The Name of the Game Was Murder (12 page)

“Let’s try. Why don’t you tell me the names of your relatives?”

He turned toward me, startled, but then relaxed. “Oh.
You’re referring to the bald eagle’s many kin. Frankly, there aren’t that many, but I’ll go through the list.”

He told me the names of his wife, his two brothers, his son and daughter and their spouses, and his two little granddaughters. He reached for his wallet, and I thought for a moment he was going to show me their pictures again, but apparently he decided not to and let his hands drop to his sides, once again staring out the window.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” the senator said, so softly that at first I wasn’t sure he was talking to me. “Why can’t they be forgotten? Why should such a terrible price have to be paid?”

“He didn’t know he’d have to pay it.”

Again he turned to me, an expression of surprise on his face. “I was talking about past mistakes made by the guests who’ve been invited here.”

“I thought you were talking about Augustus Trevor.”

Senator Maggio shook his head. “He’s the one responsible for all this trouble.”

I nodded. “And he’s the one who made the biggest mistake. He invited a murderer to his house.”

“You’d better keep in mind,” he said quietly, “that the murderer is still present.”

I wasn’t comfortable about the forbidding look on his face, so I left him in a hurry and trotted upstairs to see if Laura would answer my questions.

On the landing I took time to glance at the names of Senator Maggio’s relatives, but they added up to zilch. Except for the first letter of his son’s first name (Arthur Maggio, Jr.), the others were just a jumble of consonants: two
J
’s, two
K
’s, two
M
’s, one
P
, and one
H
. I not only couldn’t make anything out of it, it occurred to me that I’d
hardly call this “many kin.” I probably expected something like one of those family reunion photos in which relatives are fanned out all over the porch and lawn. Senator Maggio’s clue had to mean something else. But what?

The back of my neck prickled, as though someone were watching me, but I looked all around and couldn’t see anyone. The burial urn on the stand caught my eye, and I whispered to whatever invisible something that might happen to be hanging around it, “I’m working as hard as I can to get us all out of here in one piece. Be patient, will you? And stop staring!”

I found Laura Reed just where she said she’d be—in her bedroom, but she hadn’t been napping. When she opened the door to my knock, her eyes were red, and there were drippy mascara smudges on her cheeks.

“Help me solve the clues,” I said.

She shrugged as she stood aside to let me in. “I haven’t the foggiest notion how to go about it.”

“Well, I do. I mean, it isn’t foggy. I want to ask you about your last two films.”

Laura perched on the edge of the bed—a high four-poster covered with a dark blue-green quilted spread. There was a heavy swag of the same material over the head of the bed, caught into a kind of gold-colored crown, and at the windows there were draperies to match. Maybe when the sun was out the room didn’t look so gloomy. I was beginning to wonder if the person who decorated this house had learned his profession in Dracula’s castle.

“I should remember, but I don’t,” I said as I sat in a narrow gilt chair that stood in front of a dressing table. “What were the names of your last two films?”

“Nobody remembers,” Laura said, and she slumped,
hugging her elbows. “Last year was
Daughter of Vengeance
. The year before that was
Lady in Trouble
.” She sighed. “Prophetic, wasn’t it? This lady’s really in trouble.”

I wrote down the titles and looked up. “Maybe not.”

She sighed again, a long, dramatic sigh that seemed to come all the way from her toes. “It wasn’t murder,” she said. “It was a moment of anger, of acting without thinking. It was an accident.”

I gulped. “Are you telling me you killed Augustus Trevor?”

Her green-gold eyes glowed like spotlights as she turned them on me. “Of course not, because I didn’t. I wasn’t even talking about Augustus.”

“Then who …?”

“What difference does it make? This is all such a hodgepodge, and my head hurts so much, I don’t even remember what we were talking about.”

I felt cold all the way to my toes. “You’d said you were in trouble, and then you talked about the murder … I mean the way it took place, as though you’d been there … and … well, it just seemed to fit.”

No matter what Laura said or denied saying, she certainly had had the opportunity to kill him.

“Never mind. Forget what I said. I was just thinking out loud.” She sat up straighter. “We’ll talk about your clues. How do the names of my films fit into them?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“Augustus makes me absolutely furious,” she snapped. “Telling me I laid an egg and it was a doozy! How rude can you get?”

