Guess Who's Coming to Die? (29 page)
Read Guess Who's Coming to Die? Online
Authors: Patricia Sprinkle
But then she smiled, and I was again surprised at how attractive she was when she bothered to lift her lips. “Writing is a hobby of mine, and vintage clothes are another. I decided to put them together, and a historical magazine agreed to take an article on spec. Did you get what you came for?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I was thinking that Willena had a lot of the symptoms of cardiac poisoning, but Hetty assures me she didn’t eat anything here that could have poisoned her.”
“If it had happened in South America, we could blame one of them poisoned darts,” Hetty reflected. “But folks don’t use them much around here.”
Before I could speak, Wilma asked at the doorway, “Hetty? Who are you talking to?”
She had come in mighty quietly, for none of us had heard her in the hall. As she took in Rachel and me sitting cozily at the kitchen table, her thin nostrils flared in displeasure. She turned back to Hetty. “I told you this house is not open to the public. You were instructed not to let anybody in. Besides, you and Baker need to be packing. Go on, get your things together. Leave me your house keys now. And I want the two of you off the property before five o’clock.”
Hetty untied her apron, folded it neatly, and laid it on the counter. She pulled a ring of keys from the pocket of her uniform and laid them on top of the apron. Then she gave Wilma one long look in which there was neither subservience nor respect, and walked out.
“What are you all doing here?” Wilma demanded. Her face looked more pinched than usual that afternoon, and her cheeks each had a bright red spot of color. Fury, I supposed.
“I came to look at the pictures again,” Rachel admitted. “I was almost done, and I knew you weren’t likely to let me see them once you got your hands on them.” Her tone was almost insolent.
“I came to ask Hetty a few questions,” I said quickly. “I had a theory that Willena might have been poisoned.”
“Willena died of a heart attack,” Wilma snapped. “I kept telling her to get it checked, but she never did a blessed thing I asked her to do. In the end, she paid for that.” Her voice was full of self-righteous satisfaction.
“Somebody drove the corkscrew into her neck,” I pointed out.
Wilma put a hand to her cheek. “Don’t! I don’t want to think about that. I won’t think about it, do you hear me? It was terrible. Terrible!” Her face grew pinker and pinker and her voice rose.
I stood. “I think we ought to go, Rachel.”
Rachel slid her chair back and stood as well. But before we could take a step away from the table, Wilma said, “You aren’t going anywhere.”
We were looking down the barrel of a small silver pistol.
26
She smiled so pleasantly, you’d have thought she was offering candy, but the way her hand trembled, she could shoot us without meaning to. I calculated the distance from the table to where she stood. She was unlikely to kill us from there, but she could hurt us pretty bad.
I was trying to figure out how to get out of the situation safely when Rachel asked, in a voice that was amazingly steady, “What’s this about, Wilma?”
“It’s about nosy, trespassing busybodies.” Wilma spoke in exactly the tone she used when she was exasperated with somebody on a committee. “I told Hetty not to let anyone in.”
“We were going,” I reminded her. “You can put the gun away now. You don’t want to shoot anybody by mistake.”
“People are always telling me what I want to do and don’t want to do. I know what I want to do, Mac. I’m a planner. You know that. Life is all a matter of planning. I kept telling Willena, ‘You need to plan. Don’t go off helterskelter without thinking things through.’ But she never listened, of course. From the time she was a tiny thing, she always thought she knew best. Now look where it got her.” She brought a delicate blue hankie from her pocket with her free hand and dabbed her forehead. “It is warm in here. Hetty shouldn’t have turned the air-conditioning off and opened the windows.”
Grief takes different people in different ways. Looked to me like Wilma had either gone off her rails or was wobbling on them.
“Hetty’s probably saving you a few pennies. I wish Clarinda cared about that.” I aimed for a cheerful tone and to keep Wilma’s attention on me. Rachel had begun to edge away from the table.
