A Design to Die For

by Kathleen Bridge

  I laughed. “That’s one fancy stick you’ve got there, Mr. Seaton. No wonder your words come out so much clearer than mine.”

  “Yes. Now you know my secret. I whittled it myself. I have a heck of a time keeping it out of Charlie’s mouth.”

  “Whittled,” I said, grinning. “Haven’t heard that old-fashioned term used in, well . . . ever.”

  “Okay, carved. Better?”

  It felt good to laugh. I wished I could just forget about death and murder for a while. But here I was, once again in the thick of things. Maybe Elle was right. I should run for hills, or at least hide out in my cottage at the first inkling something sinister was about to happen. Death in the Hamptons was taking its toll. Murder was a cute game of whodunit in my cozy mystery books. But when life imitates art, there seemed to be something not so pleasing about flesh-and-bone corpses.

  “So, what were you about to pen in the sand?” I asked, petting the velvety dark gray fur on Charlie’s back. “Finish what you were writing. Then I’ll guess which dead poet’s quote you’ve chosen.”

  “I doubt you’ll guess this author.”

  “A challenge! Something I can’t resist.” That answered the question I’d just asked myself about getting involved in mysteries.

  He looked over at me and gave me a knowing look. Then he took his stick and wrote naught suspects is easily deceived.”

  “Who naught suspects is easily deceived,” I said, reading the apropos verse out loud. “That’s it? Only one line?” I racked my brain for who it could be. It could have been a hundred dead poets. “I’m stumped. How about just giving me one initial for the poet’s last name?”

  He quickly added a P.

  “Pope?”

  “Nope. I’m telling you—you’ll never get it.”

  “Poe? Pitt? Proust? Plato? Procter?”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.”

  I put both hands in the air. “I give. Who is it?”

  “Petrarch.”

  “You certainly got me on that one. Never heard of them. Male or female?”

  “Male. Like Shakespeare, he was known for his sonnets.”

  “Of course. Most classical poets were men. Only a handful were of the fairer sex. But think of all the female unpublished poets who stuffed their poems in drawers, or hid them under their beds.”

  “Like Dickinson,” he said.

  I gazed into his eyes. Today they were dark green. “Exactly. Only about twelve of her eighteen thousand poems were published when she was alive.”

  “It’s a writer’s curse,” he said. “Even though you might not get published, you keep on writing.”

  Charlie barked, interrupting us. She had wandered away and returned with an old tennis ball someone had left on the beach. Patrick reached down and held out his hand, palm up. Charlie dropped it into his hand. He tossed it and she went bounding away, getting lost in the tall seagrass in front of the nature preserve’s cyclone fence. Patrick said, “I’m trying to keep her away from the water today. It’s too cold for an outdoor shower.” He took a hand towel from his back pocket and wiped his hands.

  What a guy, I thought. Patrick had to have some flaws. So far, I hadn’t seen any red flags. Even his anger over me invading his privacy seemed warranted.

  “How’s your murder mystery progressing?” he asked.

  There it was. A chink in his armor. I realized he hadn’t contacted me once since the morning we spent going over the suspect board. Not one peep.

  “I’ve tried to call you on your cell, but your mailbox is full,” he said, as if reading my mind.

  Because of all of Cole’s voice mails filling up my mailbox.

  Sweet relief. Patrick likes me. He really likes me, I thought, referring to actress Sally Field’s famous Academy Award speech when she won an Oscar for Norma Rae.

  I put Patrick back in the to-good-to-be-true column, then filled him in on the latest about Frank Holden’s arrest, Morgana being in the hospital, and now, Vicki’s death. Or murder.

  After he gave my words some thought, he said, “I told you not to take out the wife as a possible suspect.”

  “I still don’t believe Jenna’s involved. But she’s the only one with ties to both Vicki and Roland.”

  “Does she have an alibi for when you think Vicki Fortune was killed?”

  I shivered, and he noticed. “Let’s go to your place or mine to go over our suspects. It’s getting cold.”

  Before I could answer, he took the decision out of my hands. “Let’s make it mine. I don’t think you want Charlie tracking sand all over your cottage.”

