Death of an English Muffin (14 page)

I
RETURNED TO
the castle to find the police still there, but in a reduced presence, two sheriff’s department cars. Virgil emerged from the castle just then. He strode over and opened my door, offering me his hand to help me out. He then got the muffin tubs out of the backseat for me. What a gentleman, and no, I’m not being sarcastic. I enjoy the niceties between the sexes, and his behavior was lovely. But as usual, his presence left me a little breathless, especially with him in uniform, broad shoulders straining the khaki fabric of his shirt, brown tie askew, dark hair rumpled by the fresh spring breeze, hat in hand. The evening of Shilo and Jack’s wedding we had danced, and I enjoyed the experience too much for my heart rate. We chatted, got comfortable with each other—I thought—and parted on good terms. I’d expected a phone call, maybe an invitation to coffee, but after one brief, odd visit when he was loopy on cold meds, he backed off and became a chimera, and ever since he acted like a cat that had been scalded would around boiling water.

“Hey, Virgil, any news?”

He set the tubs on my car hood and stared over my head toward the woods. “Not so far. No obvious connections, no obvious culprit. I have a few things I’m wondering about. I have to go somewhere right now, but can I come back and talk to you this evening?”

“Sure.”

“Did I tell you yet? I have some news.” He told me that the last person who had killed someone in my poor castle was going to be sentenced after pleading guilty to manslaughter, a reduced charge. “I was hoping for life, but you never know with a plea deal.”

I nodded and shivered. Violence had touched my life too often since I’d moved to Autumn Vale, and I was being blamed in the town by some who clearly wished I had never come to claim my inheritance. And speaking of that . . . I looked up at him, watching his eyes. “Virgil, I just heard that Lauda was staying with Minnie Urquhart. Did you know that?”

He nodded. “Minnie rents out rooms in her house. No big deal.”

“It concerns me. Minnie is still telling everyone that I’m the reason things in Autumn Vale are going to the dogs, as she calls it.”

“Can you picture Lauda and Minnie conspiring to kill her aunt and blame you just to get you in hot water?”

I shook my head and sighed. “Not funny, Virgil. But is it possible? Could Lauda have done it?”

“You know I can’t divulge our investigative process, and I won’t speculate. Do I think any of you are in danger? How do I answer that? I’m not a psychic.”

“Should I be kicking her out?”

“Merry, I don’t know what to say. You have to follow your own instincts, I guess. Can’t believe I’m saying that. But everyone in the castle and quite a few others have not been eliminated from the list of persons of interest.”

I glanced back at my beautiful castle, gleaming golden in the sunlight that streamed down on it. “I do have something else. I don’t know if they’ll be any help, but Lizzie took pictures most of the afternoon before wandering off into the woods. They’ll be time-stamped. I don’t think there will be any of the time closest to the murder, but it can’t hurt to look at them.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“I’ll get her to leave her camera with me so you can see them this evening.” This was the closest to a date we’d ever had. How weird were we?

“Gotta go,” he said, whirling abruptly and heading to his car. He clapped his hat on as he climbed into the cruiser. “See you later.”

Becket, who had emerged from the woods as we talked, joined me, sitting at my feet on the gravel drive. I watched Virgil drive away. There was something wrong between Virgil and me that had stopped him from following his inclinations. I thought it had to do with his divorce, but the marriage was over a couple of years ago, from what Gogi told me. Why couldn’t he move on? Of course, I was one to say that—the queen of not moving on, still holding on to my husband’s memory eight years after his death. Sometimes it felt like every moment of those eight years had passed, and at other times it felt like it had all happened yesterday.

“Come on, Becket, let’s go in.” I grabbed my empty muffin containers and headed into the kitchen to wash them, ready for the next batch.

I spent the afternoon working on one of the vacant rooms, systematically stripping off the hideous seventies wallpaper my great-uncle had inflicted on the room. Since the fall I had acquired a number of tools of the trade and I now knew much more about fixing up a run-down castle than I’d ever thought possible. Weary of pretty much everything, I then showered, dressed, and came down for dinner.

The Legion ladies gathered in the breakfast room, where we dined when it was just us. It is one of my favorite rooms, and from the first I had a clear vision for it, as housing my lovely china set and teapots. I had far too many for the room, so I had selected the best: chintz, figural, and antique, with a few cutesy ones thrown in for good measure. They lined the sideboard and a couple of staggered shelves mounted on the papered walls. I served the beef burgundy, to call it by its anglicized name, and we dined with Pish, who always joined us to sit with Lush. I looked around the table. This crime was a tough one. In the past outsiders were easy to pin the blame on, but this time it was likely someone at my table.

Lush was out of the question. Pish’s darling aunt was dotty and sweet, but noticed little and knew less. She wanted to be everyone’s friend and was wounded when shunned. Beyond that I just couldn’t picture her smothering Cleta or anyone, no matter the provocation.

So, the rest of the Legion.

Barbara Beakman: heavy and slow, depressed and depressing. Barbara appeared strong enough to do it. I had not witnessed a lot of animosity toward Cleta from her, but what was hidden behind those lifeless, heavy-lidded eyes?

Patsy Schwartz: beer and toilet heiress, a joke waiting to happen. She was surprisingly active for someone of her advanced years, making it up and down the stairs with the spring of someone half her age. She seemed to feel herself inferior to the others, but why, I wasn’t sure. Was it really just the source of her family’s money that made her feel less than worthy? That seemed silly. In America, rich is rich; money confers status. Of all the ladies she appeared to be in the best health, though she complained constantly, usually one-upping someone else’s tale of woe with one of her own, exaggerated. If you had a cold, she had bubonic plague. But as with Barbara, I couldn’t imagine any reason why she would kill Cleta. She hadn’t appeared to have any affection for the woman, but then, who had?

