The sun kissed my face as soon as I emerged from the cottage with Darryl. Across from us sat the enormous brown Cadillac, still moored in its parking space and still without its captain. My driver must have spent the entire time in the plantation’s museum, pouring over the artifacts.
No matter. Once Darryl realized I was safe and sound, he left, as well, and I stood by myself on the brick walk in front of the mansion. The place didn’t seem nearly as inviting now after everything that’d happened.
It was time to get back to Ambrose and put myself out of harm’s way. The quickest way to get to the museum and my driver was by traveling through the garden with the four stone benches and a fountain smack-dab in the middle of it all.
Nothing stirred as I walked. I expected to come upon the soothing sound of water lapping against stone, but something was wrong. Eventually I heard a sound, all right, but it wasn’t gurgling water. Two voices came from somewhere in the garden. Angry voices, judging by the tone.
Who would rendezvous in the garden? I peered around the corner.
“You’re getting what you deserve,” Beatrice said.
“Don’t talk like that, Bea.”
My view was limited by the boxwood hedge, but I heard every word. Quickly, I stepped backward.
Only two days had passed since Trinity’s murder, and Beatrice and Sterling had already found a way to rendezvous twice that I knew of. Shame on them.
“It’s not my fault,” Sterling said. “At least she was happy before the wedding. I gave her that.” Even though he whispered, his tone was confident now. Gone was the whine from the day before in the bar. Somehow he’d grown a spine over the weekend.
“But it was all a lie. You lied to her, Sterling.”
Since I knew the speakers’ identities, I sank back on my heels. It wasn’t fair for me to eavesdrop once again, but I wasn’t in the most charitable mood.
“If you’d been honest with her from the beginning, none of this would have happened. Would that have been so hard?”
“But she was pregnant,” he said. “What could I do? She told me she couldn’t rat out the father and the guy had no idea the baby was his. She couldn’t exactly ask her dad for help. You know that guy’s a jerk.”
“But propose to her? That was a little extreme, even for you. Couldn’t you have been her friend instead and maybe helped out with the baby? Did you have to be her husband, of all things?”
“Look, Bea. I’m an actor. By the time we got this far into it, she really thought I was in love with her. What was the problem? I’d give the kid a dad, Trinity would have a husband, and maybe I’d finally have a place of my own.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something? You didn’t love her.”
“All bets were off when you told me good-bye,” Sterling said. “You wanted me gone, and you got your wish.”
“How do you know I didn’t change my mind?”
Something rustled in the bushes in front of me—something small and quick and dappled brown—but it could have been the Hope diamond for all I cared. If Beatrice had changed her mind about Sterling . . . if she wanted him back after all . . . who knew what lengths she’d go to in order to make that happen?
Suddenly the thought of Wyatt rushing around the plantation in a borrowed soldier’s uniform seemed almost tame compared to the hard edge I heard in Beatrice’s voice.
Time was growing short. No matter how much I wanted to hear this conversation, Lance LaPorte needed to be involved. Before Wyatt traveled halfway to Mississippi, or Beatrice destroyed evidence, if it turned out she had something to do with Trinity’s murder. I didn’t have time to stand in the bright sunshine and listen any longer to this conversation when there was so much work to be done.
I turned my back to the garden. The voices continued, so I knew they wouldn’t follow me as I walked on to the museum, where I’d probably find my driver. I ducked low and out of sight until I reached the area by the back of the mansion, just in case.
I was rattled by what I’d heard, and I almost didn’t see someone exit the plantation house at the same time. The figure wore a dark blue uniform, just like the ones worn by the Louisiana State Police.
It was Lance, leaving the back door of the mansion with that precious notebook still in his hand.
“Lance, you’re a sight for sore eyes!”
He stopped. “Hi, Missy.”
“I thought you were going back to headquarters.” At least, that’s what he’d said when we bid good-bye in the church’s social hall.
“I still had a few more things to check out here. What’s going on with you? You look a little winded.”