  I didn’t protest. Thinking about Jo and Charlie meeting for the first time, it might not go too well on Jo’s part. Although she had gotten along with Cole’s dog, Tripod. Charlie tracking sand into my cottage wouldn’t bother me in the least. It was something every beachfront property owner lived with—sandy toes and salty kisses . . .

  The first thing I noticed when I walked into Patrick’s cottage was that the photo of his wife and child was no longer on the mantel. Where had it gone? Its absence tugged at my heart.

  He led me into the kitchen and offered me a glass of wine, which I accepted. “You’re not drinking?” I asked. Maybe he didn’t drink because of what happened to his family. But then I thought back to last New Year’s Eve, when I saw him drinking a glass of champagne.

  “I’m on a deadline for the next Mr. & Mrs. Winslow script. I think coffee, lots of coffee, is a better choice.”

  “Does that mean they’ll be keeping you on as the screenwriter for all eight episodes?”

  “Looks that way,” he said modestly, shrugging his broad shoulders. “I would keep it under wraps for the time being, though. You know showbiz. It took four years after one of my thrillers was optioned before it finally went into production.” He grabbed a stemless wineglass from the open shelving by the sink and placed it on the counter. Next, he reached for a bottle of wine from the wine cooler under the center island. Again, I thought of how well Patrick and my father would get along in the kitchen, and how well I would get along consuming whatever gourmet goodies they presented to me on their silver platters.

  “Rosé good?” he asked, holding up the bottle sporting a Wolffer Estate label. My mind fast-forwarded to the local winery’s Candlelight Fridays: wine tasting, small tapas plates, and romantic candlelit tables butting up to acres of grapevines . . . I realized he was waiting for my answer.

  “Yes. Rosé’s perfect. I loved your pilot script when I read it.”

  “You read it?”

  “Yes. I never guessed whodunit.” I didn’t elaborate that I’d read it while on Shelter Island last December, not wanting to bring up the last murder case I’d been involved in. Instead, I said as he uncorked the bottle and poured it into my glass, “The color pink reminds me of Vicki Fortune. She always wore pink.” Then I remembered that her pink iPad was in the seat pocket of my Wagoneer. I didn’t mention it because he might be one of those by-the-book types, wanting me to turn it in to the cops. The same reason I didn’t tell Morgana about it, not thinking at the time that Vicki was dead. I would give it to her.

  After I looked at it.

  “Unless you have a dinner date, would you like to go upstairs and rework our suspect board?”

  “No dinner date,” I stuttered. “Good idea.”

  A few minutes later, we were both staring at our suspect board, like there was something obvious we’d missed.

  “See anything useful?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “No. Why don’t you have a seat at my desk and tell me what I’ve missed since the last time you were here. Then I’ll update the board.”

  Before sitting down, I’d had to remove a spiral notebook from the chair. It was open to a page with Patrick’s writing on it. At first, I thought he was in the middle of writing a poem, but then I saw that above the words he’d jotted musical notes. Patrick was a songwriter. Wow. What didn’t he do? I glanced across the room and saw
his guitar leaning against a wood stool—no longer facing the wall, like it had last time I’d been up here. For a moment, I wished instead of going over a list of murder suspects—a dwindling list—that we were sitting on the beach, him with his guitar, me with my glass of wine, Charlie frolicking in the surf.

  Breaking into my Fantasy Island scenario—after all, Montauk was on an island, Long Island—Patrick said, “You do know that Mr. Holden could have killed Mr. Cahill, and someone else could have killed Ms. Fortune.”

  “If you want to go down that path,” I said, “then perhaps Vicki killed her former stepfather, and someone else found out and killed her.”

  “Then there’s scenario three. The obvious, but most confounding. Kuri, Nate, Freya, or Jenna killed them both.”

  “Well, there’s also the possibility, like in one of Dame Christie’s books, that they all did it together.”

