by Mary Kennedy
“The top shelves will be more difficult,” Ali said. “We’ll have to go through them shelf by shelf. If only we knew what it looked like.” She walked over to a round side table with claw feet. “It’s got to be an antique,” she said admiringly. “Expensive,” she added, running her hand over the smooth surface. “There’s a drawer,” she said hopefully. She pulled it open and frowned. “Nothing.”
“Let’s concentrate on the bookshelves,” I told her. “You start with the far wall, and I’ll do this one. We can share the ladder.”
“Do you feel a draft in here? Or is it my imagination?” Ali shivered and rubbed her hands over her arms.
“I think it’s coming from this window.” I peeked under the heavy dark green drapery. “They left this window wide-open, maybe to air the place out. Do you want me to try to close it?”
“No,” she said. “It’s musty in here. Just leave it. With the drapes closed, I won’t feel the draft.”
We worked steadily for over an hour. The search went more quickly than I’d anticipated. The books were neatly arranged by category. Abigail had been a voracious reader, it seemed, and the shelves were filled with books on art, history, and travel. She loved the classics, and I saw several French novels by Zola, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Her taste in modern novels tended toward bestsellers in contemporary mysteries and thrillers.
“What next?” Ali asked, taking a break and sinking into an armchair.
“We have to rethink our strategy,” I told her. “The diary doesn’t appear to be hidden anywhere in the room.”
“The book,” Ali said slowly. “Remember how Abigail referred to her diary as ‘the book’?”
“Yes,” I said encouragingly. “I figured she misspoke; I thought she meant to say, This is one for the books. And instead she said, This is one for the book.” I didn’t want to let Ali know how disappointed I was. If the library really had been Abigail’s favorite room in the house, I could imagine her sitting by the fire every evening, writing in her diary. Where else should we try? The mansion was enormous.
Ali stood up suddenly and walked to the far wall. “What if ‘the book’ was a real book? And she used that expression for a reason?”
“I’m not following,” I said, biting back a yawn. I thought I heard a faint creaking noise again, but I ignored it. Ali was right; old houses had lots of peculiar noises, and I wasn’t going to jump like a rabbit every time I heard one.
“Look at this row of books on the bottom shelf,” she said. “It makes sense that Abigail would choose the bottom shelf if she wanted to hide her diary. She was an old lady. I can’t imagine her scrambling up on a ladder to retrieve it each time she wanted to make an entry.”
“A good point.”
“And this bottom shelf is devoted entirely to books about Savannah.”
“Yes, and I ran my hand behind them a few minutes ago. There’s no diary hiding back there,” I said firmly. “I think you’re on the wrong track.”
“No, I’m on the right track,” she insisted, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Taylor, we were looking at this all wrong. When anyone in Savannah talks about ‘the book,’ what do they mean? Anyone besides Abigail, I mean.”
“The book? I don’t know—” I said, and then stopped abruptly. It was like a lightbulb had gone off over my head. “When they say ‘the book,’ they mean Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the novel by John Berendt.”
“Exactly. It put Savannah on the map. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over two hundred weeks. Everyone loves that book. It’s all about eccentric people in Savannah and what happens when an antique dealer is charged with murder. It’s so well-known everyone here calls it ‘the book.’”
“So if Abigail had a copy . . .” I began, but Ali was already ahead of me. She was down on her hands and knees, scanning the contemporary novels I’d already checked on the bottom shelf.
“Not ‘if,’” Ali said triumphantly, holding up a hardcover book. “She did have a copy, and here it is!” The dust jacket said Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and it featured the famous Bird Girl sculpture on the cover. “And if my theory is right,” she said, pulling off the dust cover, “this is Abigail’s diary.”
I gasped as she showed me a red leather diary inside the dust cover. The truth had been staring me in the face, and I had totally missed it.
