A Little Night Murder

by Nancy Martin

  “That’s my hope. So, will you come?”

  Emma stole a glance at me. “Is it okay with Mick?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re my sister. I want you there. So does he. Just don’t bring a banjo.”

  “I won’t,” she promised, still grinning. “But—are you sure? I mean, are you sure this is the smart thing to do?”

  “Are you referring to the curse?”

  “You know it as well as I do, Sis. The Blackbird curse puts Mick’s life in danger.”

  “It’s an old wives’ tale,” I said firmly. “It’s not real.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Emma said, but her tone said she had doubts.

  By the time we turned into the shared driveway between Lexie’s temporary home and the Tuttle house, I had revealed our whole wedding plan. Dusk had gathered, and the long shadows thrown across the lush grass by the trees on the two properties were fast melting into darkness.

  “How do you want to play this?” Emma asked, foot on the brake at the bottom of the driveway, where the single lane split into two. To the left, we could see the glow of lights at Lexie’s place. To the right, the twin mansion looked dark. Out of instinct, Emma killed her headlights.

  I pointed. “How about if we leave the truck behind that hedge? You stay here, and I’ll walk up to the house myself.”

  Emma pulled her pickup alongside the ragged hedge and shut off the noisy engine. “No way I’m letting you do anything alone.”

  I popped open the passenger door and climbed out of the truck. “I’ll be okay. Stay here.”

  Emma got out, too, and met me at the hedge. She planted her hand on my chest. “If things were the other way around, would you let me go alone?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Okay, then. Here. I’ve even got a flashlight. It’ll be pitch-dark soon. Let’s go.”

  We started up the driveway and soon reached a gate I hadn’t noticed before. Tonight it was closed and locked, barring our path. Emma clambered over it easily, leaving me on the wrong side. She faced me between the rails, smiling through the gloom. “This looks like the end of the road for you, Sis. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

  “I won’t know until I see what the options are. I have to go, too.”

  Determined, I stepped up on the bottom rung of the gate and teetered there, trying to figure out how to get my leg over the top bar without rolling my rotund self into the dust below. I reached for help. “Give me a hand, Em.”

  She deliberately misunderstood my meaning and began to clap. “Here’s a round of applause for you, Humpty Dumpty.”

  “Come on! You won’t know what to look for. Help me over.”

  “Nora, this is the universe’s way of saying you’re not supposed to go breaking into anybody’s house tonight.”

  “If you won’t help me now, I’ll do it myself! I’ve been going to yoga class, and the instructor says I’m very supple.” I stepped up on the next couple of rungs and with an involuntary grunt tried to boost myself over. When that didn’t work, I attempted to heave my leg sideways, but my belly got in the way. I tried the other leg. No luck. It soon became apparent that I wasn’t going to manage getting my large self over the top rail. Feeling a bit like Winnie the Pooh stuck in the honey tree, I realized I couldn’t seem to get down, either. Panting, I hugged the top rail. My belly was just too big to budge. I was hanging on for dear life.

  Emma smothered her laughter. “Supple doesn’t help if you’re the shape of an eggplant. Wait, let me get my phone out. I want to take a picture. This is prime blackmail stuff.”

  “I have plenty of blackmail material on you, too, remember. And I could tell Libby you want the full bridesmaid package. In a heartbeat, she’ll have you looking like a porn version of Little Bo Peep. Help me, dammit!”

  “Okay, okay, just don’t fall. Here, put your other leg over this way.”

  I felt her grab my ankle and push. “Wait! I can’t—”

  “No, no, this way. Forget about being so damn prissy for once, will you? I’ve seen your underwear before.” As I finally managed to push my right leg over the top rail, she added, “I’ve just never seen a pair that big until now. When did you start going in for granny panties?”

  I tried giving her a kick but slipped and barely caught my balance. The next thing I knew, Emma had a grip on my shoulders, and she hauled me over the gate. With a yelp, I fell—arms and legs pinwheeling—but fortunately Emma was there to break my fall. I landed softly on top of my sister. Emma somehow landed face-first in the dirt and cursed.

