In the fields I could see a few of the black-and-white belted Galloway cows that had presumably come with the farm, but Ragnar also added quite a number of black Angus cows. And there were several new additions to the herd—yet another breed of black cows, of course. The newcomers bore enormous sweeping semi-circular horns that made them look like cartoon Vikings in exaggerated helmets.
“Slow down a bit,” Dad ordered, pointing to the Viking cows. “Could those be Camargue cattle?” Dad had become quite fascinated with heritage animal breeds.
“You’ll have to ask Ragnar,” I said.
We also saw humans dotting the landscape. A gray-haired woman sitting on a stool in front of an easel—probably a guest. A tall, rangy man in blue jeans and a straw cowboy hat mending the barbed wire that kept the cows off the road—could be employee or guest. A pudgy figure trudging toward the swan-bespattered gazebo with a bucket in one hand and a scrub brush in the other—an employee, I fervently hoped.
Dad might be regretting the landscape’s refusal to re-create a late December evening, but I decided that if Mrs. Winkleson were around to see her former home, no doubt she’d be reasonably pleased with how little Ragnar had done to change the black-and-white color scheme of the grounds. A much greater proportion of black than before, but she’d probably have found that acceptable.
The house, though, would have given her fits. I paused in the drive for a moment right at the foot of the sweeping marble stairs that led up to the front portico. In Mrs. Winkleson’s time, the steps had been bare, unadorned, and a little intimidating. Nothing had interrupted the impressive sweep of the marble until you reached the portico above, where two stately marble urns flanked the top of the steps, each holding a boxwood shrub that looked just a little too small for its setting, as if cowed by all the marble.
Now the steps were lined on either side by elaborate statues of dragons and castles and armored warriors.
“Oh, dear,” Dad said. “That’s going to make an authentic re-creation of the start of the party rather difficult.”
I stifled the urge to ask who cared about the start of the party—wasn’t it the actual jewel robbery we were interested in?
“You mean the statues?” I asked.
“Yes.” Dad brooded. “I assume they’re fixed in place somehow.”
“Actually, they’re not,” I said. “They’re chess pieces. The back terrace has a giant chessboard made of black and white marble tiles, and when he wants to have an outdoor game, he just gets everybody to help him haul all the statues around to the back terrace.”
“I see.” Dad nodded and narrowed his eyes again. Hard to tell if he was still trying to visualize the arrival of Mrs. Van der Lynden’s guests or if he’d detoured into visualizing Ragnar and his motley crew of guests hauling the life-sized statues up the marble steps.
While he was pondering, I set the car in motion again. We pulled into the parking lot, which was screened from the front door by a tall brick wall, painted black and topped with an intricate menacing sort of iron fretwork I’d devised, kind of a cross between spikes and oversized barbed wire. Ragnar had loved it, calling it exactly what Sauron would have wanted for the walls of Mordor. I was just glad that so far he’d only had me install it on a few highly visible walls that no one would ever have needed to climb to get anyplace they wanted to go.
“Let’s take the elevator,” I suggested as we got out of the car.
“He’s installed an elevator?” Dad did not seem pleased.
“It was there when he came,” I said. “No idea if Mrs. Winkleson installed it or if it was already there when she moved in.”
I parked the car as close as I could to the row of vine-covered trellises that spanned the whole parking lot on the side closest to the house. Underneath the vines, you could make out that the trellises were still painted white, probably because Ragnar didn’t have the heart to disturb the vines enough to paint them black. Then I led the way through a break in the trellises to the little covered porch they sheltered. At one end of the porch was a door that had been painted to look like a well-weathered castle postern. A small grotesque gargoyle head was mounted to the right of the door. I flipped the gargoyle up to reveal a modern key pad, typed in the proper code, and nodded with satisfaction when an audible click confirmed that the door was unlocked.
Dad had opened the door to the back seat and was reaching inside for something. His black medical bag, I assumed, though I had no idea why he couldn’t just leave it in my car. It wasn’t as if Ragnar didn’t have first aid kits. But before I could speak up, he emerged holding something other than the medical bag. A brown leather briefcase. No doubt I’d find out its purpose in due time.
“This way.” I held the door open and gestured for him to enter.
Before us lay a long corridor that looked like the ancient stone passageway of some medieval dungeon, broken at intervals by well-weathered cell doors. Iron torch holders flanked each door and studded the walls at intervals. If you looked closely, you could tell that the stone floor and walls were painted and the torch flames were fake, but still, it was a great illusion.
“Where does this go?” Dad asked.
“Where doesn’t it go?” I headed down the corridor at a slow pace, to allow for the fact that Dad was doing more gawking than walking. “That branch to the right goes to the loading dock. Farther down is a side corridor to the mechanical room—boilers, water heaters, and such. In addition to the passenger elevator on this end, there’s also a dumbwaiter farther down to haul supplies to the kitchen. There’s a side passage that leads to the garage. And eventually you come out into the back garden.”
“Was this all here back in 1987?”
“No idea.” I shrugged as I hit the elevator button. “It was all here when Ragnar came. He just repainted it to his taste.”
“This place is like a sieve,” Dad muttered. “How can we possibly trace the movement of the robbers with all these possible escape routes down here?”
“And wait till you see all the doors and French windows upstairs.”
The elevator doors opened and I stepped inside.
Dad hesitated, clutching his briefcase to his chest.
“Do we just barge in?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we let Ragnar know we’re about to pop out in the middle of his living room?”
“His front hall, actually.” I planted my thumb on the elevator door’s open button. “The security code I typed in is the guest code—it sends a message to Ragnar’s phone, and if he likes he can see who’s entering through the cameras hidden in those torch sconces. Get inside before the buzzer goes off.”
“This is impossible.” Dad stepped inside. His shoulders drooped and his face wore a despondent look.
I took pity on him.
“Chin up,” I said. “It’s not as if we were trying to re-create the robbery for the boringly literal minds of a television audience. We only need to re-create it in our minds, the better to assist our little gray cells.”
I narrowed my eyes as I said this, and tapped my forehead solemnly. Dad nodded and narrowed his eyes to match mine, but he didn’t look very encouraged.
The elevator door opened to reveal Ragnar, resplendent in faded jeans, heavy boots, and a black t-shirt from the 2003 European tour of Sinister Vegetation, one of the many now-defunct heavy metal bands in which he’d played. He flung his arms out in exuberant welcome.
“Meg! Dr. Langslow! You’re— Is something wrong? Is the septic field acting up again?”
“Nothing wrong as far as I know.” Ragnar and I exchanged hugs. “Has your septic field been acting up lately?”
“No, but you both had really funny expressions on your faces. As if you smelled something bad.”
“We were visualizing.” Dad narrowed his eyes to demonstrate. “We want to reenact the jewel robbery. So we’re trying to see our surroundings as they would have been in 1987.”
“Ah.” Ragnar narrowed his own eyes and peered around for a few moments. Then h
e sighed, shook his head, and opened his eyes wide again.
“It only looks blurry to me,” he said. “Evidently I am not very skilled at this visualization.”
“That’s okay.” I patted his shoulder. “Neither are we.”
“I brought along something to help with that.” Dad lifted up the briefcase as if the mere sight of it would inspire us. Ragnar and I just blinked. “Is there someplace where we can spread out my papers?”
“The library.” Ragnar turned to lead the way down the right-hand hallway. “So this reenactment—you mean to re-create the events of 1987? Like a play?”
“Exactly,” Dad said. “And we will see what we can learn from them. Perhaps we will solve the mystery of the missing jewels.”
“May I have a part?” Ragnar asked. “I would greatly like to portray a dangerous criminal. Ah, here we are.”
He flung open the library door.
“Wow,” Dad said as we entered the room. “Now that’s a library.”
What I’d taken for a pile of books in one corner shook slightly, and a slender young man in a faded gray sweatshirt and heavy glasses scuttled out, rather the way a silverfish would when you opened an old book.
“So sorry,” he almost whispered as he slipped out of the room. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”
“It’s okay, Hosmer,” Ragnar called. “You can stay.”
But Hosmer was long gone.
“One of your guests?” I asked.
“Hosmer alphabetizes the books,” Ragnar explained. “His idea, not mine, but I have to admit, it’s starting to be useful. I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t find anything.”
“How long’s he been here?”
“A few weeks, I guess.” Ragnar shrugged. I suspected it was more like a few months.
I glanced over to see, not to my surprise, that Dad was happily planted in front of a shelf.
I’d been in Ragnar’s library before, but this was Dad’s first time, so discussion of the jewel robbery came to a halt for the time being while he explored the shelves. Understandable, since Ragnar’s library was the real thing. Back in Mrs. Winkleson’s day, the shelves had been largely filled with expensive knickknacks. A few hundred books had graced the shelves here and there, in clumps, but they’d clearly been bought by the yard for the effect—most of them were leather-bound with titles stamped in gold. Impressive from a distance, but close up you realized you were looking at the bound proceedings of early-twentieth-century medical symposia, five-volume novels by long-forgotten lady authors with three names, bowdlerized editions of Shakespeare, and obsolete legal texts.
Ragnar had filled the room with books. Real books, that looked as if they’d actually been read. Hosmer’s scheme appeared to be to arrange everything alphabetically by author rather than trying to divide them up into subjects—not a bad system. It was easy to find things, and meant serendipity could lead to you a book you hadn’t realized you wanted to read before you found it. And I enjoyed the incongruous juxtapositions—H. P. Lovecraft lurked just below Laura Lippman. John Donne leaned against John Gregory Dunne. Dashiell Hammett was flanked by Barbara Hambly and Charlaine Harris. Proust—in French—nestled next to Terry Pratchett.
It occurred to me that if Ragnar and I just tiptoed quietly out, Dad probably wouldn’t notice we’d gone for hours. He might even find some book so fascinating that he’d sit down and start reading it from cover to cover—allowing me to get back to the growing crop of chores ripening in my notebook. But before I got a chance to suggest this to Ragnar, he spoke up.
“So, what’s in the briefcase?”
