Who Killed Mona Lisa?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  “Oh,” said Otis, still avoiding her gaze. “She just didn’t want him getting in my way.”

  Claire took a deep breath. “Otis,” she said, “that’s a lie. You know it and I know it. Henry’s been helping out around this place all week. So if you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”

  Otis finally lifted his head and met her eyes. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you. Mostly because I could get in trouble if I do. I mean, you write mysteries, right?”

  “I edit them. It’s not exactly the same thing.”

  “Well, it’s just somethin’ I can’t talk about, okay?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Claire said slowly. “I’ll guess, and if I guess right, you turn a beer mug upside down.” She had a vague memory of seeing a variation on this technique used by a detective in a movie.

  Otis didn’t reply. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, a little thrilled at her own boldness. Maybe Meredith’s personality was beginning to rub off on her.

  “It was something to do with what Henry was doing,” she said. “Let’s see…I know! He was lighting candles.”

  To her surprise, Otis reached up to the shelf and quietly turned a beer mug upside down.

  “Okay,” she continued. “It might have something to do with the candles…something about them.”

  Otis continued slicing lemons.

  “Or maybe he was supposed to be doing something else.”

  Otis finished the lemons and moved on to the limes.

  “I’ve got it!” Claire said. “It’s the matches, isn’t it? It’s something to do with Henry and matches.”

  Otis reached up and turned over another mug.

  Meredith would like this game, Claire thought. At that moment her gaze fell upon the logs smoldering in the fireplace. “My God,” she said as it hit her all at once. “That fire two years ago! They think Henry may have started it, don’t they? Or maybe they know he did,” she added, almost to herself.

  Otis looked at her, his eyes pained. “Look,” he said, “nobody ever knew who started that fire, or if anyone did. It could have been a spark from the fireplace, a candle—anything.”

  “But Henry is a firebug, isn’t he?” Claire said. “That’s why his mother was so anxious to get him away from those matches.”

  “Look,” Otis said, “I have to get some more stuff for the bar.”

  After he had gone, Claire thought about the Wilson family. It all fit together, she thought: a cold, controlling mother in a troubled marriage, her disturbed adolescent son, attracted to the power and destructive potential of fire . . . burning . . . passion. But where was the passion? Paula Wilson was so constricted, so tightly wound, always so in control that it was hard imagining her in the throes of heated passion . . . maybe it was the father? She thought about Frank Wilson and his bluff, hearty manner. Friendly, yes, but hardly passionate. Maybe it was the boy himself . . . at the age of fourteen, his body was just beginning to produce the hormones that could lead to passion or destruction—or both.

  Claire shivered and drew her sweater closer around her body. Adolescence was a hazardous time, but she had trouble thinking of timid young Henry as being behind the death of two women.

  Otis returned to the bar, carrying a plastic tray full of ice. When he saw that Claire was still there, he looked disturbed. She suspected his trip to get the ice was just an excuse to end their conversation, and that he hoped she would leave before he returned. Now, as he dumped the ice into one side of the sink behind him, she stood up and went over to him. She put an elbow on the counter and leaned forward.

  “Do the police know?”

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at her. “Look, I told you, I can’t really talk about this with you. If you want to know more, why don’t you ask the Wilsons?”

  She was pretty sure the Wilsons wouldn’t tell her a thing about it, wanting to protect their son, and she was certain Otis knew this, too—but she just nodded.

  “Okay. I’m sorry if I caused you any distress. It’s just that with everything else that’s going on, it looked a little strange, that’s all.”

  That was an understatement; it was very strange, but then Claire was beginning to think everything at the Wayside Inn was a little strange.