“Maybe he didn’t mean you,” I told her.

The corners of her mouth turned down, and her voice
was sarcastic. “Oh? Who else but an actor lays an egg? Are you talking about a chicken? A goose? Maybe the goose that laid the golden egg. Wouldn’t Augustus think that was a great joke.”

A knock at the door made us jump.

Laura opened it to Lucy, who had brought two extra pillows. Laura thanked her, shut the door again, and tossed the pillows onto the bed. “I sleep better with lots and lots of pillows,” she told me, but as she sank back onto the bed she became plaintive. “I really don’t expect to sleep at all—not until that manuscript is found and destroyed.”

Tears glistened again in her eyes as she told me, “I hunted over every inch of this room, even between the mattress and springs. There’s a vent into the attic from the closet in my room. I even checked that.”

“Maybe we’ll solve this puzzle and find the manuscript,” I told her.

“How far have you come in solving the clues?”

“Not very.”

She drooped again, reminding me of a fading petunia on a wobbly stem. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she asked, “if we could live our lives over again and take out all the bad parts?”

“I guess so,” I answered, although I’d been lucky enough not to have many bad parts and nothing so terrible that I’d want to live my life over again to miss it.

“If I weren’t so miserable, I’d be bored to death here,” Laura said, and looked at her watch. “Do you realize it’s more than an hour until dinnertime?”

“I’ve been thinking about it in the opposite way,” I answered. “The weekend and the storm will be over soon.
The time we have left to find the manuscript is running out.”

Laura groaned. “You came here to cheer me up. Right?”

A loud knock on the door startled us, but we heard Buck call, “It’s me, Buck. Wake up, Laura. Open the door.”

Laura opened it graciously, holding her head high, as though she were a queen. “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “And you don’t need to shout.”

“Sorry,” he said, and his feet did a kind of fumbling shuffle as he stepped into the room. “This whole thing has got me so riled, it’s made me do things I never thought I’d ever do.”

“Like what?” I asked, and held my breath, waiting for his answer.

He looked at me with surprise, and I realized he hadn’t known I was with Laura. “Like pawing through people’s things, searching for that manuscript.”

I relaxed. What had I expected? That he’d confess to committing murder?

He nodded toward the legal pad on my lap. “Are you getting anywhere with those clues?”

“Not yet,” I admitted, “but I’m trying. That’s why I’m here. I was asking Laura some questions about her clue, and I’d like to talk to you about yours, too, if you’ve got a few minutes.”

Buck made a scrunched-up face that answered my question. “I’ve been going room to room,” he said. “I want to search Laura’s room too.”

“Forget it,” she said. “I already searched it.”

His eyes narrowed as he studied her. “Did you find anything?”

“Of course not. Don’t you think I’d have told everybody if I did?”

Buck didn’t answer right away, and Laura’s neck and face flushed an angry red. “You don’t trust me? You think I’d hold out?”

“I don’t know who to trust,” he mumbled. “All I know is that somebody here killed Augustus.”

Her voice rose to a screech. “You think it was me? How about you? Maybe
you
murdered him!”

“Okay, maybe I did!” he yelled back.

“You did?” I whispered, and clutched the arm of the little dressing table chair.

“No, I didn’t. I was just making a point. Any one of us could be the murderer, so who are we going to trust?”

“Please sit down, just for a minute,” I begged. “I’ve got only a couple of questions for you. I need to know how the song ‘My Darling Clementine’ fits into your life.”

“Fits into my life? That’s a stupid question. The answer is that it doesn’t.”

“Maybe I didn’t ask my question the right way,” I said, and felt myself blush. “I meant, was it a special song for you? Did you hear it at some time under special circumstances?”

“No,” he said. I wished he’d sit down. He was awfully big to glower down on an innocent bystander—me.

“You know the words to the song, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “A few words, here and there, that’s all.”

“Okay, what does ‘pappy’ mean to you?”

“Beats me. I didn’t call my dad ‘pappy.’ I don’t even know anyone called ‘pappy.’ ”

“You’re with kids a lot. As you said, you’re a role model. Maybe sometime in your past—”

Buck interrupted. “What are you getting at?”

