by Vicki Delany
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to remind Eddie who was in charge here. I couldn’t blame him for thinking it wasn’t me.
A black-and-white Pontiac with a red light mounted on the roof and the town’s emblem painted on the door was parked in the circle, two men standing beside it talking to Eddie. Both men’s tan uniforms had the town of Summervale’s crest on the shoulder, and the younger one had a camera around his neck. Randy and Velvet had joined them. They’d changed into warmer (and drier) clothes. Velvet had even had time to tie her hair into a sweeping fold with a sparkling clip and apply a touch of pale pink lipstick.
“I’m Elizabeth Grady, the manager here,” I said to the older of the men in uniform.
“Norm Monahan, chief of police.” Monahan, the same name as our awkward dishwasher. I didn’t bother to mention that. Everyone in the Catskills is related to everyone else, and most of them work in the hotels. The chief was well into his fifties and not going smoothly into his sixties. Overweight, watery-eyed, red-faced, nose with as many lines of rosacea as there were lines on a map of Europe. His uniform jacket and pants were crumpled, his tie askew, and his boots badly worn. He looked as though he’d just risen from his bed and grabbed his clothes off the floor, and I reminded myself that that was, probably, the case. He shifted his gun belt and looked at me. He appeared to be as impressed with me as I was with him. I shouldn’t have had to explain, but I did.
“My coworkers”—I indicated Velvet and Randy—“and I jumped into the lake to retrieve the . . . uh . . . gentleman. I haven’t had time to change.”
“Around what time was this?” Monahan asked.
“The entertainment in the ballroom ended at midnight,” I said. “My friends and I went for a walk along the lake. Maybe quarter after twelve?”
“About then,” Randy said.
“Let’s see where this happened,” Chief Monahan said to Randy. “You can show us. We don’t need to bother the ladies. You girls can run along to bed.”
“It’s no bother,” Velvet and I chorused.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, my friend and I exchanged a secret grin. In school, the other girls had called us the Bobbsey Twins. We looked nothing at all alike, but we’d been inseparable and we sometimes said the same thing at the same time.
To put a stop to any potential argument, I turned and marched down the path. It was two o’clock in the morning, but a handful of lights were on in guests’ rooms.
“Is everything all right out there?” a man called from a cabin porch.
“Perfectly fine, Mr. Reid,” Randy shouted.
In the neighboring cabin a light came on in the front bedroom.
“Shush,” I said to Randy.
“Too late now,” Randy said as the cabin door creaked open and people came out to watch our little procession pass.
“Chief Monahan,” I said. “The . . . the man is named Harold Westenham, and he is . . . was a guest here. I contacted Mr. Westenham’s nephew in New York City, and he’ll be on his way shortly.”
Monahan grunted. We reached the end of the path, and everyone stopped. I pointed. “Through there.”
“Give us a light, Dave,” Monahan said to the younger officer, who took the flashlight off his belt and turned it on. He never had been introduced. He must have also risen from his bed at the call, but his uniform was clean and pressed, his hair combed, his face shaven. He shone the light through the trees, and the light bounced off water bubbling in the creek and the trunks of the trees. Small dark eyes, low to the ground, stared back at us, and something small scurried though the undergrowth.
“There’s traces of blood there,” the deputy said. “On that rock.”
“Sorry,” I said. “That was probably me. I ran in my bare feet and got some cuts and scratches.” I pointed to a big scratch running up the outside of my right calf. “See?”
Chief Monahan gave me a filthy look.
“Sorry,” I repeated.
“You two stay here,” he said to Velvet and me. “You”—to Randy—“show us.”
The men stepped into the trees. We heard Monahan grunt and then a splash as he attempted, and failed, to jump over the creek. The light wavered, bouncing off solid trunks and stirring branches.
“Jerk,” Velvet said under her breath.
“He doesn’t have to be personable,” I said. “Just get the job done. Do you really think that man was murdered?”
