Her grandparents had been dead for years now. Her best friend, Apple, was family, she supposed. Of course Apple had her own family—and husband. Then there was Paul. Paul, who might have second thoughts about her thanks to her disaster of a mother and her loser performance as a daughter.
Snap out of it, Jo. That voice. It was definitely in her head, but it could have been her grandmother.
Yes, she had to snap out of it. Exhausted, Joanna struggled to regain her breath. She couldn’t stay in the bathroom all night, she’d freeze to death. Plus, at some point the spiders might begin to wander, and the bathroom door would not keep them out. She had one comfort: her bathroom shared a wall with the staircase to the tower room, so it was unlikely anyone had heard her breakdown.
She put a hand on the doorknob, intending to tell the others the killer was still active, then withdrew it. No. The murderer had targeted her for a reason. She’d been asking a lot of questions about Reverend Tony. Tony clearly was not the murderer—he’d been under watch all evening and couldn’t have put the spider nest in her bed. Maybe the real killer thought she’d uncovered something that would clear Tony. Or even unmask him. Or her. It was Joanna he wanted. The others were safe.
She patted her face with a towel and relit the other taper on the candelabra. She had to open the door, had to get out of her bedroom. What should she do? Joanna thought of the room: Her luggage. The folded remnants of the Schiaparelli gown. The bed. She could sleep by the fire in the great room, saying it was too cold to sleep in her own room, but she’d be a sitting duck out there. The murderer would know he failed and might try again.
Joanna set down the candelabra and grabbed towels off the rack. She took a fortifying breath, then opened the bathroom door and strode into the room. Standing as far from the bed as she could, she rolled the towels and dropped them on the bed in the rough form of a woman sleeping on her side. The black widows quickly covered the towels, first one, then several. Careful not to touch the inside of the bed, she grasped the top of the blankets to drape them over the towels.
As she lowered the blankets, her fingers tickled. A black form skittered across the back of her hand. Stifling a scream, Joanna shook the black widow loose and crushed it with her slipper. Fear rolled over her in a delayed reaction, and sobs again came to her throat. No, she told herself. Keep calm. Calm and steady.
When she felt she could move without shaking, she blew out the candelabra. She gathered the Schiaparelli dress, her sewing kit, and the candelabra, and she slipped the box of matches into her robe pocket. She opened the door to the hall as silently as she could.
The hall was pitch black, but a bare pinprick of yellow light flickered from the direction of the great room. Clarke. He must have swapped places with Daniel again and was up looking at papers in the dining room. Didn’t that man ever stop working?
Barely breathing, she padded up the hall, grasping the candelabra like a weapon. Just before she reached the great room, she turned left to take the staircase to the tower room. It was the only place she knew no one would find her.
She would spend tonight with a dead man.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
If the rest of the lodge was cold, the tower room was downright glacial. A blast of icy air hit her face as she eased open the door. Joanna stood just inside, listening. Except for the whistle of the wind, it was silent. She set down her bundle and struck a match. Beyond the sulfuric haze lay Wilson’s body still surrounded by flowers. The cold preserved them—and Wilson—like a walk-in refrigerator. She quickly averted her gaze. No time to be sentimental, she had work to do.
The box by the fireplace still held a few logs and some kindling. Good. No one would be able to hear a fire up here, and no one would be outside to see the smoke. Doing her best to ignore the corpse behind her, she rubbed her hands together to warm them, then set the kindling into a teepee as her grandfather had taught her. The fire caught quickly. She set one log on the kindling and leaned another on the side of the firebox to warm.
She shook the Schiaparelli dress toward the fire, just in case one of the spiders had crawled in. A shiver raked her neck and arms. Someone had tried to kill her and would certainly try again if they knew she was alive. As she took out her scissors, she pondered who could have put the egg sac in her bed. It could have easily been Daniel or Clarke while they were on their shift guarding Tony. All they would have had to do is take the back staircase—the one across from the storage shed on the lower level—to the second floor where the bedrooms were and slip the sac under her covers. No one in the great room would have seen them.
She stood still and listened. The wind had slowed, and for once the old lodge was silent. Where was the murderer now?
During the day, each of the others—Sylvia, Bette, Penny, and Portia—had gone to their rooms for one reason or another. They could have dashed down the staircase and into the storage room for the egg sac and smuggled it up. All they needed was an excuse about fetching more wood, and whoever was standing guard outside Tony’s room wouldn’t have questioned it. With a stick and a pillowcase, someone not squeamish could have knocked the sac down, carried it safely upstairs to her room, then burned the pillowcase.
The fire had caught and was bright enough now that Joanna blew out the candles. She smoothed the remains of the Schiaparelli over the hearth and, taking a deep breath, dug her shears into its fabric. The old silk was fragile, but also thick, and the scissors crunched hard into it. The dress’s fabric fell away.
As far as motives for Wilson’s murder went, nearly everyone had one. Tony’s was obvious. If Wilson alerted the police about his being on parole and out of the state, he could go back to prison.
