Rubout (32 page)

She was the coolest woman I ever met. She was going to pour me more tea when I’d just accused her of murder. I watched her pick up the heavy silver pot. She took a swing at me with it. I ducked and knocked over the little table covering the hole in the rug, then held the table in front of me like a shield. It shattered with one blow of the silver teapot. Lukewarm tea splattered across the Kirman rug. I rolled forward to the mantel and reached up for an ugly green vase I saw there. The thing was acid green trimmed with gold and looked like the vase my aunt Gracie won at a carnival.

Elizabeth froze. “Put that down, you idiot,” she commanded. “It’s Meissen. It’s worth a fortune. Seventy thousand dollars for a matched pair.”

As long as I held on to the vase, I was safe. I could back out the door with the vase and run for my car.

But I didn’t get a chance. She came running for me, like a springing lioness I’d seen on a
National Geographic
special. I made a run for the front door, but she blocked my way, swinging the heavy silver teapot. I had to run, either back into the living room or upstairs. I chose the stairs, remembering to step over the fishing line on the third step from the top. I managed to hang on to the vase, too. Elizabeth ran right after me and leaped the line like a spring lamb.

About then I realized I’d made a dumb decision. I was trapped upstairs. I had to get back down those steps again so I could get out the door. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. Elizabeth
pounded on it. “Come out, Francesca, come out. We can get you help,” she said.

Wonderful. Now I was the crazy one. Well, I was sitting on the commode, holding a vase worth more than my annual salary. No doubt Charlie the managing editor would believe Elizabeth before he believed me. If it were up to him, I’d be wearing a jacket with wraparound sleeves. After about ten minutes, Elizabeth quit pounding and pleading for me to come out. I could hear her go into the bedroom across from the bath and quietly pick up the phone. Who was she going to call? Her son? Charlie the managing editor? The police?

I didn’t wait to find out. I opened the bathroom door and started down the steps. Very carefully, I stepped over the fishing line again. Then I moved faster. But she heard me. I could hear her drop the phone and then I saw her at the top of the steps. I was still a long way from the bottom and the escape to the outside.

“Come any further, and I’ll drop this over the side,” I said. I plastered myself to the banister and held the vase out over the slates in the entry hall.

“Francesca, I’m sure the newspaper will get you the best care,” she said. “I won’t file any charges, if you’ll just put down the vase.”

The vase wobbled in my hands. “I’m putting it down all right, unless you tell me how you killed your daughter-in-law.”

“People in my position don’t murder,” she said. “You’re the one who comes from murderers and suicides. With your past, who’d believe anything you’d say about me? Especially when . . .”

Was that an admission? I didn’t find out. She made a lunge for me in midsentence, trying to grab her precious vase. She forgot about the fishing line she’d tied across the third step. It caught her by the foot and flipped her right over, headfirst. Her head bounced on the steps going down. Then she landed on the foyer slates with a sound like a watermelon falling out of a window. I hope I never hear that sound again. A pool of very dark blood began spreading around her head. She never moved. She would never move again. Elizabeth was dead.

I was numb, but I could feel a cold raw fear starting in the pit of my stomach and spreading outward. She’d never admitted that she had committed the murders, and she couldn’t confess now. What if she didn’t murder Sydney and Jack? I’d been wrong before. Was I wrong again? Had I killed an innocent woman?

I realized I was still on the stairs and still clutching the vase. I tried to walk downstairs. I made it, wobbly and sweaty, to the last step when the doorbell rang. I guess the sound startled me, and the sweat made my hands slippery. The ugly green vase slipped out of my hands and crashed to the floor. It lay there broken and ruined, like its owner.

“G
ood God, you’ve killed Mother!” Hudson Vander Venter said. He’d rung the doorbell and used his key to let himself in for an afternoon visit with Elizabeth. Now he stood in the slate-floored foyer, staring at her broken body. Even from where he stood, it was obvious she was dead. He did not run over and touch his mother. Probably didn’t want to get blood on his good suit. But he did take a step or two closer. Bits of the acid-green vase crunched under his feet. After three crunches, he realized what was making that noise: the vase I broke when he rang the doorbell.

