a fresh notepad and a pen, a third time to pour cups of chocolate raspberry decaffeinated coffee, a fourth time to prevent Dorothy L. from chewing on the leaves of a poinsettia. Were they really poisonous? She dropped the kitten into Max’s lap.
Max, of course, watched Annie fondly, with that nice eagerness that presaged amatory frolics.
Annie said sternly, “Max, we have to work. You don’t want Laurel to go on trial, do you?”
A mischievous grin. “The circuit courts of South Carolina would never be the same.”
Annie settled beside him, but underscored her commitment to duty by removing his hand from her thigh and placing it on Dorothy L., who purred like a motorbike going downhill.
Max draped his arm around Annie’s shoulders.
Annie removed it and tucked a pen in his hand.
“Okay,” Max said agreeably. He poised a pen over his pad. “What’s first? Motives? Alibis?”
Annie gazed thoughtfully at the fresh notepad. “We need to start over.”
Max sighed. “Start over? It’s only Thursday night, yet I feel like I’ve spent my life with these people. I know more about them than I ever wanted to know. Howard Cahill won a welterweight championship as an amateur boxer. Sydney Cahill won a couple of thousand at bingo at the club and she spent it all hiring a private detective to try and trace her father. No luck.”
Annie twisted to look at him in surprise.
“I did not spend today twiddling my thumbs,” he said with great dignity. “After I got Laurel out of jail, I kept digging.”
Annie shuffled through the bios, found those for Howard and Sydney and added the new information.
She looked at him expectantly.
“Joel Graham. Some young guy answering to his description’s been renting a room at the Sleepy Glade
Motel on Highway 278 every Monday afternoon. Lisa has a house-cleaning crew in on Mondays.”
So the garage apartment wasn’t available.
Annie wrote down SYDNEY and wreathed the name with question marks.
“The general is a man of very regular habits. Up at five A.M., oatmeal and orange juice for breakfast, walks four miles, spends an hour or so in his study, lunch, afternoon golf, an early dinner, to bed at nine P.M. A little surprising that your scream woke him Tuesday night as he has some hearing loss, plus he takes a sleeping pill every night.”
“It was a hell of a yell,” Annie said with some pride.
“Eileen Houghton was watching a late movie in her bedroom and didn’t hear anything. The movie ended and she started downstairs for a glass of milk. That’s when she realized the general’s light was on. She hurried into his room, afraid he had been taken ill, and was startled not to find him anywhere. She was just coming outside to search for him when he arrived with the group of witnesses.”
“Wonder why he didn’t tell her?” Annie asked.
“He said her door was closed and he assumed she was asleep. Saw no need to disturb her. Besides, he was certain the scream had come from next door. Thought he ought to hurry.”
“Did he tell you all this?”
“Actually, Barb tackled him. Told him she was police lieutenant Sigrid Harald.”
Annie grinned. But obviously Barb had not gone on to explain that Lieutenant Harald, Margaret Maron’s protagonist, was with the NYPD.
Max continued, “Recently, Buck Burger threatened to cut off the money when his son, Buddy, moved out on his wife and shacked up with a girlfriend.”
“What happened?”
“Buddy decided to come home. He’s still seeing the other woman, but circumspectly.”
“Ah, those Burger men,” Annie said dryly.
“As for Billye, if she’s ever strayed off the reservation, nobody knows about it.”
“Did you see Buck and Sydney together Tuesday night?” Annie asked. “I did, and I had the feeling he’d done some feeling there before.”
“That would be no surprise,” Max agreed.
“You know,” Annie mused, “it would help a lot if we knew when the mace was taken from the stand in the front hall. Did you find out anything on that?”
“No luck there,” Max admitted. “Some people think they saw it during the party, others swear it was gone. So who knows?”
“It makes a big difference. If it was in place at the end of the party, after all the guests left, it looks a lot worse for Howard.”
Max disagreed. “No way, honey. Look at it. Laurel was with Howard after Sydney ran down the path and Carleton rushed off toward the tennis courts. If Howard killed Sydney, then he was taking advantage of Laurel’s appearance to set up a kind of alibi. After he left her, he would have had to run like hell to get to the gazebo so the mace would have had to be already hidden there. Certainly there wouldn’t have been time for him to return to the house, get it, then go to the gazebo.”
Annie poised her pen over her pad. “Max, that’s brilliant.”
“Of course,” he said modestly.
“Not the bit about Howard. We all know that. No, I mean you’ve put your finger on the critical point. Who had the best opportunity to kill Sydney? Come on, let’s work it out and rank everybody in order.”
“What order?”
Annie was patient. “The most likely to the least likely in terms of opportunity.”
There were a few interruptions. A pause for more coffee. An interlude with Dorothy L., who had to be dissuaded from climbing the macramé plant holder in the kitchen. A frantic search by Annie for the peanut butter. (She could face—temporarily—being out of peanut butter cookies, but she had to have some sustenance to tide her over.)
But finally they finished and exchanged lists.
Annie’s list
CARLETON CAHILL. He was closer to the gazebo than anyone. Howard saw him running toward the house, clutching a bloody jacket.
HOWARD CAHILL. He could, of course, have reached the gazebo in time if he ran—and if Sydney took a walk before reaching the gazebo.