“I am. You won’t believe what just happened.” I proceeded to tell him all about the conversation I’d overheard between Beatrice and Sterling in the secret garden. About Beatrice’s wistful tone when she confessed she might have changed her mind about Sterling. “But that’s not all.” Lance looked shell-shocked after my frantic recitation, but he didn’t try to stop me or slow me down, bless his heart. “There’s also Wyatt Burkett. I ran into him in the registration cottage. He came at me—right at me, I tell you!”
“Whoa. Slow down, Missy. You’re not making sense.” He laid his hand on my shoulder—fortunately, the one Wyatt hadn’t bruised—to steady me. “What do you mean, Wyatt came at you? And what’s all this with Beatrice?”
I inhaled deeply. It was important to get every detail in the right order, even if it sounded insane. “I’m telling you, first Wyatt Burkett—he’s the general manager—trapped me in the registration cottage. You know I knocked him out last night, right?”
Lance looked confused, but I didn’t have time to explain the minor details. He’d have to take my word for it at this point and play along. There’d be time later to sort out the particulars.
“Anyway, he didn’t want to let me go. I think he’s the killer.” The minute I said that, I realized how absurd I sounded. Hadn’t I mentioned Beatrice in the same breath as Wyatt, even though I didn’t have any evidence to back it up? At least Wyatt had lunged at me. At least I knew he was strong enough and angry enough to hurt someone.
“There’s also Beatrice.” My tone had softened. “She has a wonderful motive. Do you know she’s in love with Trinity’s fiancé? She could have poisoned Trinity as easily as anyone.”
Lance was listening, but he shook his head as if he didn’t like what he’d heard. “There’s only one problem, Missy.”
“Problem? What do you mean, problem? We need to get arrest warrants right now so you can bring them in for questioning. I’m almost certain one of them is the killer.”
“Now I’m sure you believe that,” he said.
Why was he shaking his head? And why wasn’t he moving? He should have been on the phone by now, calling the station for backup. Instead, he looked ready to pat me on the head and send me inside for a nice glass of sweet tea and a batch of pralines.
“They both have rock-solid alibis,” he said. “She was studying for finals at LSU that night. It’s on the surveillance tape from the school library. And Wyatt was home with his crippled mother. Had to bring her to the urgent-care center Friday night when she fell and hurt her hip. Didn’t get out of there until almost four in the morning, according to the nurse on duty. I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.” He patted my knee. “Don’t take it so hard. I’m wrong a lot of times too. It only means there are two less people to worry about. I’m sure the general manager gave you a terrible fright, but he couldn’t have killed Trinity Solomon.”
“Who, then?” While neither of my theories had panned out, someone else must be under Lance’s microscope. Here I’d spent all day rushing around and I wasn’t one step closer to helping Ivy.
“I got the medical examiner’s final report back.” Lance must have felt really bad for me, because he opened his notebook. He didn’t even attempt to put up a fight, which said a lot.
“Look here,” he said. “It confirms the victim was poisoned with cyanide. Only takes two tea
spoons to put someone under.”
“I know . . . you already told me it was cyanide. By the way, whatever happened with the squashed pill capsule we found in the bathroom? Did that have anything to do with it?”
“Definitely.” He eyed the grounds around us, although we were the only two people in sight. “Traces of cyanide, all right.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“There’s more.” Lance glanced over his shoulder again, probably out of habit more than anything else. “It wasn’t the type of pill you usually see around here. It was labeled as aspirin, but it was the kind you can pull apart. Those things pretty much disappeared after a cyanide scare hit the country back in 1982.”
Who could forget that? Grandma told me all about it when I was old enough to understand. Said something about shop owners having to throw away entire shelves full of Tylenol because someone went around tampering with the capsules and filling them with potassium cyanide. Seven people wound up dead. After that, the capsules pretty much vanished from pharmacy shelves, replaced by tamper-proof gel caplets.
