When the Cookie Crumbles (11 page)

Del and Cody delivered their captive to the mayor, who looked furious enough to sentence Binnie to death. As soon as her feet hit solid ground, Binnie wriggled free of her captors and made straight for the newly arrived news crews, who’d scored a prime spot to set up their equipment. They clustered around Binnie as she scrolled through photos on her digital camera.

While Binnie soaked up everyone’s attention, Olivia glanced back toward the mansion. She thought she saw a light flick on and off in a turret window. Sheer curtains covered the window, so she couldn’t be sure. She was
certain, though, that it was the same window a grumpy, disheveled Paine Chatterley had poked his head through when Olivia had visited two days earlier.

As Olivia watched, the bottom corner of the curtain twitched. She wondered if Paine was keeping an eye on the activity across the street from his newly reclaimed home. The curtain rippled, and she realized the window might be slightly open. Maybe the light she’d seen had been no more than the sun striking a sliver of exposed glass. Olivia was glad she hadn’t said anything. Not that anyone would have listened. She seemed to be the only person neither fascinated nor angered by Binnie Sloan’s adventure.

Olivia decided her presence wasn’t necessary. Karen was busy chastising Binnie, who was barely listening as she continued playing show-and-tell with her colleagues; it was a perfect time to slip away. Olivia had gone only a few steps when she heard an unfamiliar voice nearby say, “Look, something’s happening. Start the camera rolling.”

Olivia spun around to see the mansion’s front door creep open. Hermione Chatterley stood motionless in the doorway. She wasn’t dressed to receive company. From what Olivia could tell, Hermione wore a frilly pink negligee and matching peignoir. Her white hair fluffed in loose curls around her plump face.

Cameras clicked and whirred, while muted voices relayed reports about the dramatic appearance of Chatterley Mansion’s new mistress. With everyone’s attention riveted on her, Hermione reached out with her right hand and opened her mouth as if to welcome her audience. Instead, she leaned against the doorjamb and slid to the ground in an apparent faint.

The visiting press snatched up their equipment, but they weren’t quick enough. Del shouted an order to Cody to
keep everyone back. “Mace them if you have to,” he added, loud enough for all to hear. Del had reached the mansion door before it occurred to anyone, including Binnie Sloan, that Cody wasn’t holding a can of mace.

The press belatedly surged forward, but not before Karen rushed to Cody’s side and faced the group. In her deep, authoritative voice, she said, “Stay where you are. There’s nothing to see. Mrs. Chatterley is an elderly woman with medical problems. I’m sure you don’t want your readers to think you invaded the privacy of a sick and vulnerable woman. If there’s anything newsworthy to report, Sheriff Jenkins and I will prepare a statement, and you will be the first to hear it.” Karen’s plea gave Del enough time to pull Hermione’s inert body inside the mansion and shut the door behind them.

Olivia was impressed by Karen’s quick action. Maybe she would make a decent congresswoman, after all. Then she wouldn’t be Chatterley Heights’s mayor anymore, so there was definitely an upside.

Staff from the DC and Baltimore papers, looking frustrated, began to check their watches and call in for instructions. Reporters from the small-town weeklies chatted with each other. Olivia assumed they’d be more inclined to stick around. Hermione Chatterley represented local celebrity to them, so her public faint qualified as news. Even Chatterley Heights’s own Binnie Sloan seemed content to keep an eye on the mansion rather than sneak closer. Olivia was thankful that Nedra, Binnie’s niece and photographer, was still in Baltimore taking a journalism course. Two Sloans qualified as a herd.

Olivia felt her cell vibrate in her pocket. She opened it to a text from Del: “Need you here. Use back door. Don’t be seen.”
He’s always warning me not to get involved, and
now he needs me? Interesting.
Olivia texted back that she had brought her key to the mansion and could let herself in the alley door. As she edged away from the group, she saw Cody answer his cell, glance in her direction, and nod once. He parked his tall, lanky frame on a tree stump and announced that he had information about Hermione’s recovery from her faint.

While Cody held everyone’s attention, Olivia sauntered south, as if she were returning to the store. Once she was out of sight, she circled around the block to the mansion’s back door. She half expected to see Binnie waiting for her, but the alley was empty when she slid her key into the lock. Del entered the kitchen as Olivia locked the door behind her. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Prepare yourself,” Del said. “Hermione is conscious, but she’s hysterical and incoherent. That’s why you’re here, because Hermione trusts you. If you can, get her to calm down and explain what happened.”