Unfortunately, Wilma noticed. “Stop!” She gestured with the gun toward a door in the back corner of the kitchen. “Walk toward the back stairs. Both of you.”
“How long is this going to take?” I asked her. “Pretty soon Joe Riddley is going to begin to wonder why I’m staying so long and come looking for me.”
Wilma laughed. “Don’t try that old trick, Mac. We’re going upstairs.”
“It’s not a trick,” I protested. “He is firm about my writing him a note whenever I leave the office, stating where I’m going and when I’ll be back.”
“You’ll be back when I say so. To the stairs, please.” She gestured again with the gun.
Rachel hesitated. The way her eyes narrowed, I suspected she was calculating whether a tackle would succeed. “Humor her,” I advised, thinking.
Maybe on the stairs . . .
Maybe on the stairs . . .
I led the way to the door and opened it to reveal a narrow pine staircase varnished to resemble mahogany. It climbed straight up into darkness. The air inside was close and warm. I flipped a switch and one dim light showed a landing far ahead where the stairs turned back on themselves. The walls were varnished beaded board up to the narrow handrail, a dingy gray above it. They were so close on both sides that I felt like I needed to press my elbows to my waist.
“Go on. Get up there.” Wilma stood behind us and gestured for us to climb.
I’m not the athletic type, but it’s amazing how fast you can climb steep stairs with a gun at your back. We were soon half a flight ahead of Wilma. I turned and saw Rachel close at my back. “When we reach the second floor,” I murmured, “dash toward the first open door.”
Unfortunately, the door to the second floor was locked. We both tried the knob, but the door didn’t budge. “What now?” Rachel asked, looking down at Wilma, inexorably climbing.
Once the top floor was converted from servants’ quarters to the ballroom, Frank Kenan’s servants must have used the back stairs for serving food up there. I shuddered to think of all the heavy trays that had gone up that steep staircase, but I’d have given a great deal for one of them at the moment. Anything to throw down and distract Wilma. Why had I left my pocketbook on the kitchen floor beside my chair?
“Keep climbing. When we get in the ballroom, go right. I’ll go left,” I said softly. “She can’t shoot but one of us, and that gun is far likelier to maim than kill.”
“Comforting thought,” Rachel muttered. Still, she didn’t seem the least bit panicked. Maybe people who lived in New York were used to this kind of thing.
She wasn’t gasping, either. By the time we got to the third floor I was seeing stars and sucking air. Below us on the landing, Wilma was panting worse than me. The staircase ended in a closed door with a dull iron knob. An old-fashioned skeleton key was still stuck in the keyhole. I had the fleeting question whether Frank Kenan used to lock his servants in at night, but Wilma was already calling, “It’s unlocked. Go in and close it behind you.”
I hesitated, puzzled. Rachel passed me and bolted up the last few steps. As I followed her I tried to snatch the key, but it wouldn’t come out easily, and I was in a hurry. As soon as I was through, we slammed the door and leaned our backs against it, although I didn’t feel like much of an impediment if Wilma wanted in. I hadn’t climbed so far at once in years. My legs quivered like the leaves outside the windows, responding to a light breeze.
Ahead of us the ballroom was stuffy, vast, silent, and very warm. Apparently the air-conditioning upstairs was turned on only for events. Dust motes danced in sunlight filtering through leafy branches. The hot space was empty except for a grand piano in one corner, a bar at the back, a table with two chairs near a front window, and one odd chair at the far wall.
“What now?” Rachel whispered.
I pressed my ear to the door and heard Wilma climbing up the stairs. Her steps were weary and her breath came out in little grunts. “Can you run over and bring that chair to put under the knob?” I couldn’t run even to save both our lives.
Rachel sped to the solitary chair and was back before Wilma reached the top step. The back of the chair fit securely under the knob. Elated, we slid to the floor and exchanged a silent high five.
Our celebration was short. We heard a sharp click, then Wilma’s steps going back down. “She’s locked us in!” Rachel got to her knees and grasped the knob. The door wouldn’t budge.