“Good God,” he said again. “You’ve destroyed a matched pair of Meissen.” I couldn’t tell which disaster left him more shattered—the loss of his mother, or the Meissen.

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to,” I said, sounding like Dorothy when she threw the pail of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

“You killed her, you wretched woman. You’ll pay for this.” He grabbed his cell phone from his briefcase and dialed 911. I grabbed the phone by the couch and called Mayhew’s office. He wasn’t in, but I left an urgent message. My voice shook as I said, “Tell him that there has been a major break in the Vander Venter case. He should get to Elizabeth Vander Venter’s house in Ladue immediately.”

Then I called the
Gazette
to tell Georgia what happened. I was halfway through my explanation when Hudson grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung it up. “You may NOT use Mother’s phone,” he said, peevishly. I tried to wrestle it back to call Lyle, but gave up. I could hear the sirens of the approaching police cars. After that, it was nothing but confusion, accusations, and explanations. Mayhew arrived about twenty minutes later, and Georgia blew in half an hour after Mayhew with a matched pair of
Gazette
lawyers, who promptly told me to shut up, the same advice that Georgia always gave me, except she didn’t charge to say that. I was done talking for a while, anyway. I’d already told my story half a dozen times, and now the police were checking it. There was plenty of evidence to support my version, from the shattered table to the fishing line on the stairs. Only Elizabeth’s fingerprints were found on and around the fishing line, so Hudson couldn’t say I’d used it to kill his mother. Hudson wasn’t saying anything at the moment. His lawyers had arrived, and they told him to shut up, too.

I wished Lyle was there, but I was also glad he wasn’t. Shock was setting in. My teeth were chattering and I felt cold. Someone offered me a cup of
hot tea, but I didn’t think I could ever drink tea again. Georgia gave me her jacket to wear, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I’d killed Elizabeth. Maybe not on purpose, but my intentions didn’t matter. I told myself that she’d tried to kill me. If I wasn’t such a klutz, if I hadn’t held on to the stair rail, she might have succeeded. But knowing that didn’t help. I wished I could feel sorry that she was dead. I wished I could feel sad. I wished I could feel anything but what I did feel: cold. I was so cold I didn’t think I’d ever be warm. For months afterward, I would dream that Elizabeth was chasing me through the house and down the stairs. I could see her foot catch in the fishing line. I would watch her fall down the steps and I would hear once again those dreadful thumps. Suddenly it was me who was falling. I was trying to grab on to something, but I couldn’t stop falling. I always woke up before I hit the bottom. I would be shivering and sweating, but so cold.

It was hours before I got out of that house. Hudson was making threats when I left and his lawyers were trying to muzzle him. But he couldn’t do anything. The power of the Vander Venters was as broken as the vase.

The police found plenty of proof that Elizabeth was the killer. Sydney’s blood was on the shoes and purse that Elizabeth donated to the church bazaar. One of Sydney’s hairs was in the purse. Elizabeth’s skin fragments were in the drive chain used to beat Sydney to death. The cast of the tire matched the front tire on Elizabeth’s car. In the trunk of her car were smears of motor oil. Police found credit card receipts for three cases of Exxon motor oil (twelve
quarts to a case, eighty-nine cents a quart) and a motorcycle drive chain from the West Alton Discount Barn. The site of Jack’s murder was a few miles across the river.

But the best evidence was in the can, just like Sydney told her friend, Jane. Elizabeth used a coffee can safe to hide the papers that showed all the devious ways she and her son were defrauding Sydney. She put the can on a shelf in her refrigerator. Too bad Jack missed the ruby necklace Elizabeth kept in the vegetable bin in a fake head of lettuce when he went through her refrigerator—that would have been enough lettuce to get him out of town. Jack wouldn’t have had to blackmail the lethal Elizabeth. The crafty old woman devised a perfect way to take out a big, mean biker. After she murdered Jack, Elizabeth didn’t destroy the papers. She returned them to her coffee can safe in the refrigerator. It was a stupid move by a smart woman.

