Garden of Thorns

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Dolores Coburg was no doubt in the midst of that feeding frenzy of mini cameras by the driveway; Mark could just see her blond head and the shining silver one of Vasarian. He wondered idly if Dolores had also found herself involved with a professional colleague last night. If so, they would both have alibis, too. What they didn’t have was a reason to kill Nathan.

  Jenny greeted Preston and Leslie and inspected the plastic covering the trenches. If not for himself, Mark thought, Jenny would have no alibi at all except her good character and complete lack of motive. He could hardly blame Zapata for wondering if Jenny had used him—men had been known to think with their gonads. But Jenny’s need for him had been as sincere as his need for her, wine, melancholy, and all. She couldn’t possibly have used him; she couldn’t possibly have returned to his embrace with blood on her hands.

  A couple of police officers extracted Dolores and Vasarian from the circle of lenses and hurried them toward the kitchen. Dolores’s face was pale, perfectly composed, a mask not of cosmetics but of self-control. Her nostrils flared as though at an unpleasant smell, registering disapproval, whether of the reporters, the police, or of whoever had the bad taste to murder a man in her house, Mark couldn’t say. She breezed by Jenny without acknowledgment and would’ve walked right over Mark if he hadn’t skipped out of the way. Vasarian nodded to them both, graciously if hurriedly, impelled by Dolores’s hand on his arm. His lips quirked in just enough of a grimace to excuse her rudeness and to deplore either the untimely death or its attendant circus.

  With a muttered oath, Jenny turned on her heel and followed them in the kitchen door. Mark realized the cameras were now turned in his direction. He rejected the urge to offer them an obscene gesture—like the police, the reporters were only doing their jobs.

  He waved his gratitude to Preston and Leslie, who were prowling like lions up and down the control zone between the trenches, and headed back to the house. “Once more unto the breach,” he muttered under his breath, and ducked the curious look of the policeman guarding the door.

  Mark was certain of only one thing; that hour in Jenny’s bed last night, which he’d intended to be only a parenthesis in his life, had turned out to be an exclamation point.

  Chapter Twelve

  For years Hilary had been expecting to see a newspaper headline reading, “Gary Chase Indicted For Stock and Securities Fraud.” But what she saw in the newspaper rack outside the airport baggage claim area was a headline that said: Another Murder at Osborne House.

  Her knitting bag fell from her hands and the ball of yarn spun off across the floor. She fumbled with her purse and then with the rack. Unwieldy pages of newsprint slipped in her hands as she sped through the article. A redcap picked up her yarn, put it back in her bag, and handed both to her. Absently she thanked him.

  The story trailed off into inconsequentialities about the Coburg Foundation without ever naming the victim. “Pending notification of relatives” was the excuse. But it did say “he”.

  Hilary seized her suitcase from the carousel and ran down the escalator. She found her car, screeched out of the parking lot in front of a bus and sped down the access road. A man had been murdered at Osborne House early this morning. Why should it be Mark? He’d no doubt been safely in his apartment, sleeping in that handsome brass bed, perhaps dreaming of her.

  Hilary negotiated the first interchange with a passing nod to the speed limit and accelerated past a vast landfill, birds wheeling overhead like vultures circling carrion. Gun shops, wedding chapels, warehouses, outlet stores, and shacks nestled beside the highway, the frayed skirts of the city awaiting the next politician who promised urban renewal. Ahead rose the glass towers of downtown Fort Worth, Oz rising from the prairie. Icy white patches, the remains of Mark’s blue norther, slumped in the shade of overpasses and fences. Now the sun shone brightly in a crystalline blue sky, blunting the chill in the air. The schizophrenic weather would have seemed funny to Hilary, had her sense of humor not been withered.

  She took the exit for the Cultural Arts District, cursing the leisurely pace of the other cars, whose innocent Saturday morning drivers wended their way to golf courses and malls. There was the peaked roof of the Lloyd, York Boulevard, and the topmost turret of Osborne, its glass similar to the skyscrapers behind it. The house was under siege by squad cars displaying the blue and white logo of the Fort Worth police, and vans painted with the alpha-numeric designations of television and radio stations. Yellow tape marked “Crime Scene, Do Not Cross”, hung between trees. An orange-vested officer waved her on by. Ignoring him, Hilary turned, bumped over the curb, and stopped next to Dolores’s silver Cadillac.

