The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala

by Laura Disilverio

  There were gasps of outrage and disgust as people backed away. I heard a muttered “Gross,” and a wailed “My dress!”

  “Catch that nun,” someone shouted.

  A couple of people half turned as Eloise brushed past them, and one man reached out his arm as if to grab her, but she eeled away and was out the door in a flash. Fog swirled behind her. No one gave chase. Mary was exclaiming over the ruin of her nightgown, Hart was calmly summoning uniformed officers, and I was digging in my utility belt pocket for the foil packets with the stain-removing wipes I always carried (along with bobby pins, safety pins, tape, needle and thread, pen, tissues, and various other emergency supplies that come in handy when a bridesmaid tears her dress, the birthday boy spills punch on his shirt, or a keynote speaker shoots buttons across the room because the last time he wore his tux shirt, he was seventy pounds lighter—true story). I handed most of the wipes to Mary, who took them with a muttered word of thanks and hurried toward a bathroom, followed by Lucas. I used a tissue to sponge at a streak of red infiltrating my cleavage. It smelled sweet. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goo was Karo syrup mixed with red food coloring. I gave thanks that my costume was black and hoped it wouldn’t stain. Noticing a sprinkling of red on Hart’s forehead, I reached up to blot it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute—I need to meet the officers outside. Can you hold down the fort in here?”

  “Sure. The excitement’s over.”

  I gently herded the guests who showed a tendency to gawk back toward the ballroom, murmuring about food and drinks and a door prize drawing. Brooke swished along beside me, and Lola started to come, too, but then said, “Drat, I’ve lost my stake.” She rattled the empty sheath.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brooke said. “It’ll turn up.”

  Ignoring her, Lola pushed her glasses up, dislodging her eye patch, and said, “It must have fallen out on the stairs. I’ll catch up with you.”

  The party got louder over the next half hour and had just begun to simmer down as a few people drifted out, when Wallace Pinnecoose appeared beside me. Half a foot taller than me, he was a solid man in his sixties, with bronze skin, iron gray hair slicked back from his brow, and a stiff posture that showed off his black suit and crisp white shirt. He could have walked into any British period piece and assumed the role of butler with no rehearsal, or onto the set of a Western and acted the part of a warring chief. Those two roles should have been mutually exclusive, but somehow they both fit Wallace. He waited while I finished a conversation, and then said in a low, measured voice, “Amy-Faye, we’ve got a problem.”

  I stiffened. I’d never heard Wallace use the word “problem” before. He referred to “situations” (a thieving bartender) or “incidents” (a bridesmaid and a groom found naked on Wallace’s desk during a reception) or “occurrences” (a three-alarm fire in the kitchen) and dealt with them with sangfroid, never looking stressed or breaking a sweat. Right now, he definitely looked stressed, and sweat beaded his high brow. He dabbed it with a snowy handkerchief.

  “What’s up?” I asked, instinctively speaking in a whisper.

  “Is Detective Hart still here?”

  My unease ticked up a notch. Wallace never wanted to involve the police in any of the Club’s incidents, preferring to keep things quiet so as not to harm the Club’s reputation.

  “I haven’t seen him since the scuffle earlier.”

  Wallace tipped his head to the right and I followed him, weaving my way through the gradually thinning crowd. We left the party behind and turned down a dimly lit hallway that led to the Club’s administrative offices. Golf and tennis trophies in glass cases were interspersed with framed photos from various tournaments and an oil painting or two of former chairmen of the Club’s board of directors. Halfway down the hall, a door with a crash bar led to the parking lot, and just past that, on the left, were two restrooms. The faint scent of chemical-lavender cleaning products seeped from them. The crowd noise diminished as we neared the end of the hall.

  We drew abreast of Wallace’s office. The door was ajar and a bar of light fell through it to stripe the carpet. I gave him a questioning look and he nodded infinitesimally toward the door. “In there.”

  Reluctant to look, I took refuge in awkward humor. “There’s no naked people in there this time, is there?”

  When Wallace merely slid one heavy brow up a bare quarter of an inch, I steeled myself and approached the open door.

