Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die

by Nancy Martin

  “Just a bit,” Aggie agreed.

  “There’s a firm schedule when Orlando is here. Breakfast at eight, then a brisk walk, a visit from his tutor, a reading hour—”

  “Sounds as if Hem is as regimented with Orlando as he is with himself.”

  “Oh, yes,” Agnes said. “Mr. Hemmings likes things just so. If we deviate from his usual schedule, we’d better have a good excuse. I forgot to deliver Orlando’s nine-thirty hot cocoa once, and Mr. Hemmings was so upset I almost called nine-one-one.”

  “It was worse the night I tried to iron an old copy of TV Guide instead of putting a fresh one by his bed,” Mary Margaret said.

  “Oh, goodness, yes. What a tantrum!”

  “How does Orlando handle the rigidity?”

  “He does his best to be good. And we try to ease things a bit.”

  “So the other night,” I said, getting back on track, “you didn’t see Kitty?”

  “Aggie and I were here in the kitchen until half past eleven, having a glass while we watched that Naked Chef fellow poaching a salmon.” She sighed into her coffee cup. “I still love a Guinness.”

  Agnes admiringly wagged her head. “The Naked Chef surely knows how to make a simple fish into something glorious.”

  “Mr. Hemmings was out, of course,” Mary Margaret added. “He drove Orlando to a fashion show.”

  “But I saw Gallagher at the fashion show. He picked up Orlando.”

  “Gallagher went later, to bring the child home so Hemmings could spend the evening with friends. That’s his Tuesday schedule.”

  “Sending Orlando’s nanny off,” Mary Margaret snapped, rapping her cup into its saucer. “Was that the wisest decision anyone ever made? The boy needs an ally. A young person to be his friend.”

  “Wasn’t Minky his nanny?” I asked. “When we talked last summer, she was still looking after him.”

  At the mention of Mary Margaret’s daughter, the two women exchanged a fond glance.

  “Minky would still be working here if Hemmings hadn’t enrolled Orlando in that ghastly school. At his age and what with just losing his mum and dad, I ask you, was that the right choice?”

  Agnes shook her head. “Minky was wonderful with him, too.”

  Mary Margaret smiled. “Isn’t she the best thing I ever did?”

  Agnes slid her hand across the table to join Mary Margaret’s, and the two of them looked very proud.

  The whole reason Mary Margaret went into service at all had been the birth of her out-of-wedlock child, Melissa. In the years she first worked for Oriana’s family, Mary Margaret’s baby had been like a doll for us to play with—a perfect little child with a sweet temperament. In later years, we’d spoiled Melissa with candy, taught her to French-braid hair and throw water balloons off the conservatory roof onto guests who lounged around the pool. After Oriana and I went off to college together, Agnes had come along and helped Mary Margaret raise Minky into an intelligent, gracious and empathic young woman. When Orlando was born, his mother had known exactly what nanny could best look after him.

  “No child should grow up the way Orlando is,” Agnes said. “Mr. Hemmings is so fussy about his clothes and his manners. And don’t get me started on the toothbrush ritual! Plus he’s isolating the boy from everyone who loves him.”

  “Giving Orlando only one person to turn to, see?” Mary Margaret said. “And that person is Hemmings, isn’t it?”

  “Well,” said Agnes, shooting a furtive look at Mary Margaret.

  The two blushed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It’s harmless,” Agnes assured me.

  “And isn’t Gallagher an old softie?” Mary Margaret said. “Not a bad influence on a boy, is he? He may not be the perfect companion for Orlando, but he’s the best we’ve got.”

  “We let Orlando hang around Gallagher in the garage. Keeps the boy active. Takes his mind off his troubles.”

  “And if Hemorrhoid doesn’t know, who’s going to tell him?” asked Mary Margaret.

  Watching the two women smile, I put a few facts together and made a decision.

  “Maybe I’d better go talk to Gallagher.”

  They put on their parkas and Wellies to accompany me outside, claiming they both needed a breath of fresh air, but I knew they had seen Reed from the alcove window and they wanted to meet him.