  Several figures with mini-cameras and microphones looked around curiously. She slipped under the tape and ran toward the house. Someone shouted at her. The familiar faces of Preston and Leslie materialized from the sun-dappled shadow of the trees.

  “Mark,” Hilary wheezed. “It’s not him, is it?”

  A firm hand grasped her arm as she swayed. “Mark’s all right,” Preston assured her. “He’s in the house.”

  “It’s Nathan,” Leslie said. “Nathan’s dead. I’m sorry, Hilary.”

  For a moment her mind filled with static. Her knees sagged and the one steadying hand was joined by another. Of all the possibilities, Nathan’s name was the last one she’d expected to hear. Nathan—oh, God, no.

  “Hey you,” someone shouted. “You can’t just come running in here.”

  “She knows the victim, Officer,” Preston said calmly. “The detectives’ll be wanting to talk to her.”

  Fainting wouldn’t help, Hilary told herself. Neither would screaming. Clenching her teeth against both inclinations, she extracted herself from Preston’s and Leslie’s solicitous hands. “I guess I’d better go inside. Thanks.”

  They indicated awkward sympathy. The policeman who’d run behind her waved her toward the officer guarding the kitchen door. She stepped into the dim, stale air of the house and blinked, momentarily blinded. The room was empty.

  Hilary slumped against the closest counter, a sob bursting from her chest, tears springing into her eyes. Not Nathan—not kind, good-natured, intelligent Nathan.

  The house had been waiting for another victim. She had sensed its dark expectation, its silence that of a bated breath, its shadows clotted like dried blood. Nathan hadn’t been one of the Coburgs, but he’d said his life had been measured out by them. Now the Coburgs’ house measured out his death.

  Someone was watching her. Hilary stiffened her spine and gulped down the threatening tears. Jenny stood next to the connecting door. Not surprising that her expression would be one Hilary had never before seen on her face, grimness around the mouth, grief around the eyes. “Hello, Hilary. We’ve been expecting you. Is your father recovering?”

  “Yeah, he’s fine. Are you all right?”

  “Quite,” Jenny replied. Her chin jerked toward her closed bedroom door. “Mark’s in there. He asked if he could have a bath. I’ll get the detectives, shall I?”

  Why would Mark take a bath here? Hilary wondered.

  The door beside her slammed open and Sharon Coburg walked inside. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

  Hilary avoided her scowl. “I just got here myself.”

  Travis and Kenneth crowded into the doorway behind Sharon. Travis’s features were set in something between bewilderment and petulance. Kenneth’s large dark eyes and somber expression reminded Hilary of the portrait panels on Greco-Egyptian sarcophagi. Sharon’s red face, almost matching her red hair, and her blazing eyes denoted anger, but Hilary interpreted her quivering lip to be less an expression of sorrow than of open fear. “Mother!” Sharon called. “Mother! Where are you?”

  Jenny looked back through the door. “This way.”

  The younger generation of Coburgs swept by her. Voices echoed from the front of the house, culminating in an unfamiliar feminine one saying, “Frank, take them around and do the preliminaries.” A dark-haired wom
an in a blue suit emerged with Jenny from the doorway, saw Hilary, and asked in the same voice, “You’re Miss Chase?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m Detective Rosalind Zapata. Have you spoken with anyone yet?”

  “Just Preston and Leslie outside, and Jenny.”

  Zapata looked sharply up at Jenny. Jenny sidled back toward the front of the house. Zapata pulled a notebook from her shoulder bag and a chair from the table. “Sit down, please, Miss Chase. You’re an assistant curator at the Lloyd?”

  “Yes. I worked for Nathan.” Hilary sat down and tried to force a deep breath into her lungs. It snagged on an undissolved sob. “How did he die?”

  “His throat was cut.”

  “Is that all?” she asked, hoping Nathan had been spared the indignities heaped upon Vicky and Felicia and the women in the Whitechapel portfolio.

