Murder With Puffins ml-2

by Donna Andrews

  Mamie had raised her hand to knock again when the door opened slightly, with the sort of creak they use in movies to suggest that maybe this is a door you'd be better off not entering. But there wasn't a monster or a wicked witch hiding behind the door. Just poor Rhapsody, who peeked through the narrow opening as if she were the one expecting monsters.

  "Rhapsody, we're so sorry to intrude, but Meg's parents want to buy a painting," Mamie said.

  Rhapsody didn't seem reassured by Mamie's words, but after staring at us blankly for a few seconds, she opened the door a little wider and scuttled back to let us pass.

  "I'll make tea," she murmured, and fled down the tiny hallway while Mamie led us into the living room. I instantly wished I'd suggested inviting Rhapsody down to the general store or to Mamie's house. Her decor gave me galloping claustrophobia. Not so much the furniture, although she had too much of it--fussy little chairs that would collapse instantly under anyone over a hundred pounds; rickety-looking tables about to overturn under their loads of knick-knacks; spindly cabinets whose glass fronts bulged outward from the further hoard of knickknacks within. You could have sewed all the frayed antimacassars and antique doilies together to make several bedsheets, and from the number of puffin-related items among the knickknacks, I gathered that Rhapsody was Mamie's best customer.

  And apart from the black and white of the puffins and the various wood tones, everything in the room was colored some shade of lavender, purple, or lilac.

  Everything also carried a visible coating of dust. I sneezed four times while poking around the room to find a chair I would feel safe sitting on.

  Mamie beamed with pride at the decor. Dad gazed at me, clearly awaiting brilliant deductions. I could tell Michael wanted to make a break for the wide-open spaces. I tried to stifle my sneezes by concentrating on the pictures on the wall. She had about thirty of them, all book covers or illustrations from the Puffin Family series. At the lower left-hand corner of every painting was Rhapsody's signature--a fussy, overelaborate design, barely recognizable as the letter R, in luminous purple paint.

  Rhapsody emerged from the kitchen, wearing a frilly lavender dress that served very well as camouflage, considering her decor. She carried a tray, from which she handed out tea in eggshell-thin antique china. The idea of actually grasping the delicate gold-and-lavender handle of the cup was more than I could manage; I was sure to break it. Besides, I could tell from the smell that she'd made some kind of odd-tasting herbal muck. So I cleared a space among the fragile-looking knickknacks on the doily-covered end table, set down my cup, and tried not to watch what Dad was doing with his.

  "By the way, before we talk about the painting, I have a question about puffins," I said.

  "I don't really know that much about them," Rhapsody said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. "I just paint them."

  "Yes," I said. "That's what I wanted to ask you about."

  She smiled nervously. I got the idea that four people were almost more of an audience than she could handle. I felt a sudden surge of impatience and claustrophobia and decided not to waste time beating around the bush.

  "You had a dead puffin you used as a model, right?" I asked. "You kept it in your freezer."

  She stiffened but said nothing.

  "Oh, come on, Rhapsody," I said. "We saw you down by Victor Resnick's house on the day of the murder and--"

  Rhapsody shrieked, burst into tears, and threw herself on the sofa. Mamie Benton hurried over and began patting her back.

  "There, there," she said, glaring at me. "That wasn't a very funny joke, but I'm sure Meg didn't mean anything by it."

  Mamie acted as if she'd caught me torturing a small child, which I suppose wasn't far from the truth. Dad had that "I'm disappointed with you" look, and even Michael seemed rather uncomfortable.

  "I didn't do it on purpose!" Rhapsody wailed. "It was an accident! Honestly!"

  Rhapsody lapsed into hysterical sobs. The others gaped when they heard her words, and Mamie froze, her hand still outstretched toward the sobbing woman's shoulder.

  "You don't mean--" She gasped.

  "Aha!" Dad said. "I knew you'd solve this!"

  "She can't possibly have done it!" Mamie wailed. "Oh, this is awful!"

  "Oh, for heavens' sake," I said. "Stop carrying on; what she's done may be perfectly legal."

  "Perfectly legal!" Mamie exclaimed. "I'm sure you could argue that killing Resnick was morally justified, but even if it was self-defense--"

  "Oh, do be quiet for a few minutes and let Rhapsody talk," I said. I strode over to the sofa and nudged Mamie aside so I could take her place beside Rhapsody.