  I led the way myself, knowing the path to the garage after years of playing on the grounds of the estate with my friend. Even covered with snow, the dips and curves that skirted sweeping beds planted with perennial flowers and ornamental bushes were familiar. We chatted about the small changes that had been made, and Mary Margaret pointed out the new orchard of spindly young fruit trees. Peach preserves had been Oriana’s favorite.

  At the croquet lawn, we came across Reed standing on the walk. A few yards away, Spike barked and ran circles around Orlando, who stood stiffly, ankle deep in snow and wearing an immaculate parka over a shirt and tie. I couldn’t believe my eyes. His uncle made him wear a tie?

  As we approached, the boy bent down cautiously to pet Spike. Seizing the opportunity, Spike snatched Orlando’s knit cap from his head and took off galumphing as best he could with his plastered hind legs.

  “Hey!” Orlando called.

  “What kind of animal is that?” Mary Margaret demanded.

  “He’s a dog, believe it or not,” I said. “But I think his species would prefer not to claim him.”

  “Orlando seems to like him,” Agnes observed as the boy plunged after Spike through the snow. The two of them were clumsy and yet bursting with energy.

  “And who’s this?” Mary Margaret asked as we approached Reed.

  I made the introductions, and Reed tried hard not to look appalled at finding himself introduced to people who actually lived in such splendor.

  “Have you gotten your shoes wet?” Mary Margaret asked him. “Do you want to come inside and dry off?”

  “No,” said Reed.

  “You’re more than welcome,” Agnes added. “And there’s coffee.”

  “I have to watch the dog,” he said.

  Mary Margaret’s brows rose at Reed’s devotion to duty, but she said nothing.

  Orlando arrived then, panting and pink-faced from exertion. His tie was askew and his clean parka already showed filthy paw prints. To me, he said, “What’s the dog’s name?”

  “Spike. Uh, be careful, Orlando. He’s been known to bite.”

  “He won’t bite me.”

  Spike ran up to Orlando and jumped against his knee, flourishing the cap. Orlando hesitated for an instant, then grabbed it and they played tug-of-war, Spike growling ferociously.

  Reed and I exchanged a nervous glance.

  Spike won the fight and dashed off with the cap. Orlando looked up at Reed. “Do you know Shaquille O’Neal?”

  “Orlando,” Mary Margaret said sternly. “Get your hat before the dog chews it up.”

  He knew better than to disobey her, so he romped off in pursuit of Spike.

  “Sorry,” Mary Margaret said to Reed. To me, she said, “Gallagher’s in the workshop.” She pointed. “That side door. Half-hidden by the bushes, see?”

  “I’ll find you after I’ve talked with him.”

  Mary Margaret headed back to the house with Agnes right behind.

  Reed had both hands thrust into the pockets of his coat. “Those women. Do they own this place?”

  “Agnes and Mary Margaret? No, they run the household.”

  Reed frowned. “Run it?”

  “Mary Margaret is the housekeeper. Agnes is the cook and the . . . well, just about everything else. They’re a team.”

  “They’re servants,” Reed said.

  “Employees.”

  He nodded, still frowning in the direction of Spike.

  “What are you thinking, Reed?”

  “The way you talked to them,” he said finally. “I don’t know.”

  “They’re my friends.”

 
Which wasn’t quite true. My grandmother had called it “maintaining the wall.” She could sit in the kitchen and drink coffee with her housekeeper, and I was allowed to visit the housekeeper’s room and watch her television or play Go Fish with her. But I could not ask to borrow money—even a quarter for the bubblegum machine. I was forbidden to yell for her from another room, sulk in her presence or make demands upon her time beyond certain limits that we all, instinctively perhaps, understood. I could treat her as a friend, and yet I was not permitted to make the assumptions one friend might make of another.

  Reed scowled as he tried to decide if there was social injustice at work at Tall Trees.

  “I’ll be in the garage,” I said, pretty sure I wasn’t going to change his mind about anything very soon. “You should wait inside if you get cold. They won’t bite you.”

  He shrugged, watching Orlando wrestle with Spike. “I’m okay here.”