She let out a puff of air. “It’s possible he fell off the dock and hit his head going down. Unlikely he killed himself, not with the blow to the back of his head.”
“Elizabeth?” A low voice came out of the dark forest.
My heart jumped, and Velvet let out a squeal of surprise, before we realized it was Olivia.
“Here,” I said.
My mother stepped into the circle of light cast by an overhead lamp. She wore a peach satin nightgown under a matching wrap and had mules trimmed with peach fur on her feet. The thick braid she wears to bed was swept up and secured to the back of her head. Her face was clear of makeup, and the light from the lamp above her cast long, deep shadows under her eyes.
“Is everything all right? Velvet said a man has died.”
“The police are here now. He fell into the lake.”
“Do you know who?”
“His name’s Harold Westenham, and he was staying in cabin nineteen.”
Her face fell. “Oh, dear. That must be the man I briefly chatted to earlier this afternoon. He was in cabin nineteen, and he told me his name was Harold. I thought he was nice. A true gentleman. I told you about that.”
“I remember.”
“I don’t like to say, Elizabeth, but you do not want the guests to see you like that. It’s not good for our image.”
“You’re in your nightwear, Olivia,” I pointed out.
“I don’t intend to be seen. The police are here?”
“Yes. The chief and his deputy. Randy’s showing them where the man was found. They don’t want too many people milling around.”
“I don’t suppose they sent a young policeman?”
Velvet barked out a laugh.
“If they did,” I said, “I won’t be asking him to come to our house for tea to meet my mother. Go back to bed, Olivia. I’ll handle this.”
She slipped away, as quietly as she’d come.
“Mothers,” Velvet said. “They do know how to focus on the important things, don’t they?”
Leaves rustled, water splashed, twigs snapped, and the light from a flashlight shone in our faces as Monahan burst out of the woods. A twig was stuck to the side of his hat, and his scuffed and heavily worn boots were thick with mud.
“I’d like to search the man’s room,” he said. “Do you have a key?”
“I do.” The master key to all the cabins was part of the bunch I had on me.
“Let’s go, then. We don’t need you anymore, honey,” he said to Velvet.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“I do. When they told me someone had died at a hotel, I knew it would be a mess. Always a mess with all these city folks poking around.”
“Get a lot of sudden deaths in Summervale, do you?” Velvet asked cheerfully.
He scowled at her.
“This way,” I said.
We walked back the way we’d come but turned off the main path before we reached the tennis courts. This path skirted the boundary of the public areas. Cabins and lawns and flower beds on one side, the thick woods leading up the steep hillside on the other. Monahan started puffing almost immediately. Velvet was in front, and she increased her pace so she was almost trotting.
“Almost there,” she called over her shoulder. “Tell me if you need me to go slower.”
As tempting as it was to make the man run, I slowed to match his pace. It wouldn’t he
lp matters if he had a heart attack.
The main section of this path ended at cabin nineteen and a sign that read STAFF ONLY PAST THIS POINT. Velvet gave us a wave over her shoulder and carried on toward the staff dormitories. Monahan and I climbed the steps, and I pushed open the door to the cabin’s small screened-in porch. I unlocked the main door, and we went inside.
The place was immaculate. I’d expect nothing less from any chambermaid who worked under Aunt Tatiana, but in the afternoon and evening guests did start strewing their things about. That hadn’t happened here. One pair of brown shoes, gleaming with polish, was dead center on the mat by the door. A recent copy of the New Yorker magazine lay on the coffee table, next to an empty ashtray. The brown cushions on the orange-and-brown-striped couch were fluffed and properly placed as the chambermaids would have left them. There had been no towels or bathing suits outside, left to dry over the porch railings, no sandals or water shoes kicked off by the door.
