French Polished Murder (23 page)

Mom was putting iodine on the five, razor-thin claw marks on the palm of my hand when the phone rang.

It was the home phone, not my cell phone. She left me to finish patching myself up, while Fluffy looked up smugly from the sofa. I found I infinitely preferred Pythagoras’s neurotic approach to life.

“Well, of course, Ben, dear,” Mom said. Followed by, “Are you sure you’re feeling well? Right, right, here she is.”

She brought the phone toward me, but before she handed it over, she covered the receiver with her hand. “It’s Ben but . . . he sounds drunk. Is he taking any medications?”

“No, no,” I said. “He was up very late yesterday night, is all. He’s probably a little slaphappy.” Though he’d sounded perfectly normal when I’d left him.

As I picked up the phone, he sounded definitely far less than normal. In fact, he sounded as if he were more sleep deprived than he’d been the night before. “Dyce,” he said. “Thank God it’s you. You must not tell your mother anything. I think she’s spying for them.”

“Them?”

“The killers,” he said. “You know, they killed them and put them under the tree, and if you tell her, she’ll let them know and they’ll come for you, too.”

“Ben? Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” he said. “Had a shower. Put some moisturizer on. E still asleep. Must have had lots of ice cream and all yesterday.”

“Uh . . . yeah.” This sounded more normal, and I wasn’t sure that what he had said didn’t make perfect sense. After all, my mother had arranged for that tea, and my keys had disappeared during it. I refused to think she had anything to do with the disappearance, but you never knew. And Ben wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, so if he thought that my mother was involved, she probably was.

I looked at my wristwatch. It is one of the delights of my existence that the only watch I haven’t managed to kill in my thirty years of life is a Mickey Mouse Timex. So good to be taken seriously in social occasions or at the office. It was almost time to go see what Diane Martin wanted with me. “I’ll be home in an hour, perhaps less. Do you think you can hold the fort until then?”

“Of course!” he said, sounding offended. “I’m feeding Ratso now. Then I’ll feed the others. I think it is time we start trying to give them some dry food, you know. I’ll tell Nick to buy some Cheerios.”

“Is he on the way there?”

There was a hesitation. “No, he’s investigating. You know, with the corpses under the trees and all. They need to be dug up, so I’m sure he’s doing that. But I’m sure he’ll come here afterward.” Pause. “He’s a nice man.”

“I should hope so,” I said and hung up the phone, wondering what had gotten Ben into such an odd state. I wasn’t sure I liked all this talk about finding corpses under the trees. Had someone actually found corpses under the trees? Or was it a matter of something Ben had heard? Were the police looking for corpses under the trees? If they’d found corpses and Cas had not called me, he was going to be so dead next time I saw him. I might even plant him under the nearest convenient tree.

“I have to go,” I told my mom, as she came back with a Band-Aid to put over the iodine. For a moment I flinched, remembering someone in one of Agatha Christie’s books who had been killed by having an infected substance substituted for iodine. But this was my mother. She might be disappointed with my path in life but I was reasonably sure she did not, in fact, wish to kill me.

In point of fact, should Mom ever wish to kill me, she’d probably do it by flinging a book at my head, or if she wanted to kill me slowly, by making me sit while she read me her complete collection of Patricia Wentworth. If she didn’t allow breaks for bathroom and food or sleep, that would do me in for sure, since Patricia Wentworth had written more than a hundred books.

“I have an appointment at eleven.”

“At the college?” Mother asked. Hope sprang eternal, I guess.

I had to shake my head and dash her expectations. “Uh. No. Just . . . just something that might result in a book.”

It might, except that it wouldn’t. Not ever.

The Martin house looked exactly the same as it had
last time I was there. Well, presumably minus some furniture in the carriage house. Unless it were a magically replenishing carriage house, like a very large and dusty cornucopia.

The housekeeper opened the door and this time didn’t look at me as though she thought I should have come to the tradesmen’s entrance. Instead, as she closed the door, trapping me in the cool, dark entrance hall, she said, “Oh, dear. I should have told you to wear a skirt and a nice blouse. Miss Martin is rather old-fashioned. I don’t know what she’ll make of your outfit.”

Since my outfit was a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, both clean and not mended, and I was wearing my nicer leather jacket, I didn’t answer her. If Miss Martin couldn’t handle it, then Miss Martin, clearly, ought to get out more.

The woman didn’t say anything else, and I followed her up two flights of stairs. One level up, the house seemed to open up and become much nicer, due to a massive oval skylight centered directly above the staircase, which bathed it in light. The staircase, itself, was probably walnut, well polished, with a red runner down the center held in place by little, polished wooden rods.

Our steps echoed hollowly as we climbed the staircase, all the way to the third floor. The stairs ended on a broad corridor from which a number of doors opened. The doors were double and tall enough to accommodate a twelve-foot-tall visitor—should one drop by. The red rug motif continued, though this time the rug was a Persian runner in predominantly red tones.

I thought that the whole place felt more like a museum than like a house.

The housekeeper turned right, then right again, went to the door, threw it wide and announced, exactly as if she were in some kind of reenactment, “Miss Candyce Dare, madam,” and bowed and stepped aside to let me enter.

It would not have surprised me in the least if I had been admitted to a throne room or one of those huge ball-rooms filled with people where everyone turns to stare at the newly announced person. But no. It was just a bedroom. A bedroom that had to be at least three hundred square feet, but a bedroom nonetheless.

The room was filled with flowers and baskets of flowers. I had an impression all those flowers had cards with names attached, too, and wondered who’d send them to an elderly invalid woman.