As for Sylvia, her daughter stood to inherit more as long as Wilson died before he married. Sylvia’s clinic desperately needed the money, and Wilson hadn’t agreed to lend it to her. Maybe a legal loophole allowed her to borrow from Marianne’s inheritance. Or maybe she simply killed Wilson out of anger—or jealousy.
Daniel might harbor a grudge against Wilson for losing his fingers and kicking him out of the band. Plus, he obviously had Sylvia’s interests at heart.
What about Penny and her family? Bette seemed to think Penny’s marriage to an ex-rocker would be a disaster. Would she kill to save her daughter’s future? Unlikely. She might kill to make it to her next Botox appointment, but it was hard to imagine anyone else’s life being more important to her than her own. Plus, she’d been attacked. Joanna couldn’t figure out what motive Portia would have, either, but she was definitely hiding something.
Now the dress was cut into thirteen squares, some off-white, and some streaked with Dali’s slashed-flesh design. Joanna stacked them and reached for her sewing kit. The scent of woodsmoke mingled with the lilies surrounding Wilson’s bed. Beyond the orange glow of the fire, the room retreated into darkness. She squinted toward the door and the closet door where the secret staircase led up before turning back toward the hearth.
She threaded a needle with red coat thread and pierced a silk square.
That left Clarke. As Wilson’s business manager, he’d lost a good client. Once the estate was settled, that is. What motive could he have for killing Wilson? He seemed fiercely protective of Wilson. He might have locked the chef outside as revenge for putting seafood in Wilson’s sandwich.
After twenty minutes’ work, she’d stitched “S O S Redd Lodge” over one Schiaparelli silk square. She stretched her fingers and picked up the next square.
The chef had died, too. Presumably, no one knew him before he came to cater the wedding. He had to have been killed for what he saw and threatened to tell. Incensed that he was blamed for a death, he might have waved the clam dip container in someone’s face and ended up dead for his trouble. Now the container was gone.
She clipped a thread. Sewing scissors still in hand, she looked over her shoulder once more toward the door. The fireplace’s light, casting a moving orange wash against the wall, barely illuminated that far. She w
as alone.
The second square was finished now. She put another log on the fire. Only a few logs remained. She glanced toward the door once again. Beyond the shape of Wilson’s body, the door was closed. She couldn’t keep looking behind herself like that. She set down her sewing and rested the candelabra in front of the door so it would topple and alert her if the door opened.
Over the late night hours, the house moaned a few times in the wind, causing Joanna to glance up and grab her shears. But it was just the sound of heavy wood relaxing and tightening with the night.
At last, exhausted, she placed the thirteenth square on top of the pile. Now, after arching her back to stretch, she reached into her sewing kit for thirteen plastic spools of silk thread plus another spool of thick white coat thread. Using the coat thread, she cut four foot-long lengths and tied one to each corner of a silk square. She gathered the threads together and drew them through one of the smaller spools to make a parachute. Using the same method, she assembled twelve more S O S parachutes.
Now for the final test. Joanna fastened her robe tightly and went to the tower room’s window facing the valley. She drew open the heavy curtains and shielded her eyes from the cold. The snow had stopped. A dazzling combination of bright moonlight and the pinky wisps of dawn on the horizon reflected off the snow and flooded the room. For a moment she stood, transfixed.
Then she pushed the casement window open and shivered against the icy breeze. She reached out, holding a parachute by its spool, and released it. The wind complied, lifting the silk and hurtling it down the valley, where Joanna prayed it wouldn’t simply be caught in a tree or lie camouflaged in the snow. Heartened by her success, she released the next parachute, then the next, until they were all gone.
Her last step was to affix the veil to the outside of the window where it might alert someone approaching by ski. She carefully secured its top into the window frame and pulled the casement shut. The bride’s veil caught the wind and fluttered, a lonely flag in a field of snow.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind her.
Joanna whirled around. Standing by the fireplace was someone she had never seen before.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The figure by the fireplace could have stepped from another era. It wore high-waisted gray wool trousers and the long suit jacket of the 1930s. A hulking black fur draped its shoulders. Only its head was bare. Bald. Like Penny’s ghost. Skinny and bald, just like the man Marianne said she saw in the hidden staircase.
This was Redd Lodge’s ghost.
“Who are you?” At least that’s what Joanna intended to ask, but no words came out above the fierce pounding of her heart.
The figure watched her, its white, gray-stubbled face a pale spot in the dark room. It lifted its hands to the fireplace to warm them. But ghosts didn’t need to warm their hands. This was no apparition. It was a man.
Joanna remained frozen next to the window. If she had to, she could scramble outside, although she’d probably meet the same fate as Chef Jules. “Who are you?” she tried again. This time the words formed.
“Never mind that,” the man said. “Who’s the stiff?” He jerked a thumb toward Wilson’s body.
The stranger seemed relaxed, at home. He didn’t appear to have a weapon—at least nothing Joanna could see—and he was older, perhaps in his seventies. Still, his coat was bulky enough to hide a machine gun, and she wouldn’t know it.
“Why don’t you come over here and sit down? It’s got to be cold over there, especially in your nightclothes,” he said.
