Who Killed Mona Lisa?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  “Uh, nowhere.” She glanced over her shoulder to see who was coming out of the dining room. The door opened and Rebecca White emerged, as cool and crisp as ever, as though she had just emerged from a relaxing spa instead of a heated argument. She was followed by Detective Hornblower, who had not fared quite so well: his tie was loosened, his jacket rumpled, and he looked as though he could use a drink.

  Ms. White nodded curtly to Claire and Max and marched right out of the hotel. Detective Hornblower stood where he was and watched her go, shaking his head. “That young woman is going to do very well for herself in Boston,” he commented. “She has the soul of a prosecutor—or a shark, which is pretty much the same thing.” He turned to Claire. “I understand you have some letters of interest up in your room.”

  She nodded. “I—I mean, we—think so.”

  “Good. Would now be a good time to go get them?”

  “Sure. You need the key?”

  “I have a master key to all the rooms in the building,” said Frank Wilson, coming up behind Max. “What is it you need a key for?”

  Detective Hornblower explained about the letters, and the innkeeper frowned. “The staff isn’t supposed to be leaving letters in the drawers; it’s for the guests. Are you sure it’s Mona’s handwriting?”

  “Pretty sure,” said Claire, then she realized that the obvious question to follow was how she knew, which could lead to the revelation of Meredith’s theft of the restaurant checks. Fortunately, though, she was saved by Meredith herself, who came running down the hall, all out of breath, followed by Jeffrey. He wore a grey parka, a pack of cigarettes stuffed into the top pocket. It appeared that he was on his way outside for a smoke.

  “Have you heard?” Meredith said excitedly. “Detective Hornblower is offering to pay for anyone to stay at the inn until he’s finished with his investigation! Cool, huh?”

  “Sort of tidy, keeping all the suspects together under the same roof, huh?” Jeffrey said smoothly, sliding an unlit cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

  “It was Ms. White’s idea,” the detective said. “The DA’s office in Boston doesn’t want to lose potential leads.”

  “Or potential murderers. Well, sounds good to me,” Jeffrey said. “I’m glad Richard convinced me not to order the crêpes,” he added as he sauntered down the hall toward the front door.

  “When will the tests for the mushrooms be done?” Meredith said.

  “Probably tomorrow . . . maybe even later today. I’m on my way to the crime lab as soon as I finish upstairs,” Hornblower answered, placing his bedraggled fedora on his head.

  “Well, then, let’s go,” Frank Wilson said, holding up a thick set of keys attached to a chain that was itself attached to his belt. Claire had not noticed the key chain before, and she wondered if he always wore it.

  When the innkeeper and the detective had gone upstairs, Max turned to Meredith. “I have something I was working on in the kitchen, but I’m not sure if it’s quite right. Do you want to come taste it for me?”

  “What is it?” she said, her expression half-expectant, half-suspicious.

  Max cocked his head to one side. “Well, it’s got a lot of chocolate in it . . . let’s see, what else does it have?”

  “Okay!” Meredith said. “That’s good enough for me!”

  She followed Max into the kitchen, skipping. Claire kept thinking about what Jeffrey had said so casually: I’m glad Richard convinced me not to order the crêpes. Was he trying deliberately to implicate his friend, she wondered, and if so, what else did he know? She remembered seeing Sally in Richard’s room that day, listening to his Piaf recordings—or so he said.

  Claire spent the afternoon in front of the fire in the tavern reading one of the paperback mysteries she’d found in the bookshelf upstairs. Surrounded by real death, she had a sudden, sharp craving for fiction, for the safety of make-believe murders and fictional killers. The inn was quiet: Jeffrey and Richard had gone into town for the afternoon, and Chris had taken his father out for a drive to the police station to talk about when Mona’s body would be released to the family. Detective Hornblower had made it clear that the body would remain in police custody until all the forensic evidence was gathered, but the yellow plastic tape cordoning off the basement—or “crime scene,” as Meredith liked to call it—had been removed early that morning, and Chris expressed hope that his sister’s remains would be released soon. Poor Lyle was in his room, which he’d apparently hardly left since Sally’s death.