  "Rhapsody," I said in a firm, matter-of-fact tone.

  She continued to sob. Dealing with sobbing members of my own sex isn't my forte. I began to wonder if we should send for someone better equipped to deal with the situation--though I had no idea who that might be. Mrs. Fenniman or Aunt Phoebe would only scare Rhapsody to death, and Mother would enjoy the drama and encourage her to sob for a few more hours. We had no time for that.

  "For heaven's sake, stop sniveling and sit up," I said, pulling her upright and giving her a firm shake. "No one cares about the stupid puffin; we just want to know the whole story so we can clear this thing up."

  She collapsed back on the sofa with such violence that she knocked over the end table. I could hear the tinkle of breaking glass and china. So much for the knickknacks and antiques.

  Michael suddenly appeared, kneeling at our feet.

  "Let me try," he murmured. I scooted aside to let him sit closer to Rhapsody.

  "Now Rhapsody," he said, in soothing tones, taking her hands in his. "It's all right. No one wants to hurt you. We just need to know what happened so we can take care of things."

  He went on in much the same vein while gently chafing her hands. He was making progress; her sobs grew less violent. She finally sat up, took the tissues Michael had ready, and began swabbing at her face with them.

  "They'll arrest me," Rhapsody moaned, looking at Michael with an expression of adoration. I resisted the impulse to knock her down and jump up and down on her, yelling, "Mine! Mine!" Michael was, I reminded myself, an actor. The expression of tender concern on his face wasn't real. Still, I was irrationally relieved to see that Rhapsody was not one of those women who can cry charmingly. Her entire face was beet red, and I upped my estimate of her age by a decade.

  "Arrest you for what?" Michael asked.

  "They'll think I killed the poor little p-puffin," Rhapsody said, sniffling slightly. "They'll arrest me for harming an endangered species."

  "Puffins? Nonsense, they're not endangered," I said.

  "But there are only twelve puffin nests on Egg Island," she said.

  "And a couple million healthy puffins flying around northern Canada and Greenland," I said. "Isn't that right, Dad?"

  "Oh, yes," he said. "It's threatened in this habitat, of course; they've all moved farther north, where humans don't impinge on their breeding grounds. But it's not endangered. Not in the least"

  "But I can see your point," I said. "The birders around here wouldn't take kindly to anyone killing a puffin. But of course you didn't, did you?"

  "N-no," she said. "That horrible man did, with his electric-shock things. I was trying to sneak past his house to go down to the point, where I could watch the live puffins, and I saw the poor thing die when it landed on the roof, and it fell off and was just lying there, and I couldn't resist. He was always calling my drawings lifeless and mechanical, but all I ever have to work with are photographs and bird books. I thought maybe if I used a real puffin, it would help."

  "And did it?" I asked.

  "No," she said. "I couldn't even look at it without wanting to cry. But by the time I found that out, they'd made him stop using his electric-shock things, and he was chasing people out, and I didn't have a chance to take it back."

  "So you kept it."

  "Why didn't you just leave it somewhere else on t
he island?" Michael asked.

  "Because Puffin Point's the only place on the island where anyone ever sees puffins," she said.

  "And certainly the only place on the island where you'd expect to find one electrocuted," I added.

  "Yes," she said, sniffing. "And when the hurricane came along, I thought I could just leave it there, and people would think it had washed up in the storm, and even if they figured out it had been electrocuted, they'd think he was at it again. I didn't even know he was dead until after I did it."

  "That must have been quite a shock," I said.

  "I was so terrified someone had seen me and would think I'd done it," Rhapsody said.

  "Well, you should never keep quiet about something like that," I said in my sternest tone. "These things always come out in a murder investigation, and you're always better off if you tell the truth from the start."

  Michael quirked one eyebrow. I rolled my eyes to show I realized how stupid and pretentious that sounded. But Rhapsody, Dad, and Mamie all nodded with great enthusiasm.

  "So," I said. "Tell us more about the puffin."

