“Excuse me,” he said and went out to the porch. “Hey, Hilary?”
“Since it’s Friday, Bradshaw said I should stay home and rest. I didn’t want to stay home.” She paused at the bottom of the steps, considering the short flight as though it were the north face of Mount Everest. Slowly she pulled herself up the banister and stood coughing at the top.
Mark put his arm around her shoulders. She was lissome as always, slender and resilient as a fine blade, but her usually blooming complexion had a grayish tinge. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m suffering more from embarrassment than from the carbon monoxide.”
“Why? Because the Hernandezes and the paramedics saw us together?”
“And because I was such a crybaby.”
“You weren’t a crybaby. I got us out of sync, that’s all. Next time I’ll pay better attention. Practice makes perfect.”
“Next time,” she said with a laugh, “let’s leave out the fire ants. And the audience. And am I always going to be this sore?”
Mark grinned, both relieved and encouraged that she was taking it so well. Now that he’d seen her break, he had even more respect for her composure. “Heck no, we just have to get you into shape, that’s all.”
Together they walked into the kitchen. Jenny glanced up, then glanced away again, her damnable feminine intuition testing the tender spot that was the couple’s physical relationship. Jenny’s composure, Mark thought, would be frightening if he hadn’t touched the passions that lay beneath.
Hilary and Mark collapsed at the table. Once again Zapata led them through a discussion of the night attacks, this time without suggesting Jenny was responsible, and added a quick aside on the garnet ring. Hilary agreed that the killer knew she knew about the forgeries, and that he must’ve been following her and Mark to have caught them together. “I’m going to order police guards for you,” Zapata concluded.
“Do you think Bradshaw told you to take the day off in order to get you out of the way?” Yeager asked.
Hilary shook her head and winced. “The damage has been done at the museum. And he has an alibi for last night.”
“I can’t see Vasarian hotwiring Gil’s car,” said Mark.
Jenny snorted. “Don’t underestimate Vasarian.”
The silence elongated like rubber cement. Graymalkin stretched, yawned, and padded toward a cabinet. Footsteps bounded up the back steps and knuckles rapped on the door. Preston’s voice called, “Anybody home?”
He stepped inside carrying a cardboard box filled with manila envelopes. “Hi!” he said to everyone impartially. “I got the copies y’all asked for. Looks like the porcelain that’s turning up in the dig wasn’t reported destroyed in the fire, but stolen from the house.”
“You got what?” demanded Zapata.
“Porcelain?” Yeager repeated. “That’s right—the police reports of the fire and the murder say some fancy vases were stolen. The insurance company paid for them as well as for the garage.”
Mark nodded. “The conclusion at Arthur’s trial was that Felicia was killed by a thief. Who could’ve taken her ring, if she’d had it….”
“And who then threw his booty into the fire?” Zapata, torn between reprimanding them for their initiative and opening a new lead, chose the lead.
“May I see?” Hilary asked. Preston shuffled through his envelopes, chose a photocopy, and handed it over. “Vases, decorative pieces, and tableware. Sevres, Dresden, Meissen, Royal Worcester, Staffordshire. Did the Coburgs destroy the stuff and then claim insurance on it?”
“I would have expected them to sell the pieces and then claim insurance,” said Jenny. “Although, to be fair, we have yet to catch a Coburg in anything dishonest.”
Zapata looked vaguely disappointed. Preston pulled out another envelope and handed it to Mark. “As long as I was downtown, I went by the Star-Telegram.”
“Thank you.” Mark poured a stack of glossy black and white pictures onto the table.
“Photos?” Zapata asked. She seized the closest one, inspected it, and tossed it down. “Checking alibis isn’t your job.”
“Not the done thing?” returned Jenny sarcastically.
“Every question you ask makes you more of a threat to the murderer! Weren’t the attacks last night enough to warn you off? I’ve got problems enough without pulling officers off patrol so they can guard you. I’ve got murders up to here already—I don’t need y’all’s, too.”
Yeager looked at her admiringly—no question whose side he was on.
Mark felt as truculent as Graymalkin had looked. “The way to keep this nut from murdering us is to catch him!”
