The Last Refuge

by Marcia Talley

  Amy blushed. ‘Alex has been visiting my room at night. If Drew has been watching the house …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘That sounds like motive to me.’

  ‘So, how can we prove it?’

  ‘That’s the hard part,’ I said. ‘Drew is a phantom. And, according to the government, which we all know is infallible, Drew Cornell doesn’t even exist.’

  The brush stopped. ‘Do you think I’m in danger?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Drew needs you to collect the insurance money for him. He believes you’ll join him after that happens, no matter what. You are essential to his plan.’ I waved a hand. ‘Brush!’

  ‘One thing I wonder about,’ I said after a bit. ‘Why didn’t Drew contact you sooner? Even third world countries have cell phones and Internet cafes.’

  ‘I had my cell number changed after the breakin. My email account was hacked, and my Facebook page was hijacked so badly that I couldn’t even log on. I had to set up new ones.’ The brush stopped. ‘Then I came here, so it took Drew a while to track me down. Otherwise?’ In the mirror, I saw her shrug. ‘Maybe he was afraid my phone would be tapped. Maybe he thought I was being watched and I wouldn’t act like a proper widow if I knew he was actually alive?’

  ‘You asked me about Paul. How can he help?’

  ‘He has friends in high places?’

  I laughed. ‘High military places? I suppose he does. Midshipmen who Paul used to teach are now captains, and I think there’s even one vice admiral among his former students.’ My eyes locked on to hers in the reflection in the mirror. ‘I could tell Paul that Drew is alive, sure, and he could pass that information on to the Navy brass, but that wouldn’t prove anything.’

  ‘I don’t care. We can’t let him get away with it. I know he murdered Alex just as sure as I’m standing here brushing your hair.’

  ‘But you aren’t brushing,’ I reminded her gently.

  ‘Right.’ She began again, slowly, rhythmically. ‘I wasn’t in love with Alex,’ she reflected, ‘but he was in love with me. I told him how I felt, and he was OK with it, really. I think he thought I’d come around eventually, and he may have been right. But it was just too soon after Drew to get into another serious relationship, you know?’

  ‘I know. If something happened to Paul … Gosh, breaking in one husband is hard enough. I don’t understand how women like Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa-Zsa Gabor managed it. After they talk me off the railing of the high span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I’d probably just sell up and move to a cottage in the south of France.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t, Hannah.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Your daughter? The grandchildren? How about them?’

  ‘You have a point.’ I laughed. ‘Look, I have an idea. What we need is to snatch off his cloak of invisibility, draw Drew out. What would make him show himself?’

  ‘Jealousy. If Drew killed Alex, it was because he was jealous.’

  ‘We have to assume that Drew is still watching us,’ I said.

  ‘That gives me the heebie jeebies, Hannah.’

  ‘I’m not comfortable with it either. So, under that assumption, let’s make him jealous. Get somebody to come on to you.’

  ‘But that could be dangerous, especially for the object of my so-called affection.’

  ‘That’s where the people Paul knows might come in handy.’ I thought for a moment while Amy brushed. ‘If Drew is watching you, I’ll bet he’ll turn up at the State House ball. It’s the next time that we’ll all be outside Patriot House and it’ll be a mob scene. He could easily sneak in, just like he did at the burning of the Peggy Stewart, if we assume, like I do, that the so-called reporter Alex was talking to was actually Drew.’

  ‘We’ll need help, Hannah. I’m certainly not going to flirt with you!’ She laughed, genuinely amused. ‘That would push Drew over the edge for sure! SEAL’s wife throws him over for another woman.’

  ‘It probably wouldn’t be the first time,’ I observed ruefully. ‘OK, it’s decided. In the meantime, then, it’s business as usual. Let me get a note out to Paul. I’ll try to talk to him. See what he can do.’

  ‘A note to Paul? How will you arrange that?’

  I put a finger to my lips. ‘Need to know, Amy. Need to know.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘I had to help the cook pluck a chicken today. When this is all over, I think I’m going to become a vegetarian.’

  French Fry, housemaid

  ‘Melody,’ I said as we strolled through the rose garden one morning after breakfast, cutting flowers we planned to arrange in the vase on the entrance hall table. ‘I need you to run an errand for me.’

