Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1

by Barton, Sara M.

  Chapter Five --

  “Sorry,” Ben smiled sheepishly. “Malfunction up here.”

  “I’ll malfunction your....” I was now completely entangled with the dead girl, her body twirling around as Ben held the rope above. As I struggled to rise, I found myself trying to push the deceased out of my path.

  “Put her in the wheelbarrow!” he hissed from above. “Hurry up, Bea!”

  “‘Put her in the wheelbarrow!’” I mimicked my fearless leader. “‘Hurry up, Bea!’ Bite my ass, you crazy....”

  Whoosh! I heard that sound a millisecond before the thick, plaited rope smacked my head. Stunned by the unexpected blow and the sudden dead weight in my arms, down I went. Jane Doe landed on top of me with a thud, sending me sprawling across the ground beside the yellow wheelbarrow. When we packed up the young girl in her mattress pad shroud, we created an unwieldy worm of a cadaver, and now the worm had sent me to ground There were no arms to pull on, no legs to drag. It would not fold in the middle nor yield to the firmest hand. The stiff was really stiff, and there’s the rub, as Shakespeare said in Hamlet:

  “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

  Must give us pause....”

  At the moment, I was paused on my arse, unable to free myself from the weight of my mission. When my husband got himself down from that ivory tower of his, I was going to lay him out in lavender, but good, measure for measure. I was going to Shakespeare his ass from here to Kingdom Come.

  “Mrs. Gillman!” I heard Ben call out in a very theatrical stage whisper. “What might I do for the lady fair?”

  “Crap!” I moaned. I managed to get myself to my knees. From that position, I rolled Jane Doe onto her back and off of mine. Three attempts to place her in the wheelbarrow met with disappointment, especially since it tipped over each time. Finally, fed up with the frustration, I moved it against the side of the stone house, dragged the body over, and with my knees holding the wheelbarrow in place, I lifted the awkward cadaver in. Bound legs out one end, head out the other, I carefully pushed the cart across the bumpy lawn, desperately trying to keep my own head down and out of sight on my way to the garage, while my wayward husband no doubt tried to charm the granny pants off a little old lady with a penchant for showing up at the most inopportune times.

  Which begged the question of what would have happened if she had not been sitting in that kitchen at that ungodly hour, when the young girl knocked at the door. A terrible thought occurred to me as I bumped along. Did the girl tell Philippe that Mrs. Gillman let her into the house? What if Philippe decided to eliminate Mrs. Gillman as a witness to his crime?

  I punched in the code for the automatic door, rolled the wheelbarrow into the garage, and shut it again. I opened the back door of the silver Subaru and folded down the bench seat before turning my attention to the rear compartment. Lifting the hatchback door, I considered the effort it would take to put the dead body inside. First things first, I told myself, and I set about to find a tarp to spread out over the floor of wagon. I found one tucked behind the shelf where Ben kept all of his tools. I had just finished tucking it neatly in place when he arrived.

  “What’s to stop Philippe from killing Mrs. Gillman?” I demanded.

  “Where did that come from?” my husband wanted to know.

  “She let the girl into the house. She talked to her. She’s a witness to his crime.”

  “Be that as it may, Philippe will not want to draw attention to himself.” Ben hoisted the well-wrapped dead weight and gently placed Jane Doe in the rear compartment. The legs had stiffened enough to make closing the door a challenge, but Ben rose to the occasion, carefully easing the limbs into the space. “You’re forgetting some important elements, Sherlock. Philippe doesn’t know yet that we know he killed the girl. He doesn’t know that we have the body or that we know about the tattoos. Nor does he know that Langley has been called. He thinks he’s gotten away with murder. Besides, he’s the kind of thug who’s likely to claim that it was part of his mission, and he no doubt expects that by the time anyone questions that conclusion, he’ll be far, far away, in some hidey hole, waiting for the blowback to fade away.”

  “For Mrs. Gillman’s sake, I hope you’re right!” I retorted. The thought of that low-life, no-good creep harming an innocent little old lady sent shivers down my spine.

