Murder à la Mode

by G. A. McKevett

  “Raise your swords,” Mary shouted, “and begin!”

  Savannah almost felt sorry for Brandy as she stood there, wide-eyed and scared to death, looking like a Georgia ’possum in the headlights.

  But when she remembered how expertly Brandy had handled that archery bow, and how she, herself, had struggled with the blasted thing, Savannah decided there was such a thing as justice after all.

  “Sorry, Brandy,” she said as she advanced on her, sword held at ready, “but this one’s mine. I won’t hurt you.”

  And she didn’t.

  With one blow, she sent Brandy’s sword flying out of her hand. It fell to the cobblestones, and the clatter echoed across the courtyard.

  “Well done,” Savannah heard a voice say from behind her. A beloved voice with a strong British accent.

  She turned and saw John and Ryan, who were watching from behind the camera. They both applauded, as did Mary and Alex.

  Brandy looked shaken as she walked over and picked up her sword from the stone pavement. As soon as she returned with it, Mary stepped before the camera and made another proclamation. “Our first match was won by Lady Savannah. Congratulations, milady.” She curtseyed to Savannah, who supposed that the proper thing to do would be curtsey back, but with a sword in her hand, and her musketeer outfit on, she was feeling a little too macho for that curtsey crap right now. She was ready for her next opponent/victim.

  “Our next match,” Mary said, “will be between—”

  Savannah and Roxy, Savannah thought, willing her to say it. Lop, lop, roll, roll.

  “Lady Roxy and Lady Brandy. Noblewomen, take your places. And begin!”

  This time Brandy seemed to come alive. Perhaps the competitive spirit that had won the archery trophies came to fore. Maybe she had realized that if she wanted to win, she couldn’t just stand there like a scared Brandy Bunny. Either way, she charged at Roxy, sword high. And when she got within reach of her, she gave a mighty swipe with the blade.

  Unfortunately, it missed Roxy and her sword, and Brandy lost her balance, almost falling on her face.

  “That’s it, Brandy!” Savannah shouted. “Go get her!”

  Roxy looked as shocked as anyone at Brandy’s sudden ferocity. Apparently the demure maiden from the Lone Star State had a streak of mean in her, too.

  Roxy lifted her sword to defend herself from Brandy’s next attack, but received a sound thwack on the ribs from the side of her opponent’s blade.

  “Point one for Lady Brandy,” Mary shouted.

  “Ow! That hurt!” Roxy cried. “Alex! She’s not supposed to just go at me like that, is she? If she doesn’t watch it, she could—ow!”

  “And point two for Lady Brandy,” Mary announced.

  When no one came to her rescue, Roxy flared. “Okay then!” she yelled. “You want to play rough?”

  Undaunted, and invigorated by her mini-victories, Brandy charged her again, shrieking a war cry as she ran that would have done a ravaging, pillaging Viking proud.

  At the last second, a rattled Roxy held her sword straight out in front of her and closed her eyes. Brandy ran straight into the point, which drove deeply into her left shoulder.

  “Oh, my God!” Savannah said as Brandy staggered backward, then toward her, blood pouring from the wound. Savannah caught her in her arms, just as she started to fall.

  A deep, terrible gash at least five inches long had been cut into the woman’s flesh. Savannah could see bone and tendons exposed just before a gush of blood covered everything.

  In a second, John and Ryan were on either side of her, and both of them helped Savannah lower Brandy to the cobblestones.

  Roxy came running up, leaned over and looked down on her fallen opponent. When she saw the horrible cut she began screaming hysterically.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Savannah could hear Mary asking, as though from far away.

  But she was concentrating on Brandy, who was staring up at her with eyes full of pain and confusion.

  “What…what happened?” the wounded woman managed to whisper.

  “You got cut, Brandy,” Savannah told her as Ryan ripped off his shirt, wadded it into a compress and held it tightly against the wound.

  In only seconds, the white fabric became dark red.

  “What?” Brandy murmured.

