Crypt Suzette

by Maya Corrigan

  Morgan gestured to the dining table. “Have a seat. I’ll put the water on for tea.” She went through the archway to the kitchen, taking the plate of oatmeal cookies with her.

  The wood dining table was set for two, with cups, saucers, and small plates in a traditional blue-and-white flowered china pattern. Val brushed off the cat hair from a tufted seat pad and sat down.

  Morgan brought a crystal sugar and cream set from the kitchen. “Here’s milk for English tea. Or would you prefer lemon?”

  “Milk is fine.” Val assumed she’d made the correct choice from Morgan’s slight smile of approval. “Until your full name came up on my caller ID, I didn’t know your last name was spelled with an X at the end, like the French word roux.”

  “Meaning a fat-and-flour thickener for a soup or sauce, as I’m sure you know.”

  Val did know it, but Morgan couldn’t resist showing off her knowledge as she had several times during last night’s meeting. “Your father’s French?”

  “No, I married a French Canadian and kept his name after we divorced. I like having a short last name. Also, my ex wanted me to go back to my maiden name. That was reason enough not to do it.”

  Didn’t sound like an amicable divorce. Val pointed to the dishes on the table. “I like your china. Is it a family heirloom?”

  “It’s my great-aunt’s second-best china. My sister got the bone china. She always goes first.” Morgan pursed her lips as she might after chewing grapefruit peelings. “This is porcelain based on a Chinese design, which had pomegranates on the edges. The Germany company, Meissen, redesigned it with plants more familiar in Europe. It’s called the blue onion pattern. Because it was popular, other manufacturers developed their own versions.”

  Morgan detailed the pattern variations made by companies through the centuries. Val was grateful when the whistling teakettle interrupted her history lesson.

  With Morgan responding to the kettle in the kitchen, Val stood up to study a piece of framed needlework hanging on the dining room wall. It resembled an impressionist painting of a waterfall and trees decked out in autumn leaves. The embroidery made the scene look three-dimensional. The letters MOR were stitched on the bottom right of the picture where an artist signature might be. Short for Morgan? If so, she was adept at needlework.

  Morgan set a plate of store-bought shortbread cookies on the table and went back to the kitchen. Val sat down and eyed the plate. She’d much rather eat one of the oatmeal cookies she’d brought, but Morgan returned from the kitchen without them.

  She carried a teapot covered in a cozy decorated with embroidered flowers. “The tea will have to steep for another two minutes.” She set a small glass milk pitcher next to it.

  Val noted the MOR stitched onto the cozy. She pointed to the framed autumn scene on the wall. “Did you do the embroidery on that picture and the tea cozy?”

  “Yes. It’s crewel work. The tea cozy was my first stab at it.” When Val smiled in response to the pun, Morgan continued. “I recently finished the landscape in my Novels and Needles Club. During each meeting we talk about a book while we knit, crochet, embroider, or sew.”

  “Is that the book club you mentioned on the phone?”

  Morgan nodded. “One member hosts the meeting each month. It’s my turn next month. We usually have snacks and drinks, but we want to do something special in November because it’s the club’s anniversary. We were thinking of going to a restaurant, but we’re afraid it’ll be too noisy.”

  And the restaurant might not appreciate a bunch of women occupying a table to stitch and talk for hours. “How many club members do you have?”

  Morgan poured tea into Val’s cup. “Ten.”

  Eight would be a tight squeeze in this room. “You might consider doing it in the bookshop’s CAT Corner.”

  “No! I never want to go there again.” She poured herself tea. “Last night was awful. Wilson and Casper accusing each other of killing Suzette, and then Casper pointing a finger at me for no reason at all.”

  “When you said that his car was the same color as the one following Suzette, he took it as an accusation. Did you mean it that way?”

  “Certainly not. Maybe he took it as an accusation because he has a guilty conscience.” Morgan blew on her tea. “We know he followed Suzette on foot Saturday night. He could have done the same in his car.”

