Dead and Breakfast (Caitlyn Craft Mysteries Book 1)

by David Crossman

  Mrs. Wagner scuffed across the stone floor in her slippers, one hand shielding her candle against the breath of the night. “Wouldn’t matter if you had. I told you I’d wake you up when I decided what to do . . . ”

  “And?”

  As Mrs. Wagner sat on the window seat, the faces of both women were illumined by the gentle yellow light from the candle. Mrs. Wagner smiled mirthlessly, her eyes fixed on the flame, as if mesmerized. “Simplest thing in the world.”

  Amber had no difficulty interpreting her mother’s meaning. “Fire!” she said, so stunned she forgot to whisper.

  “Shh!” With her free hand, Mrs. Wagner grabbed her daughter by the shoulder and shook her twice sharply. “Be quiet. Listen.”

  They listened, but aside from the constant, sleep-inducing murmur of the river and faintly crackling farewell of the ashes in the fireplace, the night was still.

  “Any more racket like that, and you’re bound to wake someone up.” Mrs. Wagner snared her daughter with her cat’s eyes. “Now is not the time to start getting squeamish. Not when we’re so close.”

  “But, another death,” said Amber. “No one’s going to believe it’s a coincidence. The whole idea was to drive her crazy, not kill her . . . ”

  It was a risky statement, and Amber held her breath for the response.

  “Yes, well . . . I had doubts about that plan from the start, as you know. But I played along. We gave her a good push, but she wasn’t as near the edge as some people thought.

  “Besides,” Mrs. Wagner continued, “no one’s going to suspect a thing. Because her body is just going to be one among many.”

  Horror etched itself on Amber’s face. “You’re going to burn the place down . . . with everyone in it?” Her voice rose in alarm, earning her another painful squeeze of the shoulder.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl? Be quiet!”

  “What about your husband?” Amber said desperately, frightened by the grim resolve in her mother’s eyes.

  Mrs. Wagner looked out the window. “I swore to love him ‘til death do us part.’ It’s just about to. I’ll have fulfilled my vows.”

  “And Heather . . . Brianna . . . and Delilah?” said Amber, grasping at straws.

  Mrs. Wagner raised her eyes in the red-tinged glow of the candlelight. “That’s what makes it so perfect. No loose ends.”

  Amber sat up sharply. “You can’t mean it! It was Heather’s idea . . . you can’t . . . ”

  “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Wagner rasped impatiently. “You’re still half-asleep, aren’t you?” She shook Amber’s shoulder again. “Wake up. Pull yourself together. You know as well as I do whose plan it was . . . and since that plan didn’t get the job done, we’re going with this one. Simplicity is always the best way. Now come on, let’s get it done.” She roughly hauled her daughter to her feet.

  “I . . . I, no . . . I have to . . . ” Amber stuttered. “Let me pack.”

  “Pack? That wouldn’t be too suspicious, would it? To have the police and firemen find us out on the lawn with our bags packed. No,” she pulled Amber to the dresser. “Take your purse and passport – any woman would grab those.”

  Amber ran blind hands over the surface of the dresser. “I can’t find them.”

  “Here!” snapped Mrs. Wagner, pulling open a drawer. “Where you always keep them. What’s gotten into you, girl?” She held her thumb and forefinger nearly touching. “We’re this close. This close! That woman in there,” she pointed to the adjacent room, “is the only thing left standing between us and more money than all of us could spend in a lifetime.” She leaned close to Amber’s face, the unmasked avarice in her expression startling even to someone whose memory was filled with so many firsthand horrors. “I’d burn down an orphanage with all the little kiddies in their cradles for that kind of money, sweetheart, and never give it a thought.

  “And, with Heather gone, we end up splitting three ways instead of four. That’s millions more for us.”

  “What is our partner going to think of you taking things into your own hands like this?”

  “Nothing!” spat Mrs. Wagner contemptuously. “Time’s run out. His plan didn’t work, so. . .” She held the candle up between them, “we improvise. He’ll be too busy counting his money to fuss about it.

  “Besides,” she added, as if the thought had just occurred to her, “who’s to say he’s immune to accidents himself?” She laughed under her breath. “What if we do to him what we did to poor little Nancy? Wouldn’t that be a tasty little bit of irony?”