  “The sword was sharper than we thought,” Savannah said, glancing up long enough to give Alex a withering look. “Your shoulder’s been cut, but we’re going to take care of you. Don’t you worry, hon. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  Savannah’s eyes met Ryan’s for a moment, and the concern she saw there only confirmed her own fears. This was a very bad injury.

  “Mary,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “You go fetch us some clean towels and a blanket or two. And Alex, call 9-1-1 and get an ambulance out here”—she shook her head as she watched them run away toward the keep—“again.”

  By the time Dirk arrived at Blackmoor Castle, the ambulance had already come and taken Brandy away. And he was in an especially foul mood.

  “What the hell is going on around here!” he bellowed at the crowd still standing in the middle of the courtyard. “I leave for a few hours, and you’ve got another one down!”

  Savannah resisted the urge to step out of the group and try to calm him. Dirk in a rage often produced results. And at the moment, she didn’t really care if he shot the whole bunch of them on the spot.

  That way they would be sure to get the guilty one.

  “This was an accident,” Alex told him. “A simple accident, that’s all. The girls were sword-fighting and—”

  “You put swords in these people’s hands knowing that they’ve been trying to kill each other? What’s the matter with you, man? I oughta lock you up as an accessory.”

  “The blades were blunted,” Alex protested. “My props supplier said they were perfectly safe, and…”

  Savannah left Dirk to argue with Alex and walked away from the group, over to where the Brandy versus Roxy fight had been waged. There on the pavement both swords lay, exactly where the women had dropped them.

  Roxy’s sword wasn’t difficult to differentiate. It was the one with Brandy’s blood all over the blade.

  Savannah still had one of the towels they had been using to staunch the blood flow in her hand. With the end that was still clean, she lifted the sword and looked at it more closely.

  Yes, it was just as she had feared.

  She walked back to where Dirk and Alex were still yelling at one another in front of their rapt audience.

  Showing the weapon to Dirk, she said. “This sword is sharp, not blunted. Razor sharp. I’ve shaved my legs with duller blades than this. It’s a wonder Brandy wasn’t killed.”

  John stepped forward. “As it is, the young woman will undoubtedly lose the use of her arm,” he said sadly. “She’ll never draw a bow again.”

  “How could something like this have happened, Alex?” Ryan asked. “I checked those swords myself last night, and there were three blunted weapons in that chest. This sword wasn’t one of them.”

  “How the hell do I know?” Alex shouted. “You’re acting like this is my fault.” He turned on Mary. “How about you? Why didn’t you check those things before you handed them out?”

  Mary’s cheeks flushed, and behind her thick lenses, tears began to well. “They looked okay to me,” she said. “I don’t know the difference. You guys said they were exactly what we needed yesterday. How would I know to check them again?”

  Dirk softened at the sight of her tears. It was one of his best personality traits, as far as Savannah was concerned, the ability to melt when a female started to cry.

  “Okay, okay,” he said gruffly. “We don’t need to know who was in charge of what. Obviously, the exchange was made on the sly, sometime between last night when you checked them, Ryan, and today when Mary handed them to the women. Where were they stored overnight?”

  Alex and Mary looked at each ot
her. “They were in a case,” Mary said, “and the case was left on a table in the dining hall last night.”

  “Was it locked?” Dirk asked.

  “No. It just had a plain little latch on it,” she replied.

  “So, what you’re telling me is that anybody could have gone in there at any time during the night and switched one of those weapons, and nobody would have been the wiser?”

  Alex and Mary nodded in unison.

  “And,” Savannah added, “this place has swords of every kind hanging wall to wall. It’s not as though a replacement would be hard to find.”

  “Great,” Dirk said. “That narrows things down.”

  “But who would want to hurt Brandy?” John asked.

  They looked over at Roxy, who was sitting on the front step of the keep, her hands over her face, wailing, as she had been since the moment she had inflicted the wound.

