Death in A Mood Indigo, page 26
“I took the ferry from Hyannis,” Osborne said. “Arrested for what?”
“Let’s just say the FBI wants to question you in connection with the murder of Roxanne Teasdale. They’ve been hunting for you for two days.”
“I left town.”
“I know. The question is, when. Before Roxanne died, or after? And just how long have you been on the island? Five hours—or five days?”
“Would you mind,” Jack Osborne said, “explaining why you find it necessary to be offensive?”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Merry offered congenially. “I’ll stop being offensive if you tell me why you showed up today. I mean, you haven’t actually made Nantucket your second home all these years—though I understand you’ve visited more than you were prepared to admit during our last conversation.”
Osborne measured her words. Then he shrugged delicately. “There’s no reason not to tell you. I came to pay my respects to Emily Teasdale.”
“To Emily?” Merry’s black brows came together dangerously. “But I thought Emily had gone to Boston.”
“Emily is about to go,” Osborne corrected her, “having waited, by previous arrangement, until after my visit. It was one concession I wrung from her. She categorically refused to let me attend the burial in California.”
“Too bad,” Merry said, “but think how hard it was for her, discovering that Roxanne had kept her relations with you a secret.”
“That,” Osborne agreed, “and the fact that I’m old enough to be Roxie’s father. I don’t mind telling you that Emily took no pains to hide her contempt.”
“Why did you come? You can’t have expected her to throw open her arms to you.”
“No.” Osborne’s eyes drifted away, and a palpable sadness worked at the corners of his mouth. “I didn’t love Roxanne. I’ll say that freely. But I was fond of the girl, and I understood how she viewed me. I was her knight, Detective. I was a seductive older man who could show her the ways of the world. Bring her roses, put her up in fine hotels, make her feel sophisticated and accomplished. I never played with Roxie’s feelings. I never intended her to be hurt. I assumed that one day she would outgrow me and naturally move on. But when she—when some animal destroyed her—” Osborne’s fists clenched convulsively and then released. He drew a shuddering breath.
“It’s absolutely horrible,” Merry interjected quietly, “and there is no sense to be made of it.”
“Well—” Osborne looked at her steadily. “I wanted to talk to her grandmother. I wanted her to know that Roxie was simply young, and high-spirited, and terribly alive. That I had tried to make her happy. That however many things caused her sorrow right now, my relationship with her granddaughter should not be one of them.”
“You felt guilty” Merry said, surprised.
“Oh, probably,” Osborne replied with a sheepish look.
“And Emily? Was she convinced? Did she give you absolution for corrupting Roxanne?”
Something flared in Osborne’s face—anger, resentment, a bitter self-knowledge—and then died. “I doubt it,” he said. “But she was good enough to allow me into the house, though she had a watchdog with her—”
“A dog?”
“Well, an old guy, actually,” Osborne replied. “I think it’s possible she was afraid I actually killed Roxie and had come back to finish her off. Emily made her appointment with me and got this absolute character to stand over me when I came.”
“Was he white-haired? With a beard? Bright-blue eyes?”
“Yes! You know him?”
“He’s my grandfather,” Merry said casually. “Now, let’s talk about why you took a ferry from Hyannis instead of flying over from Boston.”
Osborne sighed and closed his eyes. “A friend of Roxie’s called me Tuesday at the law school. Told me what had happened to her.”
“Lily Olszewski?”
“Lily. Yes. I … couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day. Couldn’t make sense of what I knew was true. I got in the car and drove to Hyannis. Checked into a motel. Called Emily the next morning and persuaded her to see me. She wouldn’t make time for me until today.”
“So for three days you kicked around Hyannis?”
“It sounds implausible….”
“That’s one word. I’m sure the FBI will check it out.” Merry stared at Osborne with thinly veiled hostility. “Back to those sculptures. Are you familiar with the provisions of your wife’s will?”
“She set up a trust,” Osborne supplied, “for some art-therapy group. I wonder if it’s even in existence.”
“You haven’t checked?”
“No. Why?”