  The detective’s eyes were such a dark brown that Hilary could see her own unwavering reflection on their surface. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “No, I don’t guess I do. Just tell me when and where.”

  “Mr. Owen and Dr. Galliard found his body in the parlor—the same room where the other murders took place—about 12:30 this morning.”

  Jenny and Mark both? Hilary thought. So they’d had another gabfest in Osborne’s kitchen, and she’d missed it. They owed her one. “I don’t suppose you have any idea of who or why?” she asked.

  “Either a man or a woman could’ve crept up on him from behind,” replied Zapata. “Perhaps the assailant was someone he knew and would therefore turn his back on. Perhaps someone hiding in the house. There were no signs of a struggle.”

  Midnight at Osborne House. The darkness itself alive and menacing. A knife glittering. Hilary clenched her fists in her lap and focused. She knew the routine, question after question, the verbal death of a thousand cuts.

  “When did you last see Mr. Sikora?”

  “Wednesday afternoon, right before I left town. I had just gotten a call that my father had a heart attack in Indianapolis. So I flew home.”

  “Did Mr. Sikora say or do anything that afternoon that could shed some light on his murder?”

  “He was very upset about something. What, I don’t know. He said he had a lunch date with Sharon Ward, and he asked me not to tell anyone about the portfolio of Jack the Ripper material—do you know about that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I thought maybe Sharon had warned him off, but I don’t have any reason for that assumption.”

  Zapata nodded, approving her caution.

  “Then Travis called while Nathan was gone. He said he was looking for Sharon. Not that Nathan and Sharon couldn’t have lunch if they wanted to, I mean, they were both connected with the museum….” Hilary shook her head. “I didn’t tell him they were together.”

  “What do you know about their relationship?”

  “I saw them hugging and kissing the first day I was there.”

  “Did they know you saw them?”

  “Oh, no. I just happened to look at one of the video monitors, and there they were. You could ask Leslie, she’s been there longer than I have.”

  “Leslie Underwood,” said Zapata, referring to another page. “Security guard. She’s outside now.”

  “Yes.” Hilary felt as though she were kicking dirt on Nathan’s grave. She added, “But all I saw was just the one kiss. I thought maybe Nathan was going along with Sharon so the Coburgs would donate to the museum….” She stopped. That wasn’t any better.

  “Was he still upset after lunch?”

  “Yes. Even more so, I thought. But I hardly talked to him then.” Hilary remembered Nathan’s cluttered desk. When she’d answered his phone she’d seen a letter from Felicia Coburg. Later the letter had been gone. She tried to describe to Zapata exactly what it had looked like.

  “The letter was written to Nathan’s father?”

  “Another assumption, I’ll admit, but a reasonable one.”

  “And Felicia wanted him to get a ring back from Dolores.”

  A door opened behind Hilary’s back. Mark. She turned around.

  He hadn’t eyed her with such intensity when he’d picked her up at the airport two weeks ago, after they hadn’t seen each other for more than six months. His keen gray gaze studied and memorized every one of her features, as though she were a snowflake about to evaporate in his hand. He looked terrible, pale, unshaven, his eyes rimmed with red and his face creased like his sweatshirt.

  “How are you?” Hilary asked, sincerely meaning the standard greeting.

  “As well as can be expected. How are you?”

  “I’m glad to be back here, despite all of this.” She tried a wan smile. Mark’s answering smile was as wry as a pickle.

  Zapata cleared her throat. “If you’ll excuse us, Mr. Owen….”

  “Certainly.” He turned back into the bedroom.

  The detective pulled a Polaroid photograph from her notebook. “Do you recognize this, Miss Chase?”

  Hilary took the picture and considered it. A pink sweater was spread out against a dark, muddled background—the carpet in the parlor, she realized. It was splotched with brown on one sleeve. “Nice sweater, handmade. No, I don’t recognize it.”

  “Why handmade?”

  “It’s a really intricate pattern. You’d set a knitting machine to repeat the pattern exactly, but this one varies.” Hilary angled the photo toward Zapata, her fingertip moving from one row of stitches to the next. “See, this side has a simple cable, but over here it’s a corded cable. There’s seed stitch on the one side and garter stitch on the other. You don’t happen to have a photo of the back of the sweater, do you?”

