Murder at Longbourn (10 page)

Aunt Winnie walked over to Lauren, standing mutely beside Gerald, and gently took her by the shoulders, easing her away from the
body. Pulling Lauren to her, she guided her toward one of the chairs. After Lauren was seated, Aunt Winnie walked over to Polly, whispered something to her, drew her close, and led her to the chair next to Lauren. The rest of us stood awkwardly, eyeing one another suspiciously. The band of actors seemed especially ill at ease. No longer in character, they huddled together on one side of the room. As planned, there had been a murder tonight, but the premise had shifted. Now they were the spectators and we were the show.

I was struck by the resemblance of the scene to an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life—a room full of uneasy, elegantly dressed people, some standing, some sitting, and none of them making eye contact. And, of course, in the midst of this strange tableau, a dead body lay sprawled on the floor.

But this particular tableau is not a cartoon, I thought. It’s real. And one of these elegantly dressed people just killed a man. A wave of dizziness overtook me and I sat down heavily on one of the chairs and stared at the floor.

Peter appeared beside me. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

“Of course I’m not all right!” I shot back, my voice a strained whisper. “A man is dead! Murdered!” Nodding in Gerald’s direction, I caught sight of his dead staring eyes and grimaced. A wave of nausea overtook me and I buried my head in my hands.

Peter walked over to the bar. Tom barked out at him, “What are you doing?”

Peter turned. Giving Tom a level look, he said evenly, “Elizabeth feels sick. I’m getting her a glass of water.”

Tom nodded his approval.

“Does anybody else want anything?” Peter asked. Both Jackie and Linnet shook their heads, as did Joan and Henry. Lauren and Polly appeared not even to have heard the question.

Randy stepped forward. “I think Winifred could use something,” he said. Aunt Winnie nodded gratefully.

“I could do with a spot of something, but it isn’t a glass of bloody water,” muttered Daniel, as he turned and rapidly walked to the bar. He poured three generous glasses of whiskey. He handed one to Lauren and one to Polly. The last one he drank himself in short order.

Peter poured the glass of water and came to hand it to me. “Here,” he said. “Drink this.”

I took the glass, but I didn’t drink from it. I was quite sure that I was about to be spectacularly ill. Peter must have sensed this, too, for after a moment, he took the glass away. “Put your head between your knees,” he ordered. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

While I balked at his dictatorial tone, I was too dizzy to argue with him, and so I did as he said. Forcing the image of Gerald’s lifeless face out of my head, I concentrated on slowly filling my lungs with air and letting it out just as slowly. I don’t know how long I sat like that, but gradually my stomach felt less like it had been on a cheap roadside carnival ride. I sat back in my chair. Peter eyed me cautiously. “Better?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry I snapped at you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said simply. “Would you like the water now?”

I nodded, even though I really didn’t. But it gave me something to do with my hands. When I was little and was scared or upset, I would count to myself. I don’t know why, but I found the rote repetition of numbers soothing. I reverted to my old trick now as Peter and I sat with the body of Gerald Ramsey in Aunt Winnie’s dining room.

Nobody said another word until 526 seconds later when we finally heard the sirens.

Desperate to get out of the room, I volunteered to open the door for the police. At the front door, I stood for a moment breathing in deeply the icy cold air and trying to settle my queasy stomach. The storm was in full swing now, and the lights from the ambulance and police cars made an eerie kaleidoscope of color in the swirling snow. Two paramedics pulled a gurney down from the ambulance and two policemen jumped from their cars. I motioned them in and quickly led them to the dining room. I pointed in Gerald’s direction. “He’s over here,” I added unnecessarily.

The first police officer surveyed the room and announced, “I am Lieutenant Jansen.” He was a tall man with a lanky build and a fleshy face.

Tom stepped forward. He introduced himself and succinctly provided Lieutenant Jansen with a brief report. Moving away, they spoke in terse whispers, leaving the rest of us trying to discern their seemingly coded speech.

