Death in Castle Dark, page 11
Derek shook his head. “No, I haven’t received word yet. I’ll certainly let everyone know.”
Paul exchanged a glance with Detective Dashiell and then with Derek. “Everyone seems to be here,” he said. “Maybe we should start the meeting now?”
Dashiell stood; he carried his plate into the kitchen and disappeared. Paul followed him. Derek shoved the last of his pizza into his mouth, ate it swiftly, and stood, as well, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “If you’ll all meet us in the great hall in five, that would be great.”
He left, and we stared at one another. “Why another room?” Tim asked. “We’re all gathered here already. Is there going to be a slideshow?”
We laughed, but our laughter had a nervous tinge to it, and when we assembled in the great hall, we saw that there was a large screen set up.
I sat down on a couch, shocked, and Connie sat next to me. “What is this?” she whispered. Bethany sat on my other side, looking similarly surprised.
Derek stepped forward. “Paul and I asked Detective Dashiell to let us fill you in on as much as we possibly could so that you felt you were in the loop. Obviously there are some things that the police cannot tell us because it might compromise their investigation, but there are some things that we might be able to help them with. Dash?”
Dashiell stepped forward. “First of all, let me reintroduce myself to all of you, my name is Detective John Dashiell of the Wood Glen Police Department. As you were told by Derek, I was already on the premises when the murder occurred; I was privy to those early moments that are normally lost while people wait for the police to arrive. This has been helpful to my investigation.”
He looked around at the people assembled: Paul, Derek, and Zana on one couch; Bethany, Connie, and me on another; Tim, Elspeth, and Renata on chairs near the door. “There are some things that I would like to make clear. First, Garrett carried a prop knife on his gardening belt that was meant to be brandished in an argument that he has over Bethany. The knife is missing; if any of you see it, please do not touch it, but report it to me or any police officer on the premises immediately. I believe I also gave you all my phone number so that you can text me with information. The knife looked like this.” He pointed up at the screen, where a picture of a knife like Garrett’s glimmered obscenely.
Elspeth raised her hand. “Are you telling us that was the murder weapon?”
Dashiell gave her a bland look. “I am telling you we are looking for it.”
This did not satisfy her or anyone else in the room.
“Second,” Dashiell said, “we have evidence suggesting that Garrett spent some time in the hidden passage across from the chapel before he went into the chapel and eventually died.” A diagram of the chapel hallway appeared on the screen, and Dashiell pointed out what the police believed to have been Garrett’s path on the night of the murder. “Therefore, the initial theory that whoever killed Garrett had done so in the chaos of the group traveling from one floor to the next has now been discounted. Garrett may have been assaulted as early as twenty minutes before Nora found him in the chapel.”
“Which means that any one of us could have done it,” said Connie in a flat voice.
I stole a glance at Tim; he had been the only innocent party, and now apparently he had no alibi.
Bethany looked scandalized. “Are you saying that poor Garrett staggered around for almost a quarter of an hour before he died, without getting help from anyone?”
“Conceivably,” Dashiell said.
“Why?” I said. Why would he not have looked for help? Someone could have come to his aid, saved him. . . .
Dashiell’s eyes met mine. “It is possible that he was hiding.”
One of the women moaned aloud. I understood what she was feeling; the words were so sinister that they were not easy to contemplate.
Dashiell cleared his throat. “At this point what we need from you is to go back over the night of the performance. Think about how things were supposed to go, and then consider anything that seemed amiss. What little things were out of place? What people were not at their stations? What did you think to be odd or off-kilter? I’d like you all to make some notes tonight—we need this information now, while it’s still relatively fresh in your minds—so that we can use all of your testimony as pieces of a larger puzzle.”
A woman in uniform appeared at the door. Dashiell pointed. “Derek is going to give you all a pad and pen; when you’ve jotted down your notes you can give them to Officer Crandall, who will be waiting at the door.”
Zana raised her hand. “Are you saying we have to make these notes now? Before we leave?”
“The ideas will never be more fresh in your mind. This is the time,” he said. “Do this for your former colleague and friend.”
Derek began passing out notepads. The diagram of the chapel hallway remained on the screen.
Dashiell pointed again. “I believe you all know how to access this chamber, which leads both to the chapel hallway and the ballroom on the second floor. I will be most curious to know if anyone in this room saw someone go into this passage, whether it was Garrett or someone else, or if you saw anyone in the ballroom. Consider things that you might have seen and dismissed.
“Finally,” he said, and he had our immediate attention because his tone made it clear he had saved something significant for last, “you should know that Derek has given his permission for us to search the castle, which includes all of your rooms. There are police officers in them now, and we would ask that you not return to your rooms until you get the all clear. Thank you.”
There was an explosion of responses varying from surprised to outraged; Dashiell managed to ignore these. He moved to the back of the room, and Derek moved to the front. He held up his hands to call for silence.