  Zapata smiled. “My aunts were always trying to give me sewing and crocheting lessons, but I avoided them. Didn’t want to be typecast as a girl, I guess.”

  “I just do it as a hobby,” Hilary returned.

  “No,” Zapata went on, “I don’t have a photo of the back, but I’ll get one. The sweater itself has been bagged and labeled by now.”

  “What does it have to do with Nathan?”

  “He was found holding it.”

  Hilary slid down in the chair. Those brown blotches were Nathan’s blood. “And you want to know who it belongs to.”

  “Exactly. There were a lot of photographs scattered on the floor around him, as if he’d been holding those, too. We’re still collecting them. I’ll need to take your fingerprints. But Mr. Owen tells me this isn’t the first murder you’ve been involved in.”

  “No, it isn’t, more’s the pity.”

  A large blond man herded various Coburgs, Nicholas Vasarian, Lucia Hernandez, and Jenny through the connecting door.

  “My partner, Frank Yeager,” Zapata told Hilary. “Everyone else you know.”

  Jenny dropped into the chair by the fireplace. Vasarian solemnly shook Hilary’s hand. “Dreadful business. So sorry.” Lucia patted her shoulder, sniffed, and opened the window above the sink. The Coburgs and Travis stood in a stiff row by the back door, all four faces expressing a desire to be in Acapulco, perhaps, or on the Riviera. Even Sharon’s cosmetic-perfected features were now so inert that Hilary wondered if she’d imagined that anger and fear. If Sharon had felt anything for Nathan, she was hiding it well.

  Zapata rose to her feet. “Mrs. Coburg, please tell me about the ring that the first—that Felicia Coburg wanted you to give her?”

  “What?”

  “Did Mr. Coburg ever give you a ring that had once belonged to Felicia?” Zapata asked. “Did she ever threaten to sue you to get it back?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dolores. “Arthur was much too considerate to give me secondhand jewelry. And what does that have to do with Nathan’s death?”

  Cool, fresh air flowed through the open window, carrying the sounds of voices and engines. Lucia appeared to be looking outside, but her back was alert, responding to Dolores’s innuendo with a la-di-da wriggle.

&nbs
p; “You gave Mr. Sikora the go-ahead on the biography,” Zapata went on. “Why did you choose a vanity press to do it?”

  Dolores smiled an appropriately pained smile. “Nathan had never written anything commercial before. I didn’t want his feelings to be hurt by rejections. If we published the book ourselves we could control the distribution and save ourselves the impertinences of formal reviews.”

  So, thought Hilary, Dolores was willing to forgo publicity in order to have complete control of the material. Not that she couldn’t hire a publicist once the book was written to her specifications. Hilary was encouraged to see that in the bright morning light the matriarch’s cheeks and chin sagged slightly, subject to the same gravitational assault as everyone else’s. No matter how hard she tried, Dolores couldn’t control everything.

  “Have you seen this sweater before?” Zapata passed the photograph down the row.

  Everyone shook his or her head except for Lucia. “I haven’t seen this particular sweater, no, but Felicia used to knit a lot. Pink was her favorite color—like the roses, you see. She had a grouping of Archduke Charles and Old Blush bushes out by the garage.”

  “That notepaper was pink,” said Hilary from the table. “And the note said something about roses.”

  Every eye in the room turned toward her. She felt like an insect caught in a magnified ray of sunlight, shriveling with the heat.

  Yeager read from his notebook. “Mrs. Coburg, Mr. Coburg, and Mrs. Ward were at a charity ball at the Worthington Hotel until past midnight. Mr. Ward was at the cutting horse preliminaries over at the Coliseum and then with friends at the Silver Dollar Saloon until three a.m. or so.”

  That was a topless place, Hilary thought. Travis had the good grace to look embarrassed. Sharon didn’t react.

  “Mr. Vasarian was at the Lloyd until ten, at which time he joined the charity ball. Mrs. Hernandez was home all evening, but her son was in and out—might be worthwhile talking to him.”

  Lucia shrugged, as if to say, Be my guest.