by Liz Turner
But there was one important question still nagging at her. She could see the edges of the whole story just barely, but it was like it she was looking at it through those dense woods, just barely able to make out the structure of the truth, but none of its details, through massive pine tree branches.
Why? she thought gravely. Why?
***
Dana endured the rest of the tour, though truthfully, she hadn’t heard a word Miriam had said. She had been too busy being worried, most of all, worried for Melissa. She had a clear sense that she ought to warn her, but she knew that she could do no such a thing, not without proof. Otherwise, Melissa would become nervous and do something drastic, putting herself in danger and endangering the inspector’s chances of putting the guilty party in prison for murder.
When they made it back to the hotel, Dana went looking for her, just to put her own mind at rest that she was alright. She found her delicately arranging roses into vases in the large ballroom. Dana sighed with relief.
“Oh, Ms. Potter, do you mind grabbing me a Band-Aid?” Melissa said when she saw her. “These thorns keep catching me on the thumb.” She held up her left hand, a drop of bright red blood in a perfect circle in the center of her thumb.
“Of course,” Dana replied. “Actually, I’ve got one right here.” She reached into her purse and handed a small bandage over to her.
“How is it you’re always just the person I need?” Melissa said, chuckling.
“You get to be my age, and you’ll be carrying around an arsenal of stuff too, just you wait. Can never be too prepared.”
“Oh! Did you need something? Before I asked you for the bandage, it seemed like you wanted something.”
Dana shrugged. “No, no. I just got in from the exterior grounds tour you organized, and I just wanted to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed it!” Dana tried to inject the enthusiasm she did not feel into her voice.
“Wonderful! You know I had a hunch people would want to know more about this grand old building than I could possibly tell them.”
“Yes…” Dana instinctively felt the slim metal object she had slipped into her pocket.
Melissa stepped away from the vases and tilted her head, staring at them. “Well, I think they’re as good as they can be! What do you think of them?”
There were five crystal vases, each with a cluster of ruby red roses within. The effect was stunning. The deep reds against the warm greens of the stems, all within the beautiful crystal.
“They’re perfect,” Dana said.
“Thank goodness. The florist for the wedding couldn’t make it up—the snow, you see. So the poor Wood couple was not only going to be without their guests, but without their flowers! Now, I couldn’t do anything about the guests, but the flowers…” Melissa smiled.
At that, footsteps rang through the ballroom. Dana turned to see Danielle and a tall, older man striding through the room.
“Oh my gosh!” Danielle gushed, practically running over to the vases. “They’re perfect!” Her eyes glistened as she turned to Melissa. “I cannot thank you enough for all you’re doing to make this happen for us.”
“Yes, you truly have been a godsend,” the older man said.
Danielle seemed to notice Dana standing there, and she turned with a smile to introduce the man, her fiancé. “Ms. Potter, this is Oscar, my soon-to-be-groom.”
Dana shook his hand. He was tall, with dark hair that was going gray above the ears. But he had a reassuring quality about him. “Pleasure to meet you, Oscar,” she said. “Congratulations.”
Dana had to resist looking surprised at his age. He had to be twenty years older than Danielle at least. But, as she thought it about it, she thought it made more sense than anything else. Danielle, with all her exuberance and determination, seemed quite different from most young women Dana met nowadays, though Dana couldn’t put her finger on exactly how she meant. It wasn’t anything obvious in the way she behaved, but rather, some undercurrent beneath the surface that laced her words and body language with a special need for validation. Yes, Dana thought, Underneath her passion is a rather childlike mentality in the way she seeks approval. It struck Dana not unlike the way some of her friends had been when she was a young woman, back in the 1960s. Dana’s gaze flitted to Oscar.
“Thank you. And thank you for your lovely card,” he said.
After a few more pleasantries, Dana excused herself. As she was about to exit the room, she turned to look at the little happy group in the center of the ballroom, what seemed to be a bright spot of pure joy in the middle of a murder story. Oscar had his arm looped protectively around Danielle’s shoulders, and she, in turn, was leaning deeply into his side.
Chapter 7
The Comment Box Note
Tomorrow would be Christmas Eve, and Dana had yet to mail the gifts she had brought with her to the Wesley, intending to mail them a few days before the holiday so that they’d arrive right on time. But then the snowstorm had knocked out the mail routes, and of course, Dana herself had been so preoccupied with Wallace Black’s murder than she hadn’t even given it a second thought.
She pulled out her suitcase from where she had stashed it under the big poster bed and opened to get the presents out. Seven small gifts were neatly wrapped in gold paper, mostly for her friends back in Pippin and Atlanta. But there was one in there for the Cantor’s as well. She sighed. She doubted she’d be in time to mail the gifts today—it was already nearing three o’clock—and tomorrow the postal service would be closed. She’d simply have to mail them late, with an apology note. Perhaps she would have the story to tell about how she caught a murderer.
In the meantime, she called Christian Foley. He answered after a few rings.
“Ms. Potter, what can I do for you?”
“Hello, Christian. Well, you see, I was just calling to find out if the more specific blood test results had come in from that lab. I have a theory, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t totally off track.”