“I’m not going to argue with you over that.” From her purse Zapata took the photographs of Felicia’s pink sweater and threw them onto the stack. “Here. Be my guest. But why you think you’re going to get more out of those pictures that we could, I don’t know.”
“We’re more frightened than you are,” Hilary said.
Two points, Mark thought.
“You couldn’t be any more frustrated,” replied Zapata.
Game and set, thought Mark. Jenny’s brows went lopsided, as if she would match her frustration against Zapata’s any day.
Hilary’s downturned face was half hidden behind a wave of honey-brown hair, her mouth a straight line, her chin set. Her slender hands sifted through the pile of photos. “Great! The Coburgs’ charity ball was a costume party! They’re wearing masks!”
“You’ll find they were all there.” Zapata’s chin, too, was set. She glanced at her watch and scooted her chair back. “Check with y’all later.” Yeager had to hurry to get the door open for her. From outside came the voices of the returning students.
“Did she give us carte blanche?” Jenny asked. “Or did she tell us to sod off?”
“I think she’s given us a challenge,” said Mark. “Try to survive long enough to catch the killer.”
“Thanks, folks.” Rolling his eyes, Preston put down the box and headed out to corral the students.
Jenny added the bag with the ring to the stack of ceramic shards. “Hilary, would you like to sort out these fragments? Here’s the scatter diagram. Ta.” She followed Preston out the door.
Mark said to Hilary, “I’m moving in with you.”
“Good—I can keep an eye on you.” She smiled wanly and scooped the photographs back into the envelope. She didn’t point out that their being together last night had made them a more tempting target. “We’ll look at these later. You’d better get outside before Jenny comes after you.”
“It’s not Jenny who worries me.” Mark kissed Hilary’s cool lips, glanced at the ice box blocking the connecting door, and went out to the dig.
The garage and its charred and jumbled contents were emerging from the overlying dirt and rubble. A time-lapse camera would show the surface rolling back, like a landslide in reverse. Mark considered a cement angle, the base of an internal wall, that had appeared during his absence.
“I set Amy and Hong to sorting out this room,” Jenny said. “Arthur’s workshop, I suppose. That glass is exploded bottles of paint. That metal pretzel used to be a set of engraving tools. There’s a set of mechanics’ spanners—they’re still recognizable, at the least.”
“I bet these chunks of wood were workbenches. And this metal box—no, not the space heater. A kiln. Arthur liked to tinker with his cars? They must’ve been the meanest machines on the road.” Mark produced his trowel and went to work, avoiding the students’ curious and suggestive glances.
A quick rain shower made the day even cooler, and a visit by a television crew tested Jenny’s diplomacy to the utmost. By quitting time Mark felt as if he’d been folded, spindled, and mutilated. He and Jenny found Hilary still at the kitchen table, Graymalkin purring in her lap. Arranged in front of her were several tidy stacks of shards, some of the larger ones pieced together. “A Royal Worcester tea service,” she announced. “A Dresden shepherdess. A Sevres urn. And this, s
o help me, was a Wedgewood Stilton cheese bell from about 1820.”
“Thank you,” said Jenny, rubbing her neck and shoulders. She caught Mark’s eye and quickly stopped.
If Hilary was Sleeping Beauty, then Jenny was Cinderella, he thought, suffering a glamorous step-family. Except princes were only footnotes in her story. Smiling, Mark gathered up Preston’s box. “See you at Lucia’s.”
Hilary dodged the fire ant mound outside his apartment. When she found that Lucia had not only washed the sheets and made the bed, but also washed her clothing and folded it on the pillow, she blushed scarlet—which made the gray ebb from her complexion. Mark patted her reassuringly and went to shower.
The black-and white-tile floor of Lucia’s kitchen was spotless, as were the tea towels printed with various Scottish motifs that Mark had given her. Dried red peppers hung from the window over the sink, and aloe vera plants lined the sill. Beyond the window was the rose garden, the flowers despite the overcast sky shining like Alice in Wonderland’s painted posies.
Mark inhaled deeply of the cooking smells and felt hungry for the first time that day.By the time he’d walked Hilary through the photographs lining a sideboard—Lucia’s late husband, nieces in their quinceanara celebration gowns, the confirmations and weddings of an extended, and, he wistfully believed, happy family—Preston, Leslie, and Jenny had arrived.
