An Excuse For Murder, page 5
He dropped the paperback next to the cash register. Kate glanced at the cover, read the title. “Death is often the punchline of life.”
“Excuse me?” The man asked, startled.
“It’s a line from the book. Well, paraphrased. Nabokov writes convincingly about loving someone and not being loved in return. Life ending in disaster.”
“I’ve read it before.”
“Then I’ll stop waxing poetic.” She flipped to the first page, checked the penciled price.
“Kate knows about the stages of decomposition,” Tim whispered to Will solemnly. “Since she found the body. I’ll bet the flesh flies were already circling.”
“Sometimes, Tim, you can tell that your father is a cop. That’s four fifty,” Kate told the man, glancing up. His jaw was clenched tightly, a muscle jumping beneath his cheek. She could smell cigarette smoke on him like cinders. Coins clattered loudly onto the wooden counter. Kate handed the book over. “Have a nice day.”
The man paused on his way to the door. “You know, the easiest way to find a corpse is to kill someone,” he informed them blandly.
Kate resisted the urge to clamp her hands over the ears of the nearest boy. “No, it’s not! That’s not a good idea, got it?”
“Kate.” Tim looked at her pityingly. “I’m eight. I know what corpses are and I know that only bad guys kill people. Right, Will?”
“Right.” Will nodded, looking at Tim with hero-worship in his eyes.
“Come on, Will. I want to show you something really awesome.” Tim tore off to the back of the store, Will close on his heels. Books shuddered on the shelves as their feet rounded the corner. How could such small feet make so much noise?
“Why would you tell them that?” Kate asked the man, flinging her hands out in exasperation.
“I thought they should know what they’re looking for,” he replied and stepped out onto the street.
Chapter Nine
Gary knocked on the door again, louder this time. Two houses down from the scene of the crime. Only he knew that.
Same smell, faint on the breeze. Sun-warmed apples.
He glanced behind him. Just a strip of lawn between where he was standing and the road. A tree. A tire swing. Beyond that, the street, straight down far as the eye could see. Two properties in between here and there.
You’d drive past and never even notice the old building. Maybe a glimpse of brick above the hedge, if you looked hard enough, caught the right angle as you were passing by.
A woman in a blue dress stepped off the curb to his right, moving toward the trees at the edge of the property, toward the old house, hidden from view. That familiar lift to her step. It hit him like a fist to the solar plexus. The swish of fabric over her hips, sunlight catching on the ends of her hair. Face turned away.
The street was bare and bright. Sound of kids playing in the distance. Five steps, maybe six, and she’d be within reach. He’d see her face.
“Ye’re late,” a voice said behind him.
Gary spun toward the door, now open. Checked his watch. “It’s only half past five.” He looked back. The street was empty. The trees were a tangle of branches, shadows, and leaves. Flicker of blue. Just a flash, then gone.
“How do I know you’re who ye say ye are?” Penelope asked, suspiciously.
He dug out his wallet.
She studied the ID closely, turning it this way and that. Then handed it back to him. “The boss man hi’self.” Penelope moved into the house, leaving him to catch hold of the door before it closed. “Ye were in the café yesterday, back o’ the room.” Shrewd eyes over a shoulder.
No point denying it. “Yes, I was. The coffee’s good.” It was cooler inside the house. Sunlight fell across dark wood. Papers, heaps of them, were spread across a desk in the entrance. Uncapped ball point pens. A pencil on the floor. There were no candles or vases. None of those porcelain figurines with full skirts. A sheet of lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook, was tacked to the wall above the desk. Math sums, then a drawing of a bicycle done in biro and highlighter. Loose, childish lines. “Interesting drawing.”
“My grandson’s.”
Gary looked at the keypad in the entrance. It was blinking, like it should be. “You’ve had a number of false alarms.”
Toss of the head, impatient. “There’s somethin’ wrong with it.”
“I’ll change the backup battery for you and set up a new passcode. See if that fixes the problem.” Hard to remember the last time he had personally reset an alarm system. “I’ll need to access the main control panel.”
