4 Impression of Bones (14 page)

“So, the rose
has a name? I mean, it’s not just like Ecuadorian red climbing rose or Hungarian
yellow bush rose?”

“Good heavens.
Of course they have individual names. Like I said, roses grow on every
continent except Antarctica. How else would we keep track? You can’t walk into
a nursery and say I want a red bush rose with a hint of white, mossy leaves,
and moderate citrus scent and expect them to find it for you. Trying to
describe what you want that way would be almost impossible. Anyway, it wouldn’t
be romantic.” Rose reappeared and handed Juliet a thick catalogue filled with
colored pictures and, yes, hundreds and hundreds of names in print so tiny she
had to squint.

“Do any of
them have female names?”

“Almost all,”
Rose said unhelpfully.

“Well…. Thank
you. I certainly have my job cut out for me. Um, have you ever heard of a rose
called Stephanie Gillard or Sandra Kane?”

“No, but I am
hardly familiar with all of them. There could be ones called that. Stephanie is
a very pretty name.”

Thankfully,
Rose didn’t watch the news or read newspapers.

It seemed
doubtful that Dolph, who had never expressed the slightest interest in any
plant, would have known about lady roses, but a woman might very well be aware
of the connection, especially if she had been named after a particular flower
by a fond granny or aunt.

Juliet sighed.
Hunting up appellations could take forever. She’d have to get the name of every
woman—

“Rose, you
said they were mostly called after women, but are there plants named after men
too?”

“Yes. It was
often male explorers who discovered roses in their travels. Oh, there’s the
kettle!” She hurried back inside and missed Juliet’s frown.

So, she would
need to get the name of every woman
and
man
on the project site and try to match them to the names in the catalogue. The
men were a long shot and she would save them for last, but it would have to be
done if she didn’t get a match with the feminine names. Juliet pulled the
glossy magazine open, hoping that the roses were listed alphabetically. Of
course, they were not. This catalogue seemed to group roses by growing habits
and scent. And first names, not last.

“Here you go.
Some nice ginger peach tea.
So, are you off to the castle
today?”

“Yes. Esteban
is going to help me hang my tapestries. It’s a two-person job.”

“Carrie says
they are lovely.” Rose sounded just slightly hurt that Juliet had shown her
work to another neighbor and not Rose herself.

“You’re coming
to the open house, aren’t you?” Juliet asked. “You’ll see them then and can
make up your mind. And they’ll be hanging properly. It was kind of Carrie to
say they are lovely, but I don’t see how she could tell with the fabric stuck
to the screens and velvet fluff everywhere. Frankly, until I vacuumed them,
they looked like molting birds.”

Rose was
appeased. She knew Juliet preferred that people not look at her work in
progress. Actually, Juliet didn’t care who saw her work at any stage, but she
hated being distracted by visitors while she was busy with fast-drying fabric paints,
and allowed people to believe that she was a temperamental artist who required
solitude for her art.

Wanting to get
the day over with, Juliet gulped her tea as quickly as she could without
scalding herself and then went back to her bungalow to pack up the tapestries.
The older ones were dry and could be transported with only minimal protection
of the velvet flocking. The latest
set were
still not
entirely dry. They would have to go in last and be sandwiched between layers of
acid-free tissue paper.

She and
Esteban worked efficiently, but it took a long while to carry up the tapestries
and get them mounted and to put batteries in all the various candles and lamps and
get them positioned. They were on timers, set to spring to life at eleven a.m.,
the time that the castle opened to the public for the home tour.

Juliet knew
that she was blessed in her friends. It wasn’t just everyone who would come to
work in a hot, dark tower where a body had been bricked into the fireplace, no
matter how attractive the room had turned out when all the work was done. The
tower had probably seen many deaths and births and other calamities of war. The
woman’s murder was just one
more dark
event. Still she
was glad to hang a tapestry shroud over the shadow that had not cleaned away as
well as the soot. Hiding the outline made her feel less like there should be
funeral flowers in the room.

Juliet shook
her head at her thoughts. She could be as unreasonable as anyone when she put
her mind to it.

The sun was
westering
when Juliet had the last tapestry draped on its
wrought-iron bar. Looking through the mirrored slit in the southwest window she
could see a patch of ground that she hadn’t noticed before. Though overgrown it
wasn’t as heavily forested as the rest of the estate grounds and it was
rectangular in shape. In the slanting light she could also see that it was
filled with smaller rectangles, about a hundred and fifty of them if she was
correct in her multiplication of rows and columns. The shapes were not distinct
and she doubted that they had been touched since the original interment.
So much for the story about the bodies being moved.

“Damn.”

“What is it?”
Esteban asked as he packed up his drill. He was tired and sweaty.

“I’ve found
the old cemetery.”

“Oh.” He came
to join her at the window. “But they moved all the graves, yes?”

“They moved
the headstones. They were supposed to move the bodies too, but that usually
didn’t happen. It’s expensive, you know, and a lot of the patients from the
hospital would have been paupers. Besides, who wants to deal with diseased and
rotting corpses?”

Esteban looked
out the narrow window.

“Do you need
to do anything about this?” His voice indicated nothing about how he felt.

Juliet
reviewed an old rule from her days at the NSA. Did anything need to be said?
Did it need to be said right then? Did it need to be said by her?

“Not at the
moment,” she answered.
“Maybe not ever.
I really hate
to give the press anything else to write about, and what can it matter after all
this time? It isn’t like that property is going to be developed.”