  “I don’t think she meant to do it,” Savannah said quietly to Dirk, leading him aside, out of earshot of the crowd. “She’s a basket case, and she looked as surprised and upset as any of us when it happened.”

  “But this was the little redhead who got hurt, right?” Dirk said.

  Savannah nodded.

  “She seemed like the nicest one of the batch. Who would want to hurt her?”

  Savannah had been mulling that one over herself for the past hour. “Who says they wanted to hurt Brandy in particular?” she said. “Any one of us could have drawn that sharp sword. And any one of the three of us could have been killed with it.”

  “Comforting thought.”

  “Ain’t it, though?”

  Chapter

  16

  Savannah had never seen a vampire cowboy before. And after laying eyes on R.R. Breakstone, she decided it would be just fine with her if she never did again.

  She and Dirk were walking from the gatehouse around sundown, having just conferred with Ryan, John, and Tammy, when they saw the hearse-style limousine pull up in front of the keep. A tall, gaunt man got out, looked around as though drinking in the scene, then headed for the front door.

  His jet-black hair was straight and blunt cut just below his shoulders. He wore a black turtleneck, black trousers, black cowboy boots, a black Stetson, and an enormous silver inverted pentacle hanging from a thick chain around his neck.

  He quickly disappeared into the keep, and his chauffeur drove the limo over to the stable.

  “What the hell was that?” Dirk asked her.

  “I suspect that was the owner of Blackmoor Castle,” she replied. “How much you wanna bet his favorite color is black?”

  “What do you suppose he’s doing here?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s go find out.”

  They hurried across the courtyard and into the keep.

  The moment they opened the door they could hear a heated argument echoing down the halls.

  “…in the hospital and I want to know why! What’s been going on around here, anyway?!”

  “It was an accident, R.R. An accident. It wasn’t my fault!”

  Savannah recognized the nasal twang of the second voice as Alex’s, and she surmised the first one with the slight Texas drawl must be R.R. Breakstone.

  She and Dirk strolled down the corridor that led to the dining hall, trying to look nonchalant and not a bit like the eavesdroppers they were.

  “Her doctor told me it was a sword injury! How the hell did she get stabbed with a sword?”

  The sound of the quarrel was coming from a door about halfway down the hall. Savannah had seen it open once before, and it had appeared to be some sort of small parlor.

  They stopped about twenty feet away and listened as the dispute continued.

  “It was a mistake,” Alex whined. “There was a problem with one of the swords not being properly blunted, and unfortunately—”

  “Unfortunate? You call this unfortunate? It’s tragic! Brandy will never have use of that arm again! The nerves were severed! She’s ruined!”

  “I’m really sorry that it was her who got hurt, R.R. She’s the last person I would have wanted this to happen to.”

  “Oh, it would have been okay if it had been some other girl? Is it okay with you that there’s another woman in the hospital with her arms and legs in casts?”

  “No, of course it isn’t okay. I hate that any of this happened. For God’s sake, R.R., my own wife is dead!”

  “Did you kill her?”

  R.R. had lowered his voice, but Savannah and Dirk heard the question clearly enough. They looked at each other, then strained to hear the soft reply.

  “No, of course not. Why would you even say that?’

  “Because it wouldn’t surprise me at all. The last time I saw you two together, you were fighting like pit bulls. I honestly came this close to pulling the whole project because I didn’t think you guys could work together well enough to put a show together.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Tess and I had our differences, but no more than usual.”

  “Did she find out about Roxy?”

  “She knew about Roxy all along. She couldn’t talk. She got some on the side, too.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know about her and Pretty Boy.”

  Savannah avoided glancing sideways at Dirk, because she could see in her peripheral vision that he was grinning. And if she slapped him—as she would have to do if she actually turned and looked at him—the men in the other room would undoubtedly hear it.

  Half an hour ago, in Ryan and John’s gatehouse apartment, Savannah had shared her new-found gossip about Tess and Lance with the Magnolia team.

  All four had been surprised.