  As she passed the small dining room on her way out of the bar, she saw Lyle sitting by himself at a table. She hesitated, then took a step into the room. Lyle sat limply in the chair, his hands folded in his lap. He looked empty, drained of all impulse, all desire. At that moment Claire realized that he must have loved Sally, loved her so much that he was willing to stay with her through what must have been a difficult time—waiting for her body to clear itself of the harmful substances she had filled it with—only to have her poisoned in the end after all. What a bitter irony, she thought, one that a poet like Lyle could appreciate but not one she would wish on anyone.

  He looked up at Claire as she passed, his face wan. His lips were pale, almost the color of the rest of his face. He gave a little nod in response to her greeting, and Claire couldn’t help thinking that he looked sad, so very sad.

  “You okay?” she said impulsively, although his manner didn’t especially invite conversation.

  He sighed deeply and ran a finger over his upper lip. “I guess . . . it’s hard to know what ‘okay’ is at a time like this, you know?”

  Claire sat down on one of the chairs scattered around the room, not too close to him, she hoped. “Yeah, actually, I do know.”

  He brightened. “You do? You . . . have you—” He stopped and looked away. “I’m sorry; it’s none of my business.”

  “No, that’s okay. I think I know something of what you’re going through. I lost my parents some years back, and there were times I didn’t . . . well, not to be too dramatic, but it was hard to imagine living through it.”

  Lyle shook his head. “I never lost anybody before. I mean, an aunt once, but she was really old and we weren’t that close. I never . . . oh, God,” he said, letting his head fall into his hands. “I never knew it could hurt so much.” He lifted his head to look at Claire. His eyes were very blue, like New York Harbor on a clear day. “How long does it last?”

  She shook her head. “It depends, I guess. When it’s sudden like this it can take a while.”

  “Did your parents die—suddenly?”

  “Yes. Yes, they did.”

  He let his head fall again. “Oh, God. Oh, God.” As he spoke, a piece of paper fluttered down off the table. Claire leaned over to pick it up.

  “Is this yours?”

  Lyle looked at it through tear-streaked eyes. “Yeah, it’s a poem I wrote today.”

  “May I read it?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. I don’t know if it’s any good.”

  Claire read the poem, written on plain white paper in a shaky hand.

  The snow falls white upon the ground,

  the flakes settling all around

  My heart lies frozen at the break of day

  Cold and hard as the soil lying stiffly

  beneath this winter garden of weeds

  You were here once, your body beside me,

  soft and white as a snowdrift

  I wait for the spring thaw, but the sun has left with you,

  all warmth faded, swept away

  People come and people go,

  but always there is the falling snow.

  Claire sat listening to the tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. In the stillness between them, the tick sounded loud, too loud, like something out of a Bergman film. She could hear the low murmur of voices from down the hall—just like in Cries and Whispers, she thought.

  “I like your poem,” she said. “It’s sad and full of feeling.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” he said with a bitter laugh, “here I thought of myself as a poet all those years, who wrote about human suffering, but now I find I didn’t know jackshit about suffering.” He shook his head. “All those poems, all that emotion on the pa
ge, and it turns out I didn’t know squat.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Claire. “There’s pain and then there’s pain. Children suffer—you suffered as a child. You just forgot.”

  “Oh, you mean like women are supposed to forget the pain of childbirth?” He snorted again. “No, I’d remember it if I’d felt anything this bad before—I swear to God I would.”

  “Well, maybe, but time has a way of erasing or at least smoothing over rough times.”

  He looked at her with tragic eyes. “She wanted to study anthropology. She was going to go to college and become an anthropologist.”

  Claire decided that either Lyle had nothing to do with Sally’s death, or he had missed his calling and should have been an actor.

  When Claire returned to the room she found Meredith and Wally lying on the bed playing Hangman. Claire sat on the edge of the bed. “I’ve been wondering what poison has a delayed effect . . . since it seems Sally didn’t ingest anything that morning.”

  “That’s if you believe Lyle,” Wally replied.

  “What’s not to believe? The guy is heartbroken. He clearly loved her.”

