Lost and Fondue

by Avery Aames

Edsel sneered. “I’ll bet Harker tossed it.”

  “Why would he do that?” Rebecca asked.

  Edsel worked the toe of his shoe on the floor.

  “Come on.” Rebecca ordered. “Out with it.”

  I smiled. At times, she reminded me so much of my grandmother.

  “He was going to stop painting,” Edsel said.

  “What?” Winona nearly shouted.

  I stared at her. Why would she care what Harker did with his art?

  “Yeah, he wanted to ditch it all and become a comic book artist.” Edsel’s nose narrowed, like the idea reeked.

  “But he was so talented,” Rebecca said.

  Quinn called Harker masterful. Dane said he had the chops.

  “For heaven’s sakes,” Freddy cut in. “He was not going to throw aside his career.”

  “Yes, he was.” Edsel clicked his tongue against his teeth. “He was chucking it all. The training. Everything. He said his quest for perfection in art was destroying his soul. He could do comic book work in his sleep and live a real life.”

  Before anyone could question Edsel more, the front door of the pub whipped open.

  “Charlotte!” my grandmother shouted. Waving her fingers over her head, she plowed through the layers of people. “Dèpèche-toi! Come quickly! It’s Etienne ... your grandfather. He’s had an accident at the theater!”

  CHAPTER 13

  Grandmère, Rebecca, Delilah, and I rushed out of the pub and across the Village Green toward the theater. As we ran, Grandmère relayed what had happened—half in English, half in French. She’d seen a vision of a gel light falling from the black-box theater’s ceiling onto one of the crew. To make sure all the gels were secure, she prepared to go to the theater, but Pépère said he’d handle it and went to the theater alone. When he didn’t come home in a timely manner, Grandmère searched for him and found him lying on the stage at the foot of a ladder.

  “Mon dieu!” Tears streamed down my grandmother’s aged face. “He is unconscious, but he has a pulse.”

  “Did you call the doctor?” My heart jackhammered my rib cage, but I kept my voice calm.

  “The telephone at the theater is out of order.”

  “Did you think to use your cellular phone?”

  “I did not have it with me.”

  I shook my head. Neither Grandmère nor Pépère could get with the twenty-first century. Either they forgot how to use their cell phones or they left them in the chargers at home.

  “I came to find you, instead. Oh-h-h-h.” Grandmère shook her head. “I am horrible. I left him alone. I am a monster.” Her sobs made me ache deep beneath my solar plexus.

  “No, you’re not,” I assured her. My grandmother was usually the steady one in a frantic situation. When I was eight, she hadn’t flinched when I’d hobbled into the house, my shin looking like bloody pulp after a fall on my bicycle. Faced with Pépère’s mortality, she wasn’t as tough as she made out. Neither was I. I didn’t know what I would do without him. He was my rock, my anchor. If possible, I wanted him and my grandmother to live to the ripe old age of one hundred and twenty.

  I was the first to reach Providence Playhouse. I whipped open the front door and darted to the right, down the carpeted hall that led to the black-box theater. Doorstops held the entry doors ajar. Dim working lights lit the space.

  I charged inside. “Pépère!”

  Grandmère yelled, “Etienne!”

  He lay in a heap by a rickety old wooden ladder that stood in the center of the three sofas that were set up for No Exit with Poe.

  “Pépère!” I hurried down the aisle, leaped onto the stage, and knelt beside him. Rebecca, Delilah, and Grandmère gathered around.

  Pépère stirred, then moaned.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  He offered a lopsided grin. “I’m an idiot.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Are you okay? Is anything hurt?”

  “Only my ego.” He snickered. “You’ve been telling us for a year that we needed to get one of those aluminum ladders, but did I listen?” He glanced up. The second-to-the-top rung of the old ladder had split in half. “My foot fell right through.”

  Grandmère settled onto her knees and stroked Pépère’s messy white hair. “You were unconscious. I thought—”

  He petted her cheek. “Do not write me off so soon, mon amie. And I wasn’t unconscious.”

  “Then why didn’t you speak to me? Why were your eyes closed?”

  “The wind was knocked out of me. Before I knew it, you had run from the theater.” He chuckled again. “It’ll take more than a fall from a ladder to end my life. Now help me up.”