  “Shh!” I scrambled to my feet and brushed myself off. “Do you want to wake the whole neighborhood?”

  “Me?” She got up and spat dust. “It was you who— Oh, never mind. You okay?”

  I gathered my dignity. “Fine.”

  “Well, we’re surely over the worst. Let’s go.”

  We walked up the long driveway together—both of us in heels and dresses, Emma’s face smeared with dust and me feeling meekly guilty that I had come this far. Not speaking, we listened for any clue that our less-than-clandestine arrival had been heard. I strained to hear a sound that might indicate the house was occupied. I hoped Ox Oxenfeld had been right—that the whole cast of characters had gone to the theater to rehearse for Monday night’s performance.

  For once, no cars were parked in the circular drive in front of the Tuttle house, and no music came from any of the windows. Someone had turned on the hanging lantern in the portico over the front door—as if to light their way home after the rehearsal.

  Reassured, I led Emma quietly across the terrace to the patio out back, where a stone retaining wall separated the improvised rehearsal space from the garden beyond.

  “Where are we going?” Emma whispered.

  I pointed. “See that roof behind the tall bushes? It’s a folly. Let’s try this way.”

  I found an overgrown garden path and pushed past some spindly foxgloves. We stepped over the remains of a peony hedge now slumped with rotting blooms. Emma shoved me aside and went first. Even with the flashlight, it was hard to see where to go. Underfoot, the weeds on the gravel path were worn down as if by recent foot traffic, however.

  “This better not be poison ivy,” Emma said over her shoulder. “All I need right now is a rash on my ass. This dress is too damn short.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  Together, we pressed through the jungle of the untended garden and finally emerged on the other side. We found ourselves standing on a grassy spot in front of a shabby building.

  The folly had been constructed to look like a small Roman temple. It was round with a rotunda-style roof held up by a series of Doric columns that hadn’t been painted in a long time. Between the columns were plinths where statues of nymphs might once have frolicked. Tonight all the plinths were empty but one. On it stood a single marble statue of a robed woman who looked straight at us with blank white eyes. The beam of Emma’s flashlight played from her bare feet up her nearly naked body. She had a lyre in one hand, holding it to her shoulder. At one time the other hand might have been raised to pluck the strings, but the whole right arm was now missing.

  “Creepy,” Emma said.

  “I think it’s pretty. I’m sure Jenny appreciated it.”

  “So this is it? Her secret garden?”

  “Let’s look inside.”

  With her flashlight, Emma pointed out the path that circled the building. I went first and followed the way to the back. My heart leaped when I saw a door. It was a recent addition to the temple—a modern screen door with an aluminum door on the inside. Miraculously, it was unlocked.

  Behind me, Emma said. “Not exactly top security.”

  An eerie blue glow greeted us.

  In the middle of the round room stood a baby grand piano with a lava lamp sitting on to
p. Inside the lamp, a blue blob of goop bubbled up, creating a weird glowing circle of light. By that creepy illumination, I could see we were surrounded by file cabinets covered with silly magnets, a messy desk, and a frumpy, rump-sprung upholstered chair with an ottoman, where someone had obviously spent many hours. A collection of old bottles was lined up on the windowsill. A handwritten musical score stood on the piano’s music stand. Near it, a wide-mouthed jar—a lumpy, hand-thrown bit of pottery—bristled with pencils that waited for the composer’s hand to grab one and begin scribbling on the pages again.

  Jenny’s hand, I was willing to bet. This was her creative lair. She had come to this place to be alone and to create her own music.

  Emma played her flashlight on the far wall. She cursed softly.

  Across from the piano, someone had hung a collage of photographs. The collage was studded with darts that had been thrown at the person featured in all the pictures.

  “Who’s the broad?” Emma asked, staring at the dozens of defaced photographs.

  “Boom Boom.” My voice hardly made its way out of my throat as I stared at the photos. “Jenny’s mother.”

  Emma let out a slow whistle. “Looks like Jenny wasn’t too happy with mom.”