  Wally and Meredith were also out, in Wally’s car, to get some Theraflu for Claire and—no doubt—cookies for Meredith. Claire was enjoying her time to herself, and the gentle crackle of the logs in the fireplace was the only sound in the room. She was reading a noirish crime thriller entitled Lucky Stiff and had just gotten to the part where the detective, a hard-drinking ex-boxer, was about to make love to the dame—who was probably crooked, but he didn’t care because she was so alluring, with “lips that just kept coming at you, like ripe strawberries, only sweeter” when she suddenly heard the door to the bar opening slowly, tentatively, its hinges creaking softly. She looked up to see young Henry Wilson, half hiding behind the door, leaning only his head and shoulders into the room.

  “Hello,” said Claire.

  “ ’Lo,” he replied softly.

  “Is there something you’d like?” she said.

  He shook his head, then his soft brown eyes widened. “Do you need more wood on the fire?”

  Claire looked at the logs in the grate; admittedly, the fire could use some more wood. “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I can do it.”

  He sighed deeply, then swallowed. “Please,” he said in an even softer voice. “Please let me do it.”

  Claire half expected Paula Wilson to come swooping into the room, but out in the hall all was silent. She looked at the neat pile of logs stacked to one side of the hearth.

  “All right,” she said. “Just one or two—okay?”

  “Okay,” Henry agreed, stepping into the room. He wore a flannel shirt a size or two too big for him, jeans, and snow boots. Claire didn’t think it could hurt to let him put a log or two on the fire . . . after all, she was there to watch. As the boy walked quietly over to the kindling, Claire was filled with pity for him. Physically, he took after his mother; small for his age, he was thin and fragile, and had her quick, nervous hands and unhappy eyes.

  As the boy bent to load the wood on the fire, Otis Knox entered the bar carrying a case of beer. When he saw Henry, he put the case down and approached Claire.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “There’s nothing wrong with letting a boy put a few logs on the fire,” Claire replied, watching Henry stack the wood expertly on the rear of the andirons. Doing this task, his painful awkwardness vanished, and he became graceful and efficient; his movements had the economy of practice. He seemed unaware that they were talking about him; in fact, he didn’t appear to be aware of their presence at all.

  Otis moaned and ran a hand through his curly hair. “Oh, man, what if Mrs. Wilson comes in and sees this?”

  Claire turned to him. “Does she have you all so frightened as that?”

  Otis frowned. “What do you mean? I’m not frightened, I just don’t want any trouble!”

  “Well, then, you can blame it all on me,” Claire said smugly, and turned back to Henry, who had picked up the poker and was giving the fire an expert jab to move the logs closer together. A little flurry of sparks flew as the heavy iron poker struck the wood, shimmering briefly and then dying back. Henry leaned the poker back up against the stone hearth, brushed off his hands, and returned to Claire’s chair.

  “Thank you,” he said in a small voice. There was hunger in his deep-set brown eyes—but hunger for what? Claire wondered. Attention, companionship, understanding, love? He was such a pathetic, fragile thing that she longed to wrap him in her arms and soothe away all the cold frost that had built up in his heart.

  O
tis turned back to the bar with a shrug. He picked up his case of beer and heaved it up onto the counter, then went behind the bar to put the bottles away. Henry stood hesitantly by Claire’s chair, his weight on one thin leg.

  “Would you like some cider?” Claire asked.

  He opened his mouth and was about to answer when the sound of his mother’s voice came from down the hall.

  “Henry! Where are you? I’m looking for you!”

  The boy froze, his whole body rigid. Then he sprang to the door, flung it open, and called out, “Coming, Mother!” With a final longing look at Claire, he disappeared from the room, closing the door behind him.

  Claire watched Otis unload bottles from the case of beer, his muscular arms thick as the oak logs on the fire. She was about to say something to him about Henry when she heard the sound of a car engine outside. She went to the window and peered out at the back parking lot to see Wally Jackson’s car pull up. The door opened and Wally got out, hatless, hunched up against the cold. A bitter wind was blowing in from the north, and it whipped across the barren landscape, rattling the shutters and shaking the whole house like a living thing. Meredith got out of the passenger side holding a plastic bag. The wind almost ripped the bag from her hand.

