The Butler Didn't Do It (A Maddox Storm Mystery Book 2) (10 page)

Not an invitation, I knew that.

I watched through the doorway as he sat down, ran a hand through his hair, tapped the notepad with his silver fountain pen.

His eyes lifted, creased around the edges as he regarded me thoughtfully—probably silently reciting some law official’s version of the Hippocratic Oath to remind himself why he couldn’t strangle me.

I left him to it and turned to Miss Crawley. “You weren’t in there very long. Did you say anything at all?”

“I most certainly did,” she said with a stamp of satisfaction. “I told Detective Bishop there’s never a good reason to slam doors inside a house and then I told him I wouldn’t say another word until I’d spoken with my lawyer.”

“Why would you need a lawyer?” I steered Miss Crawley out of Jack’s hearing and lowered my voice. “Whatever you were about to tell us doesn’t incriminate you, does it?”

“That juicy bit of hearsay about Lydia Fieldman?” Miss Crawley flicked the very idea away with her fingers. “I don’t need a lawyer, but I’d wager her husband might need one.”

Uh-oh.
I’d wanted to stop an avalanche of dirty secrets, not withhold vital information from the law.

I settled Miss Crawley on a sofa with a cup of tea and perched beside her. “Are you suggesting Lydia’s husband wanted her dead?”

“Not me, my dear.” Miss Crawley sipped her tea, approved the blend with the tiniest nod. “Charles mentioned that Lydia had come to him only last month, distraught over what she’d discovered about her husband.”

“Another woman,” I concluded.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Miss Crawley twittered.

I shrugged and revised that with, “Another man?”

“Worse, my dear.”

I thought about that and came up blank. “Okay, so what had she discovered?”

“He started keeping odd hours, lying about where he’d been,” Miss Crawley declared. “So Lydia decided to do a little snooping. The poor woman suspected it was just an affair.”

“There’s no such thing as
just
an affair,” I muttered.

“And rightly so.” She patted my hand. “But smuggling Asian artifacts is a criminal offense.”

Alarms went off inside my head. A black market smuggler! “Mr Fieldman is currently in Turkey on a dig. You don’t think…?”

I swallowed the accusation as I remembered he was also a philanthropist. That conjured up images of benevolent old men with spare money to give away, not hard-hearted criminals with greedy morals.

I frowned at Miss Crawley. “You don’t think he was maybe just bringing the artifacts home for safekeeping?”

“Lydia didn’t think so. She followed him a few times to an abandoned warehouse and after that, well, she set up surveillance in the house.” Miss Crawley sipped her tea while I digested that. “She uncovered a secret bank account and a hidden safe she’d never known about. That’s when she brought her suspicions to Charles.”

“What did she expect Charles to do about it?”

Miss Crawley gave a delicate shrug. “She’d known him since she was a child, so perhaps she considered him a fatherly figure. If she was looking for advice, she certainly got it. Charles insisted she had to go to the cops.”

“And did she?”

As if he could feel his ears burning, Charles Sitter strolled in from the terrace. My cheeks reddened with guilt, although goodness knows why. It was Miss Crawley doing all the tattling.

Jack intercepted his approach and Miss Crawley took the opportunity to tilt toward me and whisper, “Charles didn’t say, but what if she confronted her husband first? Perhaps even gave him an ultimatum to stop his criminal activities or she
would
rat him out?”

I slumped back in the sofa. “That all sounds plausible, except her husband’s in another country and how on earth would he have…”
stolen my prop rope?
I caught that slip just in time, assuming it wasn’t general knowledge.

“Sit up straight, my dear,” Miss Crawley reprimanded. “And being out of the country is no excuse. Isn’t that what hired hitmen are for?”

I jerked upright. A cold-blooded murderer in my home was one thing. A professional assassin was another matter altogether. Then again, I supposed that meant we were all safe from being picked off randomly.

Unless Mr Fieldman had bought a package deal.

Jonas returned from his adventure and I lowered my head, sizing him up out the corner of my eye. What was an accountant doing with tanned, leathery skin? He wasn’t a big man, but he was solid with the kind of muscle tone you didn’t get sitting behind a desk all day.

The library door opened, interrupting my suspect analysis. Julie Brown was ushered out and, seeing as Jonas was the closest, Nate called him in.

I turned my suspicions on the big-haired woman as she came to join our tea party, but I couldn’t see it. If a woman was the assassin, my bets were on the victim. After all, Lydia Fieldman had been the one who’d camouflaged her true appearance.

“How well did you know Lydia?” I asked her.

Julie took a good while to answer, a faraway look in her eyes, but when she did her voice was filled with emotion. “Since she was a child. Her mother used to bring her to the GRIMMS annual picnic.” She sighed, shook her head sadly. “And then she became a member in her own right, of course. That must be about ten years ago now.”

I hesitated to intrude on her emotion, but Miss Crawley had no such qualms.

“Has she always had that fetish?” asked Miss Crawley.

Julie blinked. “Fetish?”

“Dressing up as a woman twice her age.”

“Oh, that…” Julie gave a brisk laugh. “That was just something she liked to do, to change things up a bit. Lydia has a—
had
a brilliant mind, you see. She became an Honored Master last year, our youngest ever.”

She looked at me. “No offence, Ms Storm, but many of these mystery parties become routine after a while, somewhat boring. To make it more of a challenge, Lydia started assuming different characters for each weekend and then limiting herself within that character’s mind. An elderly lady, for example, would never…”

She trailed off, her gaze swerving as Nate came out the library.

Alone.

He stepped deeper into the lounge, commanding attention without speaking a word. The set of his shoulders, the depth of his long stride, the tension literally bristling off him. I kept looking for Jonas, wondering what on earth had gone wrong now.

Nate stopped, a furious glint hardening his eyes. He looked from one person to the next as he finally spoke.

“I don’t give a damn what rules Ms Storm cooked up, it is never okay to lie to an officer of the law.” His jaw hollowed as he bit down on his back teeth. “Lydia Fieldman is dead. I’m not playing twenty questions to search for a party favor; I’m hunting down a murderer.”

That hard gaze landed on me for a fleeting moment, but that’s all it took to send icy shivers down my spine. I’d seen Nate irritated, frustrated, tethered to the end of his patience, but I realized I’d never seen him truly angry before.

Not until now.

“So listen up folks, here are the new rules.” He balled a fist into one palm. “I’m done with second-guessing answers and second chances. The next person who lies to me will
be charged with obstructing justice. Is that clear?”

He didn’t wait for a response, whipped himself around and strode back into the library. The door clicked softly closed behind him.

A sick feeling rolled along the bottom of my stomach. I stood, my legs suddenly shaky, and pushed my way past Miss Crawley’s crossed ankles to get out of the lounge as fast as I could.

And, okay, most of that roiling sickness was the direct result of Nate’s anger. It felt like he’d lashed me with a whip.

Who knew I cared so much?

It was more than that, though. I was no angel when it came to hampering Nate’s investigations, but I’d never done so intentionally.

I made it as far as the second step on the staircase when Miss Crawley’s concern rang out from behind, “Maddox, are you alright?”

I gripped the banister and turned to her. “What is wrong with these people? Lydia Fieldman was their friend, but all they care about is silly rules and finishing the game.”

“It’s their way,” she said softly. “Even as the victim, this is the last murder mystery Lydia will ever participate in and they’re honoring her memory by playing it through to the end.”

That had a certain dramatic flair I could relate to. “Still, they could do that without impeding the law. Don’t they want justice for her?”

“These are the GRIMMS, my dear.” Miss Crawley gave an indulgent smile. “It wouldn’t cross their minds that they’re not capable of solving her murder on their own.”

“Let’s hope so,” I sighed.

I would love to receive an envelope at Sunday lunch tomorrow revealing a valid motive and a name for Nate to arrest.

NINE

My mood levelled off as I added Lydia’s husband to the list of suspects on Nate’s whiteboard, parenthesized with (
Artifact smuggler, Hitman.)
It wasn’t as if I’d encouraged my guests to lie to him. They were all adults, responsible for their own actions. If Nate wanted to blame me, that was his problem.

I hadn’t been upstairs long when Burns knocked on the door with a lunch tray. We’d planned a ‘connoisseur picnic’ for today, from The Vine’s delicatessen, and I was happy to see Burns had piled on the grain breads and cold cuts instead of the fancy stuff I couldn’t pronounce.

“Thank you, Burns.” I smiled over-brightly as I took the tray, somewhat shell-shocked at the thoughtful gesture. “I wasn’t expecting room service.”

“I was bringing a plate up for Mr McMurphy,” he said. “I knew you’d be hungry.”

“I’m not
always
hungry.”

He didn’t dignify my protest with a response. He was too busy peering over my shoulder with unabashed curiosity.

I should have known there was an ulterior motive. One good deed, however, deserves another. Not one of Nana Rose’s favorites, if you’re interested. She was more inclined to observe that ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’

I retreated from the doorway to let him in. “How did you know this was headquarters?”

“Is that what we’re calling it?” he murmured as he took a good look around.

“Burns!”

“I overheard the detective say he’d be setting up in your room, Ms Storm.” The portly man wandered over to my floorplan taped to the wall. “And he did arrive with an armful of bags. It was either this, or another of your men were moving in.”

I rolled my eyes as I carried the tray with me to the bed and got comfortable. That was such an unjust remark, it didn’t even deserve a response.

Burns drifted up to the whiteboard and unsnapped the black marker from its magnetic holder. “May I?”

“Go wild,” I told him around a mouthful of bread.

“Mr Sitter was already in the lounge when I brought the others through from dinner,” Burns mused.

“He left the table early?”

“When the dumplings were served.” He drew a box next to Charles Sitter as he spoke. “Said sweets aggravated his gout.”

“Did you see him go straight to the lounge?”

Burns gave me a dour look. “I was preoccupied with attending to our guests in the dining room.”

Suitably chastised, I went back to eating. I supposed it didn’t matter, anyway. Lydia was still very much alive at that point.

“But he did go to fetch a newspaper from his bedroom shortly after we joined him.” Burns put ‘Bedroom’ in the box and pointed an arrow to it. “And no, I didn’t follow him there.”

He added a question mark to the ‘Bedroom’ box.

Charles’ garden suite was in the north wing and it had an exterior door that opened onto the pine forest.

“He could have slipped out easily without anyone noticing!” My spine tingled with excitement. “And he was alone for at least a half-hour while the others were busy with dessert, the perfect opportunity to grab the rope from beneath the stairs and stash it in his room.”

“Except he didn’t disappear to his bedroom for very long, fifteen minutes at the most,” Burns said. “And he did come back with the newspaper.”

My excitement dwindled. It was about a five minute speedy walk to the hanging tree, another five minutes to walk back. That gave Charles five minutes to confront Lydia, subdue a struggling woman
and
string her up. Even if the elderly man had flat-out sprinted, he still had to make his way through the bedroom and stop to collect his newspaper.

And all of that on top of assuming Lydia hurried directly from the dinner table to the hanging tree for a pre-arranged assignation.

Anything was possible, but it seemed unlikely. The better Murder Window was probably the hour between 10:30 and 11:30. The house had quietened down by then as everyone went their separate ways, mostly to their rooms with no one to witness what they’d gotten up to.

Burns made a few more notes, including Julie Brown’s impromptu visit to the library to collect a book for some nighttime reading on her way upstairs.