“What happened…?” Olivia’s peripheral vision registered the chaotic state of the kitchen. Someone had removed all the antique pans and cooking utensils from the cupboards, originally set up as museum display areas, and dumped them on the floor. She followed Del into the mansion’s formal dining room, which had suffered the same fate. Silverware lay in heaps on the newly scratched surface of a walnut table inlaid with rosewood. The leaded glass doors of the built-in cabinets all hung open, revealing empty shelves. Olivia cringed at the sight of precious nineteenth-century dishware, some broken or cracked, piled in careless heaps on the dining room rug. The rug itself, hand hooked in the early 1800s, depicted a variety of green leaves and blue flowers that reminded Olivia of
cookie-cutter shapes. Now china chards pierced the delicate two-hundred-year-old fabric.

“Who could have done this?” Olivia remembered her conversation with Hermione about her husband’s state of mind. “Did Paine have some sort of breakdown?”

“Possibly, but we’ll never hear about it from him. Paine is dead,” Del said, his expression grim. “Watch it.” He reached out to steady Olivia as she nearly stepped on a broken plate.

“Del, are you saying Paine might have killed himself?”

“Right now I have no idea. I’ve called the crime scene unit. We’ll know more once they’ve done their work, and the autopsy should help, too. Paine’s death might have been an accident, though the state of this house makes me suspicious.”

“You mean…
murder
?”

Del shrugged. “Could be an accident or suicide, I don’t know. Looks like he drowned in the bathtub.” He took Olivia’s hand and led her around a mound of silverware. “We’d better get upstairs. Do I need to remind you not to mention any of this to anyone?”

“You just did.” Olivia reclaimed her hand.

Del shot her a quick look but otherwise didn’t react. “I’ve shut Hermione in her own bedroom. I don’t want her disturbing the scene any more than she already has. If you can get anything helpful out of her, I’d really appreciate it.”

Olivia decided to forgive him. They’d had more than one talk recently about her role in solving previous crimes. Del was trying to control his protective tendencies, and she’d been making a genuine attempt to stay away from murder scenes. If this was indeed a murder scene, Olivia
was here now only because Del had asked her. And he knew it. Olivia indulged in a moment of smugness.

She followed Del through the house, weaving to avoid random piles on the floor. She wondered what it would be like to move into a museum. Maybe Hermione was simply emptying cupboards and closets to make space for the couple’s belongings once they were delivered. That would explain the disarray. The broken plates and scratched furniture were another matter. Most of them had been owned originally by the Chatterleys, and some dated back to the mid-nineteenth century. Did Hermione care so little for family antiques? She was British, so maybe a plate had to be older than a mere century and a half for her to consider it interesting or valuable.

When Del stopped suddenly, Olivia almost slammed into him. He put a finger to his lips and pointed to a closed door. All the other doors they’d passed had been wide open. Olivia heard faint sounds coming from inside the room. Del held up his hand to indicate Olivia should stay where she was. She nodded her assent. Del drew his revolver and turned the doorknob gently.

Olivia watched Del’s jaw tighten as he eased open the door and looked inside the room. He plunged inside, gun drawn, leaving the door ajar. Olivia flattened against the wall. Over the next few seconds, she heard only grunts and shuffling sounds coming from inside the room. She assumed Del had subdued the intruder, but she couldn’t be sure. She slid along the wall to the edge of the door frame and risked a quick peek inside the room. It was a mistake. Her appearance distracted Del for a split second, enough for the intruder to break free. Acting on sheer impulse, Olivia slammed the door shut. She braced her foot against the frame and held on to the knob with all her strength,
expecting powerful arms to pull in the opposite direction. Nothing happened.

From inside the room, Del’s voice called out, “It’s okay, Livie. I’ve got her.”

Her?
Olivia pushed the door open and looked inside at the intruder’s back as Del snapped on handcuffs. She saw a squarish red-black-beige figure. Binnie Sloan.