I saw for myself when I snooped in her medicine cabinet. She had three bottles of aspirin and all of them were labeled either gel capsules or tablets. None of them had been divided in two.
“They also found something interesting in the victim’s bathroom.” Lance’s voice brought me back to the present. “Fingerprints in there that didn’t belong to the victim.”
“Her name was Trinity.” It bothered me that he kept referring to the girl without using her given name.
“Of course. Trinity left prints in the bathroom, but they found someone else’s there too. Not Laney Babin’s—the housekeeper’s—because she was the first person they tested and she came up clean. No, these prints were different.”
I leaned toward him, although I knew it would make me look eager.
“Who, then? They could’ve belonged to anyone, right? Trinity’s bridesmaids, her fiancé, her stepmother, even her father. You’d have to haul in a dozen people to get the right match.”
“That’s the strange thing,” he said. “They had a hard time lifting prints, even with a fuming wand, because they were incomplete. Whole sections were missing, or faded away. They couldn’t get a clean print even with the fuming glue.”
His last words floated around my mind, like wet laundry tumbling in a clothes dryer. So many memories flooded back. Talks I’d had with Darryl, Cat, Charles . . . with all of them, really. But when the tumbling stopped, a single memory clicked into place.
“Oh, shine!” My hand flew to my lips in an automatic effort to keep something worse from spilling out.
“What is it?” Lance looked troubled, either by my words or the way I’d yelled them loud enough to wake the dead in the Andrews family graveyard.
It couldn’t be, could it? I finally dropped my hand. There was only one way to find out, and I was pretty sure the answer wasn’t going to show up in a shiny gift box while I lounged around at the mansion with Lance.
“I need to check out a hunch. Can you come with me?”
“I’m sorry, but they’re expecting me back at the station. Can it wait?”
If the hunch was right, it couldn’t. “Not really. But it’s okay, I know you need to get back to work.”
He eyed me skeptically. “Tell me you’re not about to do something foolish.”
“Why, Lance. Do you really think I’d run off and do something foolish?”
“Hell, yes.” At least he smiled when he said it. “So you need to promise me that you won’t go chasing down any suspects while I’m gone. Promise.”
I scrunched up my nose before answering him. “I know you have this whole situation under control. I promise not to undermine you in any way, shape or form.” Hopefully, my response was vague enough to appease both him and my conscience.
“That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t have time to argue. Just wait for me to get back before you do anything. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’ll wait for you to get back before I do anything foolish.” There, I said it. And to my way of thinking, what I was about to do next wasn’t close to being foolish.
“That’s better,” he said. “See you soon.”
The minute he disappeared around the corner of the house, I took a deep breath for courage and plowed ahead. There was no way I was going to twiddle my thumbs on the back lawn and let the latest clue disappear like a cloud on the horizon.
Chapter 14
Once I said good-bye to Lance, I moved down the curved steps as quickly as the river water that flowed beside me. The fashion show was fast approaching, and there was no telling when my driver would reemerge from the mansion’s museum. Once I hit the last step, I sprinted around the eastern corner of the house and headed for the pool out back.
The waning sun hovered on the horizon, threatening to set but not quite there. It still amazed me that someone would murder a girl in such a tranquil place. But after a century of visitors, like me, there was no telling what the walls here had heard or the windows had seen. And now this.
I replayed possible scenarios as I ran. While I had a pretty good idea of who murdered Trinity, the tricky part was to confront the person without getting myself killed. Ambrose always said my feet moved faster than my brain, so I put on the brakes and slowed to a jog.
I rounded the brick wall circling the pool and came upon what I was looking for: a two-story building resembling the main house, only smaller. Same brilliant white paint, same lovingly tended flower beds, same dark storm shutters perfectly kept. The staff’s quarters. As I approached them, a painted snake appeared on one of the first doors in the lineup. Bingo.
Above the snake trailed a vine of magenta bougainvillea, like something out of a Grimm Brothers’ storybook. I knocked on the door and waited. When no one answered, I tried the doorknob, but the door was locked.
