The Corpse With the Golden Nose (30 page)

“I told you, Ser,” he said, looking at the smiling face of Serendipity, “we was drunk. It were just one of them things.”

“Raj. I
know
. It's not an issue.” She was still calm. She reached out and took his hand.

“But, you see Raj,” I continued, “Annette got pregnant. She was pregnant when she died. In fact, it was
because
she was pregnant with your child that she was killed.”

I watched. I saw. I carried on.

“Annette's odd behavior was because she was pregnant: even Bonnie said she was ‘dashing here and there like a bird in spring.' A
nesting
bird. She lost a tasting event to you, Raj! There's a lot of research that suggests that taste and smell change during pregnancy. She missed meetings, canceled tastings. She was likely suffering from morning sickness, and knew she couldn't hide her changing abilities when it came to her job. She was, literally, clearing out her house and beginning to prepare for a baby in her life. She started to buy larger clothes at thrift stores, and she dumped her garbage herself, probably because it contained items she didn't want anyone, even garbage collectors, to see—maybe pregnancy test kits, even the debris from cleaning up unexpected attacks of vomiting. She didn't want
anyone
to know. She didn't even tell you, Raj, did she?”

Raj was shaking his head sadly. “Is that why she changed her will, then?” he asked plaintively. “'Cos she were having my child? It
would
have been my ‘firstborn.'”

I nodded.

“Oh, dear, dear,” said Marlene, quietly. “Terrible.”

“Yes, terrible,” I agreed, “because Annette's killer committed a double homicide: Annette
and
her baby.” I let it sink in.

I looked around the people in the room. “And yet
none
of you knew. None of you
guessed
? Not you, Ellen, her loving sister, who saw her every day? Not you, Gordy and Marlene, who said she was acting oddly, and yet agreed to sign a new will? Not you, Raj, who continued to see her constantly in and around the locale and the business? Not
any
of you? Lizzie—you told me Annette was suffering from a bad back, an altered mood, and a changed sense of smell—how could you come up with ‘root chakra' and not ‘pregnant?'
Amazing.
No one saw what was right under their noses. All the clues were there, and not one of you put them together to work out that she was having a baby. That's largely because you were all, to a greater or lesser extent, fixated on your own obsessions.”

People shifted uncomfortably.

“Of course, there was the complication I had to work through about Annette selling her entire collection of snuff boxes, but that related to
her
obsession, and not to the fact that she was pregnant. Grant, you told me that you tried to help Annette, but you let her down?” Grant nodded.

“I did, and maybe even more than I thought, if what you're saying is true,” he said, grimly.

“Oh, it's true alright. It's also true, isn't it, that Annette, one of your ‘best customers' according to an inscription you wrote in a book on silverware for her, came to you and begged you to sell her snuff box collection—in a hurry. Right?”

He nodded. “We'd worked together building her snuff box collection over many years. That's how I came to get to know Kelowna, driving up here with boxes I'd found for her, when I still had my silver and antiques business in Vancouver. She came to me, a couple of months before she died, and asked if I could go back to my old contacts and sell her whole collection.
Fast.
I told her she could have got a lot more if only she would wait for the right sales to come up, but she said she needed money, and she needed it quickly. I should have pressed her. I should have made her tell me why she needed it. Though,” and here he looked puzzled, “I still don't really get it. I mean, okay, she might have been about to have a child, but the winery's doing well. She can't have been short of money.”

“She needed the cash to be able to buy her collectors' ‘grail.' She told Colin about it, right?” Colin nodded. “Otherwise, like the obsessive collector she was, she kept the whole thing to herself. I'm going to suggest that you sold her collection of silver snuff boxes for around forty thousand dollars, would that be right?”

Grant looked surprised. He nodded. “How'd you know that?” he asked.

Bud's face was telling me he wanted to ask the same question.