  I picked my way across the mud-spattered sidewalk to the door of the garage. Here it became apparent that Mary Margaret’s obsessively neat housekeeping gave way to the habits of someone less fastidious. No magnolia wreath hung on the door, but a wild tangle of shrubbery grew haphazardly close to the unpolished knocker. Hunks of rotting leaves and torn-up grass blew against the stones.

  Stepping gingerly over the mess, I knocked, then went inside.

  Chapter 8

  The first thing that hit me was the music. Screaming bagpipes, turned up loud enough to be heard over a North Sea gale.

  Next I was assaulted by the sight of junk heaped and hanging everywhere. The jumbled mess made Santa’s workshop look like a Zen temple.

  The workshop was an airy space originally intended to be a stable for horses, later converted to a garage. Sunlight streamed through the tall windows. From the roof beams hung a bizarre mobile of crooked wheels, swinging gears, bicycle tires and assorted wreckage that must have been looted from a toymaker’s trash can.

  “Mr. Gallagher?” I called over the wail of recorded bagpipe music. An Irish rebel tune, no doubt, glorifying some gallant lad’s sacrifice of love for country.

  I edged my way around a pile of empty plastic jugs with their handles lashed together. My boot struck an anvil on the floor. I ducked under a unicycle hanging from a wire and decorated with lampshades.

  “Mr. Gallagher?”

  When I straightened up, I faced an enormous model train layout. Spread before me on a series of waist-high tables was a miniature landscape with rolling mountains, tiny forests and little Victorian towns complete with houses, street lamps and human figures. Throughout the picturesque landscape wound train tracks—even disappearing through a mountain tunnel at one end of the huge table. As I watched, a model train suddenly burst out of the tunnel and charged down the tracks in my direction.

  The train flashed past me. A whistle tooted, making me jump.

  And I heard a human cackle.

  Gallagher, wearing an engineer’s cap on his head and a red bandanna around his neck, was perched on a stool in front of a lighted console, looking like a demented elf as he controlled the train’s progress.

  I waved. He saluted me by raising his cap.

  I climbed over several coils of Christmas lights and a stack of wooden reindeer, cautiously dipped my head to avoid whacking it on some low-hanging electric fans and finally managed to slide into the tiny empty space beside Gallagher at the console.

  “Pardon me, boy,” I bellowed over the thunder of bagpipes. “Is this the Chattanooga Choo Choo?”

  He laughed, eyes alight. “Hey, there, Miss Nora! How do you like my train set?”

  “It’s fabulous,” I shouted. “Can we turn down the music?”

  He reached over and flipped a switch with one finger. Instantly the dramatic skirling crescendo subsided into a tinny whine.

  “I had no idea you loved trains,” I said. “This is magnificent!”

  “It’s for the boy.” He settled his cap back on his head. “Orlando. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years. Since his mama and papa died, you know.”

  “He must love it.”

  “We both like tinkering. Here. See this corner of the table? We’re building a circus. He finished painting the animals just yesterday. He’s not a bad artist, is he?”

  “It’s lovely. There’s a lot of detail here.” I admired the platoon of miniature animals that stood ready to be inserted into the tiny model menagerie. I could see the individual stripes on the zebra, and the spots on the giraffe had been painted by a very careful hand.

  After studying the train layout, I let my gaze roam over the weird mishmash of things collected around us. “You’re quite the inventor, Gallagher. I’d forgotten that.”

  “Oh, it’s gotten out of hand these last few years,” he admitted. “I don’t drive much. Mostly I stay here and make things. Why, I invented a gizmo to clean out the house gutters; did Miss O’Toole tell you?”

  “She didn’t have time to mention it.”

  “And a slick way of taking marks off the linoleum in the garage, too. It’s a chemical compound I mixed up.”

  “So you’re a chemist, too?”

  “Well, I like to keep my hand in,” he said modestly, then waved at the junk overhead. “See all these inventions? I haven’t even tried to patent half of them yet. It’s the paperwork I don’t like.”

  “Maybe Orlando could help.”

  “Oh, he’s still a boy. He ought to be playing.”