  Claire met them at the front door. Wally stamped the snow from his boots and rubbed his bare hands together; he had apparently gone out without gloves. Claire shook her head.

  “It’s cold out there,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be—”

  “I know,” he interrupted, “but there are more important things.”

  “Oh? Like what?”

  Meredith squeezed in from behind him. Her face was flushed, and she was out of breath.

  “You were right!” she exclaimed. “It was the mushrooms!”

  “What?” Claire said. “How do you know?”

  “The guy from the crime lab is down at the police station talking to Detective Hornblower about it right now!”

  Claire turned to Wally. “Is that true?”

  He nodded. “Yes. We stopped by just as Detective Murphy was talking to Hornblower about it. He said that they found—”

  “Alpha and beta amantadines!” Meredith cried. “Right? Isn’t that what they called them?”

  “Right. Anyway, it’s a very specific toxin, and they wouldn’t have caught it unless they knew exactly what to look for.”

  “How about that?” Claire murmured.

  Wally shook his head. “You know, in all my years in New York, I never even heard of a mushroom poisoning . . . not in my precinct, or in any other. And here we are in the middle of Massachusetts . . . I don’t know; it’s pretty strange.”

  “I’ll say!” Meredith exclaimed. “It’s downright creepy!” Her tone of voice, though, said that it was absolutely thrilling.

  “How about that?” Claire repeated. She couldn’t help the sensation of pleasure she was feeling. Yes, it was a horrible thing that had happened, but . . . if it weren’t for her, there was no telling how much longer it would have taken to determine the mysterious cause of death—if they ever did.

  But her next thought was not pleasant at all: someone had deliberately poisoned poor Sally.

  “It’s interesting,” Meredith observed. “The first murder was so disorganized, passionate—and phallic.”

  “Meredith!” Claire frowned and shook her head.

  Meredith rolled her eyes. “Well, it was! It reeked of grand opera—Carmen and Don José and all that. And yet the second killing is so different…so well planned, and tidy. And not only that,” she added, “but poisoning is a traditionally ‘feminine’ way of killing.”

  “But not used exclusively by women,” Wally interjected.

  “No, but by the second murder the killer had changed character entirely…I wonder if we’re dealing here with a schizoid personality disorder, someone with a confused gender identity—or even multiple personalities.”

  “Or multiple killers,” Claire suggested.

  “That hardly seems likely, unless the two of them are in cahoots somehow,” Wally observed. “Two murders in the same place, in the same week; that would be too much of a coincidence.”

  “Coincidence is more prevalent in real life than in fiction,” Claire mused.

  “Sure, but come on!” said Meredith. “That’s farfetched, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Wally replied. “However, as you pointed out yesterday, ‘Once the impossible has been eliminated…’”

  Meredith cocked her head to one side. “I guess we’d better start eliminating some possibilities.”

  By late afternoon Claire’s head had begun to pound again, so she went upstairs to lie down. She lay on the bed sipping from a mug of Nighttime Theraflu, watching the pale pink light of the setting sun reflecting off the frozen white landscape. The lemon-flavored steam soothed her aching head, and before long she slid into a thick, medicine-induced slumber. Her limbs leaden with sleep, Claire dreamed that she was running across a snow-covered field, pursued by a woman wearing a long white dress. The more she tried to run, the more her feet sank down into the deep snowdrifts covering the field. Everything in the dream was white: the snow stretching in all directions, as far as her eyes could see, the woman’s dress, billowing out behind like wings; even the sky was an opaque greyish white, a thick cloud cover hanging low over the field.

  The clouds reminded her of the mosquito netting that had hung over her bed when she was a child and her family vacationed one summer on the Riviera. Ever since that summer Claire had suffered from claustrophobia. Those nets, thick and white and impenetrable, and her terror at waking in the middle of the night, disoriented, and having to fight her way through what seemed like endless layers of material—this had stayed with her over the years, developing into a fear of entrapment.

