The Woman Who Fell From Grace (8 page)

“That would be me,” I said.

“Charlotte, you will sit on Richard’s left.” Mavis gripped her assistant by the shoulders and gave her a firm shove in the right direction. “And next to you … no, that’s no good. We’ll have two men sitting next to each other. You’ll have to sit between my brothers, Charlotte, with Hoagy and Mercy across from you. Yes, I believe so. No, wait … ”

“I appear to be fouling up the seating somewhat,” I suggested to Mercy.

“No, you’re just giving her an excuse,” she murmured.

“To do what?” I asked.

“Move me to a different chair. Mother won’t allow me to sit in the same chair for very long for fear I’ll get comfortable. She thinks comfortable people are soft people.”

Mercy seemed to accept this with good grace. I found myself thinking how sorry I was she had Mavis for a mother.

The lady was still playing musical chairs. I started for the kitchen.

“Wait, Hoagy,” she commanded. “Where are you going?”

“I want to tell Fern to start churning,” I replied, smacking my lips. I could practically taste that homemade licorice ice cream.

“Churning? Churning what?”

“She’s not in there,” Charlotte informed me. “She went to the old house for a second.”

I went to the old house after Fern. I had my priorities. I found her in the entrance salon. She was lying there on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Her neck was at a very funny angle. At least I thought it was funny. She thought it was funny, too. She was grinning up at me. She hadn’t lost her jolly sense of humor. Just her life.

P
OLK FOUR WAS SO
clean you could eat off him.

There wasn’t a wrinkle in his crisp khaki uniform. There wasn’t a smudge on his wide-brimmed trooper’s hat. His black leather holster gleamed. His square-toed blucher oxfords gleamed. He gleamed. Polk was in his late twenties and stood several inches over six feet and didn’t slouch. He had the trim athletic build and flat stomach of a high school basketball star. His hair was blond and neatly combed, his eyes sincere and alert and wide apart over high cheekbones, a thin, straight nose, and strong, honest jaw. He had no blemishes on his face. I doubted he’d ever had any, or ever suffered from excess stomach acid or insomnia or the heartbreak of psoriasis. I hated him on sight.

He got there in ten minutes in his shiny-gray, sheriff’s-department Ford, a deputy trailing behind him in another just like it. He took charge right away. There was nothing youthful or indecisive about Polk Four. He was the sheriff of Augusta County. The deputy kept himself busy taking photographs of Fern’s body. The paramedics came, but there wasn’t much for them to do except stand around. The body couldn’t be moved until a doctor looked her over and signed the death certificate.

We all waited for him in the old parlor. Mavis was exceptionally still and composed. If there were tears in her, she would not allow them out now. Mercy wept openly into one of my white linen handkerchiefs.

The brothers had sharply contrasting reactions. Frederick was in total command — it was he who had called Polk Four and herded us into the parlor. Edward was unconsolable.

He rocked back and forth in his chair, sobbing and moaning. “I keep thinking of the night Mother died, Fred,” he cried. “I was at Fern’s when I got the news, remember? She was the one who actually told me.”

“Let’s not go into that, Ed,” Frederick said sharply. “Come on, now.”

“She was a rock, Fred, is all I meant.”

“That she was.” Frederick patted his brother gently on the shoulder. “That she was.”

Richard had gotten himself a large brandy and sat there sipping it and furtively trying to make eye contact with Charlotte, who sat in a corner wringing her hands, her own eyes firmly fastened to the floor.

The doctor arrived in half an hour. He was weary and elderly. He examined Fern where she lay. Cause of death: broken neck. Then Fern O’Baugh was lifted onto a stretcher — it took three strong men to do that — and wheeled out.

Polk joined us in the parlor. “My deepest condolences, Mavis,” he said, hat in hand. “It’s a terrible loss. Just terrible.”

“Thank you, Polk,” she said softly.

“She was a real fine old lady,” Polk went on. “Almost like another mother to Mercy.” He looked over at her, coloring slightly. “Hi, Mercy.”

“Hello, Polk,” she said, sniffling.

“She was family, Polk,” declared Mavis. “Family.”

“Speaking of which … ”

“We’ll be handling the funeral arrangements,” Frederick informed him.