Dad started in an almost guilty manner and replaced the book in which he’d been browsing—a copy of Oliver Sacks’s autobiography, I noticed. He picked up the briefcase and trotted over to a wide Mission-style table that sat in the middle of the library. Ragnar and I hurried to move the books that were piled here and there on the table—carefully, so as not to upset any organization Hosmer had been working on. Dad set the briefcase down on the table and opened it with a flourish.
“A floor plan of the crime scene!” he exclaimed as he pulled out a large sheet of paper. Ragnar and I examined it briefly in silence. From the floor plan’s grainy texture I suspected it was an enlargement of a diagram that had appeared in the Clarion. Actually two diagrams—one of the upper floor of the mansion, with Mrs. Van der Lynden’s bedroom located near the top of the stairs, and one of the front hall and ballroom—now the oversized living room. Dad was probably delighted that the diagrams included not only the location of all the doors, windows, and furniture, but also an arrow pointing to the wall safe in Mrs. Van der Lynden’s bedroom, dotted lines to show the path the burglars had taken on their way out of the house, and in the front hall, little outlines of human figures to show where the bodies of the slain burglars had fallen.
“These look the same,” Ragnar exclaimed with great enthusiasm. “Of course I have totally redecorated, but the floor plans are still the same. At least in the main part of the house. We can ignore the wings that Mrs. Winkleson added.”
I wasn’t sure how he planned to ignore them, since they’d at least doubled the size of the house. Not my problem.
“And the big bedroom at the top of the stairs—that is my bedroom, and the safe is still there.”
He and Dad actually exchanged a fist bump—where had Dad learned to do that? From the boys? I couldn’t quite share their enthusiasm.
“That’s nice,” I said. “But how does it help us find the loot? Much less solve Mr. Hagley’s murder?”
“Meg, don’t you see?” Ragnar said. “The reenactment will be perfect! The house is exactly the same!”
I looked around at the black velvet window coverings. The wrought-iron sconces and chandeliers. The gargoyle bookends scattered here and there among the volumes. The painting over the library’s fireplace, a huge oil depiction of a brooding dragon—according to Ragnar, an original by Frank Frazetta, a fantasy artist even I had heard of. I knew that unless Ragnar had recently redecorated, the living room contained a black-and-red sofa shaped like a coffin. And in a rare break from his usual medieval taste, his bedroom contained not only the one-of-a-kind king-sized wrought-iron canopy bed that I’d made for him, but also a sofa made from the rear seat and back end of a black-and-red 1965 Ford Mustang. Mrs. Van der Lynden and the Dames of Caerphilly would probably faint at the sight of any of it.
“Oh, exactly the same,” I echoed, while doing my best to keep a straight face.
“Let’s go check out the safe,” Ragnar said.
He and Dad raced off.
Chapter 30
I started to rise to follow them and changed my mind. I didn’t share Dad’s fascination with the reenactment. But I was curious about the robbery. I decided to stay behind and see what other information Dad had brought in his briefcase.
A diagram of the estate’s grounds, with all the various buildings marked, from the house itself down to the minor outbuildings, like the gazebo and the gatehouse, which had both existed at the time of the robbery. The house was considerably smaller without those imposing wings, but making allowances for the difference in color schemes, the main part of the house looked the same. Only one barn rather than the current three. A separate garage that had either been replaced by or incorporated into the left wing.
The briefcase also contained a batch of photocopies of newspaper articles, along with several dozen photos. Most of the photos were black-and-white shots, probably taken by the Clarion’s photographer for the society page. Mrs. Van der Lynden in her glittering ball gown. I paused to study that one. Her pursed lips were dark in the photo, which probably meant she was wearing bright red lipstick—had that been back in style then? Her dress had the exaggerated shoulder pads that were popular back in the ’80s, but she didn’t quite have enough neck to carry off the look. I suspected she was trying to channel Bette Davis, but it came out more like Miss Piggy. She was wearing glittering earrings and a necklace, but nothing that im
pressive. I leafed through more photos of Dames and their escorts. Everyone was in sequins and shoulder pads, but most of them had much more impressive jewelry. I wondered if they’d all found that suspicious—that the woman who had the means to outshine them all had suddenly given up conspicuous consumption for what probably passed in their circles for understated elegance.
And then I ran across a photo of Archie van der Lynden. I studied that one intently. Not that I had any hope of tracking him down—I might not even recognize him if I ran into him. Thirty years changes anyone, and if Archie had been battling substance abuse for most of his adult life, he could be more changed than most. But maybe I could get a clue to his character. He was wearing a white tuxedo with a dark rose in the buttonhole—red, presumably, though the picture was black and white. He slouched slightly, his right hand in his pocket. A lock of his blond hair fell casually over his forehead. His face, though technically handsome, was curiously unpleasant. It was the expression, half self-satisfied smirk, half sneer. A thought came to my mind unbidden—the portrait of Dorian Gray, just at the point where he decides he needs to hide it. Not someone I’d have looked forward to meeting, I decided.
Of course, thirty years could change a person inside as well as out. I hoped they had done good things to Archie. But I wasn’t optimistic.
Toucan Keep a Secret Page 19