  “Of course, I’m right,” he replied with great confidence. “Now, let’s hit the road.”

  “I need my pocketbook,” I informed him. “And I have to use the bathroom. And I don’t have any makeup on. Not to mention....”

  “Then don’t,” he cut me off in mid-sentence. “Go get your purse and go to the bathroom. You can put on your makeup in the car.”

  His cell phone trilled and Ben took it out of his pocket, clicking on a button before putting it to his ear.

  “Talk to me,” he said to the voice at the other end. He followed me out of the garage and headed to the shade of a sugar maple by the house, out of the hot noonday sun.

  It took me ten minutes to slip on a pair of deck shoes, replacing my ratty old sneakers, always reserved for the housework that comes with being an innkeeper. I managed to tuck my hair up on top of my head in a casual pile of shiny curls. It was necessary after the run-in with the wayward corpse and the head-banging rope. After relieving myself and washing my hands, I decided another minute and a half would not cause my husband to faint dead away, so I added some mascara, eyeliner, and shadow to highlight my brown eyes. A couple of quick swipes of blush lifted my cheekbones and gave them a rosy glow. I dabbed my lips with a cheerful pink gloss. Satisfied, I left the powder room on the first floor, went through the kitchen, grabbing a couple of peaches for my purse, and went out the back door, where I found Ben was still in conversation under the tree. With a smug smile, I opened the side garage door, pleased that I would be able to say I did not dilly dally. I planned to settle myself in the Subaru driver’s seat and wait for him. I even anticipated his reaction to my being behind the steering wheel, which left me smiling in anticipation of the fireworks. But what I saw when I entered the garage stopped me cold in my tracks. “What the hell....”

  The hatchback door was raised high and the rear compartment was empty. No dead body. No nothing. Not even the tarp that I had placed there remained. Like it never happened.

  “Shall I assume you are finally ready?” Ben sneered as he came through the side door. He looked at the hatchback door trying to kiss the rafters and looked at me.

  “What did you do with Jane Doe?” he demanded.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then where the hell is she?”

  “You were the one hanging around outside,” I reminded him. “If anyone had a bird’s eye view of the garage, it was you. I was in the house, getting ready.”

  “Where’s the tarp?” was his next question.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” A moment later, I found it behind the garage.

  “Whoever took her couldn’t have taken her far, not without a vehicle. Damn.”

  “Call Philippe. Call that stinking piece of....”

  Ben was already dialing his phone and he turned away as he spoke.

  “And tell him he’s not welcome here any more!” I insisted. My husband’s hand waved through the air as if he had been swarmed by a thousand mosquitoes. I’m fairly certain something was pestering him up close and personal, because he knows better than to try to silence me in that manner. As I waited for him, I happened to glance out the window of the garage. And there, bouncing merrily along the meadow was a tall man in a baseball cap, red shirt, and dark pants, a white bundle slung over his shoulder.

  “Ben!” I hailed my husband’s attention to no avail. “Ben!”

  There it was again, that waving away of the swarm of pesky mosquitoes. This time I didn’t take no for an answer. I marched up to the man I married, twirled him around, and said his name once more emphatically. He covered
the phone with his hand and snarled at me with great irritation.

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  “Philippe is making off with our Jane Doe!”

  “He can’t be.”

  “Of course he can!” I insisted, pointing to the window. “I just saw him!”

  “No, you saw a man,” Ben retorted. “And for your information, it cannot be Philippe Grapon. He’s in custody as we speak.”

  “Custody?”

  “He just got busted for having a broken tail light and an unregistered motor vehicle. I’m supposed to go pick him up.”

  “Then who is that?” I pointed at the still visible thief at a good distance. It looked like he was headed to the shoreline.

  When Ben took off, I expected him to run in a straight line, towards the man carrying the corpse, but that was not what he chose to do. Instead, Ben got into the car.

  “Are you coming or what?”

  “But....”

  “I can leave you behind, if you prefer!”