“Fine, sir,” Polk said. “We’ll need some additional information for the certificate. Date and place of birth, social security number, parents’ names … ”

“Of course, Polk,” Frederick said, lighting a cigarette. “Whatever you need.”

Richard got up and started out of the room with his empty brandy glass.

“Sit, Richard,” commanded Mavis.

He stopped. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “I merely wished to —”

“I
know
what you merely wished. Sit!”

He drew himself up, steaming. But he didn’t erupt. He submitted. Sat back down, twitching.

“What do you think happened, Sheriff?” I asked.

Polk’s clear blue eyes took me in for the first time. “We haven’t met, sir.”

“He’s Stewart Hoag, the author, Polk,” said Mercy. “Going to be living here for a while.”

Polk Four looked me over, measuring me unsurely. I guess he didn’t meet many fizzled literary icons. “Welcome to the Shenandoah Valley, Mr. Hoag,” he said, “though I suppose this isn’t what you’d consider a nice hello. She fell, in answer to your question. Those stairs are quite steep and narrow. That’s how they built them in the old days. If you’re not real careful on your way down, it’s easy to take a tumble. Fern was a big lady. She tumbled hard.”

“The guides always have to warn the tourists to watch their step,” pointed out Charlotte.

“She must have gone up and down them a million times,” I reasoned.

“That’s true,” Polk agreed with a reassuring smile. “But accidents do happen.”

“Oh, Polk, must you be so banal?” demanded Mercy.

He reddened. “I realize you folks are upset. I’ll not intrude on your privacy any longer.”

“Thank you for everything, Polk,” said Mavis. “And you’re not intruding. You’ve been most kind. Hasn’t he, Mercy?”

“Yes, Polk. You’re always
most
kind,” Mercy said hotly.

He walked out, singed at the ears. I followed him.

The ambulance and the doctor were gone. Polk’s deputy was lingering.

“Any chance Fern’s fall was something other than an accident, Sheriff?” I asked him.

Polk stopped and stood there looking at me with his hands on his hips. “Such as?”

“Something other than an accident,” I repeated.

He frowned and scratched his chin. He had the closest shave I’d ever seen. It looked as if his whiskers had been surgically removed. “You mean like was she pushed or something? Everyone here loved Fern, Mr. Hoag. She was a fine old lady. And this is a fine old family. Mavis, her brothers, Mercy, they’re not that sort of people.”

“We’re all that sort of people, Sheriff.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You have some mighty strange ideas, Mr. Hoag. Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

He nodded, as if this told him all he needed to know. Everyone from New York was crazy. Not like here, where the valley’s biggest luminary wanted to turn her lead character into an alien. “You’ll find things are a little different here, Mr. Hoag. This is a county where justice still has the upper hand. Fern O’Baugh’s death was an accident, plain and simple. Take my word for it.” He started for his cruiser, stopped. “I hope you won’t be upsetting these good people.”

“I wouldn’t think of it, Sheriff.”

“Good.” He squared his shoulders, not that they needed squaring. “Mercy … she’s a spirited lady, like her mother.”

“She is.”

“She and I … ”

“I wouldn’t think of that either, Sheriff.”

He tipped his big trooper’s hat to me. “Good day, Mr. Hoag.”

“See you later, pardner.”

He stuck his chin out at me. “Don’t call me pardner.” Then he got in his car and drove away, his deputy on his tail.

The man was right. Ferns death gave every appearance of being an accidental fall. Except to me. She’d told me Sterling Sloan was murdered. She’d told me she knew something about it. And now she was dead. That’s how it looked to me.

I took the driveway around back to my guest quarters. Lulu was out cold in her easy chair, paddling her paws in the air, whimpering. Bad dream. I roused her. She woke with a start. Grudgingly, she followed me back to the old house. It was empty now. Everyone had gone back to the east wing.

We went up the stairs. They were steep. Creaky, too. There was a short central hallway on the second floor. Two bedrooms were open for public view, both of them furnished with lovely old canopy beds, washstands, wardrobe cupboards. One was the master bedroom, the other the room that had been Vangie’s in the movie. There was a definite air of familiarity to it. The brocaded-silk bedcover upon which lay Vangie’s most trusted confidante — Miss Penelope, her porcelain doll. The mirrored dressing table where Vangie sat each night combing out her wild mane of red hair. The vast double-doored wardrobe from which she chose her most tempting outfits. There was also a definite air of weirdness. Because Vangie wasn’t a real character out of history. Vangie was fiction. And this was a movie set.