Refusing to move, Joanna shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten my manners.” He took a few steps forward and extended a hand. “My name is—”
“Back off!” Joanna yanked the sewing shears from her robe pocket and wielded them like a knife.
He put his hands up in surrender and retreated toward the fireplace. “All right, lady. I’m not up to anything. I swear. I just had to get warm.”
“Turn out your pockets. And take off that coat.”
He complied. A wad of kleenex fell from one. He took off his coat and shook it upside down. The coat—it was the monkey fur cape from the attic. The rest of his clothes were from the attic’s trunk, too.
“Your pant legs. Show me your socks.” She’d seen movies where people had hidden switchblades in their socks.
The man lifted his pants, revealing yellowed long johns and limp rag wool socks above hiking boots. No knife, no switchblade. With his white flannel pockets turned out and flapping at his side, he looked like a forlorn second-grader after a mean trick by the class bully. “Can I put my coat on again? It’s cold.”
“All right,” Joanna said, keeping the scissors pointed at him. He was right—it was cold. She moved closer to the fire, but she wasn’t letting down her guard.
“Nice fire you got here,” he said. “Good job. City folk usually make a mess of it.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Joanna asked.
The man extended his hand again. It was thin and dry, and closer she could smell the funk of a few days without a shower. Joanna stared at his hand until he dropped it.
“Name is Reggie. Reggie Redd,” he said. “I own the place.”
Joanna looked at him a moment. It all began to come together. The specter in the tower room’s window. The man in the secret staircase. The footprints in the attic. The missing food. It was this man all along.
“You’ve been here since we arrived.”
The man nodded.
“How—I mean, where have you been hiding?”
“In the garage. There’s a secret room upstairs. Dad was a bootlegger. He built in a spot to hide his liquor. It was my hideout when I was a kid, before me and Mom quit this place and moved into town.” He looked at his hands, clasped together in his lap. “I didn’t want you to know I was here. And you wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for this storm. I had a little kerosene heater, but it ran out of fuel. It was so cold out there.”
“You ate our food, too.”
He looked at the floor. “I only brought two sandwiches. Didn’t think I’d need more.” He raised his eyes. “You had so many leftovers. Figured you wouldn’t miss them. They were delicious.” He smiled as if the compliment would smooth over his theft. “Well, except for the wedding cake. A little gummy.”
The gluten-free cake. He was right about that. “Why were you here? Bette said the only staff who came with the place was the maid. And she left the first night.”
“I didn’t trust you. She’d told me the singer from the Jackals was getting married here, and I know how rock stars are on hotels, setting their guitars on fire and destroying things. Redd Lodge might be a little crazy, but it’s my only link to my father. Besides, I haven’t been here for years. Wanted to be in the place a while, for old time’s sake. I thought I’d stay in the garage, keep an eye on things. You’d never know.” He sighed. “It was only supposed to be for a night.”
Just a night. One night turned to three, counting tonight. Three nights in a murderous funhouse. God, she was exhausted. “As you can see, we haven’t wrecked anything.”
“No. The place looks better than ever. Turns out that wasn’t what I’d have to worry about at all.” He glanced back at Wilson’s body. “Plus, there’s that guy who keeps roaming around at odd times. The husky one. I even saw him digging under the couch’s cushions. What’s his deal?”
Tony. Had to be. “He’s some kind of minister,” Joanna said as if it explained everything. “And an ex-forger.”
“It’s something else, isn’t it, Redd Lodge?” Reggie said. “I never did get Dad’s fascination with surrealism. Mom hated it, couldn’t wait to get back to town. I can’t say I understand the lodge, but I know there’s something special here. Special and crazy.”
“Crazy is right,” Joanna agreed.
“I barely remember him, but everything he did was a little off. Even my name, Reggie. You’d think it was short for Reginald, but
no, he had to name me Regalo. Means ‘gift’ in Spanish. Told me I was his little gift.” A smile illuminated his face, then melted away. “Of course, he left us.”
“He didn’t die?”
“Oh, I’m sure he died. I just don’t know where. Or how.” He glanced at Wilson’s sheet-draped body a few feet away, then back to Joanna. “Speaking of dead—”
Joanna flopped her head back against the headrest. “That’s your rock star. You don’t have to worry about him wrecking anything.”
“I wondered if it might be him.” He seemed unsurprised, even comfortable sharing the room with a corpse. “Those famous ones always seem to come to bad ends.”
Another thought occurred to her. “Reggie?”
“Hmm?” He brought his wandering gaze back to her.
“Did you see a little girl in the hidden staircase in the library earlier today?”
“Yes. I did.” He looked away and fumbled with a piece of monkey fur. Joanna waited for him to continue. “The staircase was warmer than the attic or out in the garage, so I used the attic entrance to the secret staircase to sit for a while.” His face colored slightly in the firelight. “I cracked it open just a bit, you know, to get a little more heat. All the voices were in the great room. I figured I’d be safe. But that little girl was standing right there, right by the staircase, and she pulled it open.”
Slain in Schiaparelli (Vintage Clothing Mysteries Book 3) Page 20