  Everyone assisted. Grandmère and I each took an arm. Delilah and Rebecca propped him up from behind. His knees gave way twice as we shuttled him to a seat in the front row.

  “What’s going on?” Bozz entered the black box through the same door we had.

  “The ladder broke,” Grandmère said. “Would you clear it from the stage?”

  “Sure thing.” Bozz raced to the stage.

  Two teens trailed him into the theater—a gawky boy and a leggy girl with luxurious strawberry blonde hair.

  “Philby?” I asked Rebecca.

  She nodded. “Isn’t she a knockout?”

  “Her mother’s head of the PTA,” Delilah said, huddling closer.

  “But she’s not the one who got caught pole dancing at the men’s club,” Rebecca added.

  “No, she’s the one who started that book club I’ve been trying to talk you both into,” Delilah said. “You know Prudence Hart and she are related somehow.”

  “That’s right,” I said, now recalling how the whole family went together. Philby had two younger sisters about Amy and Clair’s age, and an older brother who was on some mission in Timbuktu. Literally, in Timbuktu. The mother and Prudence didn’t even share a hello if they passed in the street. I assessed Philby from afar. Bozz would be a lunkhead not to like her.

  Bozz and his gawky pal returned to the stage. “What next?”

  Grandmère said, “We need to repair that tormentor curtain on the right. The clips are coming loose.”

  “Gotcha, Gen.” He saluted and grinned.

  She narrowed her eyes, but I saw the twinkle. The little general, the crew called her. Secretly, she loved the nickname.

  As the teens disappeared in the backstage shadows, Pépère said, “The show must go on.”

  Grandmère hunkered into the seat beside him and muttered, “Old fool.”

  He clipped her chin with his knuckles. “Who are you calling an old fool?”

  “You think you are indestructible.”

  “Don’t you worry. These old bones are as strong as bricks.”

  “Oooh, speaking of bricks.” Rebecca beckoned us to gather in a semicircle in front of Grandmère and Pépère. “When we were at the pub, we were talking about the crime scene.”

  I grinned. Leave it to my sly assistant to turn a dire situation into a discussion about murder. I wondered which television show she’d mention this time.

  “I was thinking about the play you’re doing and that got me thinking about Poe,” she continued. “You know how in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ this guy exacts revenge on a friend who insulted him, so he baits his friend into believing something valuable is in the catacombs. In this case, a bottle of rare wine.”

  “Sherry,” Delilah said.

  “Sherry, right.” Rebecca eyed me for confirmation, seeing as we’d already discussed the allegorical angle of the story. “Anyway, he says he wants his friend’s opinion, but his friend is drunk.”

  “Like Harker was,” Delilah added.

  “Yes,” Rebecca said. “He lures him to the spot and chains him to the brick wall.”

  “Except Harker wasn’t chained,” I said.

  Rebecca brandished a hand to quiet me. “What if the murderer built that wall to mirror the ‘Cask’ story? What if the murderer wanted revenge against a friend?”
r />   “Are you suggesting that Dane or Edsel killed him?” I asked.

  Pépère sniffed. “Those boys aren’t killers.”

  I said, “Agatha Christie claimed, ‘Every murderer is probably someone’s old friend.’”

  “She was wrong,” Pépère said. “You all are.” He tapped his temple. “I know these things.”

  I grinned. What would he divine next? The winner of the Triple Crown?

  “I was considering Quinn,” Rebecca said.

  “She’s not a murderer,” I snapped, but who else was? Freddy, Winona? A prior acquaintance from Cleveland? I doubted any locals from Providence knew Harker Fontanne. Meredith would have a meltdown if the killer turned out to be her niece. She’d disintegrate if it was her brother, too.

  Rebecca said, “Whoever did it was familiar with the Edgar Allan Poe story.”

  “We don’t know that.” I broke from the pack and paced in front of the stage, my hands open, palms up. “It’s all supposition.” I stopped myself, befogged by the words and gestures spilling out of me. Who did I think I was, Clarence Darrow reincarnated? I hadn’t gone to law school. Unlike half of my graduating class, I’d never even contemplated becoming a lawyer.

  Delilah jabbed her forefinger toward me. “You’re missing the point. The killer tossed around jewels and built the wall.”