  I wondered fleetingly if Spike had managed to bite him yet and decided I’d better speed things up.

  “Gallagher, I’m wondering if you had a visitor here night before last.”

  “Visitor? I don’t—Oh, we were out, remember? At that warehouse fashion thing. You were there.”

  “I know, but before that? I understand Hemmings drove Orlando to the fashion show, and you picked him up later. What time did you leave from here?”

  He scratched his ear. “I don’t quite recall.”

  “Did anyone come to visit before you left?”

  He grinned. “Who did you have in mind? Some lovely lass, maybe? No, I’m past those days.”

  I smiled, too. “You didn’t see Kitty Keough, perhaps?”

  Gallagher’s brow twitched. “Keough? The one who died? I remembered her before I saw her picture in today’s paper. Years ago I did a piece of moonlighting, and she hired me to drive her around. She was a handful—very rude. But she didn’t deserve to die so young.”

  I nodded. “She died shortly after the fashion show. It’s important that I find out where she was that night. I believe she had an appointment here.”

  “Here?”

  “At this estate, yes.”

  “I didn’t see her,” he said. “I worked on the trains a little, because the boy had his heart set on playing that night. I promised if he’d behave for his uncle, we’d have a midnight session.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes. Earlier, while he was with Mr. Hemmings, I got things ready here. I made our popcorn, but don’t go telling on me. The boy needs a treat once in a while. He can’t always be on a diet. I made a special heater to pop the corn. Would you like to see it?”

  “No,” I said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  “I thought it was broken. I heard popping and thought for sure it had blown a breaker. But the noise I heard must have been outside, not here.”

  “Noise?” I asked.

  “Two big popping noises. I blow breakers all the time, but the lights didn’t go out. No, it was outside.”

  “Big popping noises,” I repeated.

  “Almost like gunshots.”

  I don’t remember how I got outside. I left Gallagher with his train and hurried away. Standing in the doorway to the garage, I looked at the mess on the sidewalk again. Leaves, dirt, twigs, bits of grass. Why was there grass, I wondered? In the dead of winter?

  It shouldn’t have been on the sidewalk.

  I walked around the overgrown bushes that ran along the garage and lo
oked at the snow. A gate stood half-open behind the bushes, allowing access to the area behind the gardener’s shed and the alley used by landscaping trucks that came when the trimming was done. A path ran from the gate down to the shed.

  I could see that the snow had been disturbed by someone walking there recently.

  And something else showed in the snow.

  A shoe. A medium-heeled, outdated silver pump with an orthodic device inside. Kitty Keough’s evening shoe.

  I leaned against the gate, staring at the shoe and suddenly starved for oxygen.

  Behind me, Reed said my name.

  “Call the police,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I think this is a murder scene.”

  Reed appeared beside me. “No way.”

  “Way,” I said.

  The police came. While Agnes had a weeping meltdown, Mary Margaret took charge of the police as if they were dragoons in need of a commanding officer. Under her tight-lipped observation, they gave me a thorough cross-examination about who I knew and what footwear they favored. Then the officers wanted to talk in detail to the people who lived at Tall Trees. A sniffling Aggie made me comfortable with coffee in the kitchen while they spoke with Mary Margaret first, then Gallagher. Reed waited with me, looking nervous that he’d tracked snow onto the floor.

  “I think I should take you home,” he said over and over.

  “Not until we find out what happened.”

  But at last I felt I couldn’t subject Reed to the torture any longer. We went outside to leave. By that time, police vehicles and a crowd of people swarmed the estate. I could see someone unwinding a reel of the familiar yellow crime scene tape, and I blanched. Some people surround themselves with chintz. For me, it was police tape.

  “Wait here,” Reed said. “I’ll go get the car.”

  I stood obediently on the sidewalk and looked at the scene. A crowd of people had gathered already. Two television trucks idled in the driveway. A cameraman was checking his batteries by the holly hedge. Some reporters were rapidly scrawling in their notebooks. The first person I recognized was Richard D’eath.

  He came over, moving with surprising speed despite his cane. He wore a worn raincoat with a faded Burberry lining. “I heard you were here.”