In the oak tree at the corner of Harvey’s small yard sat a pair of ravens, watching her with evil eyes. Directly under them was a patch of ground where someone had spent a fair amount of time, perhaps sitting on the convenient boulder, crushing the small seedlings and groundcover with their shoes as they waited. She couldn’t imagine who would sit there, inviting ticks and a case of poison oak. It wasn’t as if the site offered a great view of anything except Harvey’s bungalow.
Juliet didn’t care for the intense observation of her activities by the twins of winged darkness and looked uneasily at Marley, wondering if he was the true object of their attention. Would ravens attack a cat, especially a large one? She knew they sometimes ate carrion.
“Don’t glare at me,” she told them. “I’m the one who puts out the peanuts and bird seed all winter. Show some gratitude.”
Taking her courage and Marley in hand, she lugged the purring cat past the twin black harbingers. She set him down only after she had pushed past the bushy toyon that was denuded of ripe berries and stepped onto Harvey’s small patio which he shared with the empty bungalow to the north.
Harvey Allen appeared to be napping in the Adirondack chair in front of his cottage. Appeared to be except…. Juliet had encountered him in the arms of Morpheus before and Harvey was generally not a delicate sleeper. He snored and drooled and spluttered like Bernini’s Fountain of Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona. Today he sat still and silent. In fact his chest didn’t appear to be moving at all.
And his clothes were sodden and covered in pine needles and cedar detritus. Not dripping, but wet enough to plaster themselves to his body and to hold tight to the various leaves and needles that had fallen on him.
Had the idiot been so drunk that he hadn’t wakened long enough to get in out of the storm?
Juliet shivered and stopped deceiving herself before she even got started. This wasn’t sleep and it wasn’t a drunken stupor. She was certain that he was dead when she noticed a wasp foraging in his hair.
“Well hell.”
All thoughts of feeding Marley abandoned her as she considered what to do.
Certainly she—or someone—must summon the authorities. The nearest phone was in Harvey’s bungalow, but a mixture of habit and instinct had her backtracking to Hans Dillmeyer’s bungalow on the third terrace so she wouldn’t disturb a crime scene. She didn’t ask why she thought it was a crime scene. Juliet told herself that any unexplained death was a potential suspicious death, and that while she didn’t believe anything specifically illegal had happened, it might have and she needed to observe correct procedure.
That was a slight lie. Had it been anyone else dead, she wouldn’t have been so sure that there was the potential for foul play, but this was Harvey Allen, loathed universally and threatened from Hollywood to San Francisco with everything from lawsuits to bodily harm. Her gut said someone had killed him.
Knowing what needed to be done was not sufficiently motivating to make her hurry down the hill. The murder was inconvenient and when her name came up in the investigation it would probably ring bells in places she would prefer stayed silent. She was estranged from her old life. The separation hadn’t been as difficult as losing her parents, but that was because it was voluntary. On her part. There were still many nights though when she dreamed of dim passages, doors without numbers, and people without expressions from her past and feared they would drag her back again.
She allowed herself a moment to talk her more selfish half out of its black mood. It wasn’t easy. This place was supposed to be a safe haven where bad things didn’t happen, where she could retire off the radar and not be bothered by nastiness ever again.
“I-am-open-and-accepting-of-all-good-things-from-the-universe,” she muttered several times. It was her yoga mantra and eventually it worked to soothe her.
Feeling resigned, if not actually at peace with what had to be done, Juliet started down the hill again. She bypassed the first bungalow where the opera composer worked and stopped at the red door of Han’s cottage. She smoothed her hair before knocking loudly. Hans carved beautiful custom crèches and pipes, and was phlegmatic and unflappable but also slightly hard of hearing. Hans usually breakfasted in his own bungalow instead of going down to Robbie Sykes’ breakfast bar. She would use his phone, assuming he had one. Even if he didn’t have a cellphone, he would have one of the crank phones that all the bungalows had been installed with back in the 40s. Each resident had their own ring tone. Juliet’s was seven short rings. One long ring would raise the caretaker’s cottage.
Of course, what was needed was the sheriff, but Robbie Sykes could take care of that, she thought, brightening a little. There was no need for her to explain this mess, at least not yet, and she could keep her name out of it for a while longer.
“Miss Juliet,” Hans said in some surprise as she was enveloped in the smell of lacquer and pipe tobacco. His face was simple, put together without a lot of fuss, functional but not memorable. No one would be asking to paint him. It was, however, a face that Juliet was very glad to see.
“Hello, Hans, may I use your phone? I’m afraid that Harvey Allen has …” She stopped, realizing she was about to say that he had been killed. “He’s died. Out in his yard.”
Juliet betrayed none of her shock and outrage with her voice, but words announcing someone’s death can’t help but be shocking to both the bearer and the receiver of the tidings. There was nothing novel about evil or killing. She simply hadn’t expected to encounter anything like it in Bartholomew’s Wood.
“Good heavens.”
She was glad that she was speaking to Hans and not Rose Campion who lived next door. Rose was a lovely lady who wove beautiful textiles, but she seemed to be made more of nerves than muscle and was always clutching at herself mentally, starting at shadows of thoughts that crept up on her.