  Amber felt bile rise to her throat and ran to the bathroom just in time to heave her dinner into the toilet.

  “What in blazes is wrong with you, child?” Mrs. Wagner was framed in the doorway behind her kneeling daughter. “Are you sick?”

  She dropped to her knees beside her daughter and put the candle on the floor. “Here, let me see if you’ve got a fever.” She cupped her hand on Amber’s brow. “A little warm maybe. I can’t tell.”

  Amber reached for the chain.

  “No,” said Mrs. Wagner, grabbing her hand. “Leave it. We don’t want to run the risk of waking anyone up.” As she rose, she pulled Amber to her feet. “Now, are you finished?”

  Amber drew a shaky breath and nodded.

  “Good. Now, where’s your nail polish remover . . . ah. Here it is. Pass me that washcloth.”

  Amber did as she was told. Seconds later, the bathroom was filled with stifling fumes as Mrs. Wagner saturated the wash cloth. “You carry this,” she said, thrusting the sticky wad at Amber. “I’ll take the candle.” She retrieved it from the floor and dragged her daughter to the window, which she opened wide.

  “Hold on to me,” she commanded. “I’ve got to lean out and make sure her window’s open. If it is, we’ll just touch this,” she waved the candle in perilous proximity to the fuel-saturated cloth, “to that, and toss it in. Then you and I grab our purses and trot outside.” She laughed under her breath. “We’ll make a pathetic sight, standing out in the night shivering in our pajamas, bawling our eyes out when the firemen arrive.” She held her hand out. “Hold tight.”

  Amber took her mother’s hand and, anchored to the radiator, made as good a counterbalance as she could as the heavy woman leaned over the railing. “You should be doing this,” Mrs. Wagner whispered. “You’re a lot lighter. There! It’s open. Perfect. Just a little further.”

  The thought never occurred to Amber. There was no deliberation. She simply let go of her mother’s hand.

  Mrs. Wagner screamed and dropped the candle to the pavement twenty feet below. Despite her size, she was agile enough to seize the wrought-iron railing in her fleshy hands as she spilled from the window. Hanging in the night, too stunned even to curse, gasping and sputtering for breath, it was evident she would not be able to suspend herself for long. She looked up at her daughter, her eyes those of a cat that had just counted its last life, and wheezed. “Gayla, what have you done? You can’t do it without me . . . ”

  As if in a trance, the daughter ran her long, delicate fingers over the chubby knuckles that gripped the rail. “A mother should know her own daughter,” she said, her voice rising from a deep well of pain. “I’m Amber, mother.Really Amber.”

  She wedged her thumb under her mother’s index finger and began to pry it loose. Mrs. Wagner, discovering her breath at last, screamed bloody murder.

  Suddenly the light clicked on. “Nicely done, Miss Capshaw.”

  Amber spun around to find Jeremy Farthing standing in the open door. “Mr. Farthing?” she said weakly.

  “What say we reel the old darlin’ in and hang ‘er on the scales of justice,” he said, mimicking an impeccable Irish brogue as he came to the window, which he maintained throughout the following bit of vaudeville. “You can’t hope to pull such a trophy as this in all by yerself, miss.” He forcibly disengaged Amber’s fingers from those of her mother. His smile brought her to her senses. She stepped back.

  “Of course .
. . ”

  Farthing quickly seized Mrs. Wagner’s forearms. “You’ll do us no good as a stain on the pavement, will ye darlin’?” He turned and looked over his shoulder as far as the strain would allow. “Jean-Claude,” he called. “I could use a hand haulin’ ‘er aboard. A few too manytarte aux fraise, I’d say.”

  Jean-Claude, to Amber’s amazement, materialized from behind the sofa.

  “What were you doing there?” she stammered.

  Had the policeman been disposed to explain the obvious – which he wasn’t – there was no time. The door to the connecting room burst open, and Piper, Jill, and Caitlin tumbled in.

  “Have you ever boxed, Mr. Piper?” said Farthing. Unable, or unwilling, to go back to bed, he together with Caitlin, Amber, Joanna, and Piper, had adjourned to the sofas in the dining room for coffee.