Lucia seated them around her kitchen table. Mark and Preston showed Hilary and Jenny how to peel the corn shuck wrappers from the bundles of cornmeal and shredded meat that were the tamales. Black beans, guacamole salad, salsa, tortillas, and sour cream rounded out the meal. The sour cream, Gilbert explained jokingly, was a yuppification, toning down the burn of the chili peppers for gringo stomachs.
“Iced tea, everyone?” Lucia asked, rattling ice cubes into glasses.
Jenny didn’t seem up to iced tea tonight. “Might I just have water, please?”
Lucia brought her a glass of water, doled out the iced tea, and sat down. She let everyone have seconds before she said, “The nerve. Attacking people in their beds. How low can you get?”
“I don’t guess there’s any way we can really thank y’all for saving our lives,” Mark told her and Gilbert. “And not just our lives—you can end up a vegetable from carbon monoxide poisoning.” His memory blew a bubble, an image of a perfectly formed but mindless baby. His daughter’s condition, though, hadn’t been caused by malice; he had no one to be angry at. He mentally popped the bubble and it dissipated.
The Hernandezes seemed surprised that Mark thought thanks were necessary. “I assume the attack on you is connected to Nathan’s death,” said Lucia, casting out her lure every bit as hopefully as a fisherman on the bank of a stream. “Unless it was a particularly nasty April Fool’s joke.”
“April first isn’t until Sunday,” Gilbert corrected.
Hilary scraped up another morsel, then laid down her fork. With a smile of uncertainty at Mark and Jenny she launched into the story of the artifact forgery—not omitting the sidebar of Nathan’s affair with Sharon.
One by one, all the other forks went down, too. Gilbert’s moustache twitched in amazement. Leslie snorted, “Switched right under my nose! Damn! So that’s why they wanted the Jesus figure downtown.”
“Would you like to hear the rest of it?” Jenny asked.
“There’s more?” queried Preston.
“Hush,” Lucia told him. “Tell us the rest, Jenny.”
Jenny told them about the Allied Art Collecting Point, Pamela and Arthur, the Eleanor Cross, and the mysteriously teleporting garnet ring.
Lucia and Gilbert shared a stunned look. Preston polished his glasses, as though that would clarify the situation.
“Let me get this straight,” said Leslie. “Nathan had the figure from the Cross in his pocket. He was holding Felicia’s sweater. And a picture of Pamela was on the floor beside him? Whew—I’d wondered why on earth Yeager and Zapata considered you a suspect, Jenny. But then,” she added hastily, “it’s their job to be paranoid.”
Gilbert rolled a tortilla, folded the end, and spooned salsa into the resulting pocket. “Where’d that sweater come from? Dolores got rid of everything of Felicia’s.”
“Haven’t a clue,” Jenny answered. “I never saw it, and I turned over the house thoroughly.”
Shaking her head, Lucia started clearing the table. “Pretty shabby to reject you and Pamela and marry Dolores. But then, that was Arthur—he treated Felicia like an item in one of his collections. Dolores let him think he was treating her like that. I should’ve known you were his daughter, Jenny—your bone structure, your manner, you’re just like him.”
“Thank you,” said Jenny. She got up and started carrying dishes.
Mark couldn’t decide whether to grimace or grin. Lucia hadn’t realized she was slapping Jenny across the face with that remark.
“No wonder Arthur and Felicia never had children,” Lucia went blithely on. “His boots were never under the bed long enough. Dolores snagged him when he was getting long in the tooth, ready to settle down. Bring the dessert plates from the sideboard, would you please, Hilary?”
Lucia unmolded a custard on each plate, and Hilary dealt them out. Mark unlimbered his spoon. Sure enough, the flan was silky and not too sweet, complemented by the puddle of caramelized sugar in which it rested.
Lucia plugged in the coffeepot and rejoined the others. “The detectives were asking me about the Osborne ghost. Except they seemed to think there was more than one. The only one I’ve seen is Vicky Coburg.”