  Chapter 28

  Anatomy of a Puffin

  And so for the next half hour, Rhapsody told us about the sad fate of the puffin. Now that she'd confessed her dread secret, she was pathetically eager to spill everything. I waited patiently and let Michael respond to her description of how she'd found the puffin and what had occurred while she'd had it in her custody. I cared more about her two most recent visits to Resnick's house.

  "So anyway," she said finally. "I hid the puffin under a cloth in the bottom of my wicker basket and went up the path toward that horrible man's house."

  "Weren't you afraid of meeting him?" I asked.

  "Oh yes!" she said. "So I found a place to sketch where I could overlook the path and see when he went down to the village. I think I ruined my sketchbook, sitting out in the rain all that time."

  She gestured toward the fireplace, where a book bound in lavender velvet stood on end, its pages fanned open toward the thin warmth of her fire.

  "I was just looking around the house, trying to decide where to put the puffin, when I heard a noise down on the shore. I thought at first it was Mr. Resnick, coming back from another direction, but when I ran back down the path, I almost knocked him over. So he hadn't been down on the shore after all."

  "Probably the murderer," Dad said with obvious relish.

  Rhapsody looked stricken, and her hands flew to her mouth, stifling a shriek.

  "Nonsense," I said. "Probably only a birder, taking advantage of Resnick's absence to look for that rare whatsit that's nesting by his house."

  "Yes, I'm sure that's all it was," Michael said, patting Rhapsody's shoulder again. I braced myself for more hysterics, but our reassurances--well, Michael's anyway--did the trick.

  "Do you really think so?" she said, gazing up at him with an expression of frail, helpless innocence that would have looked perfect on the face of a Victorian maiden. For that matter, it had probably served Rhapsody rather well in her twenties.

  "After all that, I'm amazed that you managed to go back the next day," I said. "That took a lot of courage."

  "Well, I had nightmares all night," she said. "I knew I just had to return the poor little puffin so he could rest in peace. I decided that even if that dreadful man tried to stop me, I was going to march right down there and put the poor little thing somewhere near Puffin Point, where he belonged. And I did. Not near the house, of course; but I thought he belonged by the shore."

  A pity she hadn't chickened out again; if she had, we wouldn't have wasted so much time on a red herring.

  Rhapsody had no other useful information to offer, at least none we could extract during another twenty minutes of questioning, so I decided to call it quits.

  "Well, we'd better run along," I said, standing up. Surely Winnie and Binkie would have found Dr. Peabody by this time. My head felt far too near the ceiling--doubtless an optical illusion created by the busy lavender-and-white-patterned wallpaper overhead.

  "Oh, can't you stay a little longer?" Rhapsody said. To her credit, she was looking at me, with barely a sidelong glance toward Michael. "I could make more tea."

  "No," I said. "But if you like, come down to the cottage if the rain lets up a little. We can talk more, and Mother would enjoy the company. She gets out so little in this kind of weather."

  As we all milled about in the tiny front hall, poking one another in the noses with our elbows as we struggled into our rain gear in the confined space, a thought hit me.

  "Oh, by the way," I said. "May I borrow your sketchbook?"

  "My sketchbook?"

  "Yes, the one you had the day you staked out Resnick's house. Who knows, perhaps something you sketched may give us a clue."

  "Staked out Resnick's house," Rhapsody repeated. "Oh, yes, of course! Let me find something to wrap it in!"

  We set out finally, with her battered velvet-covered sketchbook wrapped in several layers of plastic in my knapsack. Rhapsody stood in her doorway, waving a fond goodbye to us.

  "Now look what you've done," Michael said. "I'm sure she'll come down to the cottage in a few hours, panting to know what clues you've discovered in her sketchbook."

  "The sooner the better," I said.

  "Do you really want her hanging around?"

  "I want to get her into Mother's clutches as soon as possible," I said. "Now that Dad's home safe, Mother will start getting restless and looking for something to do. I think Rhapsody's just the thing."

  "And what's your mother supposed to do with Rhapsody?" Michael asked.

  "Well, either Mother will decide to take Rhapsody in hand or Rhapsody will be overwhelmed with Mother and begin imitating her. Preferably both. Rhapsody's an attractive woman, but I get the feeling she's been stuck in that Haight Ashbury Pre-Raphaelite-style garb since the late sixties. She could do worse than pick up some of Mother's style. And Mother would love to have a docile, cooperative protègé; she's certainly had no luck working her magic on me."

