Dead for the Money

by Peg Herring

  “Mr. Dunbar, this is Mildred. She is going with me while I investigate your case.”

  Dunbar frowned slightly, and Mildred stepped toward him, extending a hand. “I’m a detective in training. Seamus is going to let me observe so I can learn what he knows about crossing back.”

  Seamus almost sneered at the implication that she could learn in one trip what he knew, but he stuck his hands in his pockets and examined the deck instead.

  Dunbar took Mildred’s hand and she moved closer so that he looked down into her upturned face. “I wonder, Mr. Dunbar—”

  “Please, call me Will.”

  Now Seamus quashed an urge to sniff in objection. Dunbar had not invited him to that familiarity.

  Mildred smiled coquettishly. “Will, then. Could you tell your story again, for my benefit? Seamus has given me the basics, but it would be so much clearer coming from you.”

  I wasn’t clear? Seamus almost said it aloud. Still, it couldn’t hurt to go over the facts of the case again.

  Dunbar obediently told the whole story once more. As he talked, Mildred stopped him occasionally, touching his arm lightly and asking a question. Seamus had to admit that they were all good ones.

  “So your sister lives with you. Does she have a good relationship with the child, Brodie?”

  “Well, no. Arlis tried, of course, but Brodie is...difficult. She was treated badly by her mother, and unfortunately took a dislike to my sister from the first. For my sake, they came to a sort of compromise. Arlis generally leaves Brodie alone, and Brodie generally pretends Arlis does not exist.”

  Disrespectful, Seamus thought, but he did not let disapproval show on his face. He sensed that Dunbar thought the kid made the sun rise and set each day.

  Later, Mildred had another question. “You say your grandson went into the woods to find a creature that was in pain, but you did not hear it. Did he say what it sounded like?”

  “I don’t remember him mentioning a particular animal. He might have, but—”

  “That’s quite all right. I just wondered.”

  As Dunbar described the members of the household, she stopped him once more. “This Scarlet. Does she benefit in any way from your death?”

  Dunbar seemed shocked. “Certainly not enough to be involved in it. She was a waitress I met last year when Bud and I were on Mackinac Island for a conference. She’s Irish, and she mentioned that she’d trained to be a teacher but had not yet found a position.”

  “An Irish schoolteacher waiting tables at a tourist spot in Michigan?”

  “The money is good. Young people come from all over the world each summer to work in the hotels up there. At any rate, I took an immediate liking to Scarlet. When I returned home and learned that Brodie had driven yet another tutor away, I asked her if she’d take the job.” He raised a hand. “After I’d checked her out thoroughly, of course. We extended her visa, and things worked out very well from there.”

  The questions went on a while longer. Mildred was, Seamus had to admit, a shrewd interviewer, getting Dunbar to expand on things he had not thought to ask. She learned that Arnold Wilk, Dunbar’s personal assistant, was “a bit of a worm but very efficient.” Shelley the cook had been a surrogate mother to both Bud and Brodie. And it was Bud who first suggested Scarlet as Brodie’s tutor.

  Finally, Mildred seemed satisfied. “I appreciate your candor, Will,” she said, patting the old man’s arm. “We will do our very best to find out the truth for you.”

  Seamus thought that “we” was a little presumptuous.

  They left Dunbar to his novel, walking the deck as they discussed what they had learned. Mildred took Seamus’ arm as if they were on promenade. Her pink heels clicked softly on the deck surface. “I think that went very well.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sure you noticed the same things I did.”

  “Okay, what did you notice?”

  “Well, there are two ways to explain why Will did not hear an animal crying in the woods.”

  “Yeah, like there wasn’t any animal.”

  “That’s one. But there is another possibility. Will is—well, he was—quite deaf.”

  “Deaf!”

  “Yes. Of course, here, everything works fine. But you must have noticed that he turns one ear toward whoever is speaking. It’s habit, left over from years of straining to hear with what is undoubtedly his good ear. It was the left ear he turned toward us, so his right, where the sound supposedly came from, was possibly so bad that he wouldn’t have heard a thing.”