  I climbed in beside my husband and had barely shut the car door when he opened the garage door, threw the car into reverse, and headed down the narrow track of our private dirt road that led down to Lake Champlain.

  “Shouldn’t we follow him?” I asked. The man was a good distance from the road.

  “No, we should not. I don’t want him to know we are following him. And if he has an accomplice, I want to get a good look at the pair of them before I move in. It’s not like we’re going to save Jane Doe, is it?”

  “Sarcasm is not attractive,” I pointed out to my spouse. He gave me a scornful snort and braked going down the steep curve of the road.

  “What, pray tell, is attractive at this moment?”

  “Alas, I regret to announce the death of chivalry,” I sighed. “Disappointing.”

  “‘Et tu, Brutus? Then fall, Caesar!’”

  “Cute. Very cute. Are you going to catch up with that bastard or talk Shakespeare all day long?”

  “Well, if I must....” Ben accelerated and the car suddenly lurched over a tree root with a big screech and thump that jarred my teeth. He glanced over at me as we continued on. “You did ask me to speed it up.”

  I let that one pass because I was too busy trying to spot that figure in the distance. The dirt road wound around the hilly shore for about a quarter mile, so I lost sight of it, and when Ben steered around the curve and the car came to the thick overgrown brush that lined the track on either side, I could hear the branches scraping against the side of the car.

  “Maybe we should walk from here,” I suggested, suddenly all too aware that he was driving my car, not his own.

  “Not to worry. Those little scratches will buff right out, Bea. Ah, there he is!”

  He was heading down to the banks of Lake Champlain, the body still carried, fireman-style, on his shoulder, but it was obvious the dead weight was slowing him down. Several times he stopped, as if to catch his breath. We traveled another fifty yards before he dropped out of sight below the ridge.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Go after him.” Ben tucked the silver Subaru behind a large witch hazel shrub, turned off the engine, and opened his door. “What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?”

  “Embossed will do.”

  We scrambled to cover the distance down to the formal path to the tiny beach of the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. Uncle Edward had originally had a handful of Adirondack chairs on the narrow strip of sand, but since Ben and I arrived, there was also a long dock, a power boat-lift, and a little changing cabana with a composting toilet. At that very moment, the door to the cabana was open, and we could see the man arranging Mummy Girl on the bench.

  “What in God’s name is he doing?” I asked as we found cover behind a crop of wild blueberry bushes.

  “Not a clue,” my husband replied. He pulled out the pair of mini binoculars he usually carried with him for bird watching and maintaining security for the property.

  “It’s bizarre.”

  “You should be used to that by now, babe. There isn’t much that makes sense in the intelligence game.”

  “Tell me about it!” I said with disgust. “Why does he have those newspapers? Is that a match he’s lighting?”

  “Son of a bitch!” Ben growled. “He’s trying to burn it down!”

  Chapter Six --

  “Why?” We watched as he threw liquid onto the burning paper, jumping back as it flared. I could see that poor girl, now naked, her shroud no longer protecting her from what was becoming a raging fire. Then he exited the tiny building, took out his cell phone, and dialed. A moment later, he disappeared.

  “To get rid of the evidence, that’s why. Or to set someone up. Probably us.”

  “That’s stupid. Why would he....”

  The sound of a motor cut through our chatter. A tour boat with a crowd came into view just as we stood up, intending to head down to the beach and snuff out the fire that was now smoking enough to attract attention.

  “Wait.” Ben put a hand out to pull me back down. “Watch what happens.”

  “We’re going to let the cabana burn with the girl inside?”

  “Look at Johnny-on-the-Scene,” he said grimly. I gasped as I saw Philippe pointing to the fiery cabana. There must have been thirty people on that floating party boat.

  “Witnesses. The bastard has all those witnesses.”

  “Exactly,” Ben stood up. “And now they become our witnesses, too.”

  The captain piloted the boat to our dock, hurriedly tying up the boat. No doubt Philippe had paid him well, because I noticed that two fire extinguishers were quickly produced, and four men rushed towards the fire, prepared to put it out.