“I just wondered,” Merry said. “Your wife left them her houses as well. Sconset and Back Bay. With all their contents.”
There was a pregnant silence. Osborne’s face clouded. “So what you’re saying,” he managed, “is that the sculptures would have gone to the trust, too.”
“Yes,” Merry agreed, intrigued that he took the loss of the Marlborough Street house so calmly. “It’s something of a blow, isn’t it?”
“I imagine,” he replied. “They’re probably quite valuable.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd?” Merry asked him. “That they should disappear now? Once Elizabeth’s will comes into effect?”
“I suppose so,” Jack Osborne conceded impatiently. “Someone must have decided to move quickly or lose the sculptures forever.”
“Exactly, Professor Osborne,” Merry replied. “That someone wouldn’t be you, now, would it?”
Chapter Twenty-One
“That was a figure of a woman.” Osborne pointed to a bare space in the corner of the drawing room. “A life-size copper naiad. And over there was the Couple Embracing.” He waved vaguely toward the drawing room’s French doors. Beyond them lay the bluff, and the sweep of springtime Atlantic, and the loneliness of dune grass. Merry half expected to see Nan Markham’s bright-red hair pop up from below the bluff, or hear Satchmo’s bark; but the view remained empty of both children and dogs.
“More figures, huh? Markham seems to have specialized in them.”
“It may have been a phase,” Osborne replied, smiling crookedly, “that coincided with his use of my wife as a model. Most of the women were loosely disguised visions of Betsy.”
“Even the one of—how did you put it—two figures embracing?”
Jack Osborne declined to answer.
Merry looked up from her notepad. She had agreed to accompany the professor back to Sconset once Dana Stevens and Tucker Enright had finished questioning him. Privately, Stevens had told Merry that Osborne had stuck to his Hyannis story, and she had asked the state police in Barnstable to check out the alibi with his motel. Not that the alibi proved anything; Osborne could easily have flown from Boston to Nantucket the night of Roxie Teasdale’s murder, then returned to await Lily’s phone call. His time in Hyannis was largely irrelevant. And for the night of Roxie’s death he had no alibi at all. He claimed to have been home alone.
Merry’s job was to keep an eye on Osborne until the FBI found a plausible basis for arresting him. A visit to his dead wife’s Sconset house should reasonably kill most of the afternoon.
“So is that it?” she asked him now. “Six statues altogether?”
“One more, I’m afraid. In Betsy’s bedroom. The head of a man. It used to sit on her vanity table.”
“Ian’s head?”
“Perhaps Ian as he would like to have been seen.” A touch of acid in the last remark that Merry could not help but appreciate.
“Clarence,” she called over her shoulder toward the pantry, where the crime-scene chief was painstakingly dusting the frame of the broken window for prints, “do the surface of this table by the French doors, okay? It’s mahogany. Maybe the thief gripped the underside or something.”
“Ayeh, Marradith,” Clarence shot back testily. “I’m havin’ Nat here dust anythin’ that’s exposed. You just get on with yahr business, and we’ll get on with ours.”
Nat Coffin poked his head around the drawing-room doorway and grinned in Merry’s direction. “His nose is turned, Detective,” he said. “Pining for a post with the FBI.”
Merry sighed and followed Jack Osborne slowly up the winding curve of steps to the old houses second floor, glancing minutely around the rooms adjacent to the one he had entered. “And you’re sure nothing else was taken?” she said, for perhaps the fifth time that afternoon.
“No,” Osborne replied. “I’m not. I’d have to do a complete inventory, and that’s likely to take days. Even if I managed to remember what should be here in the first place.”
“So what we’ve got, as best you can judge, is seven Ian Markham sculptures of copper-plated ceramic, value unknown.” She looked up from her notebook curiously. “Were these things attractive, Professor? I mean—copper-plated ceramic?”
Osborne shrugged impatiently. “Betsy certainly thought so. And Betsy had impeccable taste. The copper-plating was a relatively new technique for Ian. He perfected it here, in his studio.”