  Seamus was impressed. The woman was intelligent, as Gabe had said. Not just book-smart, college intelligent, but observational and deduction-type intelligent. “That’s pretty good.”

  Mildred looked pleased. “The other thing I got from his story is more important. I think we can narrow the list of suspects already.”

  “Didn’t you recently lecture me about keeping an open mind?”

  “Oh, I will,” Mildred said airily. “I always do. But I think we’ll find that a woman is our focus.”

  “The sister, Arlis?”

  “Arlis seems unlikely to go tromping through the woods, no matter how much money is at stake. But Scarlet seems much too good to be true.”

  “The tutor? What does she gain from Dunbar’s death?”

  “She’s after the grandson, you silly man. He’s wealthy, and she’s been under his nose for the past year, working on getting him hooked.”

  BRODIE INTENDED TO RETURN to the viewing point the next morning, preferring its solitude to the presence of people who disapproved of her. But Scarlet asked her to remain in the house, and she obeyed, lying on her bed and watching tiny white clouds drift by her window like passing ships.

  Brodie considered Gramps half of her life, and that half was gone. The other half she divided among Scarlet, Shelley the cook, and her husband Briggs, the handyman. Everyone else she imagined as outside an invisible circle. There were times when she had to speak to those outside people, but she had as little to do with them as possible. They made her feel like a misfit. They spoke louder than normal when they talked to her, and something in their eyes conveyed discomfort at her presence.

  Just because she’d set one tree on fire.

  It had been an accident. She’d been a kid then, and she’d taken it into her head to build a fire in her tree house and roast marshmallows. The stupid thing wouldn’t go, and she used up all but one of her matches on it. Finally, she had a brilliant idea: gasoline would make it burn. But how to get some up into the tree? She had hit on an idea she thought was clever. Using a narrow tube, she sipped some gas from the can Briggs kept in the barn into her mouth and climbed carefully back up to the tree house. Lighting her last match, she spit the gas on the kindling she’d amassed. That was pretty much all she could recall for a while. When it was all over, she had no eyebrows, a receding hairline, and a reputation as a budding arsonist to add to her other crimes. When she thought about it, she could still taste the gas in her mouth. Stupid.

  Scarlet knocked softly on her bedroom door. “Brodie? Can you come downstairs? There are things we have to discuss.”

  Dragging herself off the bed, Brodie made herself presentable, knowing Scarlet would send her right back upstairs if she did not wear shoes and comb her hair. No doubt funeral arrangements were being made. They would bury Gramps, then what? Would they send her away? Put her in some snobby girls’ school so nobody had to deal with her? She was pretty sure nobody wanted the ugly, crazy girl around. Nobody ever had except Gramps. Briggs and Shelley were good to her. So was Scarlet. But it was their job.

  When she’d come to the Dunbar house, Brodie ate only what she could manage with her hands. It had felt natural for food to go from her fingers to her mouth. Her caregivers would put her to bed in her lovely room only to find her asleep on the couch in the family room the next morning. Over time, she had adapted to society’s simple demands. She ate with a fork, combed her hair once a day, and learned to sleep in a
bed. Although not as wild as she had been, at twelve years of age Brodie still refused to go to school, associated only with a few people she was used to, and would not eat meals in company. A long line of nannies, caregivers, and tutors had been endured with very little grace. Each was tested, most beyond their ability to withstand it. Brodie considered it a kind of duty.

  Then, a little less than a year ago, Scarlet came. Brodie had learned, through her usual spying, that the new tutor came on Bud’s recommendation. Since Bud did not like Brodie, she decided the woman would be horrible. Gramps had disagreed. “Give her a chance,” he’d urged. “Most people are okay if you treat them well.” Brodie did not buy it. Best to find out right away what a person was like when she was angry. Anger told you a lot.

  On her first day, Brodie had waited for the new girl to try to befriend her, as all those before her had done. But Scarlet did not even come looking for her. Instead she sat down in the back yard in an Adirondack chair shaded by a large maple tree. It was a spot Brodie herself favored. Idly she paged through an oversized book with a medieval castle on the cover. Brodie watched from her favorite hiding place, a spirea bush that drooped branches onto the ground, making a space for a slightly undersized girl to hide, spying on her elders.