  Chapter 7

  I hovered on the threshold. There was no need to enter; indeed, I’d read enough police procedurals to know Hart would be pissed off if I mucked up his crime scene. I could tell from the doorway that it was a crime scene. All the signs pointed to it. A desk lamp was knocked over and glass from the bulb glittered on the carpet. Eight or ten books were tumbled on the floor. The one nearest me was a text on grass and soil cultivation for golf courses. The coppery smell of blood clogged my nostrils. The biggest clue, though, was the man slumped on the floor, facing the doorway, half-supported by Wallace’s desk, a knife plunged through his heart. No, not a knife, I realized, my gaze fixed on the metallic length of it. A stake. Uh-oh.

  With an effort, I turned away. My eyes met Wallace’s for a moment, and then I called Hart’s number.

  He answered with, “I’m just coming back in. We’ve searched the property but can’t find her. Chances are, she had a car.”

  I cleared my throat. “You need to come to the manager’s office right away,” I said.

  There was a beat of silence and when Hart answered, the words were clipped. “On my way.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t until I got home at almost two in the morning that I realized I’d gotten my wish to see Hart work a crime scene dressed as Batman. It hadn’t been nearly as funny as I’d imagined. He’d discarded his cape and mask, but couldn’t do much about the rest of the costume, which drew no end of guffaws from the officers and forensics techs who showed up to work the scene. He’d inspected the body and the office, and then interviewed me and Wallace—separately—in someone else’s office. After making sure I was okay, he’d been strictly professional and I’d followed suit, giving him a concise report on how Wallace had alerted me to the “problem” and assuring him I hadn’t entered the office or touched anything.

  “Do you know who he is?” I asked. The victim was the jeaned man with the short hair and the tattoos.

  “No ID on him,” Hart answered. “The coroner will run his fingerprints. Do you recognize him?”

  I’d lived in Heaven all my life (even back when the town was Walter’s Ford, before the town council renamed it to attract the destination wedding business), and Hart had been here only about six months, so it wasn’t an unreasonable question.

  I bit my lip. “I don’t know him, but I saw him at the bookstore this morning and at the auction. I noticed him here earlier, too, when that Eloise person started flinging blood.” Suddenly, I started to shake, the evening’s events catching up to me. Through chattering teeth, I said, “Can I go home now?”

  Hart relaxed his professionalism long enough to hug me and briskly run his hands up and down my upper arms to warm me. “Not quite yet. Hold it together, Amy-Faye. You’re doing great.”

  I’d had to wait while the uniformed police took down the names and addresses of everyone still at the party, and then I’d had to try to remember who else had been there earlier. It was an impossible task because there hadn’t been a guest list—anyone who bought a ticket was welcome to attend. And some people’s costumes had hidden their identity. It was, I slowly realized, a setup to make a murderer’s job much easier; at least, it would make it easier for him or her to escape unnoticed.

  The stake, of course, belonged to Lola. She was so distraught by the idea that an item she had brought to the party had been used to kill a man that I drove her home when the police finally said we could leave.
She sat in the van’s passenger seat, eye patch pushed up into her hair, hands clenching and unclenching on her thighs. “I hope the police won’t think I had anything to do with it,” she said.

  “Of course they won’t, Lo! You didn’t even know that man, did you?”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Never saw him before. I don’t think he’s from around here. That didn’t keep Lindell from asking me twenty different ways if I recognized him, knew him, or had ever seen him anywhere.”

  “I saw him at Gemma’s store during the author panel, and then again at the auction,” I said. “I don’t think the police know who he is yet. Hart said he didn’t have any ID on him.”

  “Maybe it was a robbery, and he fought back,” Lola said. “The self-defense books all say you should just hand over your wallet if you get mugged, not make a fuss, and run if you can.”

  I kept my attention on the road, ill lit this far out of town. I didn’t point out that the robbery theory didn’t account for Lola’s stake being the murder weapon.

  “I must have lost the stake when I went downstairs during all that fuss,” she said, raking her fingers through her short hair. “But it wasn’t on the stairs when I went back to look.”