“Not to worry. The main entrance is over there.” I wasn’t sure my legs were ever going to bear my weight again, but I rose painfully to my feet and took a couple of experimental steps. I might make it to the other doors.
We staggered across the floor to big double doors that Frank Kenan had installed when he had extended the front staircase to the third floor and created the ballroom.
Those doors were locked as well.
Rachel and I stood looking at each other in disbelief. “What’s this all about?” she asked.
“If I were to guess, she’s holding us prisoner while she calls the police.”
I could see Charlie Muggins’s satisfied smirk when Wilma triumphantly flung open the door and he saw me. Like I said, he’s been trying to catch me in some criminal activity ever since I became a judge. I doubted that Wilma could make a trespassing charge stick, since Hetty had invited me in, but hauling me before another judge’s bench would give Charlie enormous satisfaction.
“Do you think we could . . . you know, push the key out on the other side and pull it under the door?”
“Like they do in detective stories?” I asked dryly. “No, hon. There’s a step immediately beneath it, and no crack under the door. If there had been, we’d have seen light through the crack while we were climbing.”
We circled the room, peering down from all twelve windows, four each on three sides. At the front, the porch roof prevented us from seeing the drive, but I presumed my car and Wilma’s were both still there.
Speaking of seeing, I wondered what had happened to all the chairs that had lined the room for Joe Riddley’s prom, small gold chairs with red velvet cushions. There must have been fifty that night. Were only three left? I considered the two sitting at the small table placed near a front window. Had Willena and Grover come up here for romantic meals and dancing?
As I moved over to the side windows, I heard a crunching sound from outside. “Oh, no!” Rachel exclaimed, and started banging on a front window. I hurried to join her and watched Wilma drive away in her silver Cadillac. Lincoln seldom drove her unless she was going a distance or had things to carry.
“Where’s she going?” Rachel whispered, as if her voice had left with Wilma.
I tried to speak briskly. “Home, I imagine. She’ll call the police and let them come and find us. I hope. It’s possible she won’t bother to call them, but plans to leave us here awhile to stew.”
“Hetty knows we’re here.” Was Rachel trying to comfort me or herself?
“Hetty doesn’t know doodley-squat,” I said bluntly. “She’s over in her apartment packing and can’t see the front of the house from her windows. I’m sure Wilma will have locked up the house, and Hetty no longer has keys, remember? Besides, for all she knows, Wilma took us both somewhere with her and will bring us back later for our cars. We’re in a pickle, hon.”
The air felt warmer and closer every minute. I could tell myself there was plenty of oxygen, but I was having trouble believing it.
“Maybe we can get out a window.” Rachel stripped off her jacket and dropped it onto the little table, then headed to look for a route of escape.
In opposite directions we circled the ballroom again like wallflowers in search of partners, but the windows were small and had been painted shut sometime since the advent of air-conditioning. No windows at all overlooked the garage and Hetty’s apartment. That wall held the double doors at the front, a small one in the center, and the door to the kitchen at the back. When we opened the door in the middle, it led to a storeroom piled high with small tables and all the chairs I remembered.
Rachel peered through the gloom. “Are there windows behind all the chairs?”
I craned my neck, but saw not a glimmer of light. “Nope. This side was probably an attic storeroom when the servants’ bedrooms were up here. Maybe if we break a front window and yell together, Hetty or Baker will hear us.”
Rachel dashed across the room, hoisted a chair, and smashed a front window before I’d finished the sentence. Glass spattered the porch roof far below, and a blessedly cool breeze flitted in. We both leaned toward the window to savor moving fresh air.
But though we called until we were hoarse, Hetty and Baker did not respond.
“Let’s wait until we hear them loading up their truck,” I croaked. “Then we can yell again. I sure wish we’d brought our tea up with us. I need to wet my whistle.”
Rachel gave me a rueful grin. “Anticipated death distracts the mind. The way Wilma was shaking, I was fully occupied with praying her gun wouldn’t go off.”
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