For a moment, I merely watched in surprise, then I flew down the stairs, grabbing his arm just as he stumbled. I focused in on his face, catching his glassy, bracken-colored gaze for a brief moment. I registered relief in his eyes, mixed with something else. Recognition, maybe?
Then his hand came over mine and I felt a piece of smooth metal being pressed against the back of my hand.
“Keep them safe,” he said, his voice ragged, barely more than a whisper.
His lips pulled back into a semblance of a smile, and I caught a glimpse of a badly broken front tooth. Without another word, his arm slid from my grasp and he collapsed, the pen he’d been pressing to my hand dropping to the ground like a cylindrical metal stone.
FIVE
“Holy mother of—” I whirled toward the front door. “Help!” I called, pulling my cell phone from my vest pocket to call emergency services. “Someone help!”
The emergency operator answered just as the bellboy, tall, gangly, and pimply, flung open the door. His dark eyes widened for a second at seeing the man on the ground. Then he jumped into action. “I’ll get Mrs. P. and the defibrillator!”
I knelt next to the man and said to the operator, “A man has collapsed at the Hotel Sutton.” Steeling myself, I reached out and felt his wrist. There was a creepy nothingness where a pulse should be. “There’s no pulse. He’s not moving. Please send an ambulance.”
Somehow I already knew an ambulance wouldn’t do this poor man any good.
“Do you know CPR?” the operator asked me.
“Yes,” I said, though I barely knew I’d spoken the words. After my ordeal a couple of months back, I’d decided I needed to do something to make myself feel whole again. Instead, I did three things: I took a CPR class, a self-defense class, and went to see a counselor. All three were good decisions, and I was back to being “me” once more, but I’d hoped I’d never have to make use of the CPR or anything I’d learned in self-defense class.
No such luck.
“Was that a yes?” the operator said in my ear.
“Yes,” I repeated with more strength. “I just learned last month. I’m supposed to sing ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”
“That’s right,” the operator said. “You can do this.”
Putting my phone on speaker, I brushed a stray lock of hair from my face, closed my eyes, and started whisper-singing the Bee Gees’ 1977 classic. The operator hummed the tune along with me. It was the beat I needed, not the words. It was how fast I was supposed to push on the man’s chest.
A breeze kicked up and the pen he’d dropped—a nicer black writing instrument with gold trim that glowed in the lamplight—skittered sideways for a moment. I wanted to reach for it, but I didn’t stop CPR, not even when I heard the sounds of movement from all angles. Some of them were coming from inside the hotel, others from across the vast side lawn, where Pippa and her mother had separate cottages on the edge of the property. The first runner made it to me well before the others due to having four legs instead of two.
“Boomer, no!” I said to Pippa’s stocky yellow Labrador retriever as he happily sniffed and snuffled at the inert man, wagging his thick tail at a speed that made it dangerous to stand behind him unless you liked bruises on your legs. I managed to keep up the CPR beat, knowing it wasn’t doing any good.
“Get on,” I wheezed to the dog, using the command I’d heard Pippa say a thousand times.
It’s been said that if you really want to feel humbled, try ordering around another person’s dog, and it was true. Boomer ignored me as he nosed and snorted around the mysterious man.
“Boomer, no! Get on!”
It was Pippa’s voice this time, and she called out with authority. I glanced over my shoulder to the porch to see her skidding out the front door from behind the bellboy.
The dog, hearing his human, finally obeyed, darting off with happy abandon toward the cottages as two small headlights of a golf cart appeared. Roselyn had arrived in her personal cart. Whether she knew of the problem or had just finally decided to make an appearance at the hotel, I didn’t know. In the distance, I heard the faintest wail of a siren as the hotel’s front doors opened once more and Mrs. P. rushed out carrying a portable defibrillator.
Her eyes were bright when she reached me, already ripping off the paper that would allow the contact strips to stick to the man’s chest and electricity to pulse through his skin. I was light-headed with exertion and relief.
“I’ll take over from here, dear,” she said with soothing authority. I sat back on my heels, puffing hard. Mrs. P. announced herself to the 9-1-1 operator and began checking the man’s vitals.