“It’s downstairs.” Gary followed her down a narrow hallway. “Useless thing.” Fast mutter, beneath the breath, and hard to catch as she moved ahead of him. “Doesna stop people from stealing off your verra lawn.”
She moved quickly, despite the limp. The stairs were steep. The turn halfway down had him angling his shoulders. A strand caught the light and he brushed a hand at the spider web, flicking it away from his face. “You’ve had a theft?” That indentation in the ground beside the mailbox. He’d noticed it when he arrived. Something had rested there so long the soil had sunk. Then been removed.
“Cowards. Then that figure in the night. At the fairy tale house.” It sounded like a curse. The grin crinkled her eyes as she looked back at him. “I saw him, from my window, upstairs.” Penelope flipped the switch, casting light from a bulb on the ceiling. “Your height.” She considered him. A long, hard stare that was unsettling. “Then a deith. Sirens at the crack o’ dawn. Ay, three things.” She leant on her cane and held three fingers in the air, throwing a shadow across the gray carpet. “Theft, a figure in the night, an’ deith.” She counted them off. “Never ignore things that come in threes. It’s close tae the end then. Here it is.”
“Here what is?” His head was reeling.
“The control panel.” She tapped the box with the end of the cane. She took a small key from her pocket. The panel creaked on rusted hinges. She moved aside.
The ceiling was lower there. He had to duck his head, hunch down, as he disconnected the power and the back-up battery. The wall he faced smelled of metal, dampness. Water gurgled through exposed pipes. The control panel wasn’t hard-wired. Good. Cutting off the circuit breaker would have slowed things down. He could feel her close behind him, watching. “I’ll show you how to power up the system and then reset the passcode. This man you saw at the house, what was he doing?”
“Sneakin’ around the way people do when they don’t want tae get caught.” So close her breath brushed his shoulder.
“I wouldn’t think you’d be able to see the house from here.” The night had been his. Fireflies winking. The give of the ground beneath his feet. Darkness all around. He’d have known if someone was watching.
“Ye can see the orchard. Enough o’ it anyway. He was there. Crouched.” Her hand tightened on the cane. Veins blue beneath thin skin. “Watchin’ the hoose, at half-four in the mornin’.”
The timing could be right. He had to plant a seed of doubt. “It must have been difficult to get a good view, from that distance, in the dark. Hard to tell a tree from a man, if the angle’s right.”
“Only a fool would mistake a tree for a person,” Penelope snapped. She stepped toward the stack of storage boxes leaning against the wall, gray with dust. Opened a lid, peered inside. “Kitchen cloths. That’s richt. The first time was different though.”
“The first time?” Gary turned to her, put his hands in his pockets.
“A night or two earlier. He was movin’ fast between the trees, low tae the ground.”
“You saw the same man twice?” His tone was sharper than he’d intended. “In the orchard?”
“I’m just after tellin’ ye, aren’t I? Movin’ toward the fairy tale hoose,” she said, a hard glint in her eyes. “Fast too. Then I went off to bed.”
He had been there only once at night. “Sometimes the mind plays tricks on us.” He thought of the woman in the blue dress. “I wouldn’t worry about it. You have a good alarm system. It’ll alert you if someone opens a door or a window.”
“The Eternal Wife has to fill the hoose wi’ strangers tae keep the ghosts at bay.” Penelope pulled her sweater closer around herself.
“Roselyn Marsh?” Gary turned back to the panel. “It must be hard, living with a legend of undying loyalty.”
“The Eternal Wife has little to do wi’ the love of a husband and everythin’ wi’ deith.” There was bitterness there, hardened over time.
“I see.” He glanced at her. “Let me show you how to reset the passcode. It helps if you choose numbers that have a meaning for you. Something you’ll remember.”
“There is nothin’ wrong wi’ my memory.”
“Of course not. Sharp as a scythe, you are.”
She laughed. A young sound that had him thinking of the children he’d heard playing in the distance. “True enough.” She looked at the boxes again. “’Tis easy tae keep secrets. Things ye’ve heard or seen. Stowed away tae use when the time is richt.”
“Or take them to the grave. Whose secrets are you keeping, Penelope?” Gary bent down, said it low, “I don’t think you’ve told anyone about what you saw in the orchard.”