  "Thank goodness," Michael said. "Much as I adore your mother, I like you just fine the way you are."

  Well, those were encouraging words, I thought. Not to mention the look that went with them, which went well past encouraging. As a teenager, I'd always resented how easily Mother charmed my boyfriends. With some of them, I'd never shaken the feeling that they only took up with me in the hopes that ugly duckling Meg would eventually blossom into a swan like Mother.

  Just then, Mamie, who had stayed behind to talk to Rhapsody, came out of the lavender cottage. She saw us standing there and strode up.

  "I heard Jeb tell you to keep your nose out of this," she began.

  "Yes, but when Mrs. Peabody insisted on dragging that miserable puffin up, I knew we had to do something," I said. "I mean, if we hadn't cleared this up, Rhapsody might have had to talk to the police!"

  I tried to give my voice an authentic quaver, calculated to create the impression that Rhapsody was in genuine danger of being beset by the minions of the law, bearing handcuffs, rubber hoses, and truncheons. Whatever truncheons were. Mamie frowned, then nodded and walked off.

  "Bring the damned camera," she said over her shoulder.

  We followed Mamie to the Anchor Inn, where Jeb, Binkie, and Dr. Peabody already waited.

  Considering how cold, wet, and miserable conditions still were outside, I found myself surprisingly reluctant to step inside the Anchor Inn. Get a grip, I told myself. It's dry, warmer than outdoors, and solidly built. Compared with some of the island buildings, the Anchor Inn, I felt sure, could withstand whatever huffing and puffing the departing Gladys could manage outside.

  Yes, quite solidly built, and rather well insulated. Once we all stumbled inside and slammed the door shut behind us, the noise of the storm was a lot less overpowering. Almost muted. For some reason, that wasn't comforting. In fact, it was downright spooky.

  "Quiet as a tomb in here," Jeb remarked. He sounded ner
vous.

  "Let's not waste time, then," Dad said.

  "This really isn't my specialty," Dr. Peabody said apologetically. "I'm a dermatologist."

  Smart man, I thought. In grade school, when Dad had managed to give us the impression that as Langslows we were doomed to medical careers, Rob and I had debated at length what kind of specialist to become, our main criteria being the ease of avoiding dead bodies and large quantities of blood. I'd opted for psychiatry, but I had to admit dermatology seemed a reasonable choice for someone like Rob, who fainted at the sight of rare roast beef. Fortunately for the skins and minds of our countrymen, neither of us had actually allowed Dad to bully us into medical school. Evidently, Dr. Peabody's parents had found him more malleable. He looked greener than any of us, and we hadn't even gotten near the deceased yet.

  Jeb led the way through the silent front room of the restaurant and back into the kitchen. We stood around looking at the door to the meat cooler as he fumbled through his pockets and finally located the key to the padlock holding the door closed.

  "In here," he said after he'd unlocked and opened the cooler door.

  Dad and Dr. Peabody peered in. I looked over their shoulders at the blanket-covered bundle on the floor of the cooler.

  "Well, let's get him out here where we can take a look at him," Dad said.

  Jeb and Michael looked at each other. Having taken my turn carrying Resnick's body when Michael and I first found it, I decided I could honorably wimp out this time and let the men do the heavy lifting.

  "You'll need more light," I said. "I'll see if I can find some lanterns."

  I uncovered a stash of oil lamps in a cabinet, and enough lamp oil to fill half a dozen of them. While I bustled about trimming wicks and lighting lamps, the four men, after a bit of nervous hemming and hawing, picked up Resnick and laid him on the long wooden table I had cleared. Binkie stood watching them with her arms crossed, looking stern and vigilant.

  Dad whisked back the blanket to reveal the late Victor Resnick. He didn't look much like the distinguished figure on the back of the book I'd bought. From our brief acquaintance, I suspected the angry expression on his face was a lot more characteristic than the lofty, noble, farseeing expression the photographer had captured. His face was pale and had a sort of weird bluish color to it. His eyes were open, and his hair and beard wildly disheveled. The impulse to run screaming out of the room fought in my mind with an irrational urge to close his eyes, smooth his hair, and remove a little bit of seaweed tangled in his beard.