  Turning to look over her shoulder at the Woman in White, who was gaining on her, Claire failed to see the deep soft bank in front of her, and her foot sank deeply into the drift and she fell. As the woman hovered over her, her long white dress billowing like the mosquito nets, Claire was seized with the same primal terror she had felt as a child. She opened her mouth to scream—but was choked by the layers of white fabric streaming like waves over her. She raised her hands in an attempt to claw through the material, but it was closing in on her, cutting off her air . . .

  She awoke abruptly, in a heightened state of awareness, conscious of everything around her: the stillness of the room, a single shaft of silver moonlight streaming in through the window. She looked up at the moon, so white and cold, high in the winter sky, a dispassionate eye looking down on her, on them all, utterly indifferent to their pathetic lives.

  She sighed and dug her feet deeper under the covers, wriggling her toes between the flannel sheets. She missed the warmth of Wally’s body, the rhythm of his breathing, so steady and peaceful. She looked out the window at the field behind the inn. As she watched, a solitary fox emerged from the woods and trotted across the snow, its feet skimming lightly over the surface. Halfway across, it stopped, sniffed at the air, one paw lifted, like a bird dog on a scent. Then, evidently satisfied, the fox continued on its way, trotting gracefully across the glistening snow, the only thing moving in the moonlit meadow.

  She shivered as she thought about the woman in her dream, her white dress billowing around her. For many Native Americans, Claire remembered, white was the color of death—not black, as in European cultures. She shivered again as she thought of the woman hovering over her, floating above her like . . . like a Destroying Angel.

  Chapter 20

  Claire awoke a second time to the aroma of bread baking. She lay there for a few minutes, enjoying the smell, listening to the rattling of pots and pans in the kitchen below, then she threw off the covers, pulled on a cardigan, and went downstairs.

  Downtairs, Claire heard loud voices coming from the other end of the hall.

  “This is ridiculous!”

  She recognized James Pewter’s voice. He sounded extremely agit
ated. Claire walked down the hall toward the front door, where she saw the historian being handcuffed by a uniformed officer as Detective Hornblower watched. Rebecca White was there, too, evidently unruffled by Pewter’s rage. Wally stood in the corner watching, and Claire slipped in beside him.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered, but he just squeezed her hand in response.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Hornblower was saying as the officer fastened the cuffs behind Pewter’s back.

  “This is absurd; anyone could have sprinkled mushroom powder on her food!” Pewter bellowed.

  Rebecca White regarded him coolly. “Perhaps, but who else would have known the deadly effects of the poison?”

  “It was right there in the book, for Chrissakes!” Pewter exploded. “Any book on mushrooms will tell you the same thing!”

  Ms. White shrugged. “But you were the one with a motive.”

  The historian’s brown eyes widened in disbelief. “What? What motive?”

  “You were afraid Sally Richmond was about to expose your affair with Mona Callahan.”

  “What? Who told you that?’

  In response, the assistant DA merely shrugged again. Pewter’s face, already red, deepened to scarlet. At that moment Frank Wilson came hurrying around the corner; it was clear he had just heard the news. Right behind him was Otis Knox, who had his white bartending apron tied around his waist.

  “Frank!” Pewter cried. “Tell them they’re making a mistake; you know it couldn’t be me! I wasn’t the one having an aff—”

  “Come along, Mr. Pewter,” Hornblower interrupted. “You’ll have plenty of time to tell your side of the story down at the station.”

  “My side of the story?” Pewter sputtered. He looked around at the others, who stood watching. “Will somebody please say something?” he pleaded, but Frank Wilson just looked at him, arms folded, a deep frown on his big face. Otis Knox averted his eyes, and Claire didn’t know what to say.

  Rebecca White followed Detective Hornblower as he led Pewter away, a satisfied look on her patrician face. The heavy front door slammed with a loud thud, and there was a long, uncomfortable silence, which was broken by the sound of Jack Callahan’s slow, rusty voice.