  He threw his hands in the air. “Okay, I give. Let’s just concentrate on Vicki Fortune and what you know. Nothing else has changed with any of the others, has it?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure Nate and Kuri are in a relationship, and she’s married. Also, Nate is related to Jenna through a great-great-aunt on her father’s side. There’s the possibility that if Jenna dies, he might inherit. But why kill Roland and Vicki? Jenna had a prenup. Nothing new with Freya, except those photos I told you about, where she and Roland were holding hands, along with the fact she wasn’t invited to be a decorator and had approached Roland to be on the team. I know Jenna was mad at Vicki for telling the police that she and Roland had gotten in a fight the night before he died.” Patrick raised an eyebrow, but I kept talking, “As for alibis for Vicki’s murder, we will have to wait until we hear from Morgana about the time of death.” I realized he didn’t know that Morgana and I were friends, so I gave him a brief outline of what happened Saturday night with Frank Holden.

  “I saw it on the local news that he’d been caught and had wounded an officer, but there was no mention of you being involved.”

  “Just a little,” I said, avoiding his gaze.

  “Why do I doubt that.”

  He took an eraser and removed Vicki as a suspect, then added her name under Roland’s. With his back to me he said something that I didn’t catch. Then he must have remembered about my hearing loss. He turned to face me. “The only ties between Vicki and Roland Cahill are the interior design business . . .”

  “Veronica’s Interiors. Yes. He was the company’s chief operating officer, controlled the purse strings.”

  “Well, I don’t know what it all means. Except one thing. “You need to stay away from Enderly Hall.”

  “But . . .”

  “We should just give up for now. Finish your wine, I’ll heat up some leftover osco bucco from Pondfare, their portions are ridiculous, then I’ll walk you home.”

  Before I could give him a resounding Yes! he added, “Unless you already have plans?”

  “Nope,” I answered quickly. Maybe too quickly. Then I decided, what did it matter?

  I wasn’t the type to play games or hard to get.

  Chapter 33

  I took off my fleece jacket and draped it across Jo’s chubby body, only her furry raccoon head was sticking out. The temperature in the cottage was bordering on freezing, and I didn’t blame Jo for not thanking me. I prayed that come Memorial Day things would warm up, or I’d have to invest in portable heaters for Elle and Arthur’s extravaganza, only three weeks away.

  Patrick had left me at the bottom of the steps leading up to my cottage. Before coming inside, I’d grabbed Vicki’s pink iPad from the backseat of my car. Did I feel a stab of guilt for not mentioning its existence to Morgana or Patrick? You betcha. But in my defense, I never suspected that Vicki would be dead. Let alone murdered.

  After feeding Jo, I listened to a voice mail from Elle. She told me that her fiancé had called to tell her they found Vicki’s pink van parked in front of Veronica’s Interiors. If Vicki never left Montauk, then that meant her killer went to the beach house and packed up Vicki’s things to make it look like she’d left for Manhattan. Someone didn’t expect Vicki’s body to be found and was trying to make it look like she’d left town.

  I made a fire, stared into it for a few seconds, then sat on my white down-cushioned sofa and toggled Vicki’s iPad to the On position, bringing up a screen showing Vicki’s face. Sadness enveloped me. I realized she wasn’t a cardboard cutout (pink cutout) figure. She was flesh and bone. Or had been. Who would claim her body after the M.E. was done with it? Jenna?

  Feeling like a voyeur, I searched the iPad like a forensic CSI—well, more like a novice forensic CSI. I was about to give up when I saw an unedited video where Vicki was in the bathroom giving makeup tips for her cyber fans. There was a knock at the door; the screen was covered but the audio was still recording. I played it once. Then twice. Then three times. But because of my hearing loss, I couldn’t get a fix on who had come into Vicki’s Montauk Manor hotel room. The voice was female. That was all I knew. It wasn’t Frank Holden, and it wasn’t Nate Klein. That left Jenna, Kuri and Freya. I searched the video for some kind of time stamp but didn’t see one. However, in the beginning of the video, you could see sunlight coming in from a window behind Vicki’s head. The only day there had been sunlight in the past few weeks was yesterday.

