Dead in the Water (Olivia Grant Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

By the third round my suspicions had hardened into reality. Not only did they try to land me in unmakeable contracts but, when playing declarer to my dummy, frequently messed up perfect opportunities to take the necessary tricks and score points.

In addition, their comments and occasional smiles and winks soon alerted me to their scheme, one I decided had been used successfully with Noreen. To put it bluntly, I suspected they considered Noreen a cash cow. She not only liked to play for high stakes but did most of the losing. So, in the long run, the other three could make out like bandits. For all I knew, they had an agreement between them to bundle all their winnings and split the take three ways.

That was discouraging enough. Not that I cared that Noreen's playing caused her to lose money, but it was my Uncle Edward's money she lost every week. In addition, my probing for information had yielded little.

As we changed seats after the first round, I brought up the subject again. "So you were Noreen's best friends. When her husband died, she must have been grateful for your support."

"Right," Vicki said. "We were that close."

"Nevertheless she must have been lonely at times. A young, attractive woman like that, all alone."

"Oh, not for long," Wanda said. "Noreen had many admirers."

Vicki laughed. "Admirers? I should say they were more than that. Lovers more likely."

Aha, just as I suspected. I looked from one to the other, waiting to see which one would elaborate.

But Charlene, as if realizing the others had said too much, cleared her throat loudly. "We don't know that for sure, Vicki. She never mentioned anyone in particular."

"Well, there was that one bloke," Vicki said.

"A special boyfriend?" I asked. "What about him?"

"I don't know about special," Wanda said. "He was like the others, I expect. She always liked big men and, you know, sort of macho."

"And he liked to dance," Vicki added.

"They went dancing?"

"At that club where she used to go often with the nephew."

Chaz's club. A dozen more questions flooded my mind, but Charlene reminded her friends they must play bridge not engage in gossip and insisted we get back to the game. I returned to looking at my cards, planning to wait for a further opportunity to ask more questions. None came.

On the last round, Wanda and I were partners, and the bidding was weird. I won't go into detail, because if you don't play bridge, you won't understand it anyway.

Suffice it to say, on the last hand, no matter how conservative my bidding, Wanda managed to steer us into a too-high bid. My suspicions seemed justified. At first she showed a weak hand, but eventually she pushed me into what she probably perceived as an unmakeable contract.

Then, to make matters worse, Charlene, sitting west on my left, said, "Double." That meant if I couldn't make the contract and went down, she'd get double the penalty points, and I felt sure I would go down. I could only grin and bear it.

Then Wanda said, "Redouble." She had compounded our loss by quadrupling the penalties! If I hadn't already been sure of it, she'd now confirmed I guessed right about the situation.

Vicki, on my right, spoke in a petulant voice. "Charlene, are you sure you should have doubled? Now she knows who's holding most of the high cards."

Talking about the hands is strictly forbidden in a normal game, but this one was far from normal anyway.

"Won't do her any good," Charlene said, a smirk pulling up the corners of her mouth. "Anyways, Wanda redoubled. Maybe I don't have all the high cards after all." Nevertheless she laid down the ace of diamonds.

Before Wanda, as dummy, began to place her cards face up on the table, Charlene raised her hand to stop her and looked at me. "What say we have a little side bet, you and me?"

"What kind of side bet?"

"I haven't seen the dummy cards yet, but I don't think you can make this hand, and I'm willing to wager twenty pounds on it."

A twenty-pound side bet? Did they do this sort of thing to Noreen, or did her steady losing at two or five pence a point satisfy them? Or did they wish to cheat
me
today? Had my normal, conservative playing hampered them and made them desperate to put up one last-ditch effort to score big?

I could barely hide my frustration. I was tired of the sound of rain against the windows, tired of their almost transparent strategy, and tired of getting so little information out of them. More than that, I was angry. I said, "All right," and immediately wished I could take it back. Idiot! Fool! 

Wanda laid her cards on the table for all of us to see, and she had a good hand, after all. My spirits lifted.

Charlene's forehead creased into a frown. She, too, looked surprised by Wanda's hand, but she quickly put her smile back in place. Yet there was more bad news to come.

Looking at my own hand I saw I could take nine tricks, but I needed ten, and I could see no way to get the tenth one. I dredged my mind for ideas, but none of them seemed likely to work that time.

Without going into detail, trust me that I found a line of play and won after all. As I claimed the last trick, Charlene stared daggers at me, Vicki looked as if she'd like to slip poison into her partner's brandy, and Wanda looked completely dumbfounded.