“I was a nurse for ten years. I most certainly do know how to work the defibrillator,” she told the operator. With confident hands, she ripped open the man’s button-down shirt and applied the strips to his chest.
Pippa extended a hand and grasped mine, pulling me to my feet with a steady grip. When I was upright, though, I heard the shakiness in her voice.
“Lucy, what happened? Are you all right? Who is this man?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wiping my brow, grateful now for the cold breeze. “He came from the pathway. He was staggering and sweating and seemed confused. He stumbled and I tried to help him … but he just collapsed.”
Pippa turned to her mother, with whom she shared the same long legs, blond hair, naturally arching eyebrows, and full lips. Due to Roselyn’s regular trips to a wizardlike dermatologist and the fact she was wearing nearly the same outfit as Pippa, she and her daughter looked like sisters.
“Do you recognize him, Mom?” Pippa asked. “I don’t at all.”
Roselyn merely stared at the body, horrified. “He’s not moving,” I heard her say finally. She wrapped her arms around herself, and Pippa dutifully moved to put an arm around her mother’s shoulders.
Down on the ground, Mrs. P. had removed the strips and conscripted the stalwart bellboy to keep up the CPR beat as she pulled on a latex glove. She opened the man’s mouth, giving me another peek at his broken tooth, then used her thumbs to raise his eyelids. She pursed her lips, then took my phone off speaker and spoke to the operator. Even over another rush of cold wind, I distinctly heard the words, “No signs of life.”
“Oh my God,” Roselyn said, literally clutching her pearls, her voice brittle with stress as Mrs. P. fished for a wallet from the man’s coat pocket. “Is he dead?” Her eyebrows made a motion like they were lifting, but no lines appeared in her forehead.
“He sure is,” Mrs. P. replied. From his wallet, she extracted two dollar bills, a grocery store receipt, a driver’s license, and a ticket stub to a local live theater, the last two of which she held away from her, squinting to better read the information on them.
“What do you mean?” Roselyn’s voice went up an octave, rivaling the pitch of the sirens that were drawing nearer. “You need to keep working on him, Mrs. P. We can’t have a”—she lowered her voice to a hiss—“dead person on the premises.”
Mrs. P. held out her hand to Pippa, who helped her to her feet. Brushing crushed granite from the knees of her black trousers, Mrs. P. said, “Not much we can do about it now, I’m afraid. I suspect he’s been dying for days or weeks, and we just saw the tail end of it, when delusion finally hit.”
She held out the contents of his wallet to Pippa. “Hold these, would you, dear?”
I glanced around; everyone looked stunned, including three hotel guests I hadn’t formally met, but I knew from photos were Pippa’s Aunt Tilly and her first cousins once removed, Catherine and Ginny.
“Are you sure?” Pippa and I said at the same time. When she didn’t take the items Mrs. P. was offering, I did, looking down at the ID on autopilot.
“Positive,” Mrs. P. said as she packed up the defibrillator. She gestured to the man’s ashen face, the sheen of sweat still on it. “He’s displaying all the signs of someone who’s been going downhill. This wasn’t a sudden thing. He may have had a terminal disease, or bee
n mixing medications, or even been a drug addict. But he was a dead man walking, without a doubt.” Looking at me, she asked, “What’s his name again?”
“Edmund Hugo Markman,” I said, reading off his driver’s license.
Mrs. P. took off her latex gloves, each one rolling off with a squelching snap. “What did he buy, out of curiosity? Medications of some kind?”
Scanning the receipt, I said, “Nope. A couple of frozen dinners and a six-pack of bottled water.”
“And the theater ticket?” Pippa asked.
I held it out to her. It was for the musical Oklahoma!, which had been in town for the past few weeks. It was one of my favorites, actually. I’d taken Josephine to see it and we’d sung the catchy songs for days afterward.
Pippa glanced at the ticket. “Did he have anything else on him?”
I remembered the gold-trimmed black pen and spun around, my eyes scanning the ground, searching for it in the darkening night even as the wind whipped my long hair into my face.