  “I wonder when she first realized someone was following her. Was it recently or a while back?”

  “She didn’t say, but I’m sure if it had been going on for some time, she would have told the police.”

  Pointless, unless they had more information than just the car’s color. “If Suzette thought a car had been following her, it’s odd that she didn’t stop jogging and look at it when she heard a car behind her.”

  Morgan frowned. “How do you know she didn’t look at it?”

  “The police chief told me that when she was hit, she was facing forward. Maybe she did turn around and saw a car that wasn’t black. So she kept jogging instead of getting off the road. I guess she assumed the driver would notice her.”

  “The fog could have kept her from seeing the color of the car and the driver from seeing her.” Morgan abruptly clanked her cup down on the saucer. “Sorry. I can’t bear to think about it.” She reached for a paper on top of the sideboard. “Here’s some information I prepared for catering. It’s a list of the food sensitivities of the women in my club. We have members who are vegetarians, lactose intolerant, and gluten sensitive. I hope you can come up with a menu for them.”

  Val didn’t want to be blamed for serving the wrong food. “You can choose the dishes you want from my catering menu. It gives prices for each item and indicates which are gluten-free and vegetarian. Lactose-intolerant people usually know what they can and cannot eat, so you should check with them before making final decisions about the meal.” Val stood up. “I’d like to look at the kitchen before we finalize anything.”

  She peered into the room. She hadn’t seen a kitchen as tiny since she moved out of an efficiency apartment in Manhattan. It was what her mother would call a one-rump kitchen.

  “It isn’t big,” Morgan said as if reading Val’s mind, “but it has everything you need to make a meal.”

  For one person, not for ten. The kitchen had a cooktop but no oven. A microwave and a toaster oven took up most of the counter space.

  “When you have a meeting in this house, where does your book club gather?”

  “In the living room. I bring in dining chairs so there’s a place for everyone.”

  “Given the size of the kitchen and your group, I recommend a buffet. I’ll make the food ahead of time and set it on the dining table. People can help themselves, fill their plates, and return to the living room.”

  Morgan looked askance. “We’d have to eat on our laps. That’s not comfortable.”

  “I have one other option for you. I can cater the dinner in the café at the athletic club. It’s available after seven Monday through Thursday and after two on the other days when we close early. You’ll have to pay a bit more to cover renting the space.”

  Morgan sighed. “I guess we can split the cost among the ten of us. Can you send me the prices? Then I’ll let the club members decide.”

  Val edged toward the front door. “I’ll e-mail you my catering menu with the cost of the space factored in. Thank you for tea and for contacting me about catering.”

  * * *

  When Val arrived home, she went into the study. It looked only slightly less messy than before Granddad had tidied it today. She sat down at the computer and surveyed the list of files he’d copied from Suzette’s thumb drive. She sorted them by date and opened the last file Suzette had saved, a spreadsheet called “Expenses” with tabs for the current year and the previous two years. Suzette had entered how much she’d spent on a variety of items, including tuition, food, clothing, and books. The latest date listed in the current year’s expenses was Friday, the day before the costum
e contest, when she’d bought groceries.

  Another recently updated spreadsheet was called “Log.” It had four columns. The first column contained dates. The numbers in the next column looked like times of day or durations with a colon between the hour and minutes. The first date was a month ago. Then came three or four dates per week, the last one just four days before Suzette died. Each line in the third column contained a three-digit number. The entries in the last column were uppercase letters. The same ones appeared several times: A, R, E, J. They must be codes or abbreviations for something, but Val had no idea what.

  She closed the spreadsheet and went back to looking at the file list. Over the past couple of years, Suzette had saved documents in a folder called “Homework.” Val opened a few of them and saw what she expected—papers for college courses.

  A folder labeled “Book2” contained the chapters from Suzette’s work-in-progress, the historical mystery set in the 1920s, including the chapter the Fictionistas had discussed last night.