  The new woman was not much fun to watch. She looked at every page for what seemed like forever. Sometimes she stopped and rested her eyes, and when she did, the book would tilt forward on her lap, giving a tantalizing glimpse of more castles. It was apparently all about them, and Brodie wondered if someone had told this Scarlet person that such books were her favorites. She had several, but this one was new to her, with pages of bright greens and stark grays against blues that seemed to draw her to them.

  Finally, the Scarlet person rose, set the book down on the chair, and disappeared into the house. Brodie decided with some satisfaction that she had out-waited Gramps’ most recent hireling. She crept out from her leafy lair, looking around to be sure the woman wasn’t lurking somewhere near the French doors.

  Satisfied that she was alone, Brodie took up the book and sat down on the chair. The cover depicted Blarney Castle, one of her favorites. Like her, it was not fancy or prettied up. It was what it was. Carefully, she opened the book’s pages, and within a few minutes was transported across the ocean, visiting Edinburgh Castle, Floors Castle, Conwy Castle, and others she had never heard of. She wondered what it must be like to see those places for real, not as pictures in books or on TV.

  “I’ve been to Blarney, and some of the others as well,” said a voice behind her. Brodie knew in an instant that she had been had. The Scarlet person had left the book on purpose. Someone had blabbed, probably Arnold the Mouth. She tried to be angry, but she was fascinated that this woman had been where she wanted so much to go. In fact, she heard a lilt in Scarlet’s voice that revealed more.

  “Are you Irish?” Brodie used her voice so little that she had to clear her throat before asking.

  Scarlet made a little curtsey. “Have you heard of the Ring of Kerry?”

  “No.”

  She came a step closer, and Brodie caught the scent of apples. “May I see the book? I can show you Ballycarbery, the castle nearest my home town.”

  What must it be like to live near a castle, to see it as you passed by every day? Brodie handed the book over, and while the woman paged through to find the picture, she made a decision. She had loved Gramps. She liked Shelley and Briggs. For reasons she did not yet understand fully, Brodie decided Scarlet might be a fourth person on the earth she could like.

  Scarlet became her guide, helping her see that behaving herself was not so bad. There were no lectures about expectations, no fake “Let’s be friends” talks. Scarlet was firm but not demanding, authoritative but willing to listen to Brodie’s side of things and compromise.

  In the last year Brodie’s reading skills, which were good but had been limited to what she chose to read, widened and deepened. Scarlet let her dress as she chose, never criticizing her odd clothing choices the way Arlis did. Scarlet served as a gentle example of what was proper and gave advice, if asked. She also showed Brodie ways to manage her wild mop of hair, having her own unruly auburn curls to conquer.

  With Scarlet’s encouragement, Brodie began to mix with the people who came to the house. Scarlet suggested she might spend a few polite minutes with Gramps’ dinner guests before returning to her own pursuits. Once she found that none of them pointed at her or went into hysterics, Brodie agreed to remain through dinner from time to time. She and Scarlet practiced together which fork to choose and how to eat and answer questions at the same time. Scarlet made it a sort of game, and Brodie had done okay. She decided she didn’t mind people too much, at least for short periods of time.

  The first time she stayed for dinner, Gramps embarrassed her by asking all sorts of questions about what she’d been reading. She’d been uncomfortable, balancing questions about Great Expectations with concerns about ending up with a lapful of succotash. Scarlet explained later that he was proud of her and wanted his guests to know she read things other kids her age had never heard of. “He wants everyone to see how intelligent you are.”

  Brodie never thought of herself as smart. She had learned a lot of stuff from the array of companions Gramps had hired over the years, but it wasn’t hard. Stuff stuck in her head, but that didn’t make a person smart. Brodie had learned early on what she was.