  “Claire . . .” Wally laid a hand on her shoulder. “Believe it or not, I’ve seen some of the most convincing displays of grief you can possibly imagine from cold-blooded murderers.”

  “How can that be?” said Meredith.

  “Well, some criminals are just good actors . . . they might actually feel remorse for their crimes, and others can cry just out of the tension and fear of being caught; they turn their fear into a pretty good approximation of grief.”

  “Wow,” said Meredith. “Cheeky buggers.”

  “And,” Wally continued, “perfectly innocent people have been convicted for a crime because they didn’t show enough remorse at the death of a loved one. Maybe they were in shock or denial, or didn’t know how to grieve. My point is really that you can’t tell that much from a person’s reaction.”

  “Well, I believe Lyle,” said Claire, getting up and taking off her sweater. The radiators were on full blast, and the room was warm, the window glass frosted up on the inside.

  Meredith rolled over onto her side and began humming softly while she shuffled the cards. “Do you know the mushroom man, the mushroom man, the mushroom man?”

  Claire stared at her. “What are you singing?”

  Meredith stopped what she was doing. “Do you know—the mushroom man,” she repeated slowly.

  “That’s not how it goes,” Claire said.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry,” Claire said, as a tingle of excitement began to thread its way through her stomach.

  “How does it really go?” Wally asked.

  “Never mind . . . I have an idea.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “It’s just a hunch . . .” Claire left the room and started down the stairs.

  Meredith came flying after her. “Hey, wait for me! Where are you going?” she said as she followed Claire through the hotel toward the kitchen.

  “You’ll see,” Claire replied. “I just want to follow this hunch.”

  They found Max in the kitchen chopping vegetables. The shiny blade of his knife sliced cleanly through the stalk of celery he held pinned down to the heavy butcher-block counter.

  “Hello,” he said, looking up as they entered. He was immaculate as ever in his white shirt and apron, the fleshy folds of his neck protruding from his starched white collar.

  “Can I ask you something?” Claire began as he tossed chopped celery into a large soup tureen.

  “Of course.” He reached for a bunch of carrots and proceeded to dice them with the quick assurance only years of practice can give. There was something mesmerizing about his actions; Claire found it hard not to watch as his plump fingers wrapped around the carrots, holding them gently, almost delicately, as the knife fell swiftly and cleanly on the cutting board. There was a pleasure in watching someone do something well, she thought, even if it was only chopping vegetables.

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  She could hear the drift of the Danube in his speech, his Austrian origin thickening his consonants like cornstarch in a sauce.

  “What did Sally have to eat for dinner yesterday?”

  Max stopped and looked at her. “Why do you want to know?”

  “She has a hunch!” Meredith declared.

  “Really? A hunch?” said Max.

  Claire shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Max pursed his thick lips. “Let me see…she had the chicken marsala…no, that’s what her boyfriend had. She’s a vegetarian. She had…the wild mushroom crêpes.”

  Claire felt the tingle in her stomach grow. “Are you sure?”

  Max nodded. “Yes; I remember she was the only one who ordered it. Why do you ask?” His pale blue eyes widened, and with his smooth pink skin and bald head, he suddenly reminded Claire of an oversized baby.

  Claire shook her head and looked out the kitchen window at the old church, which looked lonely and deserted in the snow.

  “Wow,” Meredith said softly. “The mushroom man.”

  Max frowned. “Who’s that?”

  “No one,” said Meredith. “It’s just this nursery rhyme I was singing, only I got the words wrong, and Claire got this idea—”

  “Well, it’s a long shot, I’ll admit.” Claire sighed. “But something killed that girl, and if it wasn’t drugs, then someone’s got to track it down. Where do you get your wild mushrooms?”

  “Mostly from the market. But sometimes from James.”

  “James Pewter?”

  “Yes, he’s a mushroom collector. He knows quite a lot about them.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes—he keeps jars of dried mushrooms in his cellar. You should go have a look.”