  Several of the photos had been balled up or torn in pieces, but someone had reassembled them and stuck them back on the wall so the collage could go on serving as a dart board. Some photos had been scrawled with curse words. On others, Boom Boom had been slashed with mustaches or devil horns. One particularly large picture of Boom Boom in her pre-blue prime—posing in tap shoes and a short dress with a top hat—had been scribbled over with two words:

  DIE BITCH.

  On the central photo, Boom Boom’s head shot, a large, gleaming carving knife had been plunged directly into Boom Boom’s face.

  The rage on the wall was so powerful that it blew me down. I caught my balance on the piano and plunked onto the bench. Jenny hadn’t just disliked her mother. Her hate was scrawled and spewed and stabbed onto the collage.

  I found myself staring at the wall through a forest of aluminum cans—cans of energy drink that stood around the lava lamp. More empty cans lay in a small trash basket beside the piano’s bench.

  Emma sat down on the bench beside me. “You okay?”

  I nodded, unable to speak. I may have been exasperated with our mother from time to time, but I had never felt the kind of profound rage that pulsed off the wall before us.

  Emma arranged her fingers carefully on the piano keys. She struck a quiet chord. The notes rose around us—a beautiful sound in that small, enclosed space with the open rotunda over our heads.

  She said. “Judging by the shooting gallery, Jenny and her mother didn’t get along, huh?”

  “Boom Boom bullied her, belittled her. She probably wanted to keep Jenny firmly in a subservient role so Boom Boom could go on being the star. If Jenny wanted to break out, become a person on her own, she had to come here,” I guessed. “This is where she could be herself. Compose her own music.”

  “Okay,” Emma said. “What thirteen-year-old doesn’t get mad at her mom once in a while? But hanging all those pictures and throwing darts at ’em—this is bad juju.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She wanted Boom Boom dead, didn’t she?”

  “Pretty obvious,” Emma agreed. “Did somebody know that? And bump off Jenny first, before she finally worked up the courage to whack her own mother?”

  “I don’t know.” I picked up one of the sheets of her music. The paper shivered as my hands began to quake. Maybe the shy, quiet piano player I thought I’d been trying to help had actually been some kind of psychopath.

  To learn more, I got up from the piano bench and wobbled over to the desk. I opened the top drawers and found pencils, a pitch pipe and a shallow clutter of blank note cards. But in the last drawer there was a copy of the photo of the boy—the same as the one that had fallen from Jenny’s pocket.

  I pulled out the photo and held it up to the light of the lava lamp. No, it wasn’t quite the same photo. I peered closer. It was a different child. Or a different year. Under that picture lay a few more. I pulled them out. Two, three, four, five, six school photographs of little boys. And two girls.

  I stared at the pictures and tried to make sense of what was in my hands. All those children. What did it mean?

  I wasn’t paying attention as Emma got up from the piano bench and went snooping around the small, cluttered room. “There’s a big blue bottle of something over here. Looks medicinal. And, hey—there’s a little fridge.” Emma picked her way around the ottoman. “Whoa. Somebody dropped a plate of cake. There’s icing all over the—Oh, my God!”

  Emma backpedaled toward me, cursing a garbled streak.

  I dropped the photographs in my hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Holy shit, holy shit! There’s a dead lady over there!” Emma did a dithery dance of horror beside me.

  I pushed past Emma to look on the other side of the desk. On the floor in front of the small refrigerator lay a woman—Boom Boom’s nurse. I recognized her uniform and her braided hairdo. She lay sprawled on the floor much as Jenny had—one hand clutching her heart. She must have fallen as she was stricken. A plate, a fork and chunks of what was surely a piece of chocolate cake lay scattered around her.

  In the next second, Emma and I were standing outside the folly, holding each other and jabbering with panic.

  “We’ve got to call the police,” I said when my wits began to return.

  “Screw that! I say we close the door and get the hell out of here. I don’t want to get caught at a crime scene.”

  “Crime scene?”

  “You don’t think she died of natural causes, do you?”

