Read An Illustrated Death Online
Authors: Judi Culbertson
An Illustrated Death (18 page)
W
HEN WE PULLED
onto the gravel area back at Adam’s Revenge, Bianca was waiting for us.
“I kidnapped Delhi for lunch,” Regan told her cheerfully. “It felt too creepy around here.”
“You could have had lunch with us.”
“
Really.
”
“We’re still a family. Now more than ever.”
“How was lunch?” I asked Bianca.
“Terrible. Right before we sat down your detective came up to the house and said that someone set Rosa’s cottage on fire on purpose. He thinks it was one of us! How can that be? Bessie is in jail, but Claude thinks she sent Jocasta over to start the fire.”
“I thought Jocasta didn’t have a car.”
“Ask the police.” She turned toward the house and left.
“See what I had to put up with all these years?” Regan said.
She went off to find Marselli and I went down to the studio just long enough to pack up my computer, my thermal coffee cup, and my tuna salad wrap. Then I left for the day. As I backed up my van on the gravel, the significance of what Bianca had said registered. The family was upset at lunch, not because Rosa had almost burned to death, but because suspicion might be cast on one of them.
Three deaths and six people who might be responsible, eight if you counted Regan and Dai. Yet it was hard to shake my belief that Rosa had been involved in the first three deaths, then saw suicide as the only way out. If that envelope had only contained a confession instead of Gretchen’s will and the other fragment . . .
Once I was driving toward East Hampton, steering with one hand and eating my sandwich with the other, I thought of something else. What if everything had started with an even earlier death? I still didn’t know what had happened to Sonia. How had Lynn put it?
Ground up in little pieces by your family
. Could Sonia have been Rosa’s first victim? There was another possibility as well, but that scenario was even murkier, as obscured as Gretchen’s face had been in the swimming pool.
Finding out what had happened to Sonia seemed to be the next step.
If someone didn’t find out the truth, Bessie would take the blame and this time go to trial. Marselli had great integrity, but no imagination. He had no patience with nuance, of catching the faintest scent and trying to track down what it meant. Now that he had Bessie’s fingerprints and an eyewitness who saw her carrying something bulky that Saturday night, he had no interest in misty might-have-beens. Bessie had been implicated in a similar suspicious death and gotten off. He would not allow that to happen again.
I
REACHED THE
village of East Hampton and pulled into a spot opposite Lion Gardiner and his burial ground. Then I took out my phone. I suspected that Charles Tremaine would be at his office in Manhattan, and got the number from 411.
“Tremaine and Tyler Books,” the receptionist chirped.
Tyler? “Is Charles there?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“One of his clients. Delhi Laine.”
“I’ll see if he’s available.” She switched me to Handel’s Water Music.
“Hello, there.” Charles sounded pleased to hear from me, but why wouldn’t he be?
“I have some information for you. If you have some information for me.”
“What’s that?” A shade warier.
“There’s been another attack at Adam’s Revenge. The Farm, as you call it.”
“What? No! Who?”
“The last time I saw you we talked about the au pair
.
Sonia. You told me you didn’t know what happened to her. But I think you do.”
Silence. “I only know what was in the local papers. It didn’t even make
Newsday
.”
“What did they say?”
“Evidently she had been drinking at the Farm and passed out. When she came to she realized she’d mistakenly drunk a container of lye.”
“My God!”
“It destroyed her vocal cords.”
“When did this happen? Is she still around?”
“It was about a month before Nate died. I have no idea where she is now. Period.” He sounded as implacable as someone slamming the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.
“Okay. There was a fire in Rosa Erikson’s cottage in the early morning. It burned down, and she’s in the hospital.”
“No. Really? What’s going on over there?”
I hesitated. “The fire was set deliberately.”
“Get out! By whom?”
“The police are trying to find out.”
“Rosa—she’s the shy one, isn’t she? Why would anybody want to do that?”
“A lot of strange stuff is going on.”
I let him think about that, then asked, “Did you know that Nate Erikson’s eyesight was failing?”
“I knew he had a problem. A chemical in Vietnam he was exposed to.”
“Did he have someone helping him with his illustrations?”
“
Helping
him? Not that I ever heard. It’s not like he needed a seeing-eye dog. Are they saying that Gretchen’s death isn’t an accident either?”
I gave him as many details as I could. “Who’s Tyler?”
“My roommate from Yale.”
We said good-bye.
T
HE OFFICES O
F
the
Hampton Beacon
were located in Southampton, a lively village I had always liked. I parked behind the Parrish Museum but did not go in, or wander through any of the nearby galleries. Instead, I went straight to the newspaper offices around the corner on Main Street.