  Melody snipped off a white damask rose and laid it gently in her basket. ‘As long as it doesn’t involve Gabe, I’ll consider it.’

  ‘I’m sending you to the market with Karen today. You’ll be purchasing a roast for Sunday dinner, and anything else that Karen thinks we might need.’

  Melody’s face lit up. ‘I’d adore that. But, how come you aren’t going?’

  ‘Founding Father sent me an invitation to tea at Hammond-Harwood House this afternoon. No way I can get out of it.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out the note I had written to Paul using a leaf I’d torn out of the little blue notebook he’d given me. I pressed the note into her hand. ‘This is for my husband. Please leave it with Kyle or with Corey at the Maryland Table concession. They may have a packet for you, too.’

  ‘But isn’t that, like, cheating?’ Melody asked. With a furtive glance over her shoulder at the hulk of Paca House looming behind us, she accepted the note and tucked it quickly into her own pocket, a willing accomplice.

  ‘Technically, it is. But I’m hoping that this will be our little secret.’ I touched her arm. ‘Thank you, Melody. And whatever is in the packet they give you? It’s yours to keep.’

  Her eyes widened, she beamed. ‘Awesome.’

  I cleaned up for the tea party as best I could, scrubbing my face and neck with soap and warm water, and paying particular attention to my underarms. My Savannah-born grandmother had often said, ‘Hannah, honey, horses sweat, men perspire, but women glow.’ After the fever, the exertion and the tension of the previous weeks, I had done more than glow; I sweated buckets. One of my gowns was so ripe, in fact, that I was certain it could walk out of the room and down to the laundry tub quite of its own accord.

  For the occasion, I chose one of the few remaining everyday gowns in my wardrobe, a yellow silk with green lace trim that had probably looked smashing on Katherine Donovan but only made my skin look sallow, more tired and drained than I already was. I was a winter; yellow didn’t appear anywhere on my color palate.

  Through my fund-raising work for breast cancer research, I was already acquainted with the hostess, Mrs Sandra Bordley-Bowen, a local realtor who could trace her ancestry directly back to Stephen Bordley, the eighteenth-century Maryland attorney general, and rarely missed an opportunity to interject that historical fact into any conversation.

  When I arrived at the Hammond-Harwood House, an Anglo-Palladian villa built in 1774 by renowned architect William Buckland, Chad the Cameraman took some time to capture the impeccable front door, then ducked in ahead of me the better to record my grand entrance for posterity. A liveried servant took my cloak, and I was shown to the upstairs ballroom where two pianists, a man and a woman, sat at the pianoforte, and were just beginning to play the second movement of a Mozart sonata for four hands.

  Mrs Bordley-Bowen’s lips drew away from her laser-white, predatory teeth in what passed for a smile in the over-botoxed set and gushed, ‘Mrs Ives. Delighted you could join us today. May I introduce you to the others?’

  ‘Of course.’ I scanned the audience and realized that I already knew most of the others, a half-dozen women from Mrs Bordley-Brown’s book club, dressed, like her, in colonial costumes, mob caps perched precariously (and ridiculously) atop their freeze-dried hairdos. Shallow women, these, whose conversations ran the
gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker famously said, and read Oprah books almost exclusively, depressing novels where life sucks, things get worse, and everybody dies. I didn’t like these women any better now than I would have nearly two and a half centuries ago. Nevertheless I gathered my skirts around me, sat, folded my hands demurely in my lap and prepared to enjoy the music.

  The event turned out to be more of a soiree than a tea. There were sandwiches and sweets, of course, and the inevitable ceremonial pouring of the tea. At the end of the Rondo, one of the pianists retired to a Chippendale armchair, and a soprano took her place, treating us to some delightful solos from the ballad operas of Thomas Arne and William Boyce. Following the musicale, when the pianists were finally allowed some refreshment, Mrs B Hyphen B divided us up into two groups with a cheery, ‘It’s time for whist!’

  After the card games began, I could no longer avoid their questions about the terrible accident at Patriot House, and how I felt about it.