  No, I didn’t think that. And the police weren’t going to, either.

  With hands shaking so hard I could barely manage, I found my handbag and dug out the card from the state trooper who’d helped me last winter. Ricci picked up immediately, and when I identified myself, he listened to my story without interrupting. When I finished, he said curtly that he was close by and would arrive within a few minutes.

  I ended the call with trembling fingers. Suddenly I felt horrible. Light-headed and nauseated. My knees turned to water. First Jenny, and now Boom Boom’s nurse. From far, far away, Emma called my name. But the gloom of the garden closed around me, and the scent of rotting flowers became overwhelming. I felt the dark vegetation rush up around my face, and I could hardly breathe.

  When I came around again, I was sprawled in a patio lounge chair and a blur of people moved around me.

  Emma told me to breathe. She had a bottle of water, and she pushed it into my hands. “Drink this,” she ordered. “It’s from my truck, so it’s safe. It might be Poison Central around here.”

  I sipped the water. Choked on it. Tried again but couldn’t swallow. My brain finally stopped spinning and I sat up unsteadily. The police had arrived, and the whirling lights from all three cars flashed around the patio, turning it into a bizarre carousel.

  Over my head, Ricci spoke with Emma. Beneath his Mountie hat, I saw his hard expression, but I couldn’t hear his voice. Those dancing red lights were deafening. Which didn’t make sense.

  Michael arrived like the cavalry charging into battle.

  He shouldered Ricci aside and went down on one knee in front of me. He grabbed both of my hands. His tight grip pinched me back into full consciousness. His worried face swam into focus. The swelling around his eye where his mother had hit him looked worse than ever. He said, “You okay?”

  “I think so. I fainted, that’s all.” I touched my belly and felt Baby Girl give a reassuring wriggle.

  “What the hell is going on? Em?” He glared up at my sister. “Are you an idiot? You let Nora romp around in the dark like this?”

  “We weren’t romping.” Emma’s harsh tone matched h
is. “Anyway, it was all her idea. I couldn’t stop her. Now I think she’s in shock.”

  I realized I was wearing a blanket that must have come from the trunk of Ricci’s cruiser. I pushed my way out of it. “I know we shouldn’t have come,” I said, sounding maddeningly feeble. “I couldn’t get over the fence, and Emma saw my underwear but then—then we found the nurse. She’s dead. Just like Jenny. Except there’s cake on the floor. Is it my fault?”

  Michael looked stymied. “Why would any of it be your fault?”

  “I should have done something, I think. But I—I can’t seem to— Wait.” The first sensible thought shot up through my woolly brain. “Where’s Noah?”

  “He’s at home,” Michael said gently. “Rawlins dropped by. So when Emma called, I asked him to babysit.”

  I hadn’t been aware of Emma calling anyone. A lot had happened, and somehow I had checked out. I put my hand on Baby Girl again, and she gave me a reality-restoring kick. She was safe.

  Reassured but still dizzy, I said, “We haven’t discussed appropriate babysitters. Rawlins is okay, but Michael, there’s a lot we haven’t talked about. Little things, maybe, but important to discuss sensibly, no yelling. Binkies, for instance. Should we let our child suck on a binky? And what about nursery schools? Even though that’s a few years away, we should definitely be thinking about nursery schools.”

  Michael and Ricci exchanged a look and reached some kind of silent agreement.

  “Noah’s fine,” Michael assured me, helping me to stand. “You, I’m not so sure about.”

  With the blessing of the police, Michael took me out onto the driveway and helped me into another monster truck—this one cherry red with NICKY’S TOWING SERVICE printed on the side.

  Inside, a hundred different lights glowed like the cockpit of a jetliner. I said, “Why do we need a tow truck?”

  “It’s not a tow truck.” Michael started the engine with a high-octane roar. “It was previously owned by a towing company, that’s all. It can be fixed up any way we want it. It’s really . . . safe.”

  I sank down into the passenger seat and realized I could not see over the dashboard. My feet barely touched the floor. I felt helpless and stupid and pregnant and sick. And ridiculous.