“Unprepossessing” was the word. The room looked more like a neighborhood print shop than a working newspaper. A woman with cropped gray hair smiled at me from behind a high counter. “Hi there. Need to place an ad?”
“Actually I was looking for a back issue.”
She thought that over. “Which one?”
“I’m not sure. Do you have an archive?”
“Oh, my dear, no. I guess we should, but—we have back issues, but not in any viewable order. You could try the library, but if you don’t have a date . . . What are you looking for?”
I hesitated. “I’m doing some research on Nate Erikson. I’m trying to find out about someone who worked there. An au pair, Sonia?”
The smile disappeared so quickly that I was afraid she would order me out.
“That story? We didn’t run it in
our
paper. Whatever happened was a tragedy and a disgrace. A young girl’s life was ruined.”
I thought about what to ask, how to ask it.
“If you can’t speak, you can’t teach or clerk, you can’t even waitress! Think about that.”
I did. “Where is she now?”
I expected to hear that Sonia had returned to her native land, wherever that was, or that she had disappeared from view.
“She has a little cottage in Amagansett that used to be a cabana. Someone—I don’t know who—bought it for her afterward. She supports herself, if you can call it that, by washing dishes at the Shake Shack and making quilts.”
Quilts.
Who was I talking to recently about quilts?
Lynn, of course. Claude had blamed her for bringing Sonia to the compound.
“Does she live right on the beach?”
“No, the cabana was moved across Bluff Road years ago. It had originally been renovated as a guesthouse.”
I thanked her and left without asking more questions. How many remodeled cabanas could there be?
I
FOUND THE
little house with no trouble. I had been imagining a shed, but this was guesthouse size, charmingly refinished with white clapboard and little window boxes filled with red impatiens. Instead of going in, I sat in my van, staring at it for several minutes. Did I have the right to knock on her door and rock this young woman’s world again?
Belatedly I noticed a paved path leading to the house with a green VW Beetle parked on its hard-packed sand. On the driver’s side was a colorful decal of a large daisy that made me sad. What kind of life could someone unable to speak have here, trying to eke out a living? I hoped she at least drew solace from being so near the ocean, from being able to walk along the shore every day. People even drew inspiration from beaches in winter, finding comfort in the snow-crested dunes, the stiff briny air, and the solitude.
I told myself I was romanticizing her situation and stepped out of the van. The saltwater smell on the September breeze carried me back to childhood summers at the Jersey shore, to the cottage we always rented in Ocean Grove. I remembered the sweetness of coconut-oil lotion, the taste of molasses-flavored taffy, the early-morning bike rides on the boardwalk before anyone else was up. The broken white clamshells on the path to Sonia’s cottage were identical to the ones I remembered. A seagull, unimpressed by how near to him I was passing, poked at something in the reedy sand.
Once I was at Sonia’s pale green door, I saw that the impatiens in the window boxes had gotten leggy and stretched. Soon they would have to be pulled out.
When Sonia came to the door, I was relieved to see she didn’t look that much like me. We were the same height and had the same coloring, her hair was blond and tangled in waves like mine, but that was all. Her small, upturned nose and curved mouth contained an infectious joy that made you want to smile back. I could see her as Nellie Forbush in
South Pacific
or Laurey in
Oklahoma!
I did smile back. “Hi. I’m Delhi Laine. I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask you something.”
She inclined her head.
“Can I come in?”
Doubtful.
“I’m working over at the Erikson compound and bad things have been happening. Gretchen was killed and Rosa’s cottage was set on fire.”
The large gray-blue eyes, dark-flecked and intelligent, widened, and she pulled back the door for me to step inside.
Sonia lived in one large room. The furniture in the front area was brown wicker with flowered cushions. But we didn’t sit. Instead we stood near the entrance next to a white iMac with a keyboard below. She leaned over and typed on it, then stood back so I could read it.
Tell me what happened.
I did. When I talked about Gretchen’s death she looked sad. The details of Rosa’s burnt cottage disturbed her more.
What did poor Rosa ever do to anyone?
she typed.
Is there anything left?
“I don’t know if everything inside the cottage was destroyed.” I hoped not. “Are you still in touch with the family?”
Maybe not a tactful question, but she wrote,
Lynn does everything for me. Lynn helped me get this place and found me my car. She knew I would need a car living out here.
“Do you help her with her quilts?”
I piece them together for her and she does the quilting. The income really helps.
She gestured at the back corner of the cottage, opposite a cooking alcove. I looked and saw a sewing machine and stacks of fabric.
