Arsenic with Austen (9 page)

“I've been talking to Mayor Trimble. Great guy, don't you think? Forward-looking. Has a fantastic vision for this town.”

Fantastic in the sense of unreal,
Emily thought. But she let Brock ramble on, curious to see how deep a hole he would dig himself into.

“If we join forces, we can put this town on the map. Double the size of the place, double the property values. Then in a couple of years we can sell out and make a real killing.”

“But I'm not interested in making a killing. I only want to make a living, and my share will cover that quite nicely as it is.”

His nostrils flared. The scowl threatened to return, but with visible effort he subdued it. “Your share, sure. Mine's not quite so lucrative.” The scowl leaked out in his tone.

“Perhaps not, but you have some other means of support, surely? You've gotten by so far. That suit wasn't cheap, and neither was your car.” She'd caught a glimpse of his bloodred Porsche as he'd left after the reception the night before. “You must have some profession?”

“Oh, sure. I'm an actor. Maybe you caught me on
Abbott
back in oh-five? I was the murderer. Pretty clever, too.” He downed the last of his sherry and eyed the bottle, turning his glass in his hands. “Acting's fickle, though. It's not every day the right part comes along. I can't cheapen myself by taking just anything.”

That sounded suspiciously like her father claiming he couldn't lower himself to teach high school, when in fact he'd been turned down or fired by every high school in the state—after he'd exhausted all the colleges.

“I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have no intention of falling in with Mayor Trimble's plans. I like Stony Beach just the way it is, and I plan to use my influence to keep it that way.”

His full, almost feminine lips curved into a sneer. “So you're going to step into Beatrice's sensible shoes, huh? The benevolent dictator, pulling everybody's puppet strings. Never mind half the town lives below poverty level.”

Emily bristled. She doubted that was true, and if it had been, Brock was the last one to care. “If I can make life better for the people who live here, I will. But I won't clear the way for expansion. That wouldn't profit the poorest people anyway, only the few who're already at the top of the heap.”

Even as she said it, Emily wasn't entirely sure that was true. Development would create jobs—mostly low-paying menial jobs, but any jobs would be better than none, if in fact a significant number of residents were now unemployed. She'd have to find that out from Luke.

When people dreamed of a sudden access of wealth, they never considered all the responsibility that went with it.

Brock finally left when Agnes announced that Emily's dinner was served. She had plenty to think about during her solitary repast. Brock's behavior, for one. His attitude toward her was baffling, to say the least. If he was an actor, either he was a singularly poor one or he hadn't decided which role he wanted to play with her—fellow mourner, affectionate cousin, would-be suitor, disappointed rival for the inheritance, or bitter antagonist. One thing seemed clear, though: he wasn't satisfied with his portion under Beatrice's will.

When Agnes brought her after-dinner coffee into the library, Emily detained her. “Brock said something yesterday about his ‘old room' here. Did he visit Aunt Beatrice often?”

Agnes gave a disgusted sniff. “Never saw hide nor hair of him till a year ago. Then he started turning up every month or two. Madam seemed to find him amusing.”

“Did he stay long?”

“Two days, sometimes three. Till her patience started to wear thin, then he'd go.”

“Which room did he sleep in?”

“East room, across the hall from hers. Madam wanted him where she could keep an eye on him.”

“Was he here when she died?”

“Left a few days before. Came back like a shot as soon as he heard she was gone.”

That sounded suspiciously like an attempt to establish an alibi. Time to do some sleuthing.

Emily finished her coffee, then mounted the U-shaped stairway that rose from the paneled reception hall, admiring the gleaming woodwork of the banisters. Carving like this could hardly be bought nowadays, even with a fortune like Beatrice's.

In the second-floor hall she stopped to orient herself to the maze of closed doors that surrounded her. To the left, facing the drive, were two formal guest bedrooms she'd never seen used. Before her was Beatrice's room, largest and best in the house. At the far end of the hall were the bathroom and the small room where Geoff had slept in the summers, and to her immediate right the east room that Agnes said had been Brock's—and years ago, her father's, when he swept through on the occasional weekend visit between interviews.