  “Watch this,” Jeannie said to the current boyfriend. “Hey, Brodie! Hey, little girl. What’s Brodie?” She held up a cookie, just out of the child’s reach, and repeated, “What’s Brodie?”

  “Tupid.”

  Jeannie chuckled, elbowing the guy, who smiled disinterestedly. “What’s Brodie?”

  “Tupid.”

  “—and what else?”

  “Ug-wy.”

  “Ug-leee,” Jeannie corrected.” Ugly. And what else?”

  The child hesitated, trying to recall the word that would get her something to eat. “Weed.”

  Jeannie shook her head. “Not weed. Weirrrrd.”

  “Weerrd.”

  “Right.” She gave the child the cookie and watched her bite into it. “Stupid. Ugly. Weird. That’s Brodie.”

  Even if she knew some stuff, Brodie was still ugly. Maybe better now with Scarlet’s help, but nothing anyone would want to look at for long. And surly. Arlis reminded her of that often enough. And crazy. Not normal, not like normal people. Weird.

  She knew her oddness had bothered Gramps. He had not said it out loud, and it was not something Brodie talked about, even to Scarlet. She could tell Scarlet lots of stuff, but not what went on inside her head. She couldn’t tell anyone, although she always thought that if she ever had to, Gramps would have understood.

  But Gramps was gone. And she was afraid to tell anyone else how weird she felt, how unlike everybody else.

  Chapter Five

  SEAMUS CONSIDERED the case and his responsibilities to both Dunbar and Gabe. He had doubts. Mildred was intuitive and intelligent, but he had already noted her strong will and her tendency to speak first and think later. Her charming apologies might smooth the way in face-to-face conversations, but a cross-back could not apologize and explain to her host that she was sorry to have spoken out of turn.

  “Keep in mind what I said,” he warned as he went over the specifics of the trip. “We aren’t there to change anything.”

  “And you are the boss. I get it.” Mildred’s tone was politely impatient. “I won’t do anything you don’t explicitly tell me to do.”

  “Good. Then you won’t get into trouble.” Seamus took a step toward her. Realizing that the moment had come, Mildred stepped back. “I can’t go like this!” she protested. “I have to change.”

  At first he didn’t comprehend. When he did, his brow furrowed in disapproval. “They won’t—”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Five minutes,” she pleaded. “I will run—literally run—to the Ship Store and get something suitable. I promise.
I won’t be long. I can’t go feeling unprepared.”

  Seamus didn’t agree or disagree. She was gone before he had a chance to.

  As she hurried off, he looked around blankly. Finding an empty lounge chair, he threw himself into it, already regretting his decision to take Mildred along. His gut told him she was trouble, but when she was standing right in front of him, he found it hard to say that to her. “It’s those blue eyes,” he muttered aloud. “The worst reason ever for agreeing to anything.”

  MILDRED WENT FIRST to the Store, where a pleasant woman with a French accent helped her choose an outfit for the trip, complete with earrings, shoes, and a scarf for her hair. She marveled, as she had the first few times she’d visited, at the endless array of choices. Anything a person could ask for seemed to be a touch away, and the woman behind the counter took the right tone, helpful but not pushy. Mildred went to her stateroom and changed, turning before the mirror to be sure the outfit looked good from all angles. She laughed at herself a little for caring about something no one but Seamus would see, but it was important to feel like she looked good. How could a person accomplish anything otherwise?

  As she came onto the deck, Mildred passed the ship’s salon. She paused, unsure, and then turned and went inside. Seamus could not begrudge her the time to make herself look her best.

  Sometime later she emerged from the salon, hair styled and peach-scented, and all twenty nails colored to match her outfit. She was ready to go.

  As she navigated the hallway, however, she thought of Nancy, counselor for the recently dead. Nancy first explained the possibility of crossing back. She deserved word of Mildred’s imminent departure. Seamus would understand that.

  When she knocked on the door, Nancy called out, “Come in.” Mildred entered the tastefully appointed office, approaching the angel with arms outstretched. Nancy bore a strong resemblance to Mildred’s mother, though without the half-glasses Mom had worn the last decade or so of her life.