Like a ferocious pit bull, he leaned toward me, eyes glinting in narrow slits, his lower lip curled outward. He scared me so much I jumped out of my chair.

“N-nothing!” I stuttered. “I—I’m just trying to figure out these clues!”

He didn’t believe me. Not for a minute. He took a step toward me, and I shrank back against the dressing table, terrified of what he’d say next. But just then we heard muffled footsteps running toward us, and the door was jerked open.

Julia poked her head inside, stared from Laura to Buck to me, and said, “Come on downstairs. Make it quick! I’ve found the fourth set of clues!”

“
W
here did you find them?” everyone asked Julia, and as soon as we were all seated in the sun-room, she told us.

“The envelopes were fastened with a rubber band and tucked at the very back in the middle drawer of Augustus’s desk under some papers.” When no one said anything for a few moments, Julia’s voice rose. “Don’t look at me as though you think I’m lying. We didn’t search that part of the desk this morning. Remember? And we weren’t looking for clues. We were looking for the manuscript.”

“Julia’s right,” Buck said. “I went through the drawers on each side, but I couldn’t … that is, Augustus was …”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “The first clues he handed out. The second were under his arm, ready to be given out the next morning. But why would Alex have found the third set in Augustus’s bedroom, and then this set—”

Alex interrupted. “I didn’t find them in his bedroom. I
found them just inside the middle desk drawer in his office.” He shrugged. “I suppose if I’d been able to check the back of the drawer I would have found the fourth set of clues.”

I felt cold and creepy as the thought hit me. “Were you looking in the desk while Augustus was still …?”

“It’s none of your business,” Alex said.

“He was
dead
,” Laura whispered.

“There’s no point wasting time with this discussion,” Senator Maggio argued. “Will you please give us our envelopes?”

Julia proceeded to do so, and I saw that on the top of each envelope, next to the players’ names, had been printed in that same bright blue ink,
Game Clue
#4.

It was hard to be patient while the suspects—as I thought of them—read their clues to themselves. I wished I had elbowed in on the couch next to Laura, but I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, which was more comfortable than the hard straight-backed chair which had been the only seat left.

Alex was the first to speak. “This clue makes no more sense than the others,” he said, and read, “ ‘
MORE SILENT THAN THE TOMBS ARE
.’ ”

I began to write it down but looked up, startled, as Laura burst into tears. “That dreadful, horrible man,” she sobbed.

Her clue fluttered from her fingers as she covered her eyes, and I picked it up. On the paper was typed
LIKE DAVY JONES
’
S LOCKER
—
MINUS THE SEA
.

As soon as Aunt Thea calmed Laura down, I asked her if I could read her clue to the others.

Laura lay back against the cushions, one hand pressed
against her forehead, and said, “Oh, go ahead. What difference does it make now?”

I read Laura’s clue, then asked Senator Maggio, “What does yours say?”

He shrugged. “I suppose it’s a threat: ‘
DEADER THAN A DOORNAIL
,
GREEN AS A PEA
.’ ”

Julia’s eyes widened. “These are all about death. Listen to mine: ‘
TEA AND SYMPATHY
—
DONE TO DEATH
.’ ”

“So that’s what this means. I thought—” Buck interrupted himself and read: “ ‘
WHY A SUDDEN DEATH PLAY
?’ ”

“My clue is in line with the others,” Thea told us. She handed me her paper, and I read aloud, “ ‘
GIVE UP THE GHOST
.’ ”

With tears in her eyes she said, “Please believe me when I tell you that I have no idea what Augustus had in mind. To bring you here, to force you into playing this horrible game, and then to threaten all of you—all of
us
—with death, is unbelievable to me. I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.”

“No one blames you, Thea,” Julia told her, and the others murmured in agreement.

Thea was sitting close enough to me so that I could reach out and take her hand. “Aunt Thea,” I said, “you’re forgetting that these aren’t messages Augustus was giving you. They’re clues, which means they’re supposed to add up to something else.”

Everyone stared at me. Since they were all seated on chairs, and I was cross-legged on the floor, I felt like the frog in biology class just before the teacher gets ready to dissect him. I quickly stood up and read aloud the clues I’d written down: