Literary Tour 01 - Frankly My Dear I'm Dead

by Washburn, Livia

  “It’ll be fun,” Augusta said.

  “If that’s your idea of fun—”

  “That’s enough,” I said. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to let either of the girls be interrogated unless I was there. They were minors, after all.

  Luke whispered to me, “I bet they do fingerprint us. You know they got some latents off that knife.”

  I looked at him. “Latents?” I knew what he meant, but his use of the technical term surprised me.

  “Yeah … Hey, I watch TV, Miz D. I know all about that kind of stuff.”

  He wasn’t the only one. I’d read that, because of the popularity of forensics-based police procedural series, people thought they knew so much that it was making life difficult for real-life detectives and prosecutors. Juries expected a ton of forensic evidence, all of it as conclusive as what they saw on TV, and when they didn’t get it, they were less inclined to convict a defendant.

  One thing about TV, though: no matter how realistic they make the corpses look these days—and they’re usually pretty dad-gummed gruesome—when you’re watching it there’s a part of your brain that always knows it’s just a TV show. You can tell yourself it’s not real, that it’s just make-believe, an actor made up to look dead.

  Well, Steven Kelley had been an actor, but there was nothing make-believe about the blood on his clothes or the pasty, fish-belly look of his skin or the sightless, staring eyes. The real thing always looks different from what you see on the screen.

  The angry muttering in the ballroom grew louder as more time went by. The hour was getting kind of late. The fancy dress ball would have been over by now, and the guests would have all retired to their rooms for the night. The people who actually lived here, like Edmond Ralston and possibly his daughter, would have gone to their own quarters, and the actors would be on their way home.

  Instead, the burly deputies made sure that no one left the ballroom, even the people who had already given statements. Timothy Farraday obviously thought there was a good chance the killer was still here—a reasonable assumption, I suppose— and he wanted to make sure that he didn’t let a murderer slip through his fingers.

  Eventually, he got around to me, coming across the ballroom and saying as he walked up, “Ms. Dickinson?” “I’m Delilah Dickinson,” I told him.

  “Would you come with me, please?”

  I hesitated and made a motion toward Augusta and Amelia. “These are my nieces.”

  Farraday smiled, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “And they’re lovely young ladies. Would you come with me, please?”

  “They’re minors. I don’t want any of your men questioning them while I’m not there.”

  His eyebrows rose. “And why is that? ”

  “Yeah, Aunt Delilah,” Augusta said. “Why’s that? ” I suddenly realized that I’d made it sound to Farraday like the girls might have something to hide. That was ridiculous, of course. They couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with Steven Kelley’s murder, and since they’d been inside when it happened, they couldn’t even be of any value as witnesses.

  I guess I’ve always been just a wee bit too stubborn for my own good, though, because I said, “I just don’t think it would be right. They’re not of legal age.”

  “And they’re not being charged with anything.” Farraday’s voice had a patient tone to it, as if he were explaining something to a child—or somebody too dumb to understand what he was talking about. “We’re just taking statements, Ms. Dickinson, not officially questioning anyone yet.” He paused, then with weary patience asked for the third time, “Would you come with me, please?”

  I didn’t see any way around it. I turned to Luke and said, “Keep an eye on the girls.”

  He nodded. “Will do, Miz D.”

  I followed Farraday out of the ballroom and down a hall to another room. He stood by the open door and ushered me through it.

  “Right in here, please.”

  This was an office with a couple of good-sized desks and some filing cabinets. I figured Edmond Ralston ran the business of the plantation from here, or rather, employees of the management company he used did.

  Farraday motioned me into a leather chair in front of one of the desks and took the chair in front of the other desk, rather than sitting behind either of them. As he slipped a notebook and a pen from his jacket pocket, he said, “Mr. Ralston is being kind enough to let us use this office.”

  I nodded toward the notebook and pen in his hands. “Sort of low tech, isn’t it?”

  He chuckled, and for the first time this evening he seemed genuinely amused. “I’m a low-tech sort of guy.” That moment of good humor lasted only a second, and then he was all business again. “Now, if you would, tell me everything you remember about what happened tonight.”

  “You mean after the body was discovered?” I was anxious in one way to tell him about Elliott Riley finding the body, reluctant in another. I was running a business after all.

  Farraday shook his head. “No, start before that. In fact, since you’re in charge of the tour, why don’t you back up all the way to the time you and your clients arrived here at the plantation and take it from there.”

  I stared at him. “That was this morning.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  I had already figured out that he wasn’t the sort of fella who could be talked out of anything very easily, so I took a deep breath and then launched into as detailed an account as I could remember of the day’s activities. I actually went back further than he had asked, explaining how the bus driven by Mr. Cobb had picked up the tourists at their hotels and motels to bring them out here.

  Farraday wrote something down, and I figured it was Mr. Cobb’s name. That probably meant he’d be questioned, too, the poor man, and I felt bad about dragging him into this.

  From there I went over the details of the tour, and after a few minutes I started to feel like I was giving a sales pitch, not being questioned by the authorities. Farraday didn’t seem to mind, though.