Once briefed, Lieutenant Jansen moved to where Gerald lay. Kneeling beside the body, he asked, “Who is he?”

Peter answered, “Gerald Ramsey. He lives in town.”

Lieutenant Jansen nodded. “I’m familiar with the name.” He stared at Gerald’s face a moment, then leaned back on his haunches. “Okay, what exactly happened?” he asked, as the first paramedic examined Gerald’s body. The paramedic’s name tag identified him as Todd. He had long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. A blurry tattoo of a peace sign peeked out occasionally from underneath his thin white shirt cuff as he performed his examination.

“I’m not really sure,” replied Aunt Winnie. “It all happened so fast. We were waiting for the murder …”

Lieutenant Jansen jerked his head, staring at Aunt Winnie, and she realized how she sounded. Flustered, she tried to explain. “What
I mean is,” she said quickly, “that this was a dinner theater party of sorts. Some of the guests are hired actors. They pretend to kill someone—one of
them.
” She pointed at the actors. “And then the rest of us were supposed to try to solve the mystery of who committed the murder.”

I wondered if Lieutenant Jansen played much poker. If he did, I bet he won a lot. He gazed steadily at Aunt Winnie, giving no clue as to what he was thinking. He nodded for Aunt Winnie to continue.

She did. “Well, anyway, I turned the lights off as planned at about eleven o’clock. Once the lights were off, one of the actors was supposed to be murdered, but instead … we heard a gunshot and when the lights went back on … we saw Gerald.”

During Aunt Winnie’s narration, Lieutenant Jansen had pulled out a small notebook. He now rapidly scribbled into it. Todd, the paramedic, finished his brief exam of the body. “Gunshot wound to the chest,” he said, stating what I thought was a fairly obvious fact.

“Did anyone touch or move the body?” Lieutenant Jansen asked. Peter answered, “After the lights came on and I saw him on the floor, I ran over to see if … if he was alive.” He paused. “I pulled back his suit coat and tried to find a pulse, but that’s all.”

“Anyone else?”

No one said anything, although we all looked at Lauren.

She was still sitting next to Polly at one of the tables. Polly was smoking mechanically, and I wondered if she was even aware of her actions. Lauren was sitting bolt upright, staring blankly in front of her. They had neither spoken to nor looked at each other since the gruesome discovery of Gerald’s body. They were also completely dry-eyed. I found this a little sad but not very surprising given the kind of man Gerald Ramsey appeared to have been. Lauren’s earlier hysteria had given way to a zombielike numbness, and I hadn’t seen
any reaction at all from Polly. In fact, they were so devoid of emotion that a stranger to the night’s events would be hard-pressed to detect anything amiss in their manner. The only indication that something was wrong was Polly’s hand. It shook slightly as she took a drag from her cigarette.

“Are you Mrs. Ramsey?” Lieutenant Jansen said, following our eyes.

At the sound of her name, Lauren swung vacant blue eyes in the lieutenant’s direction, but I doubted that she’d heard anything else. Her expression was dazed and her eyes unfocused.

“Lauren!” said Polly sharply.

Lauren snapped back. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“Did you move or touch the body in any way, ma’am?”

“Move him? No. When the lights came back on I saw that Gerald was on the floor. I thought he might have had a heart attack. I ran over to him. And then Peter pulled back his coat and … and … I saw …” Her face crumpled and I thought she was going to cry. Instead, she gazed at Lieutenant Jansen with a lost expression.

“He was dead,” she continued softly. “This all seems like a dream.” She paused a moment and repeated, “Gerald. Dead,” and shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe it. “He was so strong. I thought he’d live forever.”

She lapsed back into silence. I thought her words odd. After all, it wasn’t as if Gerald had suffered a heart attack—someone had shot him in the chest.

I looked at Polly to see how she was faring. She was staring at Lauren with a tired expression, but she said nothing. She silently turned her head away and took another long drag from her cigarette.