She flipped open the cover to reveal pages and pages of notes written in a spidery hand. A flyleaf had Abigail’s name, and Ali began to riffle through the diary. “It’s part diary and part date book. All we need to do is find out what Abigail wrote about the visitor the night of her death. Who she was expecting at Beaux Reves, what they were going to discuss—”
“You don’t need the diary, my dear. I could have told you that myself.”
I recognized the voice, and it chilled me to the bone. Ali and I looked up in horror as Norman Osteroff emerged from the hidden passage near the fireplace. Norman Osteroff? He’d entered the library so quietly we hadn’t heard him. His eyes glinted with an evil light and he reached out one gnarled hand for the book.
The other hand was holding a gun, and it was pointed straight at us. It’s true what Noah once told me: when someone points a gun at you, you can’t concentrate on anything else. It’s like your brain goes into red alert, and all you can do is look at the gun. All the other details in a scene just fall away.
“Now, if you’ll just pass that over,” Osteroff said with a death’s-head smile, “I’ll be on my way.”
Ali clutched the book to her chest and backed up so fast she nearly crashed into me. “You don’t think I’ll let you walk out of here with this?” She gave a high-pitched laugh, and I knew she was terrified. Brave but terrified.
“You won’t care either way,” he said with a sly chuckle. “You and your sister will both be dead. Dead girls don’t talk.”
“You won’t get away with this,” I said, forcing my voice to remain steady. “A lot of people know we came to the mansion today.”
The lawyer’s face twisted into a mock frown. “Yes, and they’ll be so sad they didn’t get here in time. Such sweet young girls. Another tragedy at Beaux Reves. Maybe there really is a curse hanging over this place.” He chortled.
“They’ll know you did it,” Ali insisted.
“Not necessarily. I took the precaution of hiding my car in the woods, and I came up the back way. I entered the house through the root cellar. It was so easy.”
“Jeb Arnold is working today,” I said desperately. “He’s somewhere on the grounds.” I looked past the elderly lawyer and saw the bottom of the heavy green drapery move a few inches. It puffed out just a tad, like the jib on a sailing ship. Was it the Savannah wind coming in through the open window? Or were my nerves so jangled I imagined it?
Norman shook his head. “Oh, Taylor, how naïve you are.” He waved the gun at Ali. “I thought you were the smarter one of the two, but maybe an MBA doesn’t mean what it used to. Haven’t you figured out that Jeb has been helping himself to artwork from the mansion for years?”
“So it was Jeb who killed Lucy?” The longer I could keep him talking, the better; I figured if I asked enough questions it would feed his massive ego.
He laughed, a thin, brittle sound. “Of course not. I killed Lucy. She was trying to blackmail me. That’s the trouble with accomplices. You can never really trust them. They bite the hand that feeds them. So you have to put them down, like rabid dogs.”
“Lucy was an accomplice to Abigail’s murder?” I felt incredibly sad at the thought.
“Never. She didn’t have the stomach for it. Stealing paintings was one thing, but she would never hurt Abigail. I had to do the dirty work.”
“So you killed Abigail, too?” Ali’s tone was incredulous, and her eyes welled with tears.
Norman nodded. “And Desiree.” He raised the gun toward
us. “And now you two.”
“Wait,” I said imploringly.”At least tell us why you killed Desiree. I thought you were in love with her.”
“In love? Never. I was in love with her money. Abigail was so shrewd, I couldn’t put anything over on her, but Desiree was like putty in my hands. All you have to do with a pretty girl is flatter her.” He raised the gun again.
“But why kill her?”
“I had to,” he said in a reasonable voice. “She’d turned over quite a bit of money to me, and I’d used it for my own investments. Bad investments. I’m sorry to say they tanked. There was no way I could repay her, and she’d threatened to go to Abigail. Abigail was my main client, my bread and butter for the last thirty years. I wasn’t going to lose the golden goose, so I had to stop Desiree. A midnight stroll along the Riverwalk, one little push, and it was all over. Desiree was history. The water closed around her like she was a pebble. She didn’t even scream.”
“You’re a monster,” Ali said softly.
“And you killed Abigail because . . .” I hoped to keep him talking. I was sure I saw another movement behind the heavy drapery.
“I really hated to kill Abigail,” he said regretfully. “She was a tough old bird. I actually had trouble pushing her down the stairs. I never expected her to put up such a fight. But somehow she’d figured out that Desiree had given me all that money, and I guess she’d put two and two together. She invited me over to the house to talk about it.” He gave a harsh laugh. “‘Talk about it’? What was there to say? I had to kill her. Sometimes we do things in life that are hard to do.” He took a step closer and leveled the gun at Ali. “Like this.” He raised the gun to take aim at her forehead, and several things happened at once.
Suddenly, Sam Stiles dove out from behind the curtains with a move worthy of Lara Croft. With her gun drawn, she hurled herself through the air and connected with the lawyer in a full-body tackle.
Osteroff’s arm was jerked straight up in the air and his gun went off, blasting a hole in the fancy tray ceiling. Sam took him down in a classic karate move, and he was lying on his stomach grimacing in pain as she yanked one arm behind his back and pushed it up toward his shoulder blades.
“Cuffs!” she yelled to two uniformed detectives who seemed to appear out of nowhere. One of them quickly cuffed Osteroff, and the other jerked him to his feet. “Get him in the squad car and call it in,” she ordered. She was panting a little and said to Ali in a gentler tone, “Are you okay?”
“I think I am,” Ali said wanly. She looked deathly white, and I put my arms around her. She was trembling all over, and I gathered her in a tight hug. “I’m okay,” she said after a minute. “How did you know to come here?” she asked Sam, who was dusting herself off and rubbing her wrist. I had the feeling she’d been bruised when she’d forced Osteroff to the floor.
“Noah told me you were on your way out here today, and I had a bad feeling about it.” She laughed. “Now, don’t go telling the Dream Club, or they’ll think it was a premonition.”
“You came because Noah told you we were in danger?”
“Not just that,” she admitted. “Jeb Arnold spotted Osteroff’s car in the woods and figured he was up to no good. He called the precinct and said we’d better send some cops out because there was bound to be trouble.”
“So Jeb Arnold was looking out for us. I’m surprised,” I said. “Osteroff told us Jeb was a thief.”
“Yes, that he is,” Sam told me. “Jeb and Osteroff and Lucy have been stealing from the mansion for years. I’m sure of it. But he’s not a murderer. The DA will likely go easy on him. After all, he probably saved your lives.”
“You saved our lives,” I said feelingly.
Sam laughed. “Hey, that’s what friends are for.”
“Can we leave now?” Ali said in a small voice. “This place is creeping me out.”
“We can leave right now,” Sam said. “Let me just get some ice from the kitchen.”
“Ice?” I asked.
She gave a rueful smile. “I think I broke my wrist. I guess I need to brush up on my takedown moves.”
30
“I still think it was a premonition that brought you to Beaux Reves today,” Sybil said placidly. The Dream Club was in full force tonight. It wasn’t an official meeting but everyone gathered at our place, including Sam Stiles, who’d just given an abbreviated account of what had happened in the library.
“I knew this would happen,” Sam said wryly. “Didn’t I warn you, Taylor?” She helped herself to a cup of coffee and a couple of Russian tea cakes. Ali was experimenting with pastries once again, but this time with good results. A touch of hazelnut liqueur had jazzed up the sometimes-bland cookie and turned it into a masterpiece.
“Yes, you did.” I scooped Barney up into my lap. He was making the rounds and had just greeted the Harper sisters, who’d brought him cat treats. I hate to think that his favors can be bought, but I’m afraid that’s the case.
“Well, if it wasn’t a premonition, what was it?” Dorien asked. She seemed subdued tonight. She had been in a sour mood since I’d shown her the tasting tray and Ali and I had given her a few marketing tips. Whether she didn’t think our ideas were applicable to her struggling catering business or she had hoped for a full-out partnership, I wasn’t sure. I felt satisfied we’d done enough. It’s one thing to help a friend, but we couldn’t jeopardize our own business, which was on something of an upswing.
“It was a confluence of events,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Excellent tea cakes,” she said to Ali, who beamed. “A lot of things happened at once,” Sam went on. “It wasn’t just the call from Noah, although that certainly nudged me in the right direction. He said he had a feeling that you were in danger out at the mansion.”
I tried not to smile. Sam had grinned when she’d said the word “feeling,” and I knew what she was thinking. Everyone believes that Noah is as cool and analytical as I am and that’s why we’re such a good match. They don’t think Noah is capable of acting impulsively, or on sheer instinct or gut feelings, yet I know he is.
“There was the call from Jeb Arnold to the station house,” she said, ticking off the items on her fingers. “He said Norman Osteroff was prowling around the grounds and had hidden his car in the woods behind the house. That was enough to make me sit up and take notice.”
“How awful,” Minerva said. “When I think of what that dreadful man could have done to you . . .”
“Saints preserve us,” her sister Rose murmured. “You two would have been goners.”
“And there was some forensic evidence that turned up yesterday,” Sam said. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it, Taylor, but I know you’ll be interested.”
“Go ahead,” I urged her. Barney was getting restless, and I placed him gently on the floor, where he curled up on my feet.
“Someone had tampered with the cord to the boom box,” Sam said. “They’d replaced the original cord with a longer one. We checked it out with the manufacturer. You were right, Taylor. There’s no way Lucy could have balanced the boom box on the edge of the tub. The cord was too short.”
“So Osteroff tossed the boom box in the water to make it look like an accidental electrocution?”
Sam nodded. “Pretty clever. He figured he’d get away with it.” She shook her head in amazement. “But he made one big mistake. He replaced the cord on the boom box with a new cord from the same manufacturer, but he didn’t realize they’d changed the model. Lucy had an older version of the boom box, and it came with a short cord. That’s how we knew he’d switched the cords.”
“And he admitted it?” Lucinda asked. Lucinda was perched on the edge of her chair, her back ramrod straight. She told me she’d gone to a very strict boarding school in her youth, and young ladies were not allowed to “slouch back” in their chairs. The habit has stayed with her, all these years
later.
“He had to admit it,” Sam said. “We had him dead to rights. He must have noticed the boom box weeks earlier and bought the cord in case he had the opportunity to kill her. It was just sheer luck that she was taking a bath last night when he sneaked into the mansion. His original plan was to catch her with her hands in the kitchen sink when it was full of water. That was riskier because he wasn’t sure the boom box would really electrocute her. The bathtub situation was perfect for him. She’d either be electrocuted or he could drown her.”
“What an evil man,” Sybil muttered. “To think he nearly got away with everything. Three people are dead because of him.”
“There’s more,” Sam went on. “Do you remember that shiny object we spotted in the crime scene photos? The one with the fish?”
“Yes, of course. I wondered if it could have belonged to Lucy because she was religious and she had a fish symbol on her kitchen plaque.”
“Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t a religious symbol at all. It part of an expensive cuff link: solid gold with a fish design.” She paused. “The fish represents Pisces, and the cuff links belonged to Osteroff. We found the other one when we searched his house. He probably had no idea Abigail had pulled it off when he’d struggled on the stairs with her.”
“He was a Pisces,” I said. “It said so on his college yearbook page.”
“Isn’t it amazing how it all comes together?” Persia said. “The word around my office is that Osteroff was making a big play for Desiree. No one really believed it because they were such a mismatched couple.”
“But she had money and that’s what he was after,” Sara said. “My society reporter friend said the same thing. She was positive they were an item. She could see it in their photographs, the way they leaned into each other, the intimate looks.”
I gave a little shudder. “Osteroff as a romantic hero is hard to imagine,” I said. “As far as I can tell, the only good thing about him is that he likes horses.”