  Piper had just learned that Farthing had been acting in a professional capacity all along, and had wondered aloud why he hadn’t acted earlier.

  “As a matter-of-fact, I did box a bit. In the service,” said Piper who, judging from his tone of voice, had taken the question as a challenge.

  “Then since you’re right-handed, you’re familiar with the concept of feinting with your left.”

  “Of course.”

  Farthing smiled ingratiatingly, with just a trace of self-satisfaction. “That’s what you folks were – my left hand. More specifically, she was,” he added, dipping his coffee cup in Caitlin’s direction. “You’re quite a budding detective, you know. You and Jill made my job a lot less dangerous. For me, at least.”

  He made no attempt to hide the fact that he enjoyed an audience. “I was hired by Avril Cummings.”

  “Who’s she when she’s at home?” Piper asked, unsuccessfully shielding his impatience.

  Joanna spoke for the first time. “She is . . . was Paul’s personal secretary.”

  “Just so. And a more suspicious old bird you’ve never met. Fortunately, for you. She didn’t know Capshaw had hired Piper here,” he poked the air in Piper’s direction with his unlit cigar, “to watch over Amber and Joanna. But she did pick up on his concerns . . . his doubts about Gayla.

  “She was just able to make herself swallow his fall from the barn roof as an accident, but when Amber drowned – supposedly – she’d had all she could take. She hired me to prove the Capshaws had been murdered by Gayla.

  “Fact is that, because the girls had exchanged identities – which I discovered by listening at the keyhole to a very interesting conversation in this very room some hours ago – everybody thought Amber was Gayla, and Gayla was Amber. I’m using their proper names, of course.

  “The first thing I discovered is that Gayla had signed up for this little expedition – a treat for her bereaved stepmother. If Miss Cummings was correct in her assumptions, it followed that she was up to some nasty business. So, I signed up for your little junket.

  “My notion had been to make myself generally disagreeable, so that no one would go out of their way to be my pal, or to find me if I went missing for a few hours at a time.”

  “In that, you succeeded beyond your wildest expectations,” said Mr. Piper. “I assure you.”

  An impromptu consensus arose. “Here, here.”

  Farthing bowed, smiling brightly. “Not easy for someone with a superabundance ofbonhomie, I must say. However, it worked like a charm. That freedom allowed me to poke around unhindered, and to discover Gayla’s connection with Heather and Delilah – that racy little snapshot taken in Cancun. So, I figured there were three of them in on it.

  “I didn’t know they were schoolmates, though. We have Caitlin’s bit of larceny to thank for that particular revelation. A little digging one of my associates has done since, back in the States, turned up the fact that someone had paid off one of your prospective students to give up her berth, Caitlin, thus ensuring there’d be room at the inn when the girls turned up on your doorstep unexpectedly.”

  Piper reviewed Farthing’s disclosures. “That’s why you followed the girls over the hill the other night,” he announced in triumph.

  “Bingo,” said Farthing, not giving Caitlin time to answer. “Imagine my surprise when I found out they’d gotten into a little game of their own, on the side. Seems Heather isn’t over- discriminating about whom she bestows her favors on. Or is that upon whom she bestows her favors?”

  “Then you weren’t in bed the whole time?” Amber ventured.

  “No. I was roaming about the countryside with a throbbing headache – thanks to Mrs. Wagner, though I didn’t know that at the time.”

  “Mrs. Wagner? I thought you were hit by a falling branch,” said Piper who, with his penchant for taking things at face value, Caitlin thought, would make a better body guard than a detective.

  “So it had, during the big blow we had the night before, thus providing her with a handy weapon. It would have been a clean piece of work had I not survived. Of course, she had no way of knowing how much I’d seen, which must have caused her no end of anxiety for a while. But, as I made no mention of my suspicions, she must have assumed I’d seen nothing.

  “What I had seen was the redoubtable Heather about to reprise her role as Pharaoh’s daughter among the bull rushes – then the lights went out.”

  “They were going to do the body in the moat bit again?” said Piper.