“They are
still with us, the gentlemen of the fourth estate?” Esteban asked.

Juliet looked
out the other window.

“Yes.” She
didn’t quibble at the term
gentlemen
though she rejected it in her own mind. The buzzards of the fourth estate had
encircled the castle, hoping for more bodies or even a chance to see a murder
happen. Unless someone got assassinated in San Francisco or they uncovered the
lost city of Atlantis off the coast of Santa Cruz, they were probably stuck
with the bored news crews for a few more days.

Juliet turned
from the window.

“Esteban, I
can’t thank you enough for all the help. It would have taken me forever to
finish this room and I have to admit to being unnerved by this place.”

“
Bella
, there is a killer at large. You
should be unnerved.”

“I know, but
it isn’t the killer that is bothering me.
At least, not only
the killer.
It’s this horrid place. It felt wrong to me from the moment
I saw it baking on the hill. I thought maybe finding that poor woman’s body—”

“Cornelia
Barton,” Esteban supplied. “That was the name of the nurse who disappeared. I
also talked with a friend in the coroner’s office. They have done some
preliminary work.”

He hesitated.

“She was
pregnant when she was killed?” Juliet guessed.

“Yes, about
five months along.”

“And her
lover,
probably married and in danger of losing his position
if there was a scandal, decided to take a sure way out of his difficulties.”

“We don’t know
that for certain, but … yes. I believe so. If it had been a patient who
attacked her, there would have been some police investigation and the body
would not have been hidden in a place used only by staff.”

Patients.
Juliet recalled the dead man in the
bricked-up tunnel. Had he seen something or heard something he shouldn’t? Was
that why he had died?

“How many men
were working at the hospital back then?” she asked.

“There were
three who were here full-time. The head doctor was Maurice Blair. He was
married. There was also one male nurse, unmarried. His name was Karl Potter.
And there was a gardener, a widower called Clarence Swift.”

“So, chances
are it was this Maurice Blair who killed her. He had the most to lose.”

“Perhaps.”

“Esteban,
sometimes I hate people. I truly do.”

“I
know,
bella
.
Some days we all do.”

That night, Juliet sat down at her makeshift desk, pushing
away sketches and notebooks to make room for her to work.
Her
other work.

People had patterns.
Killers too.
And Juliet was usually able to see them, whether she wanted to or not. For a
while she had been confused, but not any longer. Since this wasn’t a common
talent and Manoogin had asked for her help, there would probably be karmic
repercussions if she turned her back on these murders.

But she wanted to. She wished passionately that she could.
She wanted to forget the day that the door in her mind opened, showing her a
new way to see the world, and eventually attracting the men in blue suits who
had been waiting for someone like her to come along. They never went away,
those suits, and were always nearby, urging her to step through the looking
glass and tell them what she saw. She wanted to forget the day that she had
stepped into the gray world of “intelligence” and lost what innocence she had.
Solving another murder would just draw their attention again.

Unless she could get Manoogin to leave her
out of things?

Juliet looked again at the catalogue Rose had leant her and
then sensibly opted for the Internet and its searchable databases, even though
she knew that she was probably being
surveilled
anytime she went online. There were websites for everything. There had to be
one that would have the name of every rose on the planet. And if her old
friends at the NSA knew that she was looking up flowers,
who
cared? Surely that couldn’t raise any red flags.

It took a while but she methodically entered the name of
every artist, decorator, and contractor she knew on the project and followed it
with the word
rose
. Finally there was
a match. Juliet stared at the name, not entirely surprised to see it. The rose
pictured next to the label was lovely, a light pink with a golden center. It
was one of the hybrid
rubiginosas
.

A
rose by another name
.

Juliet reached for the phone. She hung up a moment later,
her intuition confirmed. Manoogin had managed to track down the watch’s
purchaser. Combined with the unique sawdust found on Dolph’s body from wood
used in only one project, it was enough to bring the killer in for questioning.

Something else was explained. Dolph and Stephanie showed
evidence of
hemorrhagic effusion into the
cranium
. That meant that they had been hit on the head before having their
necks broken. The killer had taken no chances. She didn’t want them hurt. She
wanted them dead.

Marley came
and sat in her lap. He began trying to knead her into a more comfortable bed.

“What about
it, cat? Is there anything we can do about poor Cornelia Barton and the unknown
man in the basement?”

The cat
stopped pawing her legs. Marley mewed and walked over to Juliet’s small trunk
where she kept her rarer inks.

“I agree. We
must certainly see that she is buried.
But not in the
hospital cemetery.
She and her baby need to go home—wherever home was.
Hopefully Esteban can figure it out.”

Marley mewed
again. The cat also had great faith in Esteban.

The wine was mediocre, as were the canapés, and only the
most voracious guests were going in for seconds. The string quartet in the
courtyard was a nice touch, but Juliet had some doubts about the piper in the
turret, though most people probably felt that if there had to be bagpipe music
welcoming them to the castle, sticking the piper on top of the tower and as far
from the conversing crowds as possible was a wise decision since one had to be
heard in order to coax money from the guests.

Though the majority of the partygoers didn’t look like the
kind of people who had bulging Italian leather handbags and sharkskin wallets
with money that wanted to invest itself in strange real estate. Most of them
were
lookie
-loos, gawkers who wanted to see the place
where there had been a triple homicide. There would be media coverage, but a
lot of it would be about the killings and very little about the castle itself.