  The folder’s name suggested Suzette had written another book. Val skimmed the folder list and found a “Book1” folder. The documents in it were chapters one through six. She right-clicked on “Chapter 1” and viewed the file properties. Though Suzette had modified it earlier this year, she’d created it more than five years ago. That was true of the other chapters too. She must have abandoned writing her first book for a few years, gone back to revise it, and then given up again.

  Was it a murder mystery like her other book? Val opened “Chapter 1.” The first sentence grabbed her: I liked him better than any of Mom’s other boyfriends.

  Val felt a tingle of excitement. Could this be a memoir rather than fiction? She kept reading.

  The current boyfriend treated the narrator like an adult, in contrast to her mother’s earlier ones, who’d viewed the girl as a nuisance. It had been a few years since the mother’s previous boyfriend took off, and now the sixteen-year-old narrator found herself the object of admiration by a grown man. When he moved into the small two-story house with her and her mother, he declared they’d be one happy family. The girl hoped he’d be the father she’d never had. The first chapter ended on a happy note. But in the second chapter, the household dynamic changed.

  The boyfriend was amorous toward her mother in front of the girl and watched her reactions. Her embarrassment seemed to amuse him. When the mother took a second job working two nights a week, the girl had to fend off the boyfriend. She agonized about whether to tell her mother, her friends, or her teachers what was going on.

  Val quickly moved from chapter to chapter. She seethed as she read about the girl being fondled by the man and the mother calling her a liar when the girl told her what he’d done. The girl spent as much time as she could at a friend’s house, but sensed she was outstaying her welcome there. Having nowhere else to go on the nights when her mother worked, she locked herself in her room. When she wouldn’t respond to the boyfriend’s cajoling to open the door, he tried a variety of tools to unlock it. At the moment he succeeded, her mother returned from her job. The girl had no doubt that he’d unlock the door faster in the future, having discovered how to do it. She needed a sturdy bolt for the door, but she didn’t have the money to buy one.

  The next time her mother worked at night, the girl locked herself in her room again. When the boyfriend started working on the lock, she climbed out her bedroom window and lowered herself to the ground. She stayed outside even after her mother returned, wondering if anyone would come look for her. No one did. She saw the lights go on in her mother’s bedroom and then go off. The girl waited another ten minutes and then crept into the house.

  The next time she was alone in the house with him, he tried coaxing her to unlock her door and rattled the doorknob. When she didn’t respond, he stopped. She heard nothing for a minute and assumed he’d gone to find whatever tool had worked the last time. She put on several layers of clothing because it was a cold night and opened the window, ready to climb out. Then she saw the glow from his cigarette below the window. He was blocking her escape.

  Val’s heart raced. What would happen next?

  The girl shut the window, took off her heavy clothing, and put on a dress and makeup. She left the house by the front door, approached the man who was standing under her window, and said, “Let’s go out for a drink.”

  There the story ended. If Suzette had written any more of it, she’d saved it somewhere other than on the thumb drive. Still tense from reading the story, Val leaned back in her chair, trying to relax. Suzette’s memoir or fictionalized autobiography tugged at the heartstrings in a way that her murder mystery hadn’t, and left Val emotionally drained. Yet she wanted more. She wanted to find out how the story ended.

  The boyfriend’s name never appeared in the chapters. Val had little doubt he was the man Wanda Cripps had talked about whose car Suzette had totaled. Maybe her cousin knew the rest of the story, but would she share it?

  Val heard the front door open. Granddad. Should she show him the chapters she’d just read? No. She’d tell him about the story, maybe tone it down a little. Reading about the boyfriend and Suzette’s terror would upset him. She closed the documents.

  “I’m in the study,” she called out to him. He came into the room, carrying a manila envelope, and sat on the sofa. She swiveled the chair to face him. “How did your visit with the Patels go?”

  “Not the way I expected. When I got there, the kids were Skyping with their father. He’s been visiting his sick mother in India for the last two weeks. They told me they talked with him and their grandmother every day.”