Could the unit have a back door, since it was on the ground floor? Best of all would be a sliding glass door. I could sneak right in if the saints and prophets were on my side today. Apparently they weren’t, though, because when I jogged around to the back, I found a window and not a door.
No matter. The owner had cracked the window open a foot or so, probably to catch a stray breeze, which was enough for me. I slipped off my sandals and approached the windowsill. It was only three feet up from the ground. Hallelujah. I placed my palms on the sill, pushed the window open more, and hoisted my body through the open space.
Thank goodness my only witness was a marble statue of a mermaid, tucked among the impatiens, and she didn’t look like a gossiper. Once I made it through the window in one piece, I was home free.
The room I landed in was small but colorful. Cat’s bedroom. An iron headboard sat against the far wall—painted neon orange—and she’d tossed on a fuchsia comforter and some lime green pillows. It was a wonder she could sleep, since the colors fought with each other for attention.
I walked past the psychedelic display to the bathroom, where a light shone. Much like the room outside, the space was tiny and bright and crammed full of shiny things. The sink looked dirty, and she’d littered it with eye-shadow compacts, bottles of Clairol Nice’n Easy, music CDs, and a pill bottle or two. Exactly what I was looking for.
The largest of the two pill bottles wore a baby-blue cap and French words filled the label. She’d told me she studied in France. I twisted open the top and let the contents tumble into my palm, where the capsules twinkled, shiny in the fluorescent lights.
They looked like spores on a honeycomb. Golden, soft to the touch and pliable. Like they’d been spun from amber plastic. Just like the casing I’d found on the floor of the hotel’s bathroom.
The minute Lance told me about the unusual cyanide capsules as we met behind the house, plus the disfigured fingerprints, I had my answer. Just yesterday, back there in the kitchen of the main house, I’d cooked up one of my special omelets for Cat after she’d thrown up next to her car. I couldn’t exactly let her u
nborn baby go hungry. When Cat took my steaming offering and scooped it up like it had come straight from the refrigerator, my eyes widened to the size of saucers. But she didn’t feel a thing, she told me, even though I worried that besides being pregnant, the girl would have burned fingertips too. Apparently her fingers had been burned so many times—not to mention her tongue and the roof of her mouth—that she’d lost the feeling in them. And apparently the prints on her fingers too.
“You found ’em, huh?”
Someone had walked up behind me, as unexpected as a rear-end collision. I didn’t turn, although I desperately wanted to. I was frozen in place, the capsules still winking in my palm. Surprisingly, and to my credit, I didn’t gasp, but when I glanced in the mirror, Cat’s reflection appeared behind mine.
“What are they?” As if I didn’t know.
“Why, Missy. Those are the vitamins I take for my baby.”
The bathroom counter slowly spun away. It wasn’t that Cat had caught me red-handed in her bathroom. I was more surprised by the look on her face. Her eyes were so dull and black they reminded me of the skillet I’d used to cook up her omelet.
“I saw you take your vitamins in the kitchen, Cat.” I closed my fingers around the contraband. “You took some regular vitamins. From a bottle in the pantry.”
My calm recitation snapped her back to reality. She grabbed my arm hard, which jarred the medicine free and sent it tumbling into the sink. When she twisted me around, I came face to face with the tattooed snake on her neck. It grew larger and thicker as her body tensed.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” The snake writhed when she jerked her head like that. “What made you think you could break into my room?”
“I didn’t break in.” Which wasn’t a total lie. Nothing had been broken, although I knew exactly what she meant.
“Come with me.” She tightened her grasp and pushed me out of the bathroom.
Pain radiated up my arm. “Ouch.” I tried to shake her off. “You’re hurting me.”
She shoved me to the bed when we were back in the room, and I tumbled face-first onto the fuchsia comforter. No one knew where I was, did they? I tried to remember what I’d told Lance, but I had trouble focusing on anything but the sharp ache at my side.
Murder at Morningside Page 16