A
fter depositing Binnie in an upstairs bedroom, handcuffed to a four-poster, Del explained that the back parlor, where they’d found Binnie, once opened out on a garden in the northwest corner of the grounds. Binnie had used her key to sneak in and take photos. “Explain to me why everyone seems to have a key to Chatterley Mansion?” Del did not sound happy.

“Don’t blame me,” Olivia said. “It was Karen’s idea. She wanted all of us, the celebration committee members, to keep tabs on the mansion renovation. As if we didn’t all have jobs. Karen didn’t trust the workers.”

“But she trusted Binnie Sloan?”

“Point taken,” Olivia said.

When they reached Hermione’s bedroom, Del removed a chair he’d wedged under her doorknob. “Apparently, the mansion’s room keys are lost to history,” he said. “This was the best I could do.”

“Looks like it worked,” Olivia whispered as she followed Del into the bedroom.

Hermione Chatterley sat in a green velvet armchair near her window. She had changed from her pink nightclothes into another of her shapeless housedresses, this one white with red dots. She looked none the worse for her dramatic faint in front of the cameras. Her brown eyes had a golden
tinge, perhaps in contrast to the redness that implied she’d been weeping for her dead husband. When she saw Olivia, she held out a limp hand. “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come. I know we haven’t known each other long, but I feel so terribly alone, and you’ve been kind to me.”

Olivia gave her a sympathetic smile as she sat on the end of Hermione’s tousled bed. “I’m so sorry about your husband,” she said. “It must have been an awful shock.”

“Oh, it was, it was. He hasn’t been in the best of health, of course, so this is not unexpected, but…” Hermione pressed two fingertips against her lips as if she couldn’t bear to say more. Olivia would have written the gesture off as staged except for the tears trickling down Hermione’s rouged cheeks.

“Livie will stay with you awhile, Mrs. Chatterley,” Del said with kindness in his voice. “I do understand your reluctance to talk with me at the moment. We can put that off a bit.” He briefly met Olivia’s eyes. She understood. A sympathetic ear might elicit a coherent story from Hermione. Well, she could try, but she suspected that Hermione, with her flair for drama, would be inclined to embellish.

Del left, closing the door behind him. Hermione dabbed at her eyes and didn’t seem to notice a faint scraping as Del, ever the careful cop, slid the chair back under the bedroom doorknob. “Dear Olivia,” Hermione said, “I wish I had the strength to make us some tea, but I’m so very upset.”

“I can only begin to imagine how you must feel,” Olivia said, patting Hermione’s arm. “I was wondering…downstairs I couldn’t help but notice family antiques scattered about, some of them broken. Do you have any idea how that happened? Perhaps you heard something?”

Hermione blinked rapidly as her lips formed a silent“Oh.”

Olivia waited in receptive silence.

“Well, I suppose…I mean, I didn’t actually go through the house, only down the stairs to the front door to get help. Paine sometimes walked in his sleep, so I suppose…he didn’t have a terribly happy childhood, you know. Perhaps he saw a dish or a bowl that reminded him of that sad period of his life, and he simply snapped. He did have a bit of a temper. Why, once we were having a slight disagreement, and Paine flung one of my favorite crystal decanters against the drawing room wall.” Hermione’s fleshy face pinched as she began to cry again.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Olivia said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“I was so blinded by grief I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed anything out of place, even if I’d tripped over it. It was such a dreadful shock to find dear Paine in the bath. He looked so peaceful, I thought he was asleep, but then I realized his face was in the water, so he couldn’t possibly be…be…” Hermione covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Olivia noticed several small cuts on her fingers. Hermione dropped her hands and took a tissue from a box on the table next to her chair. Sniffling, she said, “He must have had a heart attack. Or else he simply fell asleep in the bath. He’d been so tired lately. And then, of course, he did like to have a little drink before retiring.”

“Is it possible your husband had more than one drink? I mean, if he lost track and drank more than he was used to, maybe he became sleepy and forgot he was in the tub?”

“Dear me, no, I don’t think so. Although…” Hermione took another tissue and touched it to the tip of her nose, rather than do something so unladylike as to blow it.

Olivia forced herself to maintain a neutral expression.
She wanted the truth, but she suspected Hermione would play to an eager audience.

“I suppose I might have been confused myself,” Hermione said with a slight shake of her head. “I thought the bottle was new because…well, we’ve only been in town for such a short while, after all.”