  Back to the darned wall. If it had been recently built, as Rebecca surmised, then who among the suspects would have had the time to do so? And how had he or she moved the materials into the Ziegler mansion without being noticed?

  “I’m telling you, the killer set the scene,” Delilah said.

  “Set the scene. Oui, oui!” Grandmère popped up from her seat and barged through Delilah and Rebecca to the stage.

  We spun around to watch her.

  “It is so important to set the scene.” Grandmère pushed one of the scenery couches off its mark. “Don’t you see? Move this an inch, and there is too much distance between the characters. Move it too close, and we lose the distance so necessary for the underlying meaning.”

  “Mrs. Bessette?” Bozz pulled the tormentor curtain—a flat curtain in front of the upstage grand drape—toward the middle. It jerked and stopped. “I think all we need is WD-40.”

  “I just bought a case. It is under the workbench.” Grandmère returned her focus to us, her rapt audience. “Where was I? Oh, yes, setting the scene. It is key. If we remove the couches entirely from the stage, we would not be doing No Exit. Do you see?”

  “Not every version of No Exit has couches on the set,” I argued.

  “Our version does,” Grandmère said.

  “Yes, that’s my point.” Rebecca clapped with excitement. “That’s what the murderer did. He set the scene for his play.”

  “Or she set it,” I said.

  “Or she,” Rebecca conceded. “The murderer—whether it’s he or she is insignificant—lured Harker Fontanne—”

  I held up a hand. “You don’t know he was lured. He could have gone there by himself to hunt for treasure. The murderer could have followed Harker and surprised him.”

  Rebecca huffed. “Fine. Then the murderer chained him—”

  “Harker wasn’t chained to anything,” I barked, feeling more contentious by the millisecond.

  “It’s metaphorical,” Delilah said.

  “Right.” Rebecca bobbed her head. “The murderer metaphorically chained Harker by choking him with that scarf and leaving him behind the wall with the jewels.”

  “And why were there jewels? Anyone?” Delilah wiggled her fingers, compelling us to answer.

  I felt like we were in the middle of a master class on the hidden meanings of a play.

  “Because”—Rebecca held up a victory finger—“the murderer set the scene.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “If the scene was staged, what do the jewels mean? Were they strewn beside Harker as a reminder of his gambling problem? Did they symbolize his constant hunger to find treasure? Or did they mean something else entirely? And what did the wall mean? Was it symbolic of some kind of emotional barrier?”

  Pépère cleared his throat and struggled to his feet. He folded his hands in front of his belly. “You know, chèrie, there was a story about the treasure on the Internet today.”

  “I read it,” Rebecca said. “It was in the New York Times.”

  “I’m sure there have been plenty of stories, in plenty of newspapers,” I said. “The rumor has been around for years. Old Man Ziegler said on his deathbed—”

  “Perhaps word of our little play inspired the crime,” Grandmère cut in.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “There were write-ups in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Columbus Dispatch. We also had Internet coverage from the regional reviewer.” Grandmère focused on Delilah. “By the way, chèrie, that reviewer saw a rehearsal a few weeks ago and is very excited. She said the playwright has courage.”

  Delilah beamed.

  “I mean, how would your play inspire the crime?” I wished I didn’t sound so snarky and out of sorts. I needed a meal or at least a slice of Manchego on warm toast with a drizzle of honey.

  Grandmère gave me an appeasing look. “Maybe someone who knew about the treasure and read our rave review thought”—she tapped her head—“Aha! I have a brilliant idea. I know a way I can get revenge. I will set the scene to baffle the police.”

  “Maybe more than one person had the idea,” Delilah added.

  I held out my hands in a gesture of defeat. “What you’re saying is everybody from Alaska to Madagascar could have known about the darned treasure and come looking for it.”

  My family and friends reminded me of a collection of bobbleheaded dolls as they nodded in unison.

  “Don’t forget,” Rebecca said. “That includes everyone in Providence, too.”

  Her words took me aback. What if Harker wasn’t killed by a friend or an acquaintance from Cleveland? What if someone from Providence wanted to keep our little town insular? A local would have had plenty of time to build the brick wall. Was the murderer ruthless enough to kill a total stranger simply to ruin Meredith’s plan to convert the winery into a college?