“That’s great.”
It keeps me busy. And my therapist wants me to write down everything that happened as I remember it. She said it will make me feel better to get it all out.
“Speaking of that, I wanted to ask you about what happened to you. If you don’t mind.”
She didn’t turn back to the keyboard for a while, just stared deeper into the cottage.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
She was back at the machine again, typing quickly now.
I want to help, but I still don’t know what happened. I was in bed, asleep, and I woke up with my throat on fire and saw someone leaving my room. They made up a story that I had been drinking and drank a caustic by mistake. But I wasn’t drunk, I’d only had some wine.
And there she stopped and turned back to me.
“Did you see who it was leaving?”
She added a name and gave me a somber look.
I felt sick. “I’m so sorry.”
B
EC
AUSE THE DAY
was overcast, I willed it to get dark early. I needed the cover of night for the other thing I wanted to do. I wasn’t going to drive all the way home and back out again, so I spent the time checking the local thrift shops and library sale shelves for books. Nothing exceptional, but I collected enough good titles to fill a cardboard carton.
At 6 p.m. I retreated to the Golden Pear Cafe and settled in with butternut squash soup and a tomato-mozzarella sandwich on a baguette. I could finally read
Let the Great World Spin
uninterrupted, and I lingered as people moved in and out, carrying away dinner. At 7:25, when the dusk seemed permanent, I headed back to Adam’s Revenge. Tonight I drove past the compound and parked farther down the road, next to a barrier of oak trees. I opened the glove compartment and took out the small flashlight I kept for illuminating books in unlit basements.
There was no mistaking my white van with its “Got Books?” logo, but there was no reason for anyone from the family to drive down the road beyond the house. I locked the van and began to edge through the trees without turning my flashlight on, nearly tripping on one high root. From below the houses I could see that the lights were on in Claude and Lynn’s cottage and in Bianca’s chalet, as well as in the main house. I thought about Eve in there without Bessie or Gretchen for company, and wondered if Puck was home. What a change for her from the days when Nate was alive, the house filled with artists and conversation and laughter. What I had been seeing was the cast after the play was over, the theater empty, no one quite sure what to do next.
I had left the cover of trees and was approaching the shell of Rosa’s cottage as quietly as I could when I heard a sound as stealthy as I was trying to be.
Nowhere to hide.
I dropped to the ground and stretched out flat. The weeds were high here, the field unmowed, though anyone looking carefully would have seen the bump my body made. I couldn’t see the cottage without raising my head and I didn’t want to do that.
There was the crunch of someone trying to walk quietly across the ashes.
The hell with it.
I lifted my head enough to see a woman’s back beyond the yellow warning tape, moving away from me. The beam of her flashlight illuminated the ground and bounced up enough for me to see that she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. I assumed it was a woman, but it could have been Puck’s slender body as well. The only one it couldn’t be was Bessie.
Then the light was extinguished and I heard nothing else. Had she found what she was looking for? If so, the item was small enough to carry in a pocket. I wondered if it was the same thing I wanted to see. What I didn’t know was whether she’d be back. I had to move quickly.
When I got to where the back door had been, the acrid odor was unbearable. I hesitated, looking in. What had been a narrow pathway through the kitchen and into the hall was now obliterated by fallen objects. For a moment I wondered why everything looked wet, then remembered that the fire department had hosed everything down.
I stepped over the threshold where the harvest table had been, and caught my breath. Shards of white china shone everywhere like broken pieces of moon. Could any of Rosa’s work be salvaged? I thought fleetingly about trying to rescue her plates. But it was impossible to breathe without choking, and I knew I couldn’t stay.
The police had created a makeshift pathway farther into the kitchen and I picked my way along it, stumbling once or twice because I didn’t want to use the flashlight. When I pressed the switch briefly, I saw that the whatnot with its china animals was barely damaged, suggesting that the fire had been set around the perimeter and had not gotten too far in.
When I reached the living room, I moved toward the corner where I had seen Gretchen’s paintings, stacked against the wall.
The wall was no longer there.
The rubble could have held the painting I was looking for, but it was impossible to be sure. Then I remembered that the model had been Rosa’s dead mother and hated the thought of her finding that out too.
If she survived.
D
RIVING HOME, MY
sweatshirt streaked with soot where I had brushed against furniture in the dark, I consoled myself with “at leasts.” At least I had gotten out of the cottage without being discovered. What would the hooded figure have done if she had found me inside? At least I had seen the painting in Rosa’s cottage last week. I couldn’t prove anything now, but if I could make one or two more things fit the picture that was forming, Marselli would have to see it too.