Then a gurgling sound made my head jerk up. Roselyn Sutton was holding her fingers to her mouth and turning pale. Pippa and I both started toward her, but Mrs. P. merely tut-tutted and took Roselyn gently by the arm. “Don’t worry, my dears, I’ve got her.” Her voice softened, as if she were speaking to a scared child. “Come on, now. Let’s go inside and get you some peppermint tea.” When she looked up to see more people were coming out the hotel’s double doors, identifiable as guests of the hotel’s restaurant by the starched napkins some had in their hands, she turned Roselyn away, saying, “We’ll just go round back, shall we?”
With Roselyn in good hands, Pippa was already up the steps, reassuring the guests that the situation was under control even as flashing lights in the parking lot heralded the arrival of the ambulance.
As the EMTs rushed toward us with their gear, I gave the man one last look, watching the thin hairs on the top of his head lifting upward in the breeze. I had the feeling I’d seen him before, but where, I couldn’t say. Mentally shaking off the thought, I stepped aside as the EMTs went to work to confirm what Mrs. P. had already determined.
The poor man was dead.
SIX
“And he said, ‘Keep them safe’?”
“That’s correct, Officer … Carr,” I said, peering across at the name badge of the policeman with a strong jaw and wheat-hued crew cut.
Shifting in a club chair in the hotel’s pretty sitting room, I fought the urge to clench my teeth. I had great respect for law enforcement—despite my dubious history of sassing a certain FBI agent—but I hadn’t had anything to eat since long before watching Mr. Markman collapse. Since lunchtime, in fact, and now my brain was feeling fuzzier by the second, even as my patience was dropping like a lead balloon. Didn’t cops know it was never a good thing to interview a witness who was hangry?
“What do you think he meant by ‘keep them safe’?” Officer Carr asked.
“I’ve no clue,” I said. “From what I understand, this man may have been ill for some time. It’s possible he was having delusions when I came across him. Has someone confirmed whether or not he is, in fact, Edmund Hugo Markman?”
Officer Carr’s face smoothed into a familiar professional mask, and I held up a hand with a sigh to stop the words on his lips.
“It was silly of me to ask. I know y’all are looking into the situation and you can’t tell me. All I know is that I’ve never seen him before and I don’t know what he could possibly have been talking about.”
Officer Carr’s response was to change the subject. “Please give me a timeline of your day.”
I told him that I’d spent the morning cleaning my one-bedroom condo from top to bottom. “Then I packed for my week here at the Sutton and drove out to Comal Cemetery in New Braunfels. I was there for nearly two hours—”
I stopped when Officer Carr’s cell phone buzzed. He took the call, easing out of his armchair and walking over to the far end of the room, where a Hepplewhite sideboard stood with a tray of Burleigh stoneware mugs in their most famous patterns. Flanking the tray were two silver urns, one kept continuously full of coffee and the other filled with hot water for tea.
I finally took a sip of my own tea. It was Earl Grey, sweetened liberally with sugar. I normally took my tea straight, with maybe a dash of milk from time to time, but Mrs. P. told me a good cup of sweet, hot tea was what I needed after witnessing that poor man’s death.
I began to feel the dragon that was my low blood sugar settle down a bit. Sipping again, I looked around the room, taking in all the nods to the Suttons’ English and Scottish ancestry in the furniture and décor. Even without my help, the descendants of Sarah Bess and Reginald had already known they were mostly British.
“My mom, though?” Pippa had said. “She tells people she’s ‘just Texan.’ Both sides of her family didn’t come to America until after World War One, and she knows next to nothing about them. I honestly think she doesn’t know what else to say because she doesn’t know who she is, so to speak.”
Remembering Roselyn’s near swoon, I decided I didn’t have space in my head for her dramatics at the moment and twisted in my seat to look out the window at the knot garden.
Sarah Bess’s creation was beautiful even at night. Crepe myrtles lit with more fairy lights stood guard at each corner, and strategic landscape lighting made it easy to stroll the paths between the carefully shaped boxwood hedges filled with winter-blooming flowers and vegetables.