  “We might just do that,” Meredith answered, with a look at Claire.

  “And last night?” said Claire. “What did you use last night?”

  Max thought for a moment. “I used some from this jar.” Opening the lid of the dishwasher, he displayed a rack of clean glasses.

  “You already washed it,” Claire said, disappointed.

  “Yes, last night.”

  “Where did the mushrooms come from?”

  “From . . . I guess they were some of James’s.” Max ran a hand over his plump chin. “This is one of his jars.”

  Claire left the kitchen and headed back down the hall, where she found Wally waiting for her.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Claire thinks it’s the mushrooms,” Meredith said as she came around the corner, chewing on a stub of carrot.

  “Mushrooms? What mushrooms?” Wally ran a hand through his thick grey hair, a gesture that always made Claire’s heart jump a little. She loved his hair, loved the way it curled at the nape of his neck or fell in rumpled locks over his forehead.

  “The mushrooms in the food!” Meredith called out excitedly.

  “It’s just a theory,” Claire said.

  Meredith hopped up and down. “See, Sally had mushrooms for dinner, and Claire thinks—”

  Wally frowned. “But she didn’t show any symptoms until the next day.”

  “Right,” said Claire. “Excuse me—I have a phone call to make.”

  She went up to the room and dug her little blue address book out of her suitcase. She had thrown it in at the last minute as she was packing, just in case. She leafed through the book’s dog-eared pages, looking for the number of the man she hoped could help her: Willard Hughes.

  It was not a conversation she was looking forward to. Willard Hughes was an enormously successful writer, but as a human being, he was a disaster. Never very at home around people, he was a man of jerks and starts, his body like a badly tuned engine. His personality had jagged edges you could cut yourself on if you weren’t careful. With his restless, twitching body and his whiny voice, he made most people uncomfortable. But now that Blanche DuBois was dead, Willard was Claire’s
star author. Mysteries just seemed to come pouring out of the fiction machine that was Willard Hughes.

  When he first came to her office, Willard was living in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, but Death Pays a House Call had taken off quickly, and now he owned a penthouse on the Upper East Side, just off Fifth Avenue, not far from where Jackie Kennedy lived in the last years of her life.

  She located his number and went down to the phone at the front desk. She dialed his number, and he picked up after the second ring.

  “Willard Hughes here.” He always answered the phone this way.

  “Hello, Willard, it’s Claire.”

  “Oh, hello. What can I do for you?”

  She took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you about something in one of your books.”

  “Sure, go ahead.” She prayed he would not ask her any questions, such as why she wanted this information. She didn’t want Willard prying into her affairs, and she didn’t feel like explaining to him the events of the past few days. She just wanted to get her answer and get off the phone.

  “You remember in your first book you had a mushroom poisoning?”

  “Vaguely . . . that was quite a few books ago, you know.” Willard liked to boast about how prolific he was.

  “Yes, I know, but I know how thorough your research is. I wonder if you’d remember the name of that particular mushroom?”

  “No, I really don’t.” He sounded irritated.

  “Well, if I were at home or at work I’d have a copy of it, of course, but I wonder if you’d mind looking it up for me.”

  Willard sighed. “Just a minute,” he said, putting the phone down. Claire could hear his footsteps as he went into the other room. After a few moments he returned.

  “It was Amanita virosa.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Claire said, jotting it down.

  Sure enough, then, the inevitable question came: “Want to have lunch when you’re back?”

  “Sure, that would be nice.”

  “Okay, give me a call.”

  Claire hung up the phone and looked at what she had written: Amanita virosa. She remembered her dear late friend Amelia Moore had mentioned once that most of the truly deadly mushrooms were members of the amanita family. Well, poor Amelia was gone, but Claire knew just who to call to get the rest of the information she needed. She picked up the phone again and dialed Sarah DuBois. She knew the number by heart; since her sister Blanche’s death, Sarah had become one of Claire’s closest friends.