“We’ve seen her ourselves,” Jenny murmured. “But Arthur is there too. Not that I can see him. I just—well—I know he’s there.”
Silence, except for the scraping of spoons. Mark skewed the subject around to the porcelain fragments found in the garage ruins. “Lucia, do you think whoever killed Felicia took the vases and things just to make it look as though a thief had been there….” He suddenly realized that evidence pointed right back at Arthur, and shot an apologetic glance at Jenny.
“That would explain why they turned up in the garage.” Leslie nodded. “Did someone set the place on fire to conceal the evidence?”
“Pretty extravagant,” said Hilary. “Or desperate. It comes down to why Felicia was even at Osborne that night.”
“You found her body, Lucia?” Preston asked.
“Let’s have an edited version,” interjected Gilbert. “We’re eating.”
Lucia eyed him indulgently. “You’re the one who came in saying the garage was on fire. You backed out the T-Bird. The two other cars were already gone. If it hadn’t been for that north wind, Osborne itself would’ve burned. Even so, I went inside to check on everything.”
“You had keys?” asked Jenny.
“I was still working there then. Dolores was probably fixing to fire me anyway—I’d been there long enough to ask for a raise. She hired the cheapest help she could get, most of the time illegal aliens who’d stay for a while, build up a nest egg, then hotfoot it back to Mexico. Both she and Arthur spoke Spanish surprisingly well.” Lucia got up and started pouring coffee. “There were always people in and out, housekeepers, repairman, mechanics. Arthur was always working on those cars. He was so possessive of them he kept his workshop locked tight.”
Hilary contemplated her cup. Mark thought, if she was as bleary from what seemed like a combination of hangover and jet lag as he was, she could take the coffee intravenously and it wouldn’t help. He handed her the cream pitcher and said, “There were garden tools in the garage, too. I guess even without Felicia’s roses the lawns and the bushes had to be kept up.”
“Oh yes, Dolores hired gardeners, too,” Lucia replied. “She’s very particular about appearances. All style and no substance.”
“I found a picture of Felicia at a Rose Festival, not long before she was killed,” Jenny said. “She must’ve started another rose garden.”
“She went back to Osborne every now and then to get cuttings from her old
bushes. I think that’s why Dolores let them die, just to spite her.”
Mark frowned. “When you found Felicia’s body, she was holding—er—a rose, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was. Freshly picked from one of the last bushes.”
“Maybe she was there that night to get a cutting,” Hilary said, picking up Mark’s thought. “She sneaked in when she knew Dolores was gone.”
Lucia sat down with a thump. “Could be. That doesn’t get her inside the house, though.”
“Did Felicia take the vases and things?” asked Preston.
“She didn’t need the money,” Lucia answered. “Arthur paid alimony, and a right fair amount, too. Funny, he always used to be short of cash. Felicia would tell him over and over he was spending too much money on his expeditions, he might lose Osborne itself. He was so mad he could have chewed bees when Felicia sold the property around Osborne, but every time she dipped into his parents’ account—Vicky’s money, mostly—he got just as mad.”
“As if he were trying to dissociate himself from his parents,” Mark mused aloud, “and yet not from Osborne.”
“When Dolores came along,” Lucia continued, “she shortened his reins real good. Her family lived more on the knees of comfort than in the lap of luxury, and she knew how to pinch a penny so tight that Lincoln screamed. Money was never a problem again. Of course, he started staying home, too.”
“I always thought Arthur was rich,” said Preston.
“Most of his parents’ money went into the Foundation,” Lucia replied. “He lived on the income from his films, books, art collections, lectures, souvenir pith helmets—whatever—so he couldn’t count on a regular paycheck. Even though he worked so hard it was Dolores who brought up the children.”
Hilary and Jenny shared a significant nod. “Spooky,” said Leslie, “to keep on living in the house where your parents were killed.”
“He kept on working there after Felicia was killed,” Lucia pointed out. “Lots of times he’d spend the night there. I’m not so sure he didn’t regret marrying Dolores. They were a generation apart in age. And I’m not so sure he didn’t feel guilty about treating Felicia so badly—not to mention Pamela, I now realize.”
Garden of Thorns Page 30