Boomer the Labrador seemed to appreciate it, too. He trotted into the garden and stood, ears perked, as he assessed something in the distance for the appropriate canine response. His lips were curled up, and at first I thought he was sensing some danger. My skin prickled for a moment, but eased when I looked harder. Boomer was merely holding something in his mouth. Whatever it was, he was carrying it around carefully.
“Ms. Lancaster?” Officer Carr said. I blinked. He’d once again settled into the armchair across from me. “I asked, what time were you at the cemetery in New Braunfels?”
Massaging the back of my neck, I forced myself to focus again on Officer Carr.
“From around two thirty p.m. to about four. I wouldn’t have stayed there that long if it hadn’t been for Hyacinth and her attempt to flour-bomb her great-great-grandma’s gravestone.”
When Officer Carr’s eyebrows went up, I explained about Hyacinth. “That’s why I was outside when Mr. Markman showed up and collapsed.” Indicating my jeans, which still bore a few white streaks, I added, “Mrs. Pollingham, the front-desk manager, made it clear that flour-covered guests were not allowed in her lobby, so I was outside, dusting myself off.”
I sipped my tea. Officer Carr asked me to take him through the moments from when I first saw our victim to the time the paramedics arrived.
Starting with the reminder, “Well, I heard him first, I didn’t see him,” I answered his questions, feigning patience. When I’d given him every detail I could remember, I put down my tea mug, hopefully signaling that I was done. Officer Carr either didn’t get the picture or didn’t give a rat’s tuchus.
“And there’s nothing else you remember that might be of interest? Besides the”—he checked his notes—“sweating, confusion, and broken left front tooth? Oh, and that he was holding a pen. A ‘nicer writing instrument with gold trim,’ you said, not just an everyday writing pen. Any idea where it might be now?”
I explained that the wind had picked up, so I was guessing the pen had ended up blown into the bushes or found by the groundskeeping team, who’d swarmed the front entrance with rakes and applied a fresh layer of golden-toned crushed granite after the ambulance had departed. Within ten minutes, the outline left by Mr. Markman’s body had been erased. It was as if he’d never existed.
Officer Carr nodded. “It’s December twenty-seventh,” he said. “You’ll be here at the hotel for five nights, until New Year’s Day, I understand?”
“That’s correct,” I said, then explained my role as Pippa�
�s genealogist. “I’ve created a video for the Sutton family that I’m showing to my client and about twenty of her closest relatives tomorrow. Then I’ll conduct a couple more interviews this week and edit them into the final version of the video, which I’m showing to my client’s extended family on New Year’s Day. After that, I plan to do nothing but relax here at the hotel with my best friends before heading home.”
“Which is here, in Austin.” Flipping to a page in his notes, he rattled off both my home address and my work address.
I confirmed both and he finally put his notepad away and got up. I stood, too, holding out my hand to him. “Thank you, Officer Carr, and happy New Year.”
“Likewise, Ms. Lancaster,” he said, straight-faced, before turning and striding out of the room. I blanched at his retreating back. In that second, he’d sounded just like Ben, all formal and stuffy and by-the-book. I put down my mug with a frustrated sigh.
From the front room, I heard Mrs. P.’s voice saying, “Good night, officer, and thank you,” just as movement in the garden caught my eye. Boomer was trotting by once more, his lips still curled around whatever he held in his mouth. This time, the landscape lighting hit it just right, and I saw that it was a long, thin cylinder. A black cylinder with gold trim, to be exact.
“Well, I’ll be darned…,” I said, chuckling despite myself, and hurried out of the sitting room.
Mrs. P. was manning her station at the front desk, her eagle eyes watching a passing guest, no doubt for signs one of her temporary charges was experiencing symptoms like Mr. Markman had earlier. She was so engrossed, she about jumped a mile when I appeared in front of her.
“Och, Lucy,” she said, putting her hand to her ample bosom. “You nearly had to use the defibrillator on me, too. Scared the life out of me.”
I grinned. “A thousand apologies, Mrs. P., but I’m on a mission. Do you have any dog treats? Boomer picked up the pen that poor man dropped and has been carrying it around. I need to get it from him before he tries to chew it up and hurts himself.”
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