Vanessa LaDuchesse: flamboyant, with a long career in Hollywood that included mostly noir films. But where had she come from originally? I didn’t know.

But then, I didn’t know much of anything about these ladies. Vanessa seemed reasonably healthy, though I knew she took heart medication and some other mysterious pills. They appeared to share a lot, including similar tastes in costume jewelry and a fondness for bright lipstick.

And then there was Lauda. The more I thought about it the more suspicious I was of her pushiness to get into Cleta’s room with no interference. Going by what Gordy had overheard between Lauda and Cleta, I would bet she wanted to search her aunt’s things to make sure no new will excluding her existed. Perhaps she had dispatched her aunt to prevent that new will from being drafted.

However two things counted against that. Surely if inheritance was the motive, she would not kill her aunt until she was
sure
there was no will disinheriting her. It was risky to do so after their confrontation in Autumn Vale. Also, I had no reason to suspect she was even
at
the castle that afternoon. Of all of them she was the youngest and strongest, though. I watched her covertly; she was a big woman, with strong, capable hands accustomed to working hard. She had lugged her heavy suitcase up the long castle staircase easily. She was physically capable of the crime, but was her personality such that she could kill her own aunt in such a brutal and personal fashion?

As I made dinner conversation, I thought about how to figure out the truth. It was frightening to think that one of them was the murderer. It
seemed
impossible.

I’d start with the woman who had the most to gain. I took a sip of wine and set my glass down, carefully. “Lauda, I have to admit, I know very little of Cleta’s past. As her niece, you must have been the one she was closest to. What was she like when you were a child?”

The woman chewed and stared at me blankly, frizzy hair badly confined in a bun, wisps sticking out around her moon face. She wore another of her shapeless mud-colored dresses, and I wondered why any designer would use that fabric to make a tent, much less a dress for a woman.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, displaying too much of the contents of her mouth as she spoke.

I turned away and set my fork down. It wasn’t a tough question, but I’d elaborate. “Did you spend time with her? Was she kind to you?” I looked at her again, examining the pouchy face and bags under her eyes. “Did she buy you things, take you places?”

She shook her head. “She didn’t like kids much.”

“Did she and your mother get along? Did you see her often?”

She just shook her head and took another giant forkful of the beef and mushrooms.

“When did she come to America from England?” I asked, glancing around at the others. “
Why
did she come to America?”

“Actually, I think I was the first to meet her,” Vanessa said, pausing in the act of picking up her wineglass. She looked around at her tablemates. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

Lush nodded. “You came back from staying with that duke in England, and Cleta came with you to visit.”

Vanessa smiled mistily. “We were all so young and gay,” she said wistfully. “Cleta, too. It was the sixties, very wild. I was divorcing Nigel and staying at the town house of a duke who threw outrageous parties for artists and musicians. Cleta was one of those upper-crust Englishwomen—you know, horses and hounds and cocktails and cigarettes—and I found her amusing. Very acidic, even then. My style protégé, I called her.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “My mother was a teenage hippie in the sixties, which meant earnest protests and war rallies.”

“We did have fun. I ran with a very fast set.”

“But you’re American, right? What did you do before the movies? Where did you come from?”

“Darling, no actress has a past before her movies,” she said, with a faint, mysterious, practiced smile. “Actually, when I married Nigel I quit movies for a few years.”

“You were separated from him by the time you met Cleta, though, weren’t you?” Patsy said, eyeing her friend. “He had left you for some little snippet in Cannes.”

“That was the story,” she said, with another slight, enigmatic smile.

I caught a hint of something in her voice, some underlying meaning, and I thought about her words. “You were separated from him?”

She nodded.

Digging for more, I said, “And he was supposed to be having an affair, but he wasn’t?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that, dear,” Vanessa said. She glanced over at Pish, then back to me. “In those days a man had to be circumspect, you know, and having a wife was a very good thing for some men, especially if she left him because he played around with younger women. That way he could be free but his reputation as a man about town, a ladykiller, if you will, was assured.”

Pish nodded, a smirk turning up one corner of his mouth. “Meanwhile, he probably had a lot of handsome young men hanging about his home.”

My eyes widened. “Ah, I get it,” I said.

Patsy had a sour look on her face that I had a hard time deciphering.

“I thought you knew Cleta before that, my dear?” Lush said. “Didn’t she introduce you to Nigel?”

Vanessa sighed and shook her head. “Lush, you know you have started mixing up dates and the order of things.”

Lush frowned down at her fork with a befuddled expression. “I suppose that’s true.”

Barbara snickered. “You asked me last week when my nephew Harrison was coming home from school. Harrison graduated college twenty-five years ago.”

Poor Lush colored faintly, her softly wrinkled cheeks rosy. “I was mistaken. I meant your great-nephew Henry, not his father. It was the merest slip of the tongue.”

Pish put his hand over hers and squeezed.

“So, Vanessa, you brought Cleta back from the continent and introduced her to the others?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?” I glanced over at Lauda, then at the other ladies, realizing how bald my questions sounded. “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but she could be so cruel. Was she always like that? Mean-spirited? She was outright rude to my friends. Pish, you always treated it like a joke, but was it?”

He shook his head. “My darling, I found over the years that treating it like a joke depleted some of the tension surrounding her behavior, and it became a reflex.” He looked back to Lush. “Auntie, did I do the right thing? Or did I just enable her?”

The room was silent, forks suspended as the others waited. Lush considered, her head down as if she was in prayer. When she looked up she said, “Cleta Sanson was a friend, but she often made me uncomfortable with her cruelty to others. I wish now I had said something. Pishie, you did the best you could, always trying to soften the blow of her words. That’s not enabling.”