Swan Song (21 page)

I pushed a cart through the familiar aisles of the supermarket, mechanically pulling what I thought of as Armando food from the shelves and bins: fresh fruit and vegetables, ciabatta rolls and cinnamon-raisin bagels, real sugar and butter, sliced turkey from the deli, cranberry-apple tea. From the butcher case I selected a whole roasting chicken, which would do nicely for our dinner. Thanks to an oven that allowed me to program a delayed start time, I could slide the uncooked bird, stuffed with fresh lemons and garlic and surrounded by carrots and tiny red potatoes, into the oven just before I left for the airport and be confident that it would be done to succulent perfection when we returned. If Armando’s flight was delayed, the oven would simply shut itself off at the conclusion of the designated roasting time, and we’d still have a decent chicken dinner, albeit a bit overcooked.

As an afterthought, I retraced my steps to add Splenda, sugar-free coffee creamer, frozen fish fillets and low fat cottage cheese, my own culinary staples. You can’t be a fairly sedentary woman over fifty and expect to keep your weight within reason while eating real butter and sugar. It had taken me nearly three months of starvation hell a few years earlier to shed a dozen pounds, and I didn’t intend to have to repeat the experience. Not for the first time, I felt a twinge of resentment for Margo, who seemed able to consume anything she wanted without gaining an ounce. She’d told me repeatedly that wasn’t true, but looking at May, fifteen years Margo’s senior and just as svelte, I had to believe genetics played a big role. Both women made stunning look easy.

After a quick stop at the package store to pick up a bottle of Armando’s favorite shiraz, I headed for home. As I unpacked my canvas bags in our sunny kitchen, I flashed on the image of May’s ruined home. It wasn’t only the physical damage that was so upsetting, I realized. It was the viciousness of the destruction. You could almost imagine the rage propelling every slash as the perpetrator methodically trashed each room. He or she had been intent on finding the USB drive, yes, but there was an element of pure hatred driving each rip and tear that was almost palpable. It was the malevolent emotion hanging in the air, the clear wish to exact revenge, that especially puzzled me, and I knew May and Margo sensed it, as well. What harm, real or imagined, could May have inflicted on someone to provoke such a response? Or was it Lizabeth who had been the unwitting instigator?

As I stood in the baggage claim area of Bradley International Airport that evening, I wondered how much of the past week’s experiences I should confide to my husband. Because of his Latino temper and tendency to overreact, I had learned to choose my words with care over our years together. Margo, Strutter and I had an undeniable predilection for becoming involved in dangerous situations. Although Armando had become more philosophical about it, as had John Harkness and J.D. Putnam, Strutter’s husband, I’d suffered his withdrawal into icy politeness, which was his response to being frightened for my safety when he could do nothing to protect me, on several occasions. I had learned with the years that he believed discretion to be the better part of valor, and he also knew my partners and I didn’t have a huge supply of it. We tended to act first and think later, which led to some uncomfortable confrontations with our respective husbands.

As the only bilingual contract expert for Telecom International, now headquartered in Orlando, Armando traveled a good deal on business these days, and we had perfected our system for departure and arrival days. While he was on the upper level of Bradley International, dancing the TSA Tango, I skipped security altogether and headed directly for the baggage carousels. On a couple of occasions, I’d been able to snag his familiar green suitcase off the belt and wheel it away from the crowd before he even got downstairs, but tonight wasn’t one of those times.

When I saw other passengers crowding down the escalators, I kept one eye on the carousel and the other on the new arrivals and waved when I saw my handsome husband coming toward me. As always when we were reunited after a separation, we both wore big grins and hugged each other warmly. After more than fifteen years, our relationship had mellowed, but we were always happy to see each other.

“So,
Cara
,” he said as he wheeled his big suitcase toward my car in the short-term parking lot. “What mischief have you and your ladies been up to while I was safely out of the way? No, don’t try to tell me it is nothing. I have heard something in your voice during our last few conversations that has already given you away, and I am too tired to coax it out of you. Just tell me, please.”

I smiled sheepishly as I handed him his carry-on bag to put in the trunk. “You know me too well. I thought I was going a great job of not burdening you with another of our strange situations.” I handed him the keys. Latino men are not chauffeured by their women.

He snorted as he slid behind the wheel and unlocked the passenger door. “Even had I heard nothing in your voice and simply assumed enough time had passed for yet another mystery to present itself, I would have an excellent chance of being correct, do you not agree?”

I had to admit he had a point. Armando, John and J.D. had the distinction of having the only wives in Wethersfield who were on a first name basis with most of the town’s police officers, paramedics and other emergency personnel. Was that a good thing, I wondered? Probably not.

By the time we got to Wethersfield, I’d come clean, and Armando was officially up to date. He must really be tired, I thought, because a Colombian meltdown had not occurred. He just drove and listened, a resigned expression on his face, nodding now and then. When the car was in our garage, he turned off the engine and sat quietly, his hands still on the steering wheel.

“Um, are you okay, honey?” I asked. His silence was unnerving me. “I already brought in the mail. It was the usual junk mail and a couple of bills.”

At last, he spoke. “What was the name of May’s friend again, the one who died in the hotel?”

“Lizabeth Mulgrew,” I told him.

“Spell it for me.”

I did.

“And the name of this famous deceased author for whose manuscript you are all searching?”

“W.Z.B. Trague,” I said. “The W stands for Wilhelm, Z and B stand for middle names of some sort, and Trague is spelled T-R-A-G-U-E. It’s funny you should ask that, because Emma asked me the same thing on the phone the other day.”

A small smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. Finally, he turned to face me. “I am not at all surprised. It is too bad you did not choose to tell me all of this sooner,
Cara
. I could have saved you a great deal of trouble.”

I looked at him warily. Was the man joking, or did he really have some insight to offer? “Are you going to make me beg, or are you going to tell me what you think you know?”

“Oh, I am going to tell you—just not right now. I am tired, and I am hungry, and I would very much like to have my dinner first.”

I decided that, considering my sin of omission, things were going pretty well between us. I would let him have his little joke. What information could he possibly have about this situation anyway? Tonight was the first he’d heard of any of it, and we’d all been wracking our brains for more than a week now in an attempt to solve Lizabeth’s riddle.

“Okay,” I replied serenely. “There’s roast chicken and potatoes for dinner and homemade applesauce for dessert. You bring your bags in, and I’ll get it on some plates. The aroma from the oven must have made Gracie crazy by now. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to have her man home again, feeding her pieces of chicken from his plate like he knows he’s not supposed to do.”

I should have known better than to think he would make it that easy for me. After he had taken his luggage upstairs, and we’d shared our chicken dinner with Gracie, Armando picked up the TV remote and began reviewing the programs that had recorded in his absence. He pointedly said nothing at all about our previous conversation. I fumed silently, but I’d be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of asking what he had to say. After loading the dishwasher and sitting through a recording of “Project Runway,” a show I found particularly loathsome, I gave him a cool kiss on the cheek and headed for the bathtub. “Sleep well, Armando,” was all I said before I turned my back on him.

A low chuckle escaped him. “Do not go away angry,
Cara
. After keeping all of this from me, you deserved to wait a little while for the answer to the riddle you and the ladies have been pursuing all of the last week.”

In spite of myself, I was intrigued. I gritted my teeth and turned around, one eyebrow raised. “Well?”

“I think that all of you have been, how do you say, too close to the trees to see the forest,” he said, mangling the English metaphor as only Armando could. “It is really very simple. There is no Wilhelm Z.B. Trague. There probably never was. In my opinion, May’s friend was having a bit of fun with her and the rest of the people with whom she worked all of those years. She meant it to be her final joke, although it has not turned out to be as amusing as she intended it to be.”

I huffed in exasperation. “What do you mean there was never any Wilhelm Trague? He was one of the most successful mystery authors in the business.”

Armando smiled that annoying smile again. “Wilhelm Z.B. Trague and Lizabeth Mulgrew are one and the same person, can you not see it? Each name has the same letters. It is what you call an amalgam?”

“An anagram,” I said sourly, the light dawning. “Fresh eyes. It happens every time someone new takes a look at this situation.”

“Or in this instance, fresh ears,” Armando pointed out, ever the stickler. “I have not myself seen anything.”

I ignored him. “Wilhelm Trague must have been Lizabeth Mulgrew’s pen name, one she used to write her own mysteries. Many publishers are also writers these days. I guess she just kept that part of her professional life to herself. May and everybody else in the business knew her only as a publisher. No wonder she had the rights to Trague’s back list.”

I massaged my temples and tried to reconfigure the events of the past week in light of this revelation. “This had to be the best kept trade secret in recent publishing history. I can think of only two people who must have been in on it. Her lawyer had to know, which is why he’s been dodging our calls. He had to have reviewed her contracts with Random House, handled her taxes, drawn up her will, that sort of thing. And her literary agent—the one who sold the Trague titles to Random House—had to know who her client really was. She must have lost a huge source of income when Lizabeth decided she had other plans for her last manuscript, and the agent would not have been happy about it.”

“How do you know this agent is a woman?”

It was my turn to bring him up short. “I not only know it’s a woman, I know what her name is and what she looks like,” I told him. “Renata Parsons, middle-aged, short skirts, pink streak in her hair, and willing to stop at nothing to get her hands on that manuscript. May Farnsworth is in big trouble. I’ve got to call her right now and warn her to stay away from her house. She should be okay with John and Margo for the moment, but John definitely needs to know that Renata Parsons is a serious threat.”

After punching Margo’s number into my phone, I leaned back in my office chair and put my feet up on the desk. I was still fuming, angry mostly with myself for not figuring out the anagram thing sooner. I wondered if Emma had figured it out, and if so, when she intended clue me in. Even Strutter had suspected that Lizabeth might have written mysteries on the side. She had also pointed out the folly of thinking that a mystery would be so straightforward. Any mystery worth its salt has more than one layer, she said. Score another point for our partner, who was not only gorgeous but brilliant.

When I told Margo about Armando’s insight, her reaction was one I hadn’t expected. Instead of spluttering in frustration, she issued one of her trademark snorts and burst out laughing. When her hoots finally subsided to chuckles, she had to put the phone down and go in search of a tissue to mop her streaming eyes. “I absolutely cannot believe that all of us with our college degrees, and especially May and Isabelle with their writin’ and editin’ expertise, did not figure this out, but your Colombian husband who is still mystified by the way we spell things in English, got it right away. That is simply too funny.” Her giggles erupted again.

“I guess that’s the good news,” I agreed, “but you realize I’ll never hear the end of it from him.”

“Probably not from Strutter or your daughter either, but that doesn’t help, does it? The question is, before I go and give this piece of news to John and Auntie May, where do we go from here? Or do we go anywhere? Maybe the best thing to do now would be to leave it to the police to track down Renata Parsons. I know that’s what would make John happy. You know how he gets his tail in a knot whenever one of these, uh, situations comes up.”

“I’m sure he’s right, and knowing what we now believe we know about Renata Parsons, I’d be perfectly happy never to lay eyes on her again. The problem is, we still don’t have the manuscript, which was the point of this whole kerfuffle, and we don’t know what Martin Schenk’s role in all this is. I’m very curious about that, and I’m sure May is, too. I’m still pretty sure it was Schenk who kept us company at the Hubbard Library, aren’t you?”

“Kerfuffle?” I was sure Margo’s eyebrows were raised.

“Commotion, to-do, fuss. I read a lot of British novels. But seriously, don’t you think it was Schenk tailing us in Hubbard?”

“I can’t think of anyone else it could have been,” Margo agreed, “but all of this stuff about Renata Parsons is still speculative. I mean, think about what we really know for certain, Sugar. You and May saw her at the hotel during a luncheon, but it was at a distance. She certainly had every legitimate reason to be there, given the nature of her business as a literary agent. Beyond that, our suspicions are pure conjecture. You think you got a glimpse of her at the diner later that weekend. The maid at the Hilton told Duane that a woman fitting Renata’s general description tried to persuade her to open the door to Lizabeth’s room and let her in. The boot tracks in the snow outside Auntie May’s house seem about the right size to be a woman’s, but we’re not really sure about that. What else?”