The windows were closed, the drapes drawn, and the air was thick. The lingering trace of tobacco smoke hung over everything. Monahan walked across the main room. This cabin had two bedrooms and one bathroom. All the doors were closed. He opened the first. The bed was made, the pillows undented. A book with a lurid green cover sat on the night table: Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov. A long red ribbon that was probably the bookmark was about three-quarters of the way in. The ashtray by the bed was also empty.
“Tidy guy,” Chief Monahan said. “Do the maids come in at night?”
“No.”
He opened the closet. A suit, the one I’d seen Mr. Westenham wearing earlier in the day, hung on a hanger, next to a sports jacket and two pairs of trousers. The cuffs of his two white shirts had some fraying around the edges. They’d been starched and carefully ironed, but they showed creases left by their confinement in his suitcase. A man who cared for his clothes but didn’t spend a lot of money on them, and either didn’t want to bother the housekeeping staff to iron his shirts or didn’t want to pay the charge. His hat lay on the top shelf. Monahan opened the drawers. The top drawer held neatly folded handkerchiefs, underwear, and socks. None of it was new, all of it clean. The other drawers were empty.
No bathing suit, no golf or tennis clothes. Not even a pair of shorts or something to wear to go boating.
The bathroom was between the two bedrooms. We went in there next. Toothbrush and toothpaste stood at attention in a mug, next to an empty water glass. The man’s shaving things and a single black comb were neatly lined up next to the sink. The trash can contained cigarette butts and ash. A lot of cigarette butts.
We went into the second bedroom.
We stopped dead in the doorway, and I might have let out a gasp of surprise. The room was strewn with papers. Stacks of papers piled on the table, papers scattered across the bed like giant snowflakes, papers thrown on the floor. A typewriter, a solid Underwood, was on the table with a sheet of paper rolled into it and a chair pulled up to it. An ashtray, jammed full of gray ash and ground cigarette butts sat on top of a stack of papers covered in close type beside the typewriter. Two books rested on a sheaf of blank paper.
The picture of a Catskills mountain scene in winter that hung over the second-bedroom table in all our cabins was on the floor, propped up against the knotty pine wall. Two large maps had been pinned in its place.
“Goodness,” I said. “It looks as though he was working on something in here.”
Monahan crossed the room. He picked up the top book and sucked in a breath as his eyes opened wide. He showed it to me. The Communist Manifesto.
I looked at the maps on the wall. The layout of streets on the bigger one looked familiar, but I could tell right away it wasn’t New York City. A wide river ran through the bottom half of the second map. “That looks like London,” I said. “In England. The other’s Washington, I think.”
“I need to use your phone, Mrs. Grady,” Monahan said.
“Okay,” I said. “Who are you going to call?”
“This is a case for the FBI. It’s obvious that what you have here is a communist cell.”
Chapter 8
“He kept himself to himself,” Aunt Tatiana said. “We had instructions to clean the room every second day only, between ten and ten thirty. If the girls could not come at that time, they were not to enter his cabin at all. They tell me he appeared to be some sort of a writer. A typewriter is on the table in the smaller bedroom, and piles of papers are scattered around. He instructed the chambermaids not to touch the table or move any of his papers.”
“We were told not to clean in the small bedroom at all.” A woman gestured with her arms. “Papers. Everywhere!”
The circle of women nodded. “He never came to the dining room for his meals,” one of the chambermaids said. “Everything was taken to his cabin on a tray even though that costs extra. You can ask the busboys, they didn’t go inside. He opened the door, took the tray from them, and shut the door. If he didn’t answer, they had instructions to leave the tray on the table on the porch.”
“He was a big tipper,” another said. “He always tipped the busboys.”
“Never us, though,” a third woman grumbled. “On the days we didn’t clean the cabin, he left the trays out on the porch to be collected.”
It was eight a.m., the morning after the death of Harold Westenham. I hadn’t been to bed, but I had had time to wash myself in the sink, give my feet a good scrubbing, attempt to refashion my hair, and slip into clean clothes. I’d called Aunt Tatiana as soon as I thought she’d be up and told her I needed to speak to the chambermaids before they headed off on their rounds.
They’d been waiting in the laundry building at the back corner of the property near the maintenance shed when I arrived. Sheets, pillowcases, table linens were hung to dry, but the day’s wash hadn’t started yet, so the room wasn’t too stiflingly hot. They were all older women, locals, with stout frames, rough red hands, tired faces, and seen-it-all eyes.
“Did he ever have any visitors?” I asked.
The women exchanged glances and shrugged.
“Did he talk to you at all? Tell you what he was doing?”
“I never spoke to him, Mrs. Grady. I’ve never even seen him.”
“I saw him once. He was heading down the path as I came up at ten o’clock. He was never in the cabin when we arrived to clean.”
“Because he knew what time you’d be there,” I said. “Thank you, ladies, carry on with your day.”
“Can we clean that cabin?” Aunt Tatiana asked.
“Stay away for now,” I said. “The police told me we can’t use it until they’ve finished searching it. The guest paid in advance, and the booking was until the end of July, so I don’t need to be in a hurry to rent it out.”
“Save on food costs,” my ever-practical aunt said.
Chief Monahan had ordered Deputy Dave—whose last name I never did catch—to cordon off cabin nineteen. When I’d checked it this morning on my way to meet with Tatiana and her chambermaids, I’d found a flock of guests standing around outside looking at nothing. As nothing was happening. The deputy—early thirties, tall and as thin as one of the saplings growing up against the cabin, with sunken cheeks, a small chin, an excessively large nose, and thick eyeglasses—sat on the porch “guarding the scene,” and looking mighty bored. Monahan had gone home and back to his bed, after being sure I—who hadn’t even been to bed—understood what a hard job policing was. Before leaving, I’d taken him into the business office to use the phone, and he’d called the FBI night line. They’d promised to have an agent here first thing in the morning.
“Can I have a word, please?” I asked my aunt now.
We left the laundry as the chambermaids burst into excited chatter.
“Chief Monahan thinks Mr. Westenham was engaged in communist activity,” I said.
My aunt shrugged.
“Have you ever . . . uh . . . heard about anything like that around here?”
“Why are you asking me, lastachka?”
“Because you know everything that goes on here, of course.”
Her round red cheeks got even redder as she flushed with pleasure. “Mr. Westenham left a note for me when he checked in, letting me know of his requirements. He said he was a writer and he was here to write a book and he needed his privacy. That is all. If communists are here, they did not tell my ladies.”
“Admittedly, that’s unlikely to be a point of casual conversation.” I thought about the man I’d spoken to so briefly. Polite, perfectly dressed and groomed, soft-spoken, wanting only to be left alone.
Did he look like a communist?
I didn’t know what a communist looked like, but I didn’t think they dressed or spoke so well.
“Mrs. Grady to reception. Reception for Mrs. Grady.” All day long loudspeakers boomed out over the property. Summoning guests to the phone, announcing meals and activities, reporting lost or found children. Sometimes lost or found husbands.
“I’ll let you know if I hear anything more about the unfortunate gentleman,” Aunt Tatiana said.
I thanked her and headed down the path at a trot. I hoped I’d get a break so I could go home for a nap later, but my chances of doing that were not good. I didn’t have to be on hand tonight for the entertainment, so I should be able to quit work when the office closed at five.
The bellhop opened the door for me with a nod, and I ran into the lobby. A man was sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs by a side window, smoking and watching the activity. He stood up as I came in and crossed the room in quick strides. He wasn’t dressed for a day of Catskills fun, but in a loose-fitting suit of light brown with a white shirt and darker brown tie and highly polished black shoes. He held his hat in his hand. He was about my age—late twenties—with thick black hair long enough to have the slightest hint of a curl, cheekbones prominent in a pale face, and attractive blue eyes. His fingers were stained yellow with nicotine and blue with ink.