“Och well.” Her lips quivered, hovering on the verge of a smile. She wagged a finger at him. “Just reset the passcode. We’ll be safe as houses then.”
Chapter Ten
The stone stairs in the tower trembled beneath Kate’s feet with the deep bass. Turpentine and oil paint fumes burned her nose. Elaina was painting. This was unusual. She should have been at work by now, serving shots of tequila and pints of beer to woebegone characters in the pub downtown, wearing burgundy lipstick and a heart-stopping outfit. Instead, Elaina was in the tower, blaring rock music.
Kate paused on the circular landing. The door to Great-aunt Roselyn’s rooms was tightly sealed as always, to block the draught that seeped into the tower through cracks in the mortar.
The stairs narrowed. Through the archway ahead, Kate could see Elaina shaking her hips to the music, while streaking a paintbrush across the canvas in front of her. “Elaina!” Kate shouted over the sound of wailing guitars, as she came into the room.
Large, rounded windows circled the space. It felt as though they were standing in the center of the clouds. When the sky became dark, the walls of the tower took on a green cast. When rain lashed at the glass, the many windows cast shadows of streaking water across the ground. The tower seemed to always be waiting in anticipation for the wind to batter and ravage it once again.
Elaina twirled to the music, scattering splashes of blue around her in the process. Kate moved around palettes and splotches of wet paint, trying to get within Elaina’s line of vision. She didn’t want to startle her and risk ruining the painting.
Elaina bobbed her head and gave a shimmy to the beat. It looked like she was doing the nineteen-sixties twist. The floor around her resembled a Jackson Pollock painting.
Elaina spun and finally caught sight of the intruder. She waved, then swirled ochre paint from her palette. Kate moved closer and looked over Elaina’s shoulder, watching the minute brush strokes. She breathed out a sigh of jealousy. Yeah, Elaina was good.
Even unfinished, the portrait was stunning. Rain smudged in angles, dark and glistening, across the background. The woman’s face was the focal point of the picture, set slightly off-center and unnaturally pale. Reds and greens and yellows gave the image a surreal quality, the lights and the darks enhanced. Behind a veil of white lace, careful shading drew attention to the passion blazing from blue eyes. She seemed to be looking out of the painting at something in the distance, above Kate’s shoulder. The force of the woman’s gaze was almost physical. The features were there, from the narrow jaw to the fine wrinkles, but it took Kate a moment to recognize her great-aunt.
Elaina had trapped secrets in oil and canvas. The pain that lay hidden beneath a tranquil surface. Kate shivered as a breeze drifted across her bare arm, raising gooseflesh.
Moving quietly, Kate left Elaina to continue uninterrupted and turned her attention to the loose sheets strewn across the table nearby. The edges were rough, as though they had been torn from a sketch pad. Among the collection of scattered drawings, one caught Kate’s eye. She carefully lifted it free of the others and held it up to the light. The sketch was done in brown charcoal and lacked the detail Elaina had given the others. It looked as though it had been done spontaneously, on a wave of emotion, only to be tossed aside just as quickly. Yet the image was striking.
The man seemed to leap from the paper. His features weren’t classic, they were too rough for that. The interest came from a sense of captured movement, even though he was standing still. His face was alive with laughter, the wide grin reflected in his eyes. But his shoulders were half-turned, his back to the viewer. He seemed to be about to leave the page. As though he had told one last joke, given one last devil-may-care grin before walking away.
“Who’s the looker?” Kate teased. Her voice was loud in the sudden silence between songs.
The brush clattered to the floor, splattering paint across Elaina’s bare feet. “What?” Her face was void of expression, her eyes blank. Suddenly, anger flared, contorting her features. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “Give that to me!” Elaina lunged and tackled Kate.
They crashed to the ground in a heap of tangled limbs. The cold floor was hard against Kate’s spine. Elaina’s elbow dug into her ribs.
“How dare you?” Elaina tore the sketch from Kate’s grasp.
“What is wrong with you?” Kate rammed her fists against Elaina’s shoulders and, with one heave, shoved her to the side.