“Okay, calm down, everyone. I shouldn’t have to remind you that our friend and colleague was murdered in this building only yesterday. The police can search whatever they wish, and if we are innocent, we have nothing to fear.” He looked around at us, a calming but slightly reproving presence, and the objections faded away. Derek nodded. “A couple more things. First, Father Jim will be here at ten tomorrow morning to say some words of remembrance about Garrett and to bless our chapel. I’d like you all to come.”
The room was silent; no one had questions about this.
Derek nodded. “Second, the police have told me that you can now start moving around a bit more freely, but of course you are not to leave Wood Glen, and if you’re going out, you should inform the officer who will be posted at the door.”
Derek and Paul exchanged a glance. I was struck anew by how similar the brothers looked. Because of our unfortunate conversation topic and the dimness of the library, it meant that they both appeared rather sinister. Derek sighed and said, “In addition, Detective Dashiell has evaluated our fail-safe method of getting in the south entrance. We will no longer be keeping a key in the current hiding place, and we will be changing the locks. If you somehow find yourself locked out, you will need to text someone inside the building.”
Renata folded her arms. “So does this mean we are looking at an outside intruder?”
Detective Dashiell spoke from a chair behind us. “We have ruled nothing out. Obviously it’s not impossible to imagine that someone could have come in that way, assuming that word of the key got out to noncastle personnel.”
“What about the visitors?” Bethany said. “There were ten of them. What if one of them had a secret grudge against Garrett?”
“We’re looking into all possibilities,” Dashiell answered.
Derek put his palm against his forehead, looking a lot more like Hamlet than his dog did, but I couldn’t fault him for the melodrama, since every actor in the room had taken a theatrical pose: Bethany slumped on the couch beside me as though she’d been drugged; Connie sat wide-eyed, a perfect ingenue; Renata still had that queenlike bearing and looked incomplete without a crown; Tim had adopted a rather bellicose pose, leaning forward and widening his shoulders as if to fight off whatever threat existed; Elspeth nervously braided the gray stripe in her brown hair, making me think of a long-ago director who had said, Don’t be distracting with your hands, but do be interesting with them.
Poor Zana just looked nervous. Paul appeared the most calm of anyone in the room, although he did keep exchanging those mysterious glances with Derek.
Derek said, “Thanks, everyone. If you can make your notes now, we can set you free for the evening.”
We dutifully hunched over our notebooks and began to write. I detailed my memories of that evening, the ones I had already reported to Dashiell right after the murder. Still, I tried to provide as much detail as I could recall. When I finished, I looked around and saw that others seemed to be finished as well.
Derek appeared in front of us once more, offering a grateful smile. “You can go eat more pizza if you want, but don’t go back to your rooms until Detective Dashiell says you can.” A thought occurred to me and made me anxious.
People stood and began milling around; I went straight to Dashiell and put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” I said in a low voice. “Is my, uh—contraband—going to be in danger of getting out into the hall?”
His brows rose, and he smiled. “I did happen to warn Officer Ramirez that there might be other occupants in the Green Crown Room.”
“Thanks.” I leaned in and whispered, “Also in the Purple Crown Room. But I only just found that out.”
He stared at me for a moment; he seemed to be suppressing an eye roll. “I’ll call upstairs,” he said, and walked into the hall, his cell phone against his ear.
“Are you making arrangements to meet later?” asked Connie, who had appeared next to me and now leered into my face with an exaggerated expression.
“No, I am informing him that I hope his goons won’t let out our precious feline friends.”
“Oh!” Connie said, upset at the thought. “Well, I hope he’s taking care of it.” Then she tipped her chin toward the exit. “Come on. They didn’t say we couldn’t walk around down here.”
That was true. I followed her out of the great hall and we hesitated in the doorway. We instinctively avoided going to our right, which would have taken us to the chapel hallway, so we went left. Even on the main floor, the halls were rather dim, and Connie clutched my arm as we walked along.
“Who held your hand before I got here?” I joked.
She shook her head. “I was scared and lonely,” she said in a mock-pitiful voice. “But I took turns making people spend time with me. The older women mothered me, and Bethany put up with me. Tim and Derek were good about taking me on outings and stuff.” Her face looked suddenly wistful.
I contemplated the hallway as we traversed it. “I’m not interested in either of the drawing rooms. And I don’t suppose the sunroom will hold much interest in the nighttime, aside from a long view of an invisible forest and the silhouettes of plants that look like people in the dark.”
“Stop trying to scare me,” Connie complained.
“I’m not. I’m trying to avoid scaring you. What about the library? I’ve never done more than glance in the big one. Maybe we can sign out some books. I can read Brontë to the Brontës.”
Connie giggled. “That is so cute.”
We walked across the hall and down a few doors until we reached the library entrance. The room was dim, lit by a lamp in the far corner. We began moving forward, but then Connie put out an arm to stop me. She pointed, and I saw that in a far corner of the room, at a table with an old-fashioned gold library lamp, Zana sat with a stack of books. She lifted one, fanned through the pages, held it upside down, and shook it, then set it aside. She did the same with the next book and the next, as though searching for something within the pages. It was an odd sight, and coming so soon after our grim meeting, a vaguely disturbing one.