“A theory, huh? Well that’s better than what we’ve got, from what I hear around the station. Bob Kelly is pretty stumped. He’s starting to think that Wallace might have simply had a night terror and gotten up and smashed his room himself, then died because of his weak heart.”
Dana paused. “Actually, I don’t think Bob is too far off with that.”
“Trust me, you’d wake up long before you’d cause that much physical damage,” Christian said. “Anyway, as to your question, no, the lab has not sent anything back to us yet.”
“Could you give me a call when they do? It’s important.”
Christian seemed a little taken aback. “Yes, I can do that. So about this theory of—”
“—Oh, Christian, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, an old friend of mine is on the line. It’s almost Christmas… you understand.”
“Of course, have a great afternoon.” Then, a click.
Just then, there was a knock at Dana’s door. When she answered, a worried Melissa walked in quickly and then shut the door behind her. Melissa paced, her hands shoved uncharacteristically deep into her trouser pockets.
“Mellie, what’s wrong?” Dana asked.
She stopped and fingered her pearl necklace, and then, without looking at Dana, she pulled a crumpled post-card sized note from her pocket and handed it to her.
It had the letterhead of the Wesley at the top, and then said We welcome your comments, compliments, and suggestions! The second half of the card was scrawled with messy handwriting. Dana squinted. Finally, she made out what the note said:
Here’s a suggestion: don’t let people get murdered in this hotel and then keep it from us! A man dies, and no one gives a second thought? What kind of hotel are you running?
Dana looked at Melissa quizzically.
She threw up her hands. “Well? Did you tell people about Mr. Black?”
Dana was taken aback. “No, of course I didn’t. Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Because obviously someone
did! Someone left this in our comment box! Can you believe it?”
Dana fingered the note. “Who knew about Mr. Black?”
“You, Noah, myself, the police, the ME. His relatives, of course, but they’re not here. Noah and I certainly did everything in our power to keep this from getting out, and the police wouldn’t do something so… so… meddling. You see why I….”
“Thought it was me.”
“Well?”
“It wasn’t, Mellie.”
“I just don’t know, Ms. Potter. Maybe you’ve been frustrated with how the investigation’s going…”
Dana sighed. She had a feeling Melissa needed to blame this on an old woman’s boredom. After all, none of the other conclusions made any sense. There was someone who knew about Wallace Black’s death that Melissa had missed in her calculations, though.
“I didn’t say a word, and I definitely wouldn’t have written that card,” Dana said gently. “There is one person you’re missing from your list of possible culprits.
Melissa looked at her warily. “Who?”
“Well, the murderer of course.”
She blinked wide in surprise, then narrowed her eyes. “That’s just… insane, Ms. Potter. Why would the?….” She said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “Murderer want to announce the crime to the whole hotel?”
Dana bit her tongue. If she was right in her suspicions, then this little act of revelation came with a very good reason indeed. But it wasn’t time yet to share that with people, certainly not with a panicking Melissa. No, Dana needed more time to find some damning evidence. So, she merely comforted Melissa and rang for a cup of hot lemon tea via room service.
Melissa sipped the hot drink dutifully, wiping away the few tears that had tumbled down her face in her stress. She shook her head softly. “Everything’s going to be alright, isn’t it?”
Dana looked her in the eyes and nodded firmly. “Yes. If I have anything to say about it.”
Reluctantly, Melissa gathered herself and began to walk out, when she suddenly felt in her pockets. “Oh gosh,” she said and began looking around at the bedspread where she had been sitting and the floor across the room. “I lost my key! I swear I just had it. Do you see it anywhere?”
Dana bent to peer under the bed and did a quick sweep of the room with her eyes, looking for that telltale piece of white plastic—one of Melissa’s master keys—but came up empty. “No, I’m sorry. Maybe you left it downstairs?”
Melissa looked concerned, but nodded. “Yes, maybe. Oh, I’m a mess, aren’t I?” she laughed, wiping away another tear that had escaped from her eyes.
***
A couple hours later, when Melissa had left and Dana ventured downstairs to get a quick bite to eat, she found the café loud with buzzing conversation, all of it charged with emotion.
“I remember him you know, most people don’t a have clue who he was, but I actually bumped into him on the way to the men’s room just the night he died! Geez, if I had known…”
“I mean, what the heck, right? They can’t just go on pretending like nothing happened! What’d they do with the body? Roll it up in a carpet and take it out during coffee hour?”
“I want to go home tonight. Who knows what kind of creeps the owners are?”
Dana sighed. So, word was officially out. She knew this was exactly the sort of word-of-mouth publicity Melissa had been trying so hard to avoid. Only, by keeping the business all hush-hush, it made her seem somehow implicated in the ordeal. The worst thing that can befall a hotel is a vacuum of trust, Dana mused. If guests don’t feel safe, they will not stay, and they will not come back next year.
“Did you hear?” a woman with a huge forehead was saying, having just sidled up to Dana.
Dana recognized her as one of the women from the tour that afternoon. “About what?” she asked innocently.
The women raised her eyebrows. “About that man bein’ killed upstairs and the owners of this place covering it up!”
“Oh, I see, I think I just heard a different version than that.”