  “That was the plan, apparently,” said Farthing. “It was meant to work the first time. When it didn’t . . . well, someone may have been good at long-range planning, but improvisation was apparently not their long suit. Time was short. If at first you don’t succeed . . .

  “Anyway, when I came to, I assumed it was Delilah who’d clobbered me. Then I found out her whereabouts were accounted for at the time. The second suspect – our ersatz Amber – was likewise confirmed to have been in her mother’s room.”

  Farthing took a sip of coffee, which allowed Caitlin time to voice a thought. “So, you knew someone else was involved?”

  Farthing smacked his lips and set the cup on its saucer. “The question was, who? I was mentally working my way through our little congregation one-at-a-time, and using a simple process of elimination, came up with several possibilities.” He paused.

  “And they were?” Piper prodded.

  “You, for one.”

  “Me?”

  “I couldn’t account for your presence that morning.”

  “I was in bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course.”

  “No witnesses?” Farthing persisted. “That’s all I mean. The others who couldn’t be accounted for were Miss Tichyara . . . ” He raised his coffee cup in mock toast to Amber, “Kudos on your performance, by the way. I confess your presence baffled me, but I honestly never doubted your blindness - apart from that incident of the soup. Hats off.”

  Amber lowered her eyes and blushed becomingly. Joanna put her arm around her stepdaughter and squeezed her gently.

  “And to you for finding her out,” Farthing said, with a gracious nod at Caitlin. “If ever you tire of dragging people around the European countryside . . . ”

  “I have a position waiting at Farthing Confidential Services?”

  “And the others?” Joanna asked frankly.

  “Jill, for one.”

  Jill stopped pouring coffee abruptly. “I’m afraid I’m much too busy to go about murdering guests,” she said. “Besides, it has a dampening effect on trade.”

  “Nothing personal, my love,” said Farthing cheerfully. “It’s just that you had no one to substantiate your whereabouts, either.”

  “And who else?” asked Amber.

  “The Wagners. A husband and wife don’t hold much water as alibis for one another in my book.

  “So, taking these in order, I eliminated Miss Tichyara out-of-hand, because of her blindness. A dangerous assumption that I shall be careful not to make in the future. Happily, despite faulty logic, the assumption proved correct.

  “Piper I eliminated because I had
no doubt that whoever had hit me did so with every intention of killing me. Had he been the one swinging the branch, I’d be not merely dead, as the song goes, but really most sincerely dead. I came close enough with the less than athletic Mrs. Wagner who, I’m glad to say, had the presence of mind to realize that if she hit me more than once – to make sure the job was done – the accident angle would be a hard sell.”

  Jill sat down on the arm of the sofa. “And were you able to eliminate me, as well?”

  “Yes, because of your solicitousness for me. No doubt you feared a lawsuit.”

  “The thought did cross my mind, given your . . . temperament.”

  Farthing laughed. “Nasty little son of the village orange-seller, wasn’t I?”

  “Very convincing,” Caitlin critiqued.

  “And Mr. Wagner?” Amber asked.

  The smile left Farthing’s face. “Poor man. He really hasn’t a clue. His whole world is going to fall apart when he wakes up in the morning and finds out the woman he’s loved all these years has been carted off by the French police.”

  “As a murderess,” Piper volunteered.

  Farthing nodded. “And that she was the mother of twins – before he even knew her.”

  “How could he be so blind to the kind of woman he’d married?” Caitlin wondered aloud.

  “That’s the definition of love, isn’t it? Blind. He has an advanced case of it, I’d say.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Amber. “Mrs. Wagner said there was a man behind it all.”

  “So you said.”

  “Mightn’t it be Mr. Wagner!” she ventured.

  “Not if I’m any judge of character,” said Farthing. “Mr. Wagner is the last of a dying breed – an honest man. An honorable man. I have no doubt that, broken heart and all, he’ll stand by his wife in the ordeal to come; never miss a visiting day.”

  “Which brings us to the real culprit,” said Caitlin, saddened by the mental image of Mr. Wagner standing patiently in the prison waiting-room, week after week, clutching a bunch of flowers, spending his honest love on a woman who, short of a religious epiphany, could never appreciate it.”