  “No telling who picked it up. It might have been a staff member, getting it out of the way, or a Good Samaritan partygoer planning to turn it in to the Club’s lost and found,” I said.

  “Or it might have been the murderer.” Lola turned her head to stare out the window.

  We drove under a streetlight as I made the turn into the Bloomin’ Wonderful driveway, which also led to the small house Lola shared with Axie and her grandmother. In the dark, I couldn’t make out any of the blooms in the fields, although my headlights glanced off the glass panels in the greenhouses. Stopping near her front door, I put a hand on her shoulder. “None of it is your fault, Lo. The killer went for a weapon of opportunity—if it hadn’t been the stake, it would have been something else—a steak knife, a deer antler. I know it feels icky to think that you brought the murder weapon to the party, that you held something that later got stabbed through a man’s guts, but—”

  “You’re not helping, Amy-Faye,” Lola said.

  I shut up. “Sorry.” I leaned over and hugged her awkwardly. “Hart will figure it out.“

  She opened the door. “He’d better do it quick, because otherwise I’m going to.” She closed the door firmly on the final word and marched toward the house, where the porch light and a dog’s barks welcomed her home.

  It was enough to make me want a dog, I thought, unlocking my own door and stepping into the quiet dark of my bungalow. My erratic hours wouldn’t be fair on a dog, however, and I didn’t think a gerbil or a goldfish would fill the same void, so I remained petless. I shucked off my Catwoman outfit in the dark, brushed my teeth, and flopped into bed, emotionally and physically exhausted. Thank goodness tomorrow was Sunday and I had nothing on my calendar except the Readaholics meeting. I’d meant to finish Rebecca tonight, but . . .

  * * *

  “Gothic heroines aren’t much like today’s female cops, PIs, or even amateur sleuths, are they?” Kerry said, buttering a biscuit. Even though she phrased it like a question, it sounded like a statement. Kerry never shied away from making statements. Maybe it came of being a politician, even a small-town one.

  We were sitting in Lola’s cramped kitchen, having voted previously to have brunch while discussing Rebecca, since we were meeting on a Sunday (to accommodate my schedule). Lola’s grandmother had insisted on cooking for us, so we were feasting on scrambled eggs with sausage, homemade biscuits with strawberry preserves Mrs. Paget had put up in the summer, and pancakes topped with pecans and bananas. It was more food than I’d generally have for breakfast in an entire week, but I was enjoying every bite of it. I poured more melted butter onto my pancakes.

  Axie was at a friend’s house and Mrs. Paget had left for a Bible study after cooking our breakfast, so it was just me, Brooke, Kerry, Maud, and Lola in the small kitchen with its cheery wallpaper printed with chickens, gingham curtains, and butcher-block counters that Lola complained about every time she had to refinish them. It felt very 1950s to me. The red Formica-topped table had a metal rim and legs, as did the padded chairs. Somehow, it also felt homey, even though it was nothing like the kitchen in the house I’d grown up in and where my parents still lived. The smell of coffee pervaded the air as Maud poured herself another cup.

  “That no-name protag was pretty helpless, I’ll give you that,” Maud said. “No gumption. No grit.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Lola said. She looked tired, with dark circles under her eyes. “She was a product of her times. Women weren’t raised to stand up for themselves then, not physically, not financially.”

  “Why didn’t she have a name?” Brooke asked. Even on a lazy Sunday morning she was perfectly made-up with her hair gleaming in the sunlight that streamed through the windows over the farmhouse sink.

  “It makes her kind of an ‘everywoman,’ don’t you think?” I asked. I’d finished the book hastily this morning, skipping church, and hadn’t had time to analyze it as much as I usually do.

  “No,” Maud said. “The average woman doesn’t meet a handsome millionaire, marry him, live in a mansion, and duke it out with a dead former wife and demented housekeeper. I should have dressed as Mrs. Danvers last night. I can play sinister.” She narrowed her eyes and tightened her mouth into a thin line.

  “You creep me out,” Kerry agreed.