  Being half a world away from a hit-and-run made a good alibi. “You scratched Mr. Patel off your suspect list.”

  Granddad nodded. “Mrs. Patel too. She didn’t act like she was jealous of Suzette. I gave the boys the books and told them Suzette had bought them. When they went out to play, I asked their mother about the note her son found in the door. She showed it to me. It wasn’t scrawled by a playground bully. It was printed on a computer.”

  “Kids know how to use computers. What did the note say?”

  “You will pay for what you done. Sounds like a kid who hasn’t learned grammar. I told her the Bayport police were investigating the hit-and-run, and it might have been deliberate. She gave me the note and said I could pass it on to them.” Granddad patted the manila envelope. “The chief wasn’t interested in what happened at the Patels’, but maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “How did your online research go? Find any previous connection between Suzette and her writing buddies?”

  “Nope. I found stuff about all of them except Morgan.”

  “I didn’t give you the correct spelling of her last name. It’s R-O-U-X. When Gillian e-mailed me contact information, she only put down first names. Speaking of Gillian, what did you find out about her?”

  “She grew up on the western side of the Chesapeake, moved to the Eastern Shore when she got married, and stayed here after her divorce. I couldn’t find other names she’s used, but I’m pretty sure Gillian Holroyd is an alias.”

  “You mean a pen name?” When Granddad nodded, Val said, “What makes you think it’s not her real name?”

  “Gillian Holroyd is the name of a modern witch in a 1950s movie—Bell, Book and Candle. The first book Gillian wrote centered on a modern witch. That can’t be coincidence. Using that name was probably a marketing gimmick.”

  A ploy geared to movie buffs like Granddad? Not a big audience. Val had another explanation besides marketing or coincidence. “Maybe her parents, the Holroyds, gave her the name Gillian because they liked the movie. What else did you find out about her?”

  “She’s written a lot of books, but nothing in the last five years.”

  Val found that hard to believe. “She’s arranged to sign her new book at Title Wave, so she must have written something.”

  “That’s a bunch of stories she wrote more than ten years ago. Some of them were published in
magazines. Now she’s collected them into a book.”

  Val swiveled the chair so she was facing the computer again, googled Gillian Holroyd, and clicked on the Wikipedia page for Gillian. All her books were listed with the publication dates. Val scanned them. Granddad was right about the timing. “She’s published fifteen novels, but none of them recently. She had one book come out each year at first. Then she wrote two a year for a while. And then nothing.”

  “A long dry spell.” He shifted on the sofa and stood up. “I’m going to sit in my recliner and put my feet up. You get a chance to look at the files Suzette saved on that thumb drive?”

  Val followed him into the sitting room and perched on the edge of the old tweed sofa. “I’ll tell you about the files I found, but I have to make it quick. I’m meeting Casper for a drink in town and then Bram for dinner.”

  “Busy night. Ask Casper what he knows about Gillian.”

  “I’ll add it to my list of questions for him.”

  Val told him what was on the thumb drive. Granddad often fell asleep within minutes of leaning back in his recliner, but her summary of the chapters in Suzette’s first book kept him wide-awake.

  When she finished, he said, “I don’t think Suzette made up that story. She was writing about what happened to her.”

  “I agree. Whether it’s a straight memoir or she took poetic license to make it into fiction, I suspect the man in the story was based on her mother’s boyfriend. Even when she was working on a historical novel, she gave her characters the personalities of people she knew.” Val stood up. “Memoir or not, the chapters I read could serve as the start of an exciting novel. I’m afraid Suzette’s death may have been the unhappy ending to it.”

  Chapter 19

  Val changed out of her black slacks with white cat hair into dress jeans, and switched her white top for a teal sweater, a good color for her. To her surprise, when she went downstairs, Granddad wasn’t asleep in his recliner. He was busy at the computer and said goodbye to her without taking his eyes off the screen.