“I’ve got to ask you,” Merry said, setting her notepad down on the dustcloth-covered mattress and pulling off her half glasses to stare Osborne directly in the face. “What in the hell were you thinking? This place is a treasure trove. You simply locked the doors and walked away eight years ago, without so much as an agreement with a neighbor to keep an eye on the place from time to time? By rights, you should have been robbed blind in three or four days.”
“Not I,” Osborne said quietly. “Betsy. Betsy should have been robbed blind. None of this belongs to me. None of it ever did.”
“Is that it?” Merry swept a hand expansively around the room. “Indifference to things that were hers?”
“I don’t know.” The law professor hesitated. “Maybe. I was just angry at first—angry that she had been such a fool as to run off with Ian in Mood Indigo. Which is what we all thought had happened, however little we talked about it. I was so angry, I never wanted to come here again.” He stopped and looked at the floor, as though the intricate pattern of the rose-colored Chinese carpet might spell out his mysteries. “And then, after a while—a year, eighteen months—it seemed simpler never to think of the place again.”
“And yet you stayed in the Marlborough Street house.”
Osborne hesitated.
“Despite the memories. Despite Elizabeth’s things.”
“Yes. That will change, of course, now. I’ll probably find a place in Cambridge. Avoid the commute.”
Merry perched on the edge of the bed. Her weight dislodged a cloud of dust. “Forgive me, Professor, but I find most of what you tell me very difficult to believe. I always have—from the moment we talked in your Back Bay office until you appeared in my doorway this afternoon. Your stories don’t entirely work.”
“Stories?”
“Well, there are several,” Merry pointed out. “There’s the one you ginned up the night Elizabeth disappeared, about sleeping soundly and thinking nothing the next day of her passport lying on the beach, until you reported it around noon. Then there’s the bit about your ignorance of how your wife came by all those broken bones—I can’t get that one out of my head. And now we have the Sudden Disappearance of a Fortune in Statues—a fortune that, by rights, belongs to Ian Markham’s wife. As I’m sure you are perfectly aware. You have a story for every occasion, Professor. We could trade them back and forth long into the evening. And they might just improve in the retelling.”
“Are you always this antagonistic toward summer people?” Osborne asked, his color rising. “Or is it just men?”
“Are you always so quick to take offense,” Merry rejoined mildly, “or just when you hear the truth?”
“I’ve had enough of this,” he spat out, and reached for the door. “I’ll simply report the theft to my insurance company and note that the local police were decidedly uncooperative.”
“Like you did when Elizabeth disappeared. Those police. Always asking nasty questions. Never taking anything at face value. I’m sure your insurance will pony up immediately—they’re never suspicious, like the police. And that way you can collect twice—once from the chumps who’ve insured you, and again when you hock the Markham stuff. I guess that’s the kind of savvy that gets people tenure at Harvard these days, huh?”
“Go ahead,” Markham said savagely. “Search my hotel room. I’m staying at the Harbor House. Search the car, if you like. Search high and low. But you’ll find nothing. Because the last thing in the world I’d have wanted to take were those god-awful pieces of kitsch that Elizabeth loved so besottedly. I hated them, do you understand? Hated them. I’d have turned them over to poor Julia with the rest of this miserable house in an instant if I could, no matter how much money I’d have gotten. I can’t get rid of it all fast enough.”
“Because of the memories, Professor?” Merry asked quietly. “Which memories in particular? I confess I’m curious. Because your neglect of this place—your absolute avoidance and abandonment of it, in fact—looks remarkably like the disgust of a guilty man.”
“Guilty? Guilty of what?”
Merry shrugged. “Strangling your wife, maybe, in a jealous rage? Burying her body somewhere it should never have been found? Maybe you even sabotaged Markham’s boat. It has a nice symmetry to it—because everyone, of course, thought your wife was on Mood Indigo, Nobody really looked for her with much gusto, including the grieving husband. I’ve been wondering why. Why it was necessary to keep Elizabeth’s body missing for so long.”
“And what has your feeble brain come up with?” Osborne asked harshly.
“You handed it to me today,” Merry replied. “The statues. Not worth much, except to Elizabeth, when they were made—but they’ve skyrocketed in value, so I’m told. If Elizabeth’s death had been proved soon after Ian Markham had died, her collection would have gone immediately to Art in Mind. But Elizabeth remained in limbo. Markham’s tragedy gave his reputation a boost. The sculptures were suddenly valuable. Why not wait and see? Let Art in Mind die from lack of interest and support, let Markham’s pieces become rarer and rarer, and then stage a robbery at a propitious moment. And what moment could be more propitious? You’re about to lose your Back Bay house. That’s clearly of some value to you, since you’ve stayed in it for years. And I notice Elizabeth left you absolutely nothing to live on in her will. But those sculptures of Markham’s would probably set you up for life, even sold on the black market. And how satisfying, really, to turn a buck behind the backs of those two. Ian and Elizabeth. The ones who betrayed you.”
Osborne slumped heavily against the wall, his expression dazed. “You can’t possibly be accusing me,” he said, “of all these … enormities”
“No,” Merry agreed. “I really can’t. I have no proof. And I’m still working on one part of the problem. Somebody moved your wife’s bones from wherever they had lain for years and reburied them in January on Sconset beach, where they were found a few weeks ago. For the life of me, I can’t come up with a reason why you’d do that. Yet.”
“I’m sure you’ll invent one, given time,” he said, and studied her face. “I didn’t take you very seriously, Detective Folger, that day you came to Back Bay.”
Merry smiled. “Well, isn’t that a surprise.”
“I take you rather more seriously now.”
“Thank you.” Had she unsettled Osborne? Or was he merely an excellent actor?
The professor waited for her to lead him from Elizabeth’s bedroom, an unconscious gesture of civility Merry bowed to without protest. She could hear Clarence’s heavy tread as he mounted the stairs at the end of the hall, bound for Elizabeth’s vanity table with his dusting kit.
“Detective,” Osborne said tentatively.
“Yes?”
“About those broken bones of Betsy’s.”
Something quickened along Merry’s spine.
Osborne nodded at Clarence as the crime-scene chief shrugged past them, leaving the stairway clear.
“I’ve been thinking. Perhaps you should talk to Julia Markham. She may know more about Betsy’s last year than I could possibly imagine.”
“I’m on my way to talk to her now,” Merry told him. “Why don’t you come along?”
The Markham place was only a few blocks away from Elizabeth Osborne’s stately home on Baxter Road, but it might have been a different world.
“My God.” Jack Osborne’s eyes widened as he took in Codfish Park’s abandoned houses, and the empty foundations where several had been moved. “What happened here?”
“Weather,” Merry said briefly, and brought her Explorer to a halt in the sandy lane before Julia Mark-ham’s door.
Jack got out of the car, followed by a vigilant Howie Seitz, and stood staring at the ravaged beachfront. “That’s Ian’s studio,” he said, pointing to a small fisherman’s shack tilted crazily on its foundations. “It’s been hit.” He walked like a man in a dream across what remained of Codfish Park Road and stopped before the damaged building. Then he passed his hands over his eyes. “I should never have come back here.”
Merry pocketed her keys and, after an instant, followed him to the eroding bank. Osborne was right, she thought; the building was like a metaphor for everything that had happened here—destruction, loss, abandonment, decay. The sculptor’s studio must have been a charming thing eight years earlier—rose covered, perched on the edge of dunes no longer in evidence, filled with the white glare of sunlight refracting off sand. Now it looked as though a giant hand had plucked it from the earth, tossed it drunkenly in the air a few times, and left it battered and forgotten for the next wave to claim.
“I wouldn’t get too close,” Merry advised Osborne. “These places are pretty unstable.” She shaded her eyes and looked down the road, searching for Mabel Johnson’s house, and was reassured to find it still sitting on its small rise above the sand. When all this was over, Merry promised herself mentally, she’d figure out what to do about Mabel. There had to be a way of helping her.