Lieutenant Jansen noted everything down. “We’ll need to take statements from everyone individually. Is there somewhere private
we can do that?” he asked Aunt Winnie. “We’ll need to clear the room and look for evidence.”

“Of course,” Aunt Winnie answered. “You can use my office. It’s off the foyer.”

I doubted how productive Lieutenant Jansen’s interviews would be if they were conducted in Aunt Winnie’s tiny, messy office. I had a sudden image of Lieutenant Jansen’s lanky frame squashed and half hidden behind a desk piled high with catalogs and papers, trying to carry out a serious interview with a suspect who, for lack of space, was forced to stand pressed up against a wall papered in faded roses.

I was about to suggest that the reading room might be more comfortable when a hissing sound from the corner distracted me.

It was Lady Catherine. She was standing next to her pillow bed with a particularly peevish expression on her feline face. In the center of her bed, and the apparent reason for her displeasure, lay a gun. It had a curved wooden handle and was so small that at first glance it looked like a toy, especially as it lay nestled among Lady Catherine’s embroidered pillows. But this was no toy. It was a Derringer, and unless I was very much mistaken, it was the gun that had killed Gerald Ramsey. Next to it lay a crumpled white glove.

“Well, well,” said Lieutenant Jansen with a grim smile. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Almost as if on cue, the grandfather clock in the foyer chimed midnight.

Happy New Year.

I
T WAS ALMOST four in the morning when I finally crawled into bed. Granted, I’d been up that late before on New Year’s Eve, but then it had been the result of an unfortunate combination of tequila and karaoke. I promptly swore off karaoke the next afternoon. This time my late night was due to relentless questioning by a humorless detective. All things considered, I preferred the tequila/karaoke debacle, even with all its nasty aftereffects.

The detective who’d been put in charge of the case was a burly man by the name of Stewart. As far as I could tell, he had no first name. He was about forty years old, with thick black hair, cropped short. His hazel eyes hinted at a sense of humor and were framed by the thickest lashes I’d ever seen wasted on a man. But after spending less than five minutes with him, I found myself mentally humming the Eagles’ hit “Lyin’ Eyes.”

I was glad Aunt Winnie had agreed to my suggestion that the reading room, rather than her cramped office, be used for the questioning. But even settled in the relative comfort of an overstuffed yellow chair, the interview process with Detective Stewart was a painful one.

He had seated himself in the only hard-backed chair in the room, no doubt to lend an air of authority to his questioning. I suppose he felt it would be difficult to intimidate his subjects while being half swallowed by a gaily patterned club chair. But after my seemingly endless interview with him, I realized the man would be daunting even if lounging on a pool raft with an umbrella drink in his hand.

After asking standard questions such as my name, age, and address in a raspy voice reminiscent of the chain-smoking aunts on
The Simpsons,
he launched into the heart of his interrogation.

“Where were you when the lights went out?”

I refrained from asking if that was the title of a song and obediently answered, “I was standing near the sideboard, opposite the door.”

“Right. And where was Mr. Ramsey in relation to you?”

“He was still sitting at the dinner table. It was in front of me, to my right.”

“What was he doing?”

He’d been glaring at Daniel or Polly or both of them, but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “He was watching his daughter on the dance floor.”

“I see. And how was his demeanor?”

“He didn’t seem pleased.”

Detective Stewart looked up from his notes. “Really? Any idea why?”

I could think of at least eight reasons off the top of my head, but somehow it didn’t seem right to assign motives to a dead man. I shrugged. “Not really.”

Detective Stewart didn’t respond. Instead, he stared at me. I wish I could say my courage rises with every attempt to intimidate me, but I can’t. Instead, my reaction is Pavlovian: my palms begin to
sweat and all the moisture evaporates from my mouth. In fact, his piercing gaze produced such a pronounced reaction in me that I briefly wondered if it was a skill taught at the police academy. If Detective Stewart noticed my reaction, he gave no indication. He merely noted my answer and moved on to the next question.