She opened the door, half expecting to see the clutter of books and papers that had followed her father wherever he went and that he warned the housekeeper on pain of death never to touch. But the past was not that tenacious, nor would Agnes have been so easily intimidated. The room was spotless and, compared to the rest of the house, rather bare.

Emily made a circuit of the room, opening each drawer of the heavy walnut bureaus and checking every shelf of the tall mahogany wardrobe, so dark and forbidding, she expected it to lead not to Narnia but perhaps to Charn. It held no fur coats, however, nor indeed any personal possessions of any kind. Either Agnes or Brock himself had been quite thorough in eradicating all traces of his habitation.

At the bed Emily paused. A memory teased at the back of her mind. Herself about ten, Geoff twelve. Exploring the house, pretending to be Edmund and Lucy from the Narnia stories. Their father was away, and they'd snuck guiltily into this room against his strict prohibition. The wardrobe yielded only old clothes, and the medallions on the mantel failed to open any secret passageways. But the headboard of the bed had seemed promising with its depth and elaborate carvings of vines and fruit.

They tried the pear, the peach, the cluster of grapes. No joy. Then a hand reached out to the forbidden apple, hanging so temptingly from the peak of the triangular headboard. But whose hand was it, hers or Geoff's?

Too small for either. A pudgy, grubby little hand with bitten nails. Eustace.

It was Eustace who found the apple. Their little cousin—not really a cousin, but they thought of him that way for convenience—the six-year-old nuisance they called Eustace so often they forgot his real name. Horace's nephew, Horace who was then still alive. They couldn't shun the child because he had more right to be there than they did, but he was a brat and a pill, and they could at least annoy him by calling him Eustace, which he didn't understand because he hadn't read any of the right stories.

But he was the one who found the apple. And, of course, his real name was Brock.

The grown-up Brock, sleeping in this bed, would undoubtedly have remembered. Emily pushed the apple, but nothing happened. No, it wasn't a push but a downward pull, as if one were picking the apple. She gave a gentle tug, and the panel swung noiselessly open.

Wary of spiders, she peered inside. Neither the fading twilight from the east-facing windows nor the dim glow of the overhead bulb could penetrate the shadow of the dark velvet hangings that framed the bed. She checked the nightstand drawer and blessed Stony Beach's occasional power outages—each bedroom was always equipped with candle and matches. She lit the candle and held it up to the secret compartment.

For one mad moment Emily thought she'd entered a time warp. When the three of them first found the compartment, it had dashed all her romantic hopes by revealing only a slender pint bottle of vodka and a shot glass. It might have been the same bottle and glass she saw there now, only these were free of dust. And her father would never have left the two fingers' worth of vodka that remained in the bottle.

Emily slumped on the bed, fighting tears, just as she had done all those years ago. Eustace snickering, Geoff barking at her to “quit sniveling” only made it worse. At age ten she'd hardly understood what the bottle was; but she had known it for her enemy. Brock's pint was nothing but a letdown.

She looked again, unwilling to accept failure, and saw a darker shape behind the bottle. She pushed the bottle aside and drew it out. A book with the typical leather binding of the Windy Corner library.

Why would Brock hide a book? Beatrice was protective of her books, but not so much that she wouldn't allow a guest to read them. Emily turned it over.

Strong Poison
by Dorothy L. Sayers. Emily's heartbeat accelerated. The murder method in that mystery was arsenic—one of many poisons that would cause such symptoms as Beatrice had undergone.

But as Lord Peter Wimsey so cleverly deduced, the murderer in
Strong Poison
had built up an immunity to arsenic over months, then shared a poison-laced meal with his victim. Brock couldn't have done that; he'd been out of town for several days before Beatrice grew ill.