  We had no access to modern-day newspapers at Patriot House, of course, but I quickly learned from the ladies that Alex’s death had been in all the papers. Fortunately, neither The Capital nor The Baltimore Sun had mentioned exactly who had found Alex Mueller’s body, so I could smile wanly, claim shock, and suggest that with time, I might possibly get over it, which was the honest truth.

  The sun was low in the sky before I could politely excuse myself, send for my cloak, and hurry home to Patriot House, just two blocks away, with Chad hot on my heels. If Melody had done her part, I would have an appointment with Paul at the back wall, and I didn’t want to miss it. But first, I’d have to ditch Chad.

  I paused at the Paca House gate. ‘Don’t you have a place to go home to?’ I inquired sweetly.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he drawled, ‘and as soon as I lock this camera up, I’m going there.’

  At that time of year, the sun set around seven o’clock, but it wasn’t well and truly dark until seven thirty. I waited in my room until the long case clock chimed the half hour, then threw my dark cloak over my neon-yellow dress. I entered the garden through the kitchen, skirted the flower and holly parterres by way of the green houses, scampered as quickly over the footbridge as possible before melding into the darkness of the wilderness plantings along the back wall.

  Paul was waiting for me. Through the vertical slit in the wall, we touched hands. ‘I feel like I’m in the visiting room at the Maryland state penitentiary,’ he said as his fingers met mine.

  ‘It feels that way to me, too.’

  ‘I got your message,’ Paul said, cutting to the chase. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I have a job for you, and I think it might be dangerous.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘At the State House ball? I want you to seduce Amy …’

  ‘What?’ he sputtered before I even had time to finish the sentence. ‘Are you completely out of your mind?’

  I squeezed his hand. ‘Sorry, let me rephrase that. I want it to appear as if you’ve got a thing going with Amy.’

  ‘And that’s different, how?’

  ‘She will know you don’t mean it, for one thing. What’s even more important, so will I.’

  ‘Hannah, I’ve gone along with some of your hare-brained schemes before, but this one really takes the cake. No. My answer is No. N, O. No.

  ‘Amy and I have talked it over, Paul, and it’s the only way we can think of to draw Drew out of hiding, make him show himself. He’ll be at the ball, we feel certain of that.’

  ‘And suppose I agree?’

  ‘I’m going to pretend to be outraged, of course. I’m an old hag, tired and worn out. You’re the elder statesman, virile, devastatingly attractive.’

  ‘What bullshit. Never mind. What does this Drew person look like?’

  ‘Longish hair, bleached white. Otherwise, I don’t know. Amy had pictures of him on her iPhone, but they disappeared along with the phone. Her Facebook account was hijacked, so the photos on her wall are inaccessible, too. There may be photographs on the Internet, but I doubt it. Drew was, is a SEAL, after all. People in covert ops don’t generally post their mug shots all over cyberspace. Do you have any buddies who can pull something out of the official records?’

  ‘I’m not sure I have any buddies who are that good, but I’ll try.’

  I rested my forehead against the bricks, still radiating heat from the sun. In spite of their warmth, a sudden chill crept over me. I shivered. ‘I feel like someone’s watching us.’ I kept my voice low. ‘Look over my shoulder, Paul. Do you see anything?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere!’ I said impatiently. Cautiously, I turned, straining my ears, listening for the rustle of a bush, the snap of a twig, looking for the sudden flick of a curtain in the window of one of the condos in the building next door.

  Paul squeezed my fingers. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you, sweetheart.’

  Again, I shivered. ‘I know that Drew’s out there somewhere, watching, always watching. It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Do you think he’s going to rise up out of the fish pond wearing a ghillie suit?’ In the gathering dark, I couldn’t see my husband’s face, but I could tell from his voice that he was smiling.

  ‘Did you get my note?’ he asked, steering the conversation away from disgruntled SEALs who may or may not be hiding among the bulrushes, dressed like Sasquatch.

  ‘What note?’

  ‘The one I left in the bottle.’

  I pressed a hand to my mouth. ‘Oh my gosh! I totally forgot. I’d just picked it up and was heading back to the house when I found Alex …’ I took a deep breath. ‘It’s been sitting in my pocket all this time. I’m so sorry, Paul.’