“I can’t believe she kept a ruby necklace in the icebox,” I said to Mayhew. Elizabeth’s death took care of any awkwardness between us. When he showed up at her house, the last thing I worried about was what he thought of me after our afternoon together. Now we were back to being old friends. Mayhew gave me an update over breakfast at Uncle Bob’s, while Marlene sedately brought our food and didn’t say a single snotty word.

“You’d be surprised what rich people do,” Mayhew said. “I know one guy with an incredible art collection—Monets, Cézannes, Picassos, the works. He has it guarded with the cheapest possible alarm system. I
wouldn’t have it at my house to protect my CD player.”

No one is exactly sure how Elizabeth found out the papers were missing, but I liked Mayhew’s theory. Here’s what he thinks happened: “Cordelia complained to Elizabeth about those muddy footprints on her kitchen floor,” he said. “At least, Cordelia says she made a fuss.”

“I know she did,” I said. “Cordelia even complained to me about the footprints.”

“I think Elizabeth saw the footprints and knew someone had been in her kitchen,” Mayhew said. “She waited until Cordelia left for the day, then checked the safes. The ruby necklace was untouched, but the coffee can safe was empty. She immediately suspected her daughter-in-law, or someone acting for her, took the papers. Who else but Sydney would benefit from them?”

“Did Sydney know about the coffee can safe?”

“Hud Junior told us she often joked about Elizabeth’s cut-rate security system. Sydney thought the refrigerator was the first place a burglar would look for cold cash and valuables. It’s probably the first place she had Jack check when she gave him the key to her mother-in-law’s house.”

“How did you know she gave Jack a key?”

“We found it on his key chain. We didn’t know what door it matched until after Elizabeth’s death. We think Elizabeth decided to kill Sydney before her daughter-in-law claimed her share of the family fortune in the divorce. Elizabeth found the perfect way to make herself invisible. She dressed like a dowdy, respectable old woman. Elizabeth stole Cordelia’s
coat. She bought the sensible black shoes, felt hat, and a big black purse at a store in Florissant, about as far away from Ladue as she could go—but conveniently on the way home from the Discount Barn. We found that credit card receipt, too, and the clerk definitely remembers Elizabeth.”

Mayhew can’t prove his theory, because nobody ever found Cordelia’s coat. But it made sense to me. Why else would a tightwad like Elizabeth buy Cordelia a new coat?

“Did you ever find out what Hudson was doing in those missing fifteen minutes?” I said. That was the question I couldn’t answer.

“He just might have been in the bathroom, like he said,” Mayhew said. “We pressed him about it again after his mother died. This time he was scared enough to tell us he had diverticulitis—a bowel problem that could keep him in there for a while. The great financier said he was too embarrassed to admit he had this ‘weakness.’ Hudson even gave us permission to talk to his internist, who confirmed he had been treated for an inflammation of the large intestine.”

Hudson also admitted his mother gave him six quarts of oil, but he swore he didn’t know that she murdered Jack. Hudson said he never changed his own oil. He planned to give it to his handyman on the next visit to the farm.

Hudson still denied beating my car with a cinder block. So did his lawyer-lover, Brenda, when the police questioned her in connection with the case. Hud Junior said he didn’t do it, and I believed him. Maybe it was Elizabeth, but crude vandalism didn’t seem
subtle enough for her clever mind. It could have been the neighborhood kids. But I didn’t think so. The incident nagged at me.

But I had too many good things to think about. Lyle and I are getting along fine. I’ve moved in with him—almost. I still keep a few clothes and things at my grandparents’ place, and I go there whenever I need a break from living with Lyle. I slop around in an old hairy pink bathrobe, order pizza, eat tuna out of the can, and sleep sideways in the bed. Single-mindedness dies hard. Besides, I have to go back to clean those steps.