by Mary Bowers
He nodded almost wildly. “On the terrace. Charlotte found her this morning.”
“Oh, poor Charlotte! She’ll never want to set foot on that terrace again. Wait! On the terrace? Julie’s room is on the third floor, on the other end of the house. How did she manage to fall to the terrace?”
“From the balcony in Fawn’s room.”
My mouth dropped open stupidly. Then I hitched up my jaw and said, “She didn’t have a key. At least that’s what she said. So how did she get in? Is there a communicating door through to Maxine’s suite? Not that I can imagine Maxine doing her any favors.”
“No. There was at one time, when it was a Mr.-and-Mrs. suite. Horace and Adela Moon, of course. But Maxine had that bricked up when Fawn took over Adela’s room. You can’t even tell where it once was. Maxine is throwing a fit right now, because the police are in her office looking for a way through to Fawn’s room.”
“This one just doesn’t compute. I know that Fawn was Julie’s boss, but how does it make sense . . . she must have been lying. She did have a key to Fawn’s room after all.”
Ed shrugged. “She told us she didn’t, when you and Charlotte were trying to get in yesterday morning.”
“Uh huh. And we believe everything Julie told us, including why she was in Ryan’s room the other night?”
“Who can follow the vagaries of the human heart?”
“Oh, come off it, Ed. I think that situation calls for a much more earthy explanation. I just don’t know what it is.”
I was still partially under the covers, and Ed sat down on the edge of the bed. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it.”
“About Ryan and Julie?” I sat up, interested.
“Oh. Not that. About that manuscript you found. We presumed that because you found it in Fawn’s room that she had written it. What if she didn’t?”
It took me a moment, but the light began to dawn. A solution too confused and complicated to put simply started forming in my mind. “Ed, you’re a genius. Only not the way you think you are.”
“I never said I was a genius.” He settled and focused. “Now. Fawn and Maxine were sisters. Presumably there could have been a similarity in their ‘writer’s voices,’ so to speak. They grew up in the same household, share a gene pool, and thus must have had some similarities in how they expressed themselves, although they weren’t immediately apparent. But the more I think about it, the gruesome turn of phrase used in the description of the assault on the young lady in the story is something I’ve run across before. In Scratching the Blackboard. I believe, based on that, that the manuscript you found was written by Maxine, not Fawn.”
I was nodding. It was all making sense to me.
“And,” Ed went on, “Fawn didn’t want the book published. She was a lady of delicate sensibilities. She recognized the abusive men in her family, painted a little bloodier than they actually were, perhaps, but recognizable to Fawn. She was horrified. She stole the book and hid it from her sister, then, sometime in the middle of the night, she awoke to the realization that there was nothing she could do to stop publication. Obviously, it was written on a computer, so there is a computer file. Push a button; here’s another copy. Or Maxine could simply rewrite it, if she was determined to publish and be damned. Think of the publicity! That, combined with her husband’s recent death and her children’s marriages falling apart, drove the poor, weak-minded woman over the edge. Or off the balcony, as it happened.”
He looked at me for my reaction.
“I agree. Up to a point. I’m not sure she was all that weak-minded, though. And Julie? What’s your analysis of that?”
“She was in Fawn’s room looking for the manuscript. Maxine has just hired her, and job number one was to get that manuscript back. She probably assumed that Julie would know exactly where it was.”
“Agreed. Then what?”
“Um, that’s where I come to a full stop. Fawn was driven to suicide. But that wouldn’t have worked with Julie. Or Julie killed Fawn – wait, wait, I’ve got it! – Fawn knew Julie had designs on her son, and forbade her to go anywhere near him again, on pain of being fired and exiled. Something like that. So Julie gets Fawn out of the way, somebody figures it out, and she gets killed in retribution? I like it. What about you?”
“Not so much,” I said. I was thinking hard.