So it seemed unlikely this book would have given him ideas. And if it had, it wouldn't make sense for him to hide the book here; he could have simply returned it to the library to sit in all innocence on its appointed shelf. If someone had killed Aunt Beatrice, he or she had been clever enough to conceal the true nature of the crime. It wasn't likely such a killer would leave incriminating evidence lying around—even in secret compartments.

Anyway, she couldn't take Brock seriously as a potential murderer. He lacked the requisite resolve for such an act. But why had he never alluded to their previous acquaintance? He'd been young; perhaps he didn't remember any more than she had at first. Yet somehow he struck her as the type who would never forget a grievance, but would nurse it until it ripened into hatred. Should she disarm that hatred with an apology for her youthful unkindness? Or would it be better to let sleeping dogs lie?

She couldn't answer that question tonight. She restored the book to its hiding place, intending to show it to Luke later in case it might be significant, then blew out the candle and returned it to the drawer. She'd had enough of sleuthing for one night. All she wanted was a book and a hot bath, then bed.

Back in the library, she pulled out an old favorite—
Persuasion
. If Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth could get back together after so much water under the bridge, perhaps there was hope for her and Luke as well.

 

ten

The party … soon found themselves on the sea-shore; and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserved to look on it at all.

—
Persuasion

The sun streamed in through the southeast window of the tower at five thirty in the morning, waking Emily from a fitful dream in which Luke and Brock dueled on the beach with starfish for weapons, while their seconds—Mayor Trimble for Brock and Sunny Longman the unsunny waiter for Luke—cheered them on, with Dr. Griffiths standing by to mop up the blood.

Between the sun and her screaming bladder, Emily knew she'd never get back to sleep. The sky was clear, and breakfast was hours away. She slipped into chinos and a wool sweater and headed to the beach.

The lawn of Windy Corner sloped gently downward toward the water but ended abruptly in a rock-faced cliff about ten feet high. A rough wooden stairway intersected the rocks. At the bottom, a short stretch of low dunes gave way to a broad expanse of smooth, packed sand. The difference in tides here was dramatic, and the tide was currently near its low ebb.

The beach was public, but only rarely did walkers from town venture this far north, and never at this early hour. Emily had the beach to herself. She stood for a moment, feet planted shoulder-width apart and arms raised in a V, soaking the cold salt-laced wind in through her pores. At Windy Corner she still felt somewhat like a visitor, but here on the beach she was home.

She strolled aimlessly, stopping to peer at shells and stones and driftwood, loading her pockets with smaller pieces but having no real idea what she would do with them. She skirted a flock of gulls, startling them into flight, then followed a line of paw prints up near the high-tide mark, nose down like a tracking dog. The paw prints led her into loose sand, then abruptly turned and looped back. She stopped and looked up.

The prints had led her to the mouth of the Sacred Cove. A tiny cove—more of a cave, really—no more than ten feet across, the opening much narrower, and high enough on the beach that the tide rarely reached it. This was where she and Luke used to come to be alone.
Say it straight, Emily
—this is where they had come to make love.

Memories washed over her, irresistible as an undertow. They'd worked together at the ice-cream stand on the beach downtown. He'd won her with hardly a word—a smile from those teasing eyes was enough. That, and telling her she was beautiful. She'd never heard that word from anyone else, never thought it could possibly apply to her. It brought her down like an ax on a young fir.

She'd loved him so much she could taste it. It tasted like the sea and the sand and the mingled sweat of their bodies and the old wool blanket he spread out in the cove when they made love. It tasted like freedom and adventure and possibility, like all the endless things she could become by only pointing her finger and saying,
That one
.

Would that sixteen-year-old girl have pointed to a safe, slightly boring tenured professorship and a marriage based more on companionship than passion? The mature Emily doubted it. Those choices had come only later, when so many other possibilities had been washed away in the tide. Along with Luke himself.

But now he was back in her life. Or seemed ready to be if she wanted him. Would the moving finger point his way? She called to mind the words of the
Rubaiyat
—“The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”