THE GENERAL. If he committed the murder, he could have heard Annie yell and decided to arrive on the scene, playing good neighbor to the rescue. There was absolutely no proof at all that he was in bed and came from his house.
DORCAS ATWATER. She could easily have paddled across the lagoon after the party ended. But how could she have obtained the mace? Could she have slipped unseen through the gardens earlier? Sure! She could have just finished putting the mace in the gazebo when she accosted Annie on the pier.
EILEEN HOUGHTON. On the spot, of course, but tricky to see how she could have done it and gotten back to the house before the general came out. However, she could have seen him leaving the house and hidden in the shadows until he passed.
GEORGE GRAHAM. If he did it, he must have just missed being seen by Laurel. But it was certainly possible.
DITTO LISA GRAHAM.
DITTO JOEL GRAHAM.
THE BURGERS. Their bodyguard said they didn’t leave the house, but either of them could have timed his circle of the property and slipped by. Also likely to have run into Laurel.
Max’s list had a drawing of the lagoon and enough X’s and O’s and arrows to pass for a football coach’s blackboard.
Max’s list
HOWARD CAHILL
CARLETON CAHILL
DORCAS ATWATER
THE GENERAL
THE GENERAL’S WIFE
THE THREE GRAHAMS
THE BURGERS
The grandfather clock chimed eleven and the glazed gleam in Max’s eyes was replaced by a warmer glow.
Annie would have worked longer.
But sometimes Max had such good ideas.
Max slept, of course, the sleep of a man well satisfied with his day and its close.
Annie tossed and turned.
The timing.
More to it than just the spread of moments between Sydney’s departure for the gazebo and her discovery by Annie (and previously by Carleton, if he could be believed).
Why Tuesday night?
Because Valentine’s Day gave a good excuse for that enticing missive?
Or was there some other reason?
Annie sat bolt upright, her heart pounding.
That splash. That splash that sounded so near. Laurel out on the lagoon.
Annie rolled out of bed and ran for the stairs. At the garden-room door to the patio, her hands fumbled with the lock. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Behind her, she faintly heard Max’s sleepy call, “Annie? Annie?” The urgent, desperate, overwhelming sense of something wrong propelled her out into the night.
A single lamp at the far end of their pool glowed golden in the impenetrable darkness.
“Laurel?” Annie heard the sob in her voice, felt the thickness in her throat.
Something awful.
Certainty pervaded her.
She was almost past the pool, racing toward the lagoon, when she saw the crumbled mortar at the corner near the lamp. Three-foot-high porcelain vases sat on low, tiled platforms at either end of the pool. In season, they would hold a profusion of marigolds.
Skidding to a stop, Annie stared at the bereft platform. The vase? Where—
Relief pumped through her. She moved swiftly to the deep end. That splash! Certainly the vase toppling into the pool would be enough to wake her. Her heart still thudding irregularly, Annie peered over the side into the greenish depths, the waters faintly illuminated by the occasional underwater lights spaced every few feet.
“Oh, no,” she cried aloud, not wanting to see, not wanting to believe.
Khaki. Oh God, khaki! And wavering tendrils of blond hair.
Seventeen
THE WATER WAS cold, so cold. Down, down, down. Her hands grappled against sodden cloth, pulled. Oh God, too heavy! She couldn’t—Her lungs were bursting.
A splash drummed against her ears,
and the water quivered against her. Helping hands. Together, she and Max pulled, hauled, burst up to the surface, Annie gasping for breath. Water slapped into her mouth. She choked, and a scarlet thread of pain laced her chest.
“Hold steady,” Max yelled, and he was up and over the side, pulling their deadweight burden onto the tiles. Then he reached down and lifted Annie out of the water, held her tight until her choking subsided.
Her shoulders still shaking, she stared down at the inert form.
Khaki and limp blond hair, darkened by the water.
“Oh God, Max. It’s Joel!”
Never again in this lifetime did Annie want to see the kind of anguish that transformed George Graham’s face, destroying forever her image of the smooth, self-satisfied, prideful dentist and leaving in its place a shattered figure, with empty, tortured eyes.
He clung to his dead son’s hand and cried, over and over and over again, “Joel.” Lisa stood rigidly beside the grieving father and the dead son, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her robe, her face flattened with shock.
Chief Saulter knelt beside him for a long time. “Go home for now, Dr. Graham. Please, go home for now.”
Everyone was there, of course, roused by the siren, drawn to tragedy and held there by the unspoken knowledge that once again a resident of Scarlet King had killed. They knew. It was clear in the abrupt, sidelong glances, in the way they stood, tense and wary.
Howard Cahill turned to his son. “God, I can’t believe this.” Howard’s face held an unaccustomed look of bewilderment and uncertainty.
Carleton didn’t answer. His eyes moved from one person to another.
Laurel stood quietly by Howard, her face sad in repose.
Buck Burger, barechested and barefoot in his Levi’s, glowered at Saulter. Finally, he erupted. “Goddammit, Chief, there’s a madman running loose on this island. I want complete police protection. How the hell did something like this happen?”
Saulter ignored him.
Deadly Valentine Page 23