Without talking, Connie and I backed out of the room and returned to the hall, moving past Derek’s castle office and a first-floor bathroom to the final room on the hallway, what Derek called the meditation room. It was just a comfortable space with plush couches and pillows and a stereo system into which people could plug their iPhones and select any playlist.
Now Connie flipped on a light and we both plopped onto the nearest couch. “What was that?” she asked me. “Was she ransacking the library?”
I shook my head. “She was just—looking in the books. Maybe she left a bookmark in there or something. She told me she takes books out all the time and that the library is the best part of working at the castle.”
Connie thought about this, her lips pursed. “I don’t know. It looked weird. Like she was casing the joint.”
“Come on! It’s Zana. She’s sweet and nice and your friend. Maybe she used a twenty-dollar bill as a bookmark, and now she needs it back.”
Smirking, Connie patted my hand. “Whatever you need to believe, Nora.”
We chatted and laughed in the meditation room for twenty minutes or so, and then a uniformed man appeared at the door. He knocked to get our attention. “Everyone is free to return to their rooms,” he said, and then he walked away.
“Well, he was talkative,” I observed.
Connie yawned. “Ugh, I’ll be glad to get upstairs. I just want to crash on my bed and watch TV or read a book maybe.”
“And I need to check on my fuzzy children.”
We stood up and left the room, wandering back toward the main stairway. “I’ll come by to kiss them good night,” Connie said. “It will be nice to have someone to kiss good night.”
“You talk a lot about romance. We need to get you a dating app, girl.”
She yawned again. “We really do. Before I grow old and moldy in this castle, like some sad princess in a fairy tale.”
“At least you’re a princess and not a troll or a witch or something.”
“It would be interesting to be cast as a witch. I think I could have a lot of fun with that.”
“You probably could. But we both know—they’d cast you as the princess and me as the witch, because of my dark hair. I’ve played my fair share of evil characters.”
She thought about this as we started up the stairways, our phone lights on. “Did you enjoy it, playing evil characters?”
“Yeah, for the most part, if they weren’t one-dimensional, but had some complexity that I could examine in my performance.”
“Evil’s not that complex, is it?” Connie asked.
We reached the second floor, and a part of me yearned for the piano. We started climbing toward the third floor. “I think it can be. For example, what if the person doing an evil thing doesn’t think it’s evil? What if they don’t think they’re evil, either?”
“Like whoever killed Garrett?”
“Maybe. I really can’t fathom that at all, how someone could push a knife into another person. But I would assume that if someone did it, then they found ways to justify it.”
“Or they felt a lot of hate or anger,” Connie said. “Would any other emotion explain it?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s good that we don’t understand it, though, right?”
We reached our floor and started walking toward our rooms. Connie stopped in front of hers and said, “Because if we understood it, we wouldn’t be the sweet, innocent young maidens that we are, right, Nora?”
In the dim hall, her expression looked strange—ironic and almost spiteful.
Surprised, I lifted my phone higher and saw that it had been a trick of the light. Connie’s face was as sweet and friendly as always.
“Right,” I said. “Good night, Connie.”
“Night,” she said, and disappeared into her room.
9
Branches in the Wind
The Brontës, I was relieved to find, were all accounted for and playing happily on my bathroom rug. It was a shag carpet with long pieces of yarn, and the kittens would grab hold of a piece and then flop over sideways, kicking out with their tiny feet. I watched this pastime with delight for quite some time, then replenished the food in their bowl, which brought them tumbling over for an evening meal. Grinning, I went to an easy chair that my parents had donated to my new room. Because you can’t just sit on your bed! my mother had insisted.
She was right. I tucked into the chair and picked up my phone. I had long been in the habit of scrolling through posted auditions and casting calls on a Chicago theater site. I did so now, scanning the possibilities, even as a part of my brain acknowledged that I had just taken a job. But what if that great part was out there and it was waiting for me?
I set the phone down and let my gaze drift over to the kittens. I couldn’t imagine telling Derek, who had been under so much stress in the past couple of days, that I was leaving him in the lurch. And what would I tell Connie, my brand-new friend?
A sigh escaped me, and I leaned my head back in the chair. In any case, the police had told us to stay in Wood Glen; who knew how long that stricture would last?
I needed a distraction; with a sudden burst of brilliance, I realized that I had the perfect diversion right next door. I jumped up and left my room, leaving the door unlocked but closed so that all Brontës were safe inside. My bare feet led me one door to the north, where the small library sat, silent and largely uninvestigated by me. I went through the open door (Derek wanted it to be welcoming to all comers, Connie had said) and felt for a wall switch. Soon the room was bathed in warm white light, and the books beckoned.
On closer examination I saw that they had been loosely divided into categories, with sticky notes indicating the genres. I wondered which of the actors had gotten bored on a rainy day and decided to organize the shelves. Floating toward the mystery/suspense section, I rummaged around until I found a book with a delightfully Gothic-looking cover, written by someone named Victoria Holt, and decided it was perfect for my present circumstances. I tucked it under my arm.