  CHAPTER 14

  As I headed home, I couldn’t help thinking about what my grandmother and friends had said back at the theater. Urso wouldn’t relish hearing the theory about the murderer setting the scene, but I left him a message to call me, hoping that when I did reveal the theory, I would create enough doubt in his mind that he’d agree to free Quinn on bail. I also reflected on Harker’s stolen artwork. I hated to admit it, but Freddy topped my list of suspects for the theft. He had clearly disliked Harker, and he had something hidden in his room at the bed-and-breakfast.

  When I turned the corner toward my house, the urge to find out what was in Freddy’s suitcase plagued me. I paused in front of Lavender and Lace and stared at the windows upstairs. Lights were on in the two rooms facing the street, one of which was Freddy’s. The drapes were pulled back, but the sheer lavender curtains hung closed. I didn’t detect any movement beyond the curtains, but that didn’t mean Freddy wasn’t there. He could be in the restroom or lying on the bed. Or he could be among the guests in the great room having late-night tea. A soft glow spilled from that region of the B&B. If Freddy was there, I could steal in, take a peek, and slip out.

  A minute. I’d be inside only a minute.

  I started for the front door and froze. Someone moved in Freddy’s room upstairs. Freddy, I assumed. And then another shadow joined him—as tall as he was, with round curves. Winona? She pressed into him. Their heads drew close. Their mouths met.

  Upset that I couldn’t try my hand at sleuthing, I shambled home. I found Rags fast asleep in his wicker kitty bed in the kitchen. I poured fresh milk into his bowl. Then, discovering I was out of Manchego, I made a quick Camembert and fig jam panini for myself, grabbed a Pellegrino water, and tiptoed upstairs with my snack. Expecting the girls to be asleep, I was surprised to see light coming fro
m their bedroom. I peeked in and spotted Matthew sitting on the antique rocking chair between the twin beds, reading a story from the girls’ favorite Crafty Sleuth series.

  Snuggled beneath her purple quilt, Clair looked like she was closer to six years old than nine. An angelic smile graced her lips. Amy sat upright, and per usual, her hands patted the bed with a little rhythm. She loved to sing. Look out, American Idol, I mused. In seven years, if the popular show was still on TV, Amy would be one of the first in line to audition. She was a talented ham, just like Grandmére.

  I left them to their tender moment and padded into my room.

  The moment I closed the door, a mischievous urge swept through me. I set my meal on the nightstand, and without turning on the light, stole across the Persian rug to my window. Doing my best to be discreet, I pulled back the brocade drapes and peeked at Lavender and Lace. The lights had dimmed in Freddy’s room, but I still made out two shadows. They moved about the room as if they were doing the tango. Was it some kind of celebratory dance? Had they killed Harker together?

  “Stop it, Charlotte,” I whispered. “They could be in love.”

  Yeah, and Limburger cheese smells good.

  Abandoning my Peeping Tom routine, I switched on the light on the nightstand, perched on the edge of my bed, and in less than two minutes, wolfed down my food. After that, I did my ablutions, spending extra time flossing—my dental hygienist would be so proud. Next, I donned a Victoria’s Secret nightgown that Rebecca had given me for Christmas and slipped into the oak T-back armchair at my desk. If I couldn’t sleuth in person, the very least I could do was an Internet search. Not only did I want to read what Pépère and Rebecca had mentioned they had seen online, but I wanted to know more about Winona Westerton.

  In the past year, thanks to Bozz’s guidance, I’d become pretty adept at Google searches. I’d learned that there were dozens of Jordan Paces and hundreds of Jacky Petersons. When creating their new identities, Jordan had been careful to choose common names.

  Not so for Winona Westerton. I woke up my sleepy computer, clicked on my Internet browser icon, and typed Winona’s name into the Google search line. There was only one hit with her name. She didn’t have a Web page. She didn’t blog. And she hadn’t joined any of the social networking sites. But her name appeared in a newspaper article listing the donors for a regional theater in Cleveland and again as an alumna attending a reunion for Northwestern’s class of 2005. The article said that as a teen, Winona and her sister Julianne won ballroom dancing competitions. Winona also placed fifth in a high school art competition. And she was fairly adept at baking, having won a pie contest at the age of fourteen. Hyperlinks to the various competitions were included.