“Please come in,” he said. “You wish I should call Mr. Sykes?”
“Yes, please,” she said, but hesitated about stepping inside. “Could you do it for me? Please tell him we need the sheriff right away.”
“Of course. You do not wish to come in and rest, or have some coffee? You look pale, my dear.”
“I’ve just remembered the cat. There were two ravens up there in the yard and I am afraid they may attack Marley. I had better go find him.”
This was true. She also wanted a better look at the body now that duty was done. Something was whispering that this was murder and she wanted to know what at the scene was toying with her intuition in this uncomfortable way. And forewarned was forearmed. This matter needed to be solved swiftly and quietly, perhaps avoiding any mention in the national news.
“Okay. You rescue the cat and I will phone for help…. I wonder if it was spleen that killed him,” Hans muttered as he retreated inside, shaking his silvered head.
Juliet didn’t think it was spleen, though according to her neighbors Harvey had certainly had enough of it to poison anyone.
“Marley,” Juliet began calling when she reached the yard. She was a bit breathless from all the dashing up and down steep trails. She had only been there for a few months and had yet to build up a tolerance for exercise at elevation.
“Meooow.”
The orange fluff ball was up on the roof, digging at something in the gutter.
Were she ten years younger and twenty years stupider, she would go up on the roof and look for herself at whatever had the cat’s attention. Fortunately, wisdom prevailed.
“Come down and I’ll feed you,” she promised, but Marley ignored her. Juliet looked around but the ravens were gone. “Fine. I have things to do too. Come down when you’re ready.”
Juliet faced the dead man and decided that playing ostrich wasn’t an option.
She was careful not to touch the body as she leaned over it. Had the patio been something other than moss and shattered brick and capable of taking prints, she would not have ventured so near, but there was no hope of lifting any tracks, not after the rain ha
d scattered pine needles everywhere and washed any muddy tracks away.
The probable cause of death was not hard to find. There was a hole in Harvey’s sweater—just a tiny one—but there were traces of blood around it which the rain had failed to wash away. Juliet judged it came from a small caliber weapon, discharged at short range since it had burned the wool fibers. It had entered the heart which was why there had not been a lot of bleeding and what gore had escaped had mostly been pounded away by the hard rain. The killer had either gotten lucky with a moving target, or Harvey had already been passed out.
And it was murder. Sometimes she hated being right.
Juliet had not cared for her neighbor, but she cared even less for mayhem. Disorder offended her, and murder was the ultimate in disorderly and uncivilized conduct.
She also knew that with very few exceptions—so few that unless one lived next door to the Dalai Lama one needn’t disturb the statistics looking for anomalies—that anyone can be driven to murder by extraordinary circumstances. Admittedly, some people were a lot less likely to resort to violence than others, but since none of her neighbors were the Dalai Lama and all of them had been cut off from the rest of the world by a storm last night, Juliet had to assume that the killer was among them.
Unless…. There was one slim possibility.
She circled the cottage looking for the old trail to the top of the promontory. At one time there had been a path around the compound which rejoined the road further down the hill.
A long-ago earthquake had fractured the mountain promontory the compound was built on, and there were places where the sheer drop-off was spanned by makeshift bridges of slabstone. No one was supposed to use the trail because it was considered unsafe, the shale flaking away in great slabs every winter after the ice had done its work, but she knew that a few of her painter friends had sought out the old gate last summer, hoping for a new and exciting vista to paint or photograph.
They hadn’t stayed long.
The path was as bad as she remembered from her first exploratory visit in the fall, but at last she reached the rear fence and examined the narrow gate that led to the outside. Since no real maintenance was done up there the fence was deteriorating, and far more quickly than the stone path. The wood had dry rot, but the gate was closed, its bolt and lock in place. Someone could have climbed over if they were careful and small, and had done it before the storm turned the ground to mud, but it didn’t seem likely.
There was also the matter of how someone would have reached the back gate to begin with since the old path wasn’t even a ledge wide enough for rodents anymore. Unless they were trained in rock climbing and had scaled up several hundred feet of sheer cliff from a river that was running high and white, it didn’t seem likely that this was how the killer arrived or escaped. The odds were better in favor of the killer being someone inside the compound.
“And that isn’t good news.” Sighing, she turned and went down to meet the sheriff.
Chapter 3
White Oaks had one sheriff and a deputy who worked half time. They got lucky that morning and drew the long straw. Sheriff Garret arrived only twenty minutes later. He was accompanied by an ambulance that doubled as the coroner’s van and was attended by Dr. Hyder, who was prepared to give either first aid or pronounce death, depending on which was needed. He was the town’s only doctor and saw to both the births and deaths of those locals who chose not to visit the HMO about fifty miles down the coast.
Juliet watched him climb the trail. He paused to look at her easel and said something to Asher Temple who was standing in his door, smoking his pipe and scowling.