“Why not? It makes perfect sense. Now, let’s think about who. It had to be somebody who could have gotten at her when she was in Fawn’s room. Who knew she was going there, or saw her go in. Oliver’s room is at the other end of the hall, with a clear view of Fawn’s door. Either Julie left the door unlocked, which doesn’t sound right, or somebody else had a key and went in after her. Because I think we have to assume that Julie had a key. And Oliver has the only other one. I hate the logical conclusion I’m coming to, because this could mean we don’t get paid in full, but –“
“Maxine could have heard somebody messing around in her sister’s room if she was in her office writing late at night,” I said. “Elizabeth could have come out of her room at a critical moment. Ryan, ditto. Heck, even young Horace. We’ve been thinking of him as a child, but he’s thirteen, and he obviously loved his grandmother.”
He counterattacked, probably miffed that I was shooting holes in his beautiful theory. “Jeralyn had a motive, too, don’t forget. Julie was the Other Woman, trying to slide in between Jeralyn and a rich, good-looking man. And two-thirds of a love triangle have been known to unite against the other third and commit murder, just to prove their love.”
We stared at one another for a long moment, then I popped out of the bed and said, “Get out. I gotta get dressed. But don’t go far,” I added before he could get away. “When I’m ready to go, I’m going to want you.”
“I understand. I don’t want to be alone in this house either.”
“Do you know where Bastet is?”
“Observing the police,” he said.
“Say what?”
He didn’t bother to repeat it. We just stared at one another for a few heartbeats and then I said, “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
“Take all the time you need. Once we’re downstairs, we may not have another quiet moment in the foreseeable future.”
So I took half an hour. When facing police interrogations, a girl wants to know that her make-up is on straight.
* * * * *
Much as we wanted to, we weren’t allowed to stay together once we went downstairs. When the police found out that Ed and I had been hovering around Fawn’s door at midnight and thought we heard noises from within, they were very interested in talking to us, and they picked off Ed first. Detective Frane was handling the interviews, and he especially wanted to be the one to interview Ed and me – separately. He looked at me meaningfully and told me not to go far; I was next.
Nobody thought about suicide again, except for Oliver, who kept going around telling anybody who’d listen that this proved that Julie had killed Fawn (why he didn’t say), and once she’d had time to let it sink in, she felt so guilty about it she had gave herself the death penalty.
Preposterous. I hadn’t known Julie for long, but even I could see that she didn’t have a compassionate bone in her body. The conscience compartment of her brain had collapsed under pressure from the enormous size of the me-first compartment a long time ago. Every other person on the planet would have killed Julie Lang before she, herself, would have.
But nobody contradicted Oliver. Why bother?
I strolled the length of the great hall, not hurrying, noticing that old Horace in alabaster wasn’t back on the mantel in the great hall yet. It made the room so much more pleasant.
Even if I stood very still in the area outside Oliver’s office door, I couldn’t hear what they were saying inside, and I didn’t want to get caught with my ear on the door, so I went to the kitchen.
Coffee! Even the small delights of morning had been forgotten in the confusion.
I went through the seri
es of useless rooms between the great hall and the kitchen, leering at Horace and smiling at Orion as I passed the mantel in the dining room. For some reason, Horace didn’t bother me anymore. In the kitchen, there was nobody and nothing around except for the smell of freshly brewed coffee.
There was a full pot on the burner of the coffee maker, so I figured Charlotte had gotten it going before stepping out to the terrace and finding the gruesome thing that awaited her. I helped myself to a cup, stirred cream into it, then absent-mindedly opened the dishwasher to put the dirty spoon in. It was running, and I found myself enveloped in a hot cloud of wet steam, looking at drippy machine innards and dishes. I quickly closed it, hoping I hadn’t messed up the wash cycle, and after a pregnant pause, it started up again.
“I’m always doing that,” Charlotte said from behind me. “It runs very quietly. You get the idea it’s just an electrical hum from the refrigerator, or an especially loud day on the ocean outside.”