  “The heroines in gothic novels should make it a practice to fire all the servants the moment they walk through the door of the spooky old mansion,” Brooke said. “And call the Ghostbusters. That would solve a lot of their problems up front.”

  When we stopped laughing and humming the Ghostbusters theme song, I said, “Okay, maybe not an ‘everywoman,’ but I think it’s the same ploy you see in modern suspense fiction—a normal person living a normal life gets caught up in extraordinary circumstances and has to cope.”

  “If you can call what she did ‘coping,’” Maud sniffed, still down on the protagonist.

  “I think du Maurier not giving her a name is an identity thing,” Brooke said. She flipped her hair over her shoulder to keep from trailing it in the syrup on her plate as she forked up the last morsel of sausage. “Names are powerful. Names give immediate impressions. I mean, you’d have a different idea of someone named Arabella than you would if she was called Mildred. Du Maurier is playing with that, making us decide who this woman is without giving us a clue via the name.”

  “That’s deep, Brooke,” I said, half admiringly, half mockingly.

  She made a face at me.

  “No, it is,” Lola said. She rose and started to collect our plates. “I think du Maurier’s playing with all the names. De Winter, for example. That conjures up a cold feeling to me, and I think the husband is a cold man. Or”—she cocked her head to consider—“maybe he’s become cold as a result of his experiences with Rebecca.”

  “She was evil,” Kerry said.

  “And do you know what her name means, what ‘Rebecca’ means?” Lola asked, returning to her names theory. We looked at her and shook our heads. “‘Tied’ or ‘bound.’ I looked it up.”

  I crinkled my brow. “What are you saying she was bound by, Lo?”

  “Not her marriage vows—that’s for sure,” Maud said, making us all crack up.

  “Maybe her evil nature,” Lola said slowly. “I think sometimes that when you choose to do the wrong thing time after time, when you choose to hurt others, eventually it’s not a choice anymore—you can’t break out of the habit.”

  “Wow, this is an unusually cheery discussion,” Kerry said.

  Lola slumped into her chair, cupping her hands around a coffee mug. “Sorry. I’m not feeling too cheery today.”

  “That wasn’t an attack on you,” Kerry said, look
ing dismayed that Lola had taken her words that way. “It wasn’t a cheery book.”

  “And last night didn’t exactly end on a cheery note, either,” I said. The murder was the elephant in the room we’d all been avoiding mentioning.

  “Do the police know the victim’s name yet, Amy-Faye?” Brooke asked.

  “I haven’t talked to Hart today, so I don’t know.”

  “I wonder how he ended up in the manager’s office,” Kerry said, focused, as usual, on logistics.

  “Someone lured him there,” Brooke suggested.

  “Or more than one someone,” Maud said.

  We groaned. “Not everything that happens is part of a conspiracy,” Kerry said tartly.

  “Most everything is.” Maud was unrepentant. “Even in Rebecca, you can tell Mrs. Danvers and that smarmy Favell are working together to—”

  “Maybe the manager had something to do with it,” Brooke said.

  I immediately shook my head, setting my ponytail swinging. “No way. I’ve worked with Wallace Pinnecoose for years. He’s not the murdering type.”

  “That’s what people said about Jeffrey Dahmer,” Maud said.

  “And Ted Bundy,” Kerry added.

  “And—”

  I tossed my napkin at Brooke before she could add another serial killer to the list. “Right, I got it. Everyone liked Jack the Ripper, too. He was a swell guy to his friends and his dog. I’m just saying I don’t think Wallace had anything to do with it.”

  “When the police find out who he was, maybe it’ll be clear who killed him,” Lola said quietly.

  Kerry patted her arm, and I said, “I hope so, Lo.”

  “And, if not, we can figure it out,” Maud said. She put her cup down with a decisive click, her tanned hand strong and bony against the delicate china. “Nothing about the murder is remotely your fault, Lola, but if it will give you peace of mind to know what happened, then we’ll find out.” Even though she liked Hart, her activist days at Berkeley in the late sixties had left her convinced that all police were corrupt, incompetent, or both.