Against one wall was a bed—massive and curtained in white lace. The sort of bed one imagined all those cute little princess suites, in white and silver, that used to be sold for spoiled little girls, were modeled upon. Only this bed was much larger. As was the armoire and the dresser.

Miss Martin was reclining upon a rosewood frame velvet upholstered love seat. She had a lovely shawl over her shoulders and a pretty fluffy blanket across her legs.

The resemblance to the romantic Victorian virgin my mind had been expecting stopped there. In fact, Miss Martin, looked like one of those women who get stronger as they get thinner and dryer. She had white hair cut so short it formed a sort of fuzz on her head. Her nose was aquiline, and her eyes a piercing blue. She reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t quite place whom. She waved for me to sit down on an armchair that matched the love seat and was placed directly facing it, so that she could hold court, I suppose.

For the longest time, she looked at me and said nothing, and I contented myself with looking back at her, unblinking.

At long last she sighed. “So you are Elizabeth Dare’s little granddaughter.” She nodded. “I never thought that son of hers would get married. He was an odd bird.”

“He still is,” I said, calmly.

She gave me the once-over with those blazing blue eyes, as though saying, “So that’s how you want to play it.” I smiled back at her, and she looked away, toward the heavily curtained window near the end of the love seat.

“I heard about your project. The book you’re intending to write about Mama.”

“It’s actually not a book about your mother, Miss Martin,” I said, softly, remembering what they’d said about her having had a stroke. “It’s about unexplained criminal occurrences in Colorado, specifically in Goldport. You know, one of those unsolved-mysteries things. People like reading that sort of thing. I thought I would mention your mother’s disappearance, as well as the disappearance of Mr. Jacinth Jones at the same time.”

I don’t now what reaction I expected. If I had wanted to provoke shock or horror, I’d have been disappointed. She remained absolutely impassive. Of course, the Martins would have told her about what I was looking into, so she would be unsurprised.

“Your nephew told me what you said to him,” I said. “About your mama.”

She sighed. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s very hard to tell the truth to the young. And sometimes, despite one’s best intentions, one doesn’t.”

I looked at her in silence. I didn’t know what to do with that, particularly since compared to her, I was definitely very much “young.” I made a note that she might feel it necessary to lie to me, but was completely unprepared for what came next.

“That small table against the wall, Miss Dare. You’ll find a picture in a silver frame there. The frame has a basrelief of calla lilies. If you would be so kind as to bring it over here.”

I went over, picked up the frame that showed the picture of a blond woman, obviously from the beginning of the century, and brought it back. Miss Martin made no effort to pick it up, and instead motioned for me to sit again. “That is a picture of my mother,” she said, in the grand manner of someone announcing that they’ve just discovered the meaning of the universe and it all boiled down to penguins.

All the same, whether she wounded a few quarts short of a gallon or not, I was interested in the picture. So this was the Almeria who’d written the note I’d found in my piano. I looked closely at it. It was nothing like I expected. Given her son’s looks—and even her daughter sitting before me had a trace of what must have been near enough a naturally golden skin—I would have expected Almeria to be an olive-skinned, black-haired beauty.

She was none of the above. She looked exactly like the kind of woman that, after meeting, you say
She’s very nice.
Blond hair and a rounded face, large blue eyes, a nice enough nose, and the kind of expression that every child dreams his mother will have while he tells her of his exploits.

Her attire, too, was nothing exceptional. A skirt and jacket, with the jacket cut loose and the skirt covering her to the ankles. She wore a hat that looked like a feminized version of a fedora.

I stared at the picture wondering if, truly, anyone could think that Almeria had ever had a grand romance, much less an adulterous one. She looked kind, nice, sensible. The type of woman who would remind her husband to take his vitamins and always make sure that her children went to school with an appropriate, healthy snack.

Even in modern days I had trouble believing she would be a force to reckon with in, say, the PTA. More likely she would not be able to make meetings because she was sewing a dress for her daughter, baking those cookies her son really liked, and making sure her husband’s notes were collated and ready for his big meeting.

As far as her appearance went, she was, in fact, a nonentity, not even different enough to be considered exceptionally good- or bad-looking. I frowned at her and found myself wondering if perhaps she had been stalking Jacinth Jones. What was really behind that letter, with its passionate closing of “Yours, Almeria
.
”

“My mother, Miss Dare,” Miss Martin said, in an authoritative voice that made it impossible for me to correct the mistake of my honorific, “was an exceptional woman. She was not a native of Colorado. Grew up in Philadelphia. I daresay when my father met her, he thought he was getting a rather conventional wife. He couldn’t have been more wrong.”

She looked up at me, and her blue eyes sparkled. “Her exterior might have been placid and accommodating, but she was a woman of ideas. For that time and place, very revolutionary ideas. She thought, for instance, that child labor should be stamped out. She thought that all children should have access to a good education and that, given a good education, most poor children could perform at a level far higher than their place in society. Though she was not foolish or blindly idealistic. She understood the need for proper nutrition and hygiene with the rest.”

“I don’t know how long it took my father to realize that the woman he had married was nothing like the woman he had thought he was marrying.” She looked ahead of her and at the heavily curtained window, again. “She was private. Didn’t think it was the place of a lady to speak of her politics, her religion, or any of her beliefs. She had her generation’s—” a rueful smile “—and, indeed, my conviction that a woman’s intellect is, perforce, always inferior to a man’s. Even if she were aware that this was not true in every case, she was too much of a lady to mention it. So in public, she pretended to believe in everything my father said and support all his causes. She stood by him, the unexceptionable political wife, while he ran for office.