Elaina lifted the sheet and tore it into scraps. Kate watched in stunned amazement. The pieces fluttered one by one to the floor. Kneeling there with her hair waving wildly around her shoulders, her cheekbones sharpened by the dim light, Elaina looked like a triumphant warrior. “You had no right,” she said and let the last shredded corner fall.
“No right to what? Look at your art? You’ve never been bothered by that before.” Kate pressed a hand to her aching side. It was disturbing to see Elaina shaken.
“Some things are personal.” Elaina stood.
“What are you doing here anyway?” Kate got to her feet as well and glared at the taller woman. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I was painting. Liz took my shift.” A smile tweaked at the corners of her mouth, spread, and turned into a chuckle. “You’re covered in paint, Kate.” The chuckle became a fit of giggles. Elaina doubled over, holding her sides.
Kate could feel her shirt sticking wetly to her back. “How much of this is oil paint?”
“Don’t worry, it’s mostly acrylic,” Elaina gasped and wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. “A good laugh is just the thing to restore the karma. Drive out the ghosts. If left too long, these things can cling to the walls.”
“The only thing clinging to the walls is the nicotine from your cigarettes.” Kate rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be so tetchy.”
“You knocked me over.” Kate swiped her hair away from her face, and hoped she hadn’t just spread more paint across her cheek. “You think the house absorbs the events that take place inside it?”
“Not just events. Generations later, perceptive souls can sense if the previous owners experienced emotional or physical pain while living in the house. There’s an aura that lingers on, especially if a sudden or violent death occurs on the property.”
“Have you been watching late night shows on paranormal activity again?”
Elaina ignored that and picked up a paintbrush, a finer one than before. “Mrs. Marsh wants our help to box up Mr. Wendell’s things.”
“Shouldn’t his relatives do that?”
“I don’t think she wants to wait. She’d like the room cleaned out on Sunday.”
“I hope he wasn’t a messy person.” Kate didn’t want to spend the weekend rooting through mold and dirty socks.
Elaina narrowed her eyes at the canvas, considering the painting. “We’ll have to break through the lock on his bedroom door first. Mrs. Marsh hasn’t been able to find the key.”
“That’s odd. What did he have to hide?”
Elaina shrugged. “That’s what we’re going to find out. I’m pretty handy with an axe. I could take the door out.” She paused, reflectively. “Or we could call a locksmith.”
“I imagine Great-aunt Roselyn wants the door to remain intact,” Kate pointed out dryly. “Maybe I can have a go at it. I’ve always wanted to pick a lock. It can’t be that difficult to do.” She could see herself already, kneeling in front of the door, tools in hand; hear the click of the lock as it opened. Taste the satisfaction of the triumphant sleuth. “I’m sure Marcus would get a kick out of it, too.”
“Yes, but if you manage to open the door, will he help us with the boxes? Somehow I can’t imagine Marcus getting down and dirty.”
“You’d be surprised.” Marcus could handle anything when it came to going through someone else’s closets. “I do love snooping.” Kate grinned.
Elaina nodded absently. Her attention was on the canvas, and the haunted eyes of the woman she had painted. Kate recognized the intense focus. Elaina’s moments of inspiration resembled a trance more than anything else.
Twilight had descended outside. Clouds drifted past the windows in gossamer wisps. Kate left Elaina to her work. She’d grab a book, a Victorian mystery of some kind, and while away a few hours in the company of her fictional heroes.
Who was the man in the sketch? Kate exited the tower and let the heavy door slam shut behind her. She made her way across the lawn, toward the French doors that led into the kitchen. The wide orchard behind her pressed closer. A sibilant whisper slid between the trees. It might have been the wind or the spectral remains of a ghost searching for pickles. Kate stepped into the kitchen quickly, closing out the growing darkness.
Maybe the man in charcoal was a musician who had performed at the pub one night. Eyes meeting across the smoky, crowded room while he strummed a love song on his guitar, melting Elaina’s tough façade like ice cubes on a summer day. Elaina would have fallen head over heels for the first time in her life. Kate sighed and pressed a hand to her heart.