  “He wants to discover the body,” I exclaimed. “He’s going to blame it on us!”

  “He can’t, not without admitting he’s our guest. Okay. Are you prepared to be hysterical? Remember, we don’t know there’s a body.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s just backtrack a bit, so we look like we saw smoke and came hurrying down here to see what the problem was.” He gripped the binoculars as if he had used them to observe the black plume rising in the air. We crawled along the bushes back to the Subaru, stood up as if we had just climbed out of the car, and started running. When we got to the incline, we started hollering.

  “Hey! What are you doing! Stop that this instant!” Ben was waving his arms like a lunatic. “Are you crazy?”

  “The cabana’s on fire! They’re burning our cabana down!” I yelled as I ran downhill after him. “I’ll call 911.”

  And that’s exactly what I did. I talked to the emergency operator, who transferred me to the fire department, made up of local volunteers. Bud Solange, the man in charge, assured me they would be there as soon as possible, but it would take a good ten minutes. I promised to call Uncle Edward to direct traffic when the fire engine arrived. The chief informed me that Lyle Tretorn had a boat and lived just a couple of miles away, so he’d probably be the first to respond. Lyle could tie up to our dock and start fighting that fire.

  Meanwhile, the excited tourists were now flocked on our little beach, crowding around the smoking cabana. A couple of little old ladies were smart enough to park themselves in the Adirondack chairs for the show. Lyle was on the scene soon after the 911 call, bringing a firefighting buddy and equipment with him, and they got busy right away. Eventually, the flames were extinguished by the pair, assisted by two members of the boat crew. The body was now the center of attention. Philippe Grapon had a lot of ‘splainin’ to do and there was no Lucy Ricardo to pin it on.

  “Oh, please!” I could hear Ben scoff. “You just happen to be our house guest, you just happen to spot a fire from a distance, and you just happen to find a dead body on our property? That’s ridiculous!”

  “I’m not the one who killed this girl and put her in here!” Philippe pointed to the body of the girl now leaning against the wall of the cabana, the charred, melted mess o
f mattress pad and shower curtain liner still tucked around her feet. “I was on that boat!”

  “He did ask the captain if we could swing over here,” said a very helpful gentleman in a pink golf shirt and khaki shorts, his arm draped by a cute young thing in a tight little shift and very kicking pair of strappy sandals I would have given my eye teeth to own.

  “That’s right!” an older gentleman in a Red Sox cap agreed. “He insisted that he saw some kind of bird I never even heard of before, and I’ve been a bird watcher for more than thirty years!”

  “And he was the first one to shout ‘fire’.” That was the observation of a middle-aged woman with tortoise shell eyeglasses and a full mouth outlined in dark red. “Rather suspicious if you ask me!”

  “It is, isn’t it!” The smell of acrid smoke hovered over the assembled group. I wondered if the helpful folks were on a surveillance detail, monitoring the wily Frenchman’s bad behavior.

  “But how do we know she was murdered?” That came from one of the little old ladies in the Adirondack chairs. “She’s naked and dead. I don’t see any wounds on her body. No throat cut. No bullet hole. No strangulation bruises.”

  “Maybe she was using the cabana without your knowledge,” another audience member suggested helpfully from her beach chair. “Maybe she’s one of those meth heads you hear so much about. Could that have caused the fire?”

  “I saw that on A&E last week. They had a guy on who....”

  Slowly, surely, the conversation turned toward accidental death, a mysterious girl on the run, and the fire caused by illicit drugs. By the time the rest of the fire department arrived, the tourists were satisfied that nothing unusual had happened at the cabana, other than a young girl lost her life tragically to drugs. Convincing the coroner about that might be a little harder.

  Once the girl in the cabana was exposed to public view, I had started the ball spinning by calling 911 to report her death. We needed to establish that the body was discovered in front of the assembled crowd. I sure didn’t want a bunch of forensic snoops dusting the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast for prints.