"I believe we've played our twelve hands," I said, and Vicki and Wanda wasted no time in getting up from their chairs. Charlene, who had commandeered the score pad from the first, remained sitting, grim-faced and tight-lipped, while she added up the points for each player. The double and redouble had quadrupled mine. Then she fished into her handbag and threw a wad of bills on the table.

I couldn't tell if she gave me the right amount. I didn't much care. As I said, I rarely played for money. It was the challenge of the game that intrigued me: trying to determine by intuition and experience what cards the opponents held and using skill to play my own cards correctly.

Hmmm. Suddenly it seemed to me that playing bridge resembled detective work. No wonder I kept trying to solve the mystery of Noreen's death: asking questions, trying to read answers in people's looks and gestures. Maybe, since I could win at bridge, I'd be pretty good at playing sleuth as well.

After Noreen's chums departed—with hardly a good-bye among the three of them at the front door—I returned to the drawing room to put the cards and used glasses away. To my surprise, Chaz sat in one of the chairs at the table making a house of cards. He created a third level to his structure with remarkably steady hands.

He looked up when I came in. "I say, this looks like fun. Plus, when I came down to the library, I heard laughing."

I explained that three of Noreen's lady friends had been there. "We were playing bridge, not normally a funny game."

"But you enjoyed it." A statement, not a question. "How'd you like to teach me to play?"

"You knew Noreen played bridge with them, didn't you? If you wanted to learn, you could have asked her to teach you."

"I'm asking you." He picked up the money Charlene had thrown on the table, got up, and came to stand in front of me. "You seem to have come out the winner. Might as well learn from the best, eh?" One by one, he thrust the bills into the neckline of my dress. Gently, erotically.

I backed away, removing the bills. "I don't think so."

"You're attracted to me. I can tell. Why don't we stop this cat-and-mouse game, go upstairs, and spend a cold, rainy afternoon cuddling under my quilt?"

I tried to think of the right words to turn him off. "Chaz, be serious. I'm much older than you are."

"Don't give me that 'old enough to be your mother' routine. We both know that's not true. And what has age got to do with it anyway, so long as we're both adults?"

"This particular adult isn't interested in pursuing a…" I left the sentence unfinished and started a new one.

"My brother Brad is almost your age." Okay, I exaggerated. "You wouldn't want to make love to a woman who was thinking you were her younger brother, would you?"

He moved toward me again, his voice soft and seductive. "You think what you want, and I'll think what I want."

I couldn't help smiling. "If you promise to behave in future," I said over my shoulder, "I won't tell your mother."

His laughter followed me down the hall.

*  * *

Chaz didn't appear the rest of the weekend, which didn't surprise me, and on Monday Jason went back to work, Beryl to another women's club meeting, and William, Alice, and Elizabeth finished making funeral arrangements.

In the evening, no doubt feeling guilty that my visit had turned out so strangely, they took me to a posh restaurant for dinner, and I joined in the conversation about other subjects than the one which preoccupied me.

Despite the still-pouring rain, Noreen's funeral took place on Tuesday. The service was held in the local church, less than a mile from Mason Hall. The doors of the small, moss-covered stone building looked too large for its size, and inside I saw worn wooden pews and a small stained glass window. As we family members sat in the front pews, I didn't have an opportunity to determine if a mysterious stranger made an appearance.

The local vicar read a eulogy both blessedly short and totally unrelated to Noreen's character. Apparently to fill time, we sang several hymns until the vicar determined we'd observed the necessary formality.

No, I did not know the woman, and, yes, I thought she probably deserved her fate, so when I found my eyes filling with tears, I recognized my feelings came from the funeral of my husband Stephen. To keep from making a public spectacle of myself, I tried to think of something less stressful, and I remembered the time Stephen and I went into a funeral home to choose a casket for my maternal grandfather. We descended stairs to the lower level of the building, and the very sight of the caskets made us solemn, especially the small ones made for babies. After touring the entire room, we came upon one regular-sized casket with a sign on top reading, "This is not a casket."

Stephen had looked at me and said, "Do you suppose it's a sailboat?" The tension broke, and we both cracked up.

I tried to stifle my giggles and said, "We mustn't laugh. What if they have microphones down here like used car dealers have in their offices?" Then we exploded into more loud guffaws.

Well, maybe you had to be there.

Now, sitting next to Elizabeth, I covered my face and held my cheeks together lest the memory send me into gales of laughter again.

Afterward, mourners came forward, passed the closed casket, and shook hands with us, murmuring appropriate sentiments. I recognized Charlene, Vicki, and Wanda, but they seemed to go out of their way to avoid me. Alice identified the others for me: friends, shopkeepers, and tenants of the family-owned properties that occupied the village. Everyone accounted for. No one who didn't belong or looked even remotely like a suspect.