“I just spoke to a very nice, if sleepy, man in Newfoundland, by the name of ‘Sanderson.' His family name used to be ‘Sandy' back when they were in Scotland: such a well-respected name, in certain parts, that it was an honor to be known as a ‘son' of the house, hence ‘Sanderson.' He confirmed that he sold Annette a signed James Sandy snuff box, made from the wood of the bed in which Robbie Burns died, with a letter in Sandy's own handwriting giving it an impeccable provenance. She paid fifteen thousand dollars—which he assures me was a very fair price—and Annette had deposited another twenty-five grand in her bank account. That's forty.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Ellen, to my right.
Ah!

I turned toward Ellen. “Yes, you didn't know that the plain wooden box that arrived at Anen House by courier, two days after Annette's death, was worth that much, did you Ellen? Otherwise you might
not
have tossed it into the apple store with all her other mail. All that
stuff
you hang onto, Ellen. All the years you've been filling storage bins, surrounding yourself with the evidence of your inability to let go? It speaks volumes about you. You're a very unusual hoarder: you're neat; you're highly organized; and, unlike many who see the ‘value' in everything, which is why they can't get rid of it, you're a hoarder who sees ‘value' in nothing. Not in a small, perfectly formed little box. Not in your sister. In fact, the only thing you do see ‘value' in, the only thing you see as ‘important' is you.
You
, Ellen Newman. You are the center of your world. You are the only one with desires that matter. It is only
your
obsession that counts.
You
are the person in this room with by far the strongest, most driving obsession.
Your
obsession is Raj Pinder, isn't it? It has been since he arrived in Kelowna, four years ago. Which was when you went to Lizzie Jackson and asked for her help to ‘make room' in your life for ‘someone special.' It was because of your obsession with Raj that you've killed four, probably five people, including your own sister, and have tried to kill again tonight.”

There was complete silence. Even the approaching sirens had stopped wailing.

“Don't be ridiculous!” exploded Ellen, jumping to her feet. She drew herself up to her full height and looked down at me. “You're talking rubbish. It was
me
who said Annette had been murdered. Why would I say
that
if I'd murdered her, when everyone said it was a suicide. Why wouldn't I just shut up and get away with it?”

Everyone looked at me, Ellen's question reflected on their faces.

“That is
such
a good question, Ellen, and, you know, that had even
me
confused for quite some time. If you'd managed to stage the perfect murder, because everyone thought it was a suicide, why would you be rattling the cage, asking Bud to come and look into your sister's possible murder?”

“And the answer is?” asked Lizzie, on behalf of the room.

“The answer is because of
Raj
. Again, back to Ellen's obsession. Let me explain.”

“Please do,” said Sheri, “because I want my boy to be off to the hospital—but
only
when you've explained, right, Colin? I have to
understand
why my Rob is dead, and I don't.”

I nodded at Sheri, then at Bud. He understood, and began to move toward the doors.

“This is what happened, and how it happened, and why it happened,” I said, suddenly feeling very weary. I took a sip of water. Then one of champagne.
Much better.

“Ellen and Annette Newman lost their parents, tragically, in a road traffic accident. Ellen stepped up and made sure she and her sister were okay. She, and then her sister, built up a successful and, thanks to Annette's fabulous nose, world-renowned winery. About four years ago Raj Pinder comes to town. He's younger than Ellen, good-looking, and a bit out of the ordinary for a woman like her, whose major brush with the outside world—her years at the University of Vancouver—I'm guessing made her feel a bit left out of things. It's not an unusual story: Ellen Newman fell for Raj Pinder. What
is
unusual is the psychological profile of the woman doing the falling.”

I looked down at Ellen, who had plopped back onto her seat. She looked up at me, nostrils flaring, face all pink. She was
seething
.