  Jo had waddled over to where I was sitting, jumped onto the sofa and sat on top of the iPad. “Bad girl! This is evidence in a murder case.” She didn’t budge and I was worried her weight would cause the screen to implode. I changed tactics. Praise your children, never scold was a new mantra I was trying out on Miss Chubs. “What a good kitty. What have you been up to today? How about some stinky, I mean delicious, sardines for a reward.”

  That did the trick. She got up, stretched, then hopped off the sofa and headed to the kitchen. After turning off the iPad, I went to the bathroom for some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls and erased all of my prints. If Chief Pell wasn’t in the equation, I would have just handed it over to Morgana as is.

  Then I went into the kitchen to feed Jo. “Oh, you bad cat!” I screeched when I saw all the garbage covering the kitchen floor. I must have left the cupboard door open that held the small covered bin of food that would go in my organic compost pile. Odorous items. The garbage can was one of those step-on ones. Jo had obviously stepped on it, and had tipped it over.

  I removed a clean garbage bag, broom and dustpan from under the sink, put on rubber gloves, then got down on my hands and knees. I swept the garbage into the dustpan while Jo sniffed around. Nothing was to her liking. Too many vegetables. She’d already scavenged the good stuff. She looked at me expectantly. When she saw my expression, she knew that her snack of sardines was off the table. And would be forevermore.

  A few minutes later, as I was tying off the garbage bag, it hit me.

  The trash bag that I’d taken from the Amagansett rental master bathroom was still in the back of my car.

  After scrubbing the floor with wood floor cleaner, I ran out to the car to retrieve the bag. It was a garbage kind of night.

  What I found inside was a revelation. So was what I’d found online, after a little digging.

  I grabbed my jacket off the chair, and sneezed a few times from the cat hair. Jo looked over at me expectantly. I said sternly, “Don’t you even! Momma has to go talk to someone.”

  Someone who might turn out to be our murderer.

  Chapter 34

  “Meg, what are you doing out on a night like this?”

  A good question, I thought, glancing around at Freya’s mammoth home in East Hampton.

  “Come into the kitchen. I have the kettle plugged in. I was just going to make a cup of tea.”

  I didn’t answer her, just followed her into the huge kitchen. I took a seat at a long wood farm table that smelled of beeswax and lemon. She’d told me she was a big fan of Grimes House Antiques, and it showed in all the pieces she used sparingly in her décor.

  “Is ev
erything okay? There hasn’t been another murder, has there? Jenna’s okay, I hope. That poor thing,” she said, wringing her hands.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it. Looking back at me on the refrigerator, behind a magnet that said Star Student, was the completed page of the jewel-toned peacock that Freya’s sister, Emma, had been working on earlier today at Enderly Hall.

  Something must have shown on my face because Freya turned to me and asked, “So why are you really here? You’ve found out about my connection to Roland Cahill, haven’t you? Even so, I didn’t kill him.” She held the unplugged electric kettle in her hand—a shaky hand that just might take it upon itself to toss scalding water all over me. I looked toward the wood block holding carving knives. Freya followed my gaze, blinking rapidly. She grabbed the papa bear of the group from one of the slots with her free hand. She put the kettle down, but still held the knife, pointing it downward in front of her.

  “I just have a couple questions. But they can wait,” I answered, my voice betraying me with its mouselike squeak.

  “You must also know about Emma. I can tell by the way you looked at her artwork.” She and the knife stepped closer to me.

  “Oh, you mean about the lawsuit your sister won against Roland Cahill. That’s why I’m here. I came to tell you that your secret is safe with me, because it has no bearing on the murders. You see, Frank Holden was caught on camera in the parking lot of the hotel where Vicki was staying, which coordinated with the coroner’s estimation of her time of death. For Emma’s sake, I thought you’d be relieved that you wouldn’t be a suspect when they found out about Roland’s negligence that caused your family so much pain. She’s such a special girl.” The special girl part was true.

  Freya looked down at her hands. Still holding the knife, she went to the refrigerator, opened it and took out a covered pie plate. Turning to me, she said, “How about a slice of raspberry pie? My mother’s recipe and Emma’s favorite.”

  “Sure.”