Coats pulled tightly around shoulders, umbrellas raised, we all trooped out to the graveyard behind the church. Someone had obligingly set out stiff black runners so we didn't have to walk on sodden grass. Brought up with Hollywood films, where it always rains during funerals, I accepted the dark clouds that dripped water like a leaky faucet. Between grey skies and all the black clothing, the scene resembled a movie shot in black and white.

The outdoor service was also mercifully brief, but due to the hats worn by the mourners and the umbrellas over their heads, I could barely see any faces, even if by looks alone I'd be able to identify someone who might have been Noreen's murderer. Then I noticed Chaz standing off to one side with three young men, presumably his band members. Their attendance surprised me, since I would have thought the ceremony too old-fashioned, too reeking of tradition, for them. Yet could one of them have been Noreen's lover? After all, Chaz had supposedly met Noreen at the club where they played. Perhaps she'd been involved with one of those men as well. Before I could question them to learn more, the four of them disappeared immediately afterward, not coming to the house for refreshments.

While I concocted a substantial lunch for myself from the sandwiches and cakes Alice and Annie had whipped up that morning, I made mental plans to go hear the band perform. The thought of becoming a "groupie" made me smile, until I discovered an elderly woman frowning at my seeming levity from across the room, and I hid the grin on my face behind a cup of tea.

* * *

Afterward, Elizabeth and I helped Alice mop the stone floors in the great hall, where visitors had left wet and muddy footprints. At two o'clock, we joined the other family members gathered at Jason's behest in the drawing room.

Jason stood behind the desk, looking like a political-cartoon senator. He cleared his throat several times, waiting for us to pull up chairs in a kind of ragged semicircle in front of him.

"As you remember," he began, "the solicitor read Uncle Edward's will a few weeks ago. Now it's my task to read his widow's final testament." He paused dramatically, looking at us over the tops of his wire-framed reading glasses.

Aunt Beryl gave a long, slow sigh, and Chaz muttered a remark, probably something cynical, under his breath.

Having caught our attention by making his pronouncement sound ominous, Jason then relaxed somewhat, and his lips curled upward. "I have the good fortune," he said, "to tell you we found no new will signed by Noreen, and, inasmuch as she died three weeks after Edward, the wills they made out together will prevail."

"What does that mean?" Aunt Alice asked.

"A clause in the original wills," he paused while he adjusted his glasses and turned pages in the legal document he held, "states that should the two parties die within thirty days of one another, they are considered to have died simultaneously. Therefore the property did not pass from Edward to Noreen after all."

I knew the concept, which no doubt grew out of times when both husband and wife were involved in an accident together, and one died mere hours or days after the other. I didn't know, however, that British wills also used such a clause.

"Do you mean," Elizabeth said, "that Noreen didn't inherit after all?"

"Precisely." Jason removed his glasses and laid them, along with the document, on the desk.

Chaz stood up. "Then who does?"

William, who I presumed had known about the outcome before the rest of us and had been sitting well back in a wing chair, legs outstretched before him, answered. "I do."

Still, his face didn't betray how he felt about it.

Chaz sat down again. "That's a rum go."

"What else is in the will?" Alice asked.

"Some small bequests to servants," Jason said, "but basically, nothing happens. We all go on as before." He smiled, pleased with himself.

From his tone, Chaz was not so pleased. "Easy for you. You like living in this mausoleum. What about me? Can't I get a little something so I can live normal-like, on my own?"

William sat up straight. "You're free to leave any time you like. You may find some employment, like Jason, to support yourself."

"Jason again. Always Jason. 'Be like Jason,'" he mimicked. "Well, I do support myself. I make as much as him, but I want my own place. It's time I had my privacy."

"You have your room," Beryl said, her voice quavering, as if she feared the exchange between her husband and younger son might erupt into violence. "And a lovely music studio besides."

Chaz vaulted from his seat, and this time he headed for the door. "Thanks for nothing."

A long silence followed his exit from the room, and I wondered if Chaz's animosity extended to Jason as well as Noreen. Jason, tight-lipped, made no comment on the altercation and gathered up the papers on the desk to put them in a folder. He'd finished his little will-reading ceremony.

As I left the drawing room, I thought of my parents having come to Uncle Edward's funeral and hearing the reading of that will, the one giving everything to Noreen. No wonder they were concerned. Even in the short time I'd been in the house, I'd learned that everyone despised her. I marveled she'd lasted three whole weeks.