The woman leaned in close, smacking her gum loudly. “No way. What version did you hear?” Her voice and posture dripped of anticipation.
“That he died of natural causes, and the owners, after calling the police, felt no reason to alert the personal affairs of the family to whole hotel.”
The woman’s face fell. “Oh, well, that’s… yeah, I don’t know, I heard it was murder,” she said with a final smack of her gum before she sailed away to another table.
Dana ate her salad at a table alone in silence, trying to look busy in her book. She didn’t want anyone to suspect she might know something about the Black murder, and luckily, no one approached her. She checked her watch. It was nearing six o’clock, which meant the fanfare for the Wood wedding would be starting soon. If she remembered correctly, the wedding had a start time of eight p.m.
Feigning a yawn, Dana got up and weaved her way through the mingling crowd and headed upstairs, taking each step as though she were quite sleepy indeed, just in case anyone spotted her. Looking behind her quickly, she exited the stairwell on the third floor, rather than continuing to the fourth, and swiftly walked to Danielle’s room.
She listened for a moment to make sure there was no one inside, though she was fairly certain Danielle would be long gone, already in the ballroom preparing to get married. Satisfied she’d be alone, Dana whipped the master key she’d swiped from Melissa’s pocket earlier and stuck it in the card reader. There was a metallic clicking sound and then the door’s little light went green. Dana pushed the door open.
The drapes had been drawn, so the room was dim. But it looked much the same as it had that morning when Dana had visited the blushing bride to congratulate her. Dana wasted no time, hurrying over to the central window, the one she had seen a very caught-off-guard Danielle hanging her head out of that morning. Dana pushed the window open and poked her own head outside. She could make out the tour group’s footprints clustered some ten feet away from the building, and then a lone set of footprints, which stopped directly below this window. Dana grunted, satisfied that the metal object she’d found had come from this window.
Then, she went to work carefully examining Danielle’s things. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she would know it when she found it. Something to connect the soon-to-be Mrs. Wood to Wallace Black. If Dana had judged her character right, the young woman would have kept something, out of sheer sentimentality, out of love.
Dana rifled through the drawers on the desk, pushed the clothes aside in the wardrobe, and found nothing. She turned around, slowly scanning the room for any spot where something important might be stashed. It was then that she noticed the newly made bed appeared off-kilter. One of the pillows was standing more forward than the rest. Dana made a beeline for the bed and lifted the protruding pillow up. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw what lay beneath it.
Chapter 8
A Christmas Wedding
The book was a later edition than the one she had come upon in the library, but it was the same, nonetheless. Small and cream-colored, the book had its title written in fancy red script: Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada. By Pablo Neruda. This “evidence” perhaps wouldn’t stand up in court, nor would it be enough to get Inspector Bob Kelly over here, but to Dana, that was the definitive proof she needed that her suspicions had been correct: Danielle Wood was mixed up in the murder of Wallace Black. And Dana was beginning to piece to together why.
She carefully placed the book back under the pillow and looked around. She spotted a laptop peeking out of Danielle’s briefcase by the desk. Eagerly, she retrieved it and opened it. The box to type in the password waited expectantly. Guessing, she typed in p-o-e-m-a-x-x, and the screen transformed to the desktop. Oh Danielle, she thought sadly.
Dana first scrolled through the emails on Danielle’s personal account, looking for any information about her plans for Wallace Black, but found none. Most o
f the emails were junk, stores sending her alerts about their latest sales. She clicked into her work account, her email through the university, without much hope of finding anything there. Surely she’s not stupid enough to converse about murder in her university account. And a search for Wallace Black pulled up nothing. However, something did catch Dana’s eye.
It was an email from a fellow research professor of biology at the university, and it was discussing the latest results of their years-long study on the effects of sounds on bats.
Dana’s jaw dropped. Bats, a mammal, a flying mammal. Of course! When there was no traditional weapon used, no gun, no knife, no rope, it was that much harder to pin a murder on the culprit. But this was closer than she’d ever hope to come on that front. As she read through Danielle’s rough drafts of the lab report, the details of what must have happened that fateful night in Wallace Black’s room began to take vivid shape before her eyes.
But how on earth would she ever prove it? As she sat staring at the bright images of dozens of bats in cages, a plan began to formulate in her mind. She looked to her left out the window and to the woods. She thought of the metal object lying in her pocketbook in her room. Finally, she imagined the Wood couple downstairs right now, giddily having photographs taken for their wedding, the happiest day of their lives.
Yes, she thought. That’ll do.
***
Back in her own room, Dana quickly dialed Inspector Bob Kelly directly. He didn’t answer, so she dialed again. This time, he picked up. At first, he seemed annoyed to hear from Dana, but once she began talking, he seemed drop his guard.
“You really think that’ll work?” he asked
“I’m not positive, but I think it will be enough.” Dana bit her lip. “So, will you come?”
After a long pause, Bob grunted his acquiescence. “Foley and I will be there in a half hour.” Then, he added, “Don’t do anything until we get there.”
“Oh, Inspector Kelly,” Dana said. “One last question. Has anyone come forward with information about Wallace Black in the past hour or so?”