I turned. “Charlotte, I’m so sorry about . . . you know.”
Her voice had sounded twenty years older, and all worn out.
“Things are really falling apart around here, aren’t they?” she said numbly, walking over to get a cup of coffee for herself. She seemed beyond tears.
“It’s too much. You should ask Maxine for a leave of absence. Nobody should be forced to work under these circumstances. I’m serious, Charlotte. After the police are out of here, you should tell Maxine that you’re taking a cruise or something. Then do it.”
She was smiling ruefully.
“You think Maxine won’t let you go?”
“Oh, no. She will. She’s done it before. When my husband died, she insisted.”
“She insisted?”
Charlotte smiled wanly. “You don’t know her as well as I do. I understand her. She’s not all that bad. She enjoys creating this monstrous image for herself. If she were really like that, I’d never have lasted 30 years with her.”
“She wasn’t that nice to the Coxes.”
Now she laughed. “The Coxes had only been here for three years. In Maxine’s mind, they were still on probation.”
“I’m sure the Coxes didn’t agree.”
“Oh, they were just happy to get out of here. It wasn’t a good fit. I suspected that when I hired them, but we needed somebody, and husband-and-wife butler-and-cook combinations are just about history these days. I’m trying to persuade Maxine we could do with just a cook, and whether she finally agrees or not, I think that’s how it’s going to have to be. And as for a leave of absence, I’ll think about it. It all depends on how I feel a few days from now, when I manage to digest all this.”
I gave her an encouraging smile and decided I’d better head back to the great hall. Detective Frane had said I’d be next, and I didn’t want to him to have to come looking for me. Actually, by that point, I might have wanted to talk to him even more than he wanted to talk to me.
* * * * *
Oliver’s office door opened at the same moment I sat myself down in the great room with my cup of coffee. As if I’d been waiting patiently, I turned to them slowly, got up with a sigh and looked Ed up and down for physical damage. He looked tired but unbloodied, and we smiled in passing as he came out and I went in.
Frane closed the door behind me and I was plunged into the gloom, but not so much that I didn’t see the bright green eyes of Bastet watching me from where she had curled herself up on the desk. As he passed around behind her, Frane gave her a familiar little stroke, and she flicked her ears reflexively, but didn’t object.
“Is she bothering you?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he said, “I like cats. And apparently, she likes me. This is the famous magical cat that your friend Edson Darby-Deaver has written about?”
I groaned. “Tell me you haven’t read that book.”
“I seem to keep running across you, so I thought I’d find out more. My buddy Burt Bruno, from St. Augustine –“
“Oh, yeah,” I said, sinking down a little more in my chair. “I met him last year when Ed’s neighbor washed up on the beach.” I bit my lip and shut up. Bruno had caught me at a particularly ridiculous moment, coming out of Ed’s guest bedroom, and I could only imagine what he’d told his Flagler County colleagues about the crazy cat lady and her ghost-hunting friend.
“He told me all about you. We caught up with each other at The Oasis last week, as a matter of fact, and we talked about you for quite a while. Even the bartender joined in. You’re well-known around here.”
“Yup.” For all the wrong reasons, I thought. I’m in animal rescue. Not, you know, weird stuff.
“At first I thought you were just a garden-variety nut case,” he said easily. “Pardon my frankness.”
“Oh, no, not at all, not at all. I’m getting used to it.” I could no longer look at him. Bastet held my gaze, though, and gave me one of her mysterious slow winks.
“So let me get this straight. In this book, your friend Edson protected your identity by characterizing you as a lone-wolf do-gooder who runs a soup kitchen –“
“A guy named Larry,” young Bill Weyer added helpfully.
“I think Fawn Moon was murdered,” I said, calling the pre-school class to order. They stopped talking, but continued to smile. “And here’s why.”
* * * * *
Oliver Moon is a law-abiding citizen, always ready to support his local representatives of the law, but I didn’t think he was doing it with the smile he ought to have been giving us.
“She’s helping you,” he said, looking at me.
“We’ve consulted with her on cases before,” Frane had the nerve to say without batting an eye. “She has excellent instincts.”
“And a little help from her friends,” Oliver said in half-voice, indicating the heavens above, or maybe a hovering ancestor. “That key won’t open Maxine’s murder room, you know. She had that lock installed herself.”
“I see. Well, thank you for your cooperation,” Detective Frane said, holding the master key in the palm of his hand. “We’ll return this to you as soon as we’re finished.”
Oliver nodded, gave me a last look from hooded eyes, and walked back into his bedroom and quietly closed the door. Inside, I heard young Horace’s voice asking a question, then the rumble of his great-uncle’s answer. So the boy was spending time with the old man. Under circumstances other than a murder investigation, it would have been sweet.
Frane unlocked the door to Fawn’s bedroom and swept his partner and me inside. The drapes had been closed, and I immediately went across the room and opened them.
“Now, where did you find it?”
“In an old train case. You know, the kind that looked like a square packing case with a handle right in the middle of the top that made it even harder to carry? Yeah, that one,” I said as Frane lifted the thing down from the dressing room shelf and handed it to me. Strange, I thought, studying it. Olive green was actually a fashionable color at one time. Some things just can’t be explained. At least it wasn’t Harvest Gold. I chattered as I handled the awkward, boxy thing. “It has a false bottom – here. Charlotte and I had decided to spare the family having to throw out used cosmetics and toiletries, so I’d gone through the train case, and when I emptied it, it was still kind of heavy. Off balance. You know? So I poked around and found the false bottom. The manuscript was in there. It’s gone,” I said, staring into an empty tray about the size of an in-box.
Frane squatted down to be near me as I sat on the floor with the train case. “Can you remember what it was?”
“I can do better than that.” Okay, I thought, here we go. “I . . . took a few pages! Yes. I didn’t think it would do any harm. Fawn was dead, and it didn’t look like something really personal, like a journal or anything. I was just curious. That was before we were told that nothing was to be taken from the room. I just, you know, folded them up and stuffed them in my pocket, because, um, Fawn didn’t need them anymore, and I was interested in reading t
hem, and Charlotte and I were working so hard and all – stop staring at me. Your eyes – I feel like I can see straight through to the back of your skull.”
He smiled. “I know. Old Creepy Eyes, that’s what they used to call me in school. But they’ve had their uses in my career.”
“I can believe it.”
“You know, you’re good. My people picked this room apart, and they didn’t find this.”
I shrugged, not entirely sure there wasn’t a subtext there. “I never would have. I wasn’t snooping, you know. I was trying to help. I only found it because once I’d emptied the train case, it was obvious something else was in there. Anyway, I slipped four pages out from the middle of the pile, and they’re in my room right now if you want to see them. Confiscate them. Whatever. That doesn’t ruin their evidentiary value, does it?”
“They probably don’t have any evidentiary value in the first place, but let’s go take a look. Anything else we need to see, now that we’re in the room?”
“No. But you guys found the elevator, right? When you searched Maxine’s office?”
Frane had started to get up, but he sat down again abruptly.
Me again, babbling: “That’s why she was so furious that you were searching her office. It wasn’t about a connecting door. It was about the elevator.”
“How did you know about that?”
“Oh, simple deduction. The other day I heard the dishwasher running in the kitchen while I was standing in the pantry. Only you can’t hear the dishwasher running, even when you’re standing right next to it. It’s just about silent. I opened it this morning and got a steam bath. Couldn’t hear it running. And earlier, Charlotte was telling us about the old dumbwaiter, which ran up from the old kitchen to the butler’s pantry. She said Maxine had it sealed up, but that doesn’t make sense. Why seal up a handy little shaft that goes from floor to floor? I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now I think I must have heard the elevator going up, because right after that, Maxine came out onto her balcony – why are you looking at me like that?”