“Miss Juliet,” Sheriff Garret said when he finally reached Harvey’s yard. They had met at an art show last summer and Juliet was pleasantly surprised that he remembered her name. It was possible, maybe even likely, that the sheriff investigated everyone who moved into Bartholomew’s Wood. There had been some disreputable drug-dealer types over the years and it would not be surprising if the local law kept an eye on the tenants. Still, it was nice that he recalled her since her official background was so very beige and respectable. “You found the body?”
“Actually the cat found the body,” she said. “Marley came to get me. I think he wanted breakfast.”
That was an oversimplification of events but she chose not to explain more.
“And you followed him back up here?” No skepticism in the voice, but Juliet knew it was probably there. She supposed that it did rather sound like an episode of Lassie.
“It was easier than shooing the cat out of my paints. Harvey kept Marley’s food on the porch so it wasn’t a problem.”
“I see. And he couldn’t feed his own cat?”
“Well, not to speak ill of the dead—”
“Oh, please go on. People spoke plenty ill of him while he was alive.”
It didn’t surprise Juliet that her neighbors had complained to the sheriff about Harvey’s behavior. Harvey was loutish when he was drunk. And complaining to Robbie Sykes did no good because he took his orders from the owner and the owner didn’t care.
It did surprise her that the sheriff was open to talking about it with her.
“Well, he drank. A lot. Often he didn’t wake up until late. If I had had a sandwich with me I would have shared that instead, but I came out early and was empty-handed and decided it would be easier to walk up the hill for cat food than go back to my cottage and make tuna fish.”
Garret nodded once. He wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat, but he should have been. He also would have looked more at home in something besides hiking boots, though they were sensible footwear given where he would be investigating.
Dr. Hyder joined them and gave Juliet a nod and gentle smile.
“Miss Juliet.” She had been in last December with a case of bronchitis. Like Garret, the doctor had a hint of accent from somewhere in the south. Juliet guessed Tennessee.
The sheriff had obviously had no doubts about Harvey being dead after a single glance at the body, though he listened attentively and unhappily when the doctor mentioned the bullet hole and the heart and all the basic facts that Juliet had already deduced.
Like Juliet, he would have preferred that this be a natural death. He wasn’t looking for thrills or extra work. And maybe he also felt that murder seemed like an obscenity in that place. It was rather like a monastery.
The compound was closer to New Age than Dark Age, but it didn’t have the modern amenities or sentiments that came with other planned communities. No cable television or enormous water heaters. If one wanted prolonged water wallowing, one went to the lake or to the hot springs in town. It was a place of purity and a kind of innocence. Worship went to art more than God, but the residents were devout in their veneration.
Deputy Hendersen arrived then, carrying a camera and some kind of kit, probably for collecting evidence. He was breathless and red in the face. His skin wasn’t happy to be out in the sun and it made his eyes pucker, and his nose, always red from his chronic skin condition, was already beginning to peel.
He would look worse after he and the sheriff carried the body back down the hill. The morning was advancing and so was the sun, and though there was a road of sorts to the second terrace, there was no way to drive the ambulance up to the top of the mountain. They would have to carry a stretcher to the van.
Juliet considered offering him her sunglasses, but his head was large and they probably wouldn’t fit. Anyway, they were prescription and she had a feeling that she would be needing them shortly.
“Where is the cat now?” Garret asked as the doctor began bagging Harvey’s hands and Deputy Hendersen started snapping pictures.
Juliet pointed at the roof.
“I really do think that you should see what the cat is worrying up there. He’s been at it for some time. I have a touch of vertigo, or I would do it myself.”
The sheriff showed slight surprise at these words, but obligingly pulled up a bench and reached into the gutter.
Marley backed off and waited patiently.
The sheriff pulled out a black tube that was trailing some wire.
“It’s … I don’t know what it is,” he said, stepping back onto the patio. “There’s some kind of a swivel mounting up there.”
“It’s part of a parabolic microphone,” Juliet said helpfully. “More commonly known as a shotgun mike. It’s kind of like a giant hearing aid. There should be a dish thing on the end. It seems to have been pulled off.”
“Yes?” Garret looked at the tube in his hand and then at Juliet. “Why would he have a microphone?”
“It’s used for many things—collecting wildlife sounds for instance.”
“And do you think Harvey was collecting wildlife sounds?” Garret asked.
“No. Harvey was not a nature lover.” Juliet sighed. “I’m sure he was spying on his neighbors.”
“A high-tech peeping Tom. That sounds more like Harvey Allen,” the sheriff agreed. “Any thoughts on why or who he was spying on?”
Juliet considered.
“Harvey was generally obsessed with learning secrets. Some people are built that way. And he wanted to know everything, even when he couldn’t necessarily profit by the knowledge,” she finally said. “He was probably listening in on all of us. Recording us too.”
That annoyed her though she had nothing to hide since retiring.
“I suppose I’ll have to look for recordings inside. And listen to them.” Garret sounded disgusted.
“Yes, you must,” Juliet agreed, but having a moment of intuition she added, “But you won’t find any. I think whoever tore the top off the mike probably also removed Harvey’s computer. So much easier and safer than trying to erase files.”
The sheriff tilted his head as he considered this.
1 Portrait of a Gossip Page 2