  Only Dirk had been thrilled. And she wasn’t likely to forgive him for that any time soon.

  “This isn’t about Lance,” Alex was saying, “or Tess, or that Carisa gal, who’s in the hospital. This is about a terrible accident that we all deeply regret, R.R. I know how much Brandy means to you.”

  “I doubt that,” R.R. replied. “I doubt it because I don’t think you’ve ever seriously cared about any woman in your entire life, including your wife. I’m crazy about Brandy. I’m going to marry her. And I promised her I’d get her into some serious films. This show of yours was supposed to launch her, get her face out there, get her recognized. Now she has nothing. Not even the use of her arm. And I’m holding you accountable.”

  Savannah and Dirk heard him walking toward the door, his cowboy boots resounding on the flagstone floor. They glanced around quickly and spotted a door about ten feet away on the opposite side of the hallway.

  Ducking into the tiny room that served as a broom closet, they barely had the door closed behind them, when R.R. Breakstone marched out into the hall and past their door.

  About a minute later, they heard Alex leave, too, exiting the other direction down the hallway.

  “Well,” Savannah whispered. “I think I like Mr. Breakstone a little more than I thought I would.”

  “Why? Because he said he was cra-a-azy about his woman?”

  “That was a point in his favor, yes.”

  “You always were a sucker for that romantic crap.”

  “And because he jerked a knot in Alex Jarvis’s tail. That right there is reason enough for me to love him, ugly long hair, vampire clothes and all.”

  “Do I have to remind you?” Dirk said. “He built this monstrosity of a place, those demon statue things on the roof, that dungeon downstairs with all the torture devices—this weirdo’s idea of ambiance.”

  Savannah shrugged. “So he’s a lousy decorator. Nobody’s perfect.”

  Dirk had headed off to find R.R. to see if he could “squeeze something good out of the Satan-cowboy dude,” and Savannah decided it was a good time to call her grandmother. The last time she had spoken with her, she had left her dangling, telling her only that a part of the building had fallen on somebody. Gran didn’t like being left hanging. And even though Granny Reid was three thousand miles away, and Savannah had qualifie
d as being a “grown woman” for more years than she cared to think about, she still feared raising Gran’s ire.

  So she decided to return to her room and make the call, steeling herself for opening words like: “Lord have mercy, girl! I was worried plumb to death, thinkin’ all the awful things that might have happened to you there in that castle with all those Hollywood people. You know how Hollywood people can be! They’re into more mess than the rest of us can even imagine, and you right there in the thick of ’em!”

  But when Savannah reached her room, lain down across her bed and made the call, Gran sounded anything but indignant. She sounded exhausted and frustrated. Which meant only one thing: Vidalia and her young’uns were visiting.

  “You got a houseful?” Savannah asked.

  “Sure seems like it,” Granny replied. “Lordy, but these twins sure have a heap of energy. Wish I had a tenth of it myself.”

  Savannah could just imagine. One set of Vidalia’s twins could drive you crazy, but with both pairs at once, a person tended to just shut down mentally and tune out. It was a matter of sanity preservation.

  And since Vidalia herself had shut down years ago, she wasn’t exactly the most vigilant mother or the greatest disciplinarian in the world. As a result, her children were known the width and breadth of McGill, Georgia, as being unholy terrors.

  “Today,” Gran said, “I caught the two oldest ones in the garden, picking my tomatoes and eating them green. Heaven knows how many they ate because now their stomachs are all tore up. And the babies went from crawling to running around good now, getting into everything. They liked to’ve pulled my pole lamp right down on ’em a minute ago, and now they’re foolin’ with the knobs on the TV.”

  “What’s Vi doing?” Savannah asked.

  “She’s resting, poor thing.”

  “I’ll bet she is,” Savannah muttered. Vi never missed an opportunity to rest, pregnant or otherwise, and between Gran’s good nature in the daytime and her husband’s willingness to care for his children in the evenings, Vi had “relaxation” down to an art.