  ‘Never mind. It wasn’t all that special anyway.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll treasure it,’ I said. ‘Once I have enough light to read it by.’ I leaned closer to the opening in the wall. ‘Guess I better be going in.’

  His fingers found mine. ‘I guess. See you at the ball?’

  ‘At the ball, then.’

  ‘And Hannah?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m bringing back-up.’

  I smiled. ‘That’s what I hoped you’d say.’

  Back in my bedroom, I lit the candle on my bedside table, then fished the little bottle out of my pocket. Using the tweezers that Amy had managed to scrounge up for me, I teased Paul’s note out of the narrow mouth, dropped the note onto the table, then smoothed it out and read, not the silly poem I expected but this:

  Can’t wait to see you at the ball, Mrs Ives. Something tells me you’ll be needing a date. It wasn’t Paul’s handwriting.

  That night, I crept out to the summer house, let myself in, and gave the diary cam a piece of my mind.

  Jud! Listen up. This is important. Amy’s husband isn’t dead. You hear me? Drew Cornell is alive, he wants Amy all to himself, and he’s not going to let anything stand in his way. I’m convinced he murdered Alex Mueller. Did you get that? He murdered Alex! Now he’s sent me a note saying he’s planning to crash the ball. It’s a long story, but I’m worried that he’s going to harm my husband. You’ve got to get your security team on Drew right away. If anything happens to my husband, I swear to God, money or no money, I’m going to walk. Got it?

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘I’ve got this recipe for battalia pie, and it calls for … hold on a minute while I find the page … sheep’s tongues and shivered palates, two pair of lamb’s stones, twenty to thirty cockscombs, with savory balls and oysters. Lay on butter, it says, and close the pie with a lear. Jesus, where’s Wikipedia when I need it?’

  Karen Gibbs, cook

  Dressing for the ball would have been exciting in any case, but in anticipation of what might happen if Drew made his promised appearance kept my nerves – and Amy’s – on edge.

  I wanted to get a message out to Paul, but leaving it in the bottle was out – Drew would be on the lookout for that – and with preparations for the ball occupyin
g all our time, I had no opportunity (or good excuse!) to sneak out to the Market House.

  ‘Relax, Hannah,’ Amy said as she handed me my petticoat. ‘Jud’s security people will take care of everything. Nothing bad is going to happen to Paul.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said, stepping into the garment and tying it securely around my waist.

  ‘Of course I’m right. In a few hours you’ll be dancing the night away, your husband on your arm.’

  I was still fretting when Melody entered the room, but for the young teen’s benefit, Amy and I pretended everything was normal. Amy helped us both dress and we, in turn, assisted her. After I’d donned my gown and all its associated paraphernalia, only one thing remained – my wig. It had been professionally dressed for the occasion with ribbons and papier-mâché birds. ‘It looks like the birds have nested in my wig,’ I giggled as I settled it on my head, tucked stray strands of my own hair in with my fingers.

  ‘Cool beans, Mrs Ives. Mine just has flowers,’ Melody complained as she sidled up close to me so we could both share the mirror.

  ‘As befits a maiden,’ I said, adjusting one of my birds, a canary, that seemed to be perched on one leg. ‘It’s birds in my belfry, at least, and not bats, although my husband might beg to differ.’

  The gown that Mrs Hamilton had designed for me, based on a Paris original circa 1773, was exquisite. Made of heavy white brocade, it had an elaborately quilted petticoat and matching slippers, all trimmed with gold ribbon and Swarovski crystals. I looked like a superannuated ice maiden.

  Melody wore a coral gown in a similar design. My descent into the spring house to look after Alex had ruined the blue gown I’d planned to loan Amy, so Melody and I were lacing her into my blue ruffled gown instead.

  I extracted one of the birds, a robin, from the aviary I carried on my head and stuck it into Amy’s wig, adjusting it so that it seemed to be peeking out of a curl just over her left ear. ‘There, perfect!’ And indeed she was. In that gown, and with that flawless face, Amy would send any colonial swain into a deep swoon.

  I hoped Paul was immune.