  He kept taking notes, occasionally interrupting me to ask a question and get something straight. I reached the part where the ball started, but I didn’t say anything about the conversation I’d had with Dr. Will Burke. It didn’t seem the least bit relevant.

  “Then I heard some sort of commotion going on and went to see what it was all about. Mr. Riley was yelling and pointing out into the garden. He said, ‘He’s out there,’ or something like that.”

  “What did you think he meant by that?”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, Mr. Riley had something on his hands, and it looked like blood to me, so the first thing I thought … I thought he’d gotten into a fight with Mr. Mueller again.”

  Farraday’s eyebrows were a little bushy. Not prominently so, just a little more than normal. They climbed up his forehead now.

  “Who’s Mr. Mueller?”

  That opened up a whole new can of worms, as the old saying goes, so I had to explain about the trouble at the museum the day before. “There was bad blood between those two, so I thought they’d been tusslin’ again. I was afraid that maybe this time Mr. Riley had really hurt Mr. Mueller, because of the blood and all, you know. So Luke and I hurried out there to see what had happened.”

  Farraday consulted his notebook. “That would be Luke Edwards, your assistant?”

  I smiled. “He’s my son-in-law, too.”

  “Okay. So you thought you’d find this man Mueller out in the garden, maybe hurt. How’d you feel about that?”

  How did I feel about that? Was he a detective or a psychologist? Either way, I had to answer the question.

  “I was so mad I was about ready to spit. This is my first tour since I opened my own agency, Mr. Farraday. I was afraid two of my clients had gone and messed it all up.”

  He grunted. “It’s messed up, all right, but this guy Mueller doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with it.”

  “What about Riley?”

 
; He looked surprised that I was asking a question, instead of answering one. He was noncommittal in his reply. “We’ll be talking to him.”

  Even though I didn’t like Riley, and even though I was the one who had brought up his name, I felt compelled to defend him. “There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for how he got the blood on his hands. He could have found the body and tried to see if the man was still alive, or something like that.”

  “We’ll ask him. He’ll have a chance to tell his story.”

  Farraday wasn’t going to give me anything else. Instead he had me go over what had happened in the garden after Luke and I walked out to where Steven Kelley’s body lay, and then I told him about Edmond Ralston joining us, and Maura Kelley’s reaction when she saw her husband, and that was about it. He nodded, thanked me, and told me I could go back to the ballroom.

  I stood up. “How long are we going to have to stay here?”

  He closed his notebook and looked up at me. “I was under the impression that you and your assistant and the rest of the tour group were going to spend the night here anyway.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you already have rooms assigned to you.”

  I nodded.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer before you’re allowed to go to your rooms for the night.”

  “What about tomorrow?” I asked. “The bus will be here in the morning to take everybody back to wherever they’re staying.”

  Farraday shook his head slowly. “We’ll have to wait and see about that.”

  “You mean we may not be able to leave the plantation tomorrow morning?” I knew that would really upset some of my clients.

  He got to his feet, and the lumbering motion reminded me a little of a bear. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said again.

  I had figured out by now that I’d run into somebody who was just as stubborn as me. When somebody challenged him, Timothy Farraday fell back on repeating what he had said before, refusing to be budged from his position. I didn’t like him very much, I didn’t like the possibility that we were all going to be stuck here on the plantation while Farraday carried out his investigation, and I especially didn’t like the chance that before this was all over, some of my clients might be thinking about suing me.

  And the chances that some or all of them would be asking for refunds were just, well, astronomical.

  My business was going to go bust before it even had a good start. As I went back to the ballroom I felt a little like murdering somebody myself. Problem was, I didn’t know who to kill, because I didn’t know who was responsible for what had happened.

  If I did know, though, I wouldn’t have stabbed him.

  I’d have strangled the son of a gun.

  CHAPTER 8

  I

  f going through a relatively amicable but still painful divorce had taught me one thing, it was that no matter how bad the situation is, it can always get worse.

  That was what I found when I returned to the ballroom. Luke was standing where I’d left him, all alone now with a frantic look in his eyes.

  “I couldn’t help it, Miz D,” he said as soon as I walked up, before I could even ask him where Augusta and Amelia were. “The deputies came and got ’em, and when I said that you didn’t want them questioned unless you were there, they told me to back off or they’d arrest me for interfering with an investigation.” He shook his head. “I thought about sluggin’ one of them, figured that would distract them from the girls, but then I thought about what Melissa would say if she had to come and bail me out of jail… .”

  I was upset, but I managed to pat him on the arm. “That’s all right, Luke. Your getting arrested wouldn’t really help anything. Did they take the girls somewhere together?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am. They separated ’em …I guess to see if they told the same story when they were apart.”

  That was what the deputies would do, all right. I suspected that Farraday had given them instructions to handle it that way, as well.

  “Did you see where the deputies took them?”

  He shook his head again, still looking miserable. “Nope. I followed them all the way to the ballroom doors and told them again you didn’t want it this way, but the deputy there stopped me.”

  “There was nothing you could do, Luke. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I told him.