The room next to Vangie’s was locked. So was another door across the hall. I stood there in the hallway, wondering what exactly Fern was doing up here in those seconds before she died. She was about to serve lunch next door. Why had she come up here?

Lulu was sniffing the floor at the top of the stairs. There was a carved banister post on either side of the top step, painted white to go with the hallway decor. Lulu looked up at me when I approached. When she did, I noticed she had white particles stuck to her wet black nose. I knelt beside her and wiped them off.

The particles were tiny flecks of white paint.

There were more of them on the floor at the base of each banister post. I ran a finger along one of them. The wood was hard and smooth with several coats of glossy paint over it. Except about three inches from the floor, where a set of thin grooves had been made in the paint. All the way around. On both posts. Fern hadn’t been pushed. Nothing so crude as that. Someone had tied a trip wire across the top of the stairs after she’d gone up. She was easy prey — blind as a bat without her glasses. They’d lain in wait for her to go down — and down she went. Then they’d removed the wire and returned to the house. It could have been anyone in the family. Anyone could have slipped out for a minute while we were having our sherry. That’s all it would have taken. One of them had shut her up. Made sure she’d never tell what she knew about Sterling Sloan. What was it she’d seen? What had been covered up? And how could it possibly matter now, fifty years later?

But it did matter. That much I knew for damned sure.

Mercy and Charlotte were in the kitchen getting our belated lunch together.

“I managed to drop a paper clip in my typewriter,” I said. “Need a piece of wire to get it out.”

“You’ll have to ask Roy for it,” said Mercy as she took a tray of food into the dining room. “I have no idea where you’d —”

“Bottom drawer there under the toaster, Hoagy,” broke in Charlotte. “With the tools.”

There was a flashlight in there, a pair of pliers, a hammer, screwdrivers, twine. There was also a spool of wire and a pair of cutters. I cut myself a length of wire.

“What’s in those closed rooms upstairs in the old house?” I asked Charlotte.

She took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator. “They keep the vacuums and cleaning supplies in the room next to Vangie’s. That used to be the sitting room. There’s still a door connecting them. They moved the big wardrobe in front of it so the tourists would stop asking if they could go in there. The other room is a bathroom, from when the family still lived up there.”

“I was wondering what Fern was doing up there.”

“Getting something, I suppose,” Charlotte said, chewing on her lower lip.

“Makes sense,” I agreed. “Only she was empty-handed when I found her. Odd, don’t you think?”

She looked at me strangely. Clearly, she thought I was being morbid and weird. “I can’t imagine what difference it makes,” she said brusquely. Then she sped out with the tea.

I put the wire and cutters back in the drawer and closed it. I turned to find Frederick standing there before me. I was getting good at telling the brothers apart now — as long as Frederick had a cigarette in his hand.

“I wonder,” he said, “If you could drop by my office later this afternoon. We have business.”

Frederick Glaze, investment counselor, did his business in Staunton on the top floor of the Marquis Building, a three-story, turreted, red-brick Romanesque on Beverley Street. I took the stairs. I was by myself. Lulu had shown more interest in her chair than a trip to town.

His offices were large, bright and hi-tech. No cobblers shop, this. Modular cubicles filled with modular young brokers working the phones and the terminals. The place smelled of money. His own private office was located in the round turret, and the past. He had an old rolltop desk in there, and a pair of worn leather armchairs and no computer. There was also an old freestanding steel safe, the kind that fall out windows and flatten people on the street below in cartoons. His windows offered a panoramic view of the business district and the Victorian houses climbing up the steep hills beyond it.

Frederick’s jacket was off. The sleeves of his white broadcloth shirt were turned back to reveal a silver wristwatch on one wrist and an ID bracelet on the other. He seemed profoundly weary under his smooth, genteel exterior. “Thank you for coming, Hoagy. Sit down, please. Ed won’t be joining us. This Fern thing hit him pretty hard. Ed, Fern, and me … we all grew up together. We were classmates. Friends.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

He coughed huskily, drank from a glass of water at his elbow. “When you get to be my age, you get used to losing your friends. But you don’t get to liking it. You keep wishing you’d treated them better.”