“I haven't spent a great deal of time with you, Ellen, but I can see traits in you that suggest a borderline personality: you are a woman of extreme emotions. You will
not
be denied, you
will
organize and arrange, you
will
have your way. And if you don't, you
snap
. You
are
clever though, I'll give you that, Ellen. You've balanced your impulsiveness with your intelligence very well. For example, you knew, rationally, that you couldn't invite Raj to your apartment with all those storage boxes in it, so you sought help to work through how to get rid of them: your mental condition wouldn't allow you to simply make a dozen trips to the dump, but it
did
allow for at least trying some hypnotherapy. It didn't work for you, did it? And, because you ‘didn't get your way'—in other words, because Lizzie Jackson and her healing powers, and by association Grant and the Faceting for Life dogma, couldn't help you—you didn't just
walk away
, you launched a campaign of vitriol against the Jacksons and their beliefs.”

Grant and Lizzie moved in their seats, muttering to each other.

“So, you didn't get Raj. It just didn't happen. Sometimes these things just aren't meant to be. That didn't mean it was over for
you
, Ellen, did it? Raj's life progressed here, yours stagnated—with him as your sole obsession. Suzie, I'm going to suggest that you made your play for Raj pretty soon after his arrival at your winery.”

I didn't expect a response, so I was surprised when Suzie shouted, “So what if I did?” at the whole room. “He's cute . . .” She stopped, put her talon-tipped fingers to her mouth, looked at her daughter, and said, “Oh, sorry Serendipity, baby.” She looked deflated.

I carried on. “When you threw those vitriolic comments at Ellen last night, Suzie, I was puzzled. Did you hate Ellen so much because you thought that she, and when she was alive, her sister, were going to spoil the nice little business you and Sammy were developing in cannabis wine? Or was there another reason? Having put this all together, I'm suggesting that Ellen and you had words about Raj, and that's where your hatred of her stems from. You'd have made an open play for him, and I think that Ellen wouldn't have been able to resist telling you to back off.”

“You're right, she did,” Suzie replied. “Who did she think she was? She told me that Raj would rather be with her than me. When he turned me down, flat . . . I was pissed. Sure. But I soon found out he wasn't with her, either. Miserable little cow. Look at her. Who the hell would want
her
? She's all
desiccated
. Eaten away from inside. That's where
real
beauty is born.” The irony of these last words, spoken by a woman whose many procedures had so clearly gone a long way toward supporting at least one child of a plastic surgeon through college, was not lost on the majority of the room.

“Thanks for being so—open, Suzie,” I said. Suzie sat down again, flicking her hair in triumph as she did so.

“What about Raj's girlfriend, Jane? I'm sorry Raj, I don't know any more about her than that, and that she was a girl who held down seasonal jobs and then just disappeared. Could you tell us a little more?”

Raj rolled his eyes toward Serendipity. She reached out and held his hand. “Aye, she were a nice lass. Like you said, she worked at Big White in't winter, then at a winery in't summer. It weren't nothing serious, just a bit of fun. But she were nice, and pleasant.”

“And she just ‘disappeared?' Is that right? In what way?”

Raj nodded. “She went out one day on her rollerblades. Loved them, she did. She went really fast. At least, that's what she
said
she were doing. But when I went to her place the next evening to pick her up to go out, all her stuff were gone and
she
were gone too. Didn't leave no note, no rent, just did a runner. Didn't hand in her notice or nothing. And never a word from her since.”

“Did you, or her family, or anyone, report her as missing? I can't imagine you were the only person who knew she'd gone.”

There was a bit of fidgeting around the room. Clearly more people than Raj had known about this Jane's disappearance and had done—
what
, I wondered?

“Well, I didn't think it were my place. I mean, like I said, it weren't nothing serious. I did phone her aunt in Terrace and told her, and she said I weren't to worry because Jane was always up and leaving places. She'd done it before, and she usually got in touch when she were good and ready. No, I didn't do owt. And it were chaos here, anyway. It were when those fires hit, you know, the really bad ones? We was lucky, over here at SoulVine Wines, but we could see the fires over on this side of the lake, and thousands were out of their homes. What with all the coming and going, and people's houses being burned down, and folks with nowhere to live, I think we was all just a bit involved with that.” Raj hung his head.