  There hadn’t been anything Luke could do … but that didn’t mean I couldn’t.

  I went to the ballroom doors and the deputy there stopped me, just as I expected he would.

  “Some of your men took my nieces away to question them,” I said. “They’re minors. I want those interrogations stopped right now.”

  “You’d have to talk to Lieutenant Farraday about that, ma’am.”

  “I was just with the lieutenant. He knows how I feel about this.”

  The deputy shrugged. “If you’re not the legal guardian of the girls, I don’t imagine there’s much you can do. Are you the legal guardian?”

  “Well … no. But I know their mama wouldn’t want them being questioned about a murder they didn’t have anything to do with!”

  The man just shook his head, and I knew it wasn’t going to do any good to keep arguing with him. I knew what Luke meant about wanting to slug one of them, but that wouldn’t help, either. I settled for glaring and muttering under my breath as I turned away from the doors.

  To take my mind off the girls and what they might be going through, I made my way across the ballroom to where Edmond Ralston was standing with his daughter Janice. Ralston still looked upset, naturally enough. The tourist trade was important to him, and once the word got around that a murder had taken place here on the plantation—during one of the tours, even—that might cut into his business.

  Or, depending on how morbid people were, I told myself, it might even increase the number of tourists who wanted to come out here.

  Even though Ralston was still shaken, he was back in masterof-the-plantation mode, at least to a certain extent. He gave me a little half-bow and said, “Ms. Dickinson, I simply cannot begin to express my regret at the pall these circumstances have cast over the evening’s festivities.”

  His daughter gave a quiet, hollow laugh. “Dad, you’re not really Thomas Mitchell, you know. You just look a little like him.”

  Ralston sighed. “I know. Would that this was a movie, because the director would have yelled ‘cut’ before now.”

  “Poor Steven was the one who got cut,” Janice said. “Or rather, stabbed.” A shiver went through her.

  “Had you known him for very long?” I asked.

  “He’s been our creative director for the past couple of years,” Ralston said. “He supervises all the actors, and he’s in charge of the costuming and things like that. And of course he supplies most of the performers. They’re students of his.”

  I recalled Will Burke saying earlier in the evening that Kelley was the head of the drama department at a nearby college.

  “I don’t know what we’ll do without him,” Ralston went on. “We’ll have to find someone else to take charge, I suppose.” “What about Dr. Burke?”

  Ralston looked surprised. “You know Will?”

  “Not until tonight. We met earlier during the evening, before …”

  I didn’t have to finish. They both knew what I meant.

  “Dr. Burke’s areas are history and literature,” Janice said. “He doesn’t know anything about theater and things like that.”

  She looked to be about the right age to be in college, so I asked, “Were you in Mr. Kelley’s classes?”

  “Oh, yes. Steven was a wonderful teacher. Perry can tell you.”

  She turned to a young man standing near us and reached over to tug on the sleeve of his brown swallowtail coat. He was one of the actors, dressed in swallowtail coat, tight, tan whipcord trousers, high-topped brown boots, white frilly shirt, and a gray
silk cravat. He was tall and lean and had sleek, dark blond hair, and I realized he was the actor who played Ashley Wilkes. He even bore a slight resemblance to Leslie Howard, the movie Ashley, just as Edmond Ralston looked a little like Thomas Mitchell. I looked at Janice, with her rounded face and wholesome prettiness, and realized she was supposed to be Melanie Hamilton, or rather, Olivia de Havilland. She was a little young for the part, but I thought she could probably carry it off.

  “Perry works with Steven,” Janice continued. She caught her breath as she realized what she’d just said, and with that catch in her voice she added, “I mean … worked with him.”

  The young, blond Leslie Howard look-alike gave me the same sort of half-bow that Ralston had. Obviously it was a common mannerism among these folks. “Perry Newton, ma’am, at your service,” he introduced himself. “I was Steven’s teaching assistant.”

  I managed a smile and a nod for him, but before I could say anything, Ralston spoke up again. “Perry, it just occurred to me that you’re the natural candidate to take over Steven’s job, since you were his assistant. Are you interested?”

  “Dad!” Janice said. “You shouldn’t be …it’s too soon after … after what happened …”

  “Nonsense. Business is business, and it doesn’t stop for anyone’s death. How about it, Perry?”

  Stiffly, Perry Newton answered, “I think Janice is right, sir. This discussion isn’t very seemly at the moment.”

  “Seemly be damned. I have tours to put on, and I need someone to run them. You’re the best qualified.”

  Perry shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I suppose I ought to do what I can to help out, for the time being, anyway.”

  “That’s good.” Ralston slapped him on the back. “Thanks, son.” Perry Newton still didn’t look very happy about it, though. Ralston sighed and went on, “Of course, we don’t know when we’ll get to go ahead with the tours. That detective from the sheriff’s office is acting like he’s going to shut us down until he solves this murder. He’ll be hearing from my lawyer if he tries a stunt like that.”

  “Finding out who killed Steven is more important than keeping the tours going, isn’t it?” Janice said.