Murder Under the Palms (29 page)

“Very pleased to meet you,” said Charlotte, taking note of Marianne’s expression as she gazed at the jeweler: jaw protruding, nostrils quivering, sharp brown eyes staring. It was a look reserved for something she had to possess, usually a man. “Like a bird dog with a fix on its quarry,” was how Spalding had once described it. She had obviously wasted no time finding another point of light on her path to artistic enlightenment, Charlotte thought, one that was, once again, unsuitably young.

The question was, what type of collection would Nikolai inspire? Actually, Charlotte couldn’t remember if Marianne had ever done a French collection. Her designs were usually more exotic, like the Uhuru collection inspired by the African nationalist or the Ballet Russe line inspired by the Russian ballet dancer who had defected to the United States. Maybe it was time for something basic, like a Champs Élysées collection.

Charlotte stepped forward to shake Nikolai’s hand. He was a good-looking man, shorter than Paul but with the same strong jaw and striking gray eyes. “I’m very sorry about your great-uncle,” she said.

Nikolai shook his head. “He was a great artist,” he said. “He taught me everything I know. I will miss him very much. Are you the lady who is interested in buying my uncle’s house?”

Charlotte wasn’t aware that she had expressed any such intention. “What makes you think that?” she asked, surprised.

“Marianne’s daughter, Dede, gave us that impression. She said you admired the house very much. But perhaps she was jumping to conclusions when she said that you might be interested in buying it,” he added apologetically.

But as he spoke, Charlotte realized that Dede hadn’t been jumping to conclusions at all. She had simply been reading Charlotte’s mind. “Is it for sale?” she asked, her intended purchase of a necklace now forgotten.

“Yes,” Nikolai replied. “It’s going on the market tomorrow. Would you like the real estate agent to show it to you? I could call her right now. There’s no time like the present, as the saying goes.”

Charlotte thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would.”

Charlotte had been thinking about Château en Espagne ever since the idea had first occurred to her that she might buy it. It had insinuated itself into her subconscious the way something does that is meant to be. In the back of her mind, she knew that she and the house were fated to spend the rest of her life together. Besides its visual appeal, it met all the basic criteria: convenient to airport, town, and beach, in a community in which she already had good friends. And it wasn’t overly expensive, at least by Palm Beach standards. (Where else was she going to spend all her hard-earned money? She had no one to leave it to.) It even had a built-in caretaker. She was sure that Dede would gladly look after the house when she was away. Perhaps because Charlotte had spent so much of her life on the road, the place where she lived had always been very important to her. In her mobile world, the houses she owned were the only places that didn’t change. Which was why she moved so infrequently and chose her houses with such care. Besides meeting all the basic criteria, Château en Espagne filled a less obvious but more important requirement. A house was not just a sterile body of molecules, it was an entity with a soul of its own, and the soul of this house resonated with her own.

Waiting now in the real estate office for the agent, who was on the telephone, Charlotte studied the brochure for the house, which was headed
Old World Elegance
. The text read: “Unique 1920s Spanish Revival villa, designed by renowned architect Addison Mizner, with signature exterior tower and spiral staircase. Superbly restored, with all the comforts of modern living. European in feeling, with soaring arches, rich stone floors, and glorious ceilings. With the purchase of Château en Espagne, you will be acquiring a piece of Palm Beach history.” From there, the description continued in smaller print: “This three-story Mizner home offers privacy with an in-town location. A pool accents the beautiful, junglelike grounds. The home has high ceilings and two fireplaces, four bedrooms, three and one-half baths, plus a two-car garage and a studio cottage with a bathroom.” This was followed by the price—one point seven million dollars—which was enough to support an African village for a couple of decades.

The real estate agent was a pretty woman in her forties named Eileen Finneran with the face of Ireland and the long, curly red hair to go with it. She had a vivacious personality and a leaning toward feminist New Age philosophies, evidenced by the plethora of crystals and amulets—many of them in the form of primitive goddesses—that hung from around her neck, dangled from her earlobes, and adorned the bangle bracelets on her freckled forearms. On the brief ride over to Château en Espagne, Eileen managed to deconstruct Charlotte’s fifty-year career in terms of the ascent of the ancient goddess over the modern patriarchal god. Charlotte wasn’t quite sure she liked seeing her career evaluated in such simplistic terms (her own talent and hard work had had something to do with it, after all), but she liked Eileen, and they hit it off immediately.

Ten minutes later, they were walking through the empty house. Since Charlotte had last been there, Paul’s personal belongings had been removed, presumably by his nephew, though the massive, Spanish-style, Mizner-designed furniture, which was original to Château en Espagne, remained.

“Does the furniture go with the house?” Charlotte asked as they entered the dining room, with its rich paneling imported from a Spanish monastery and its views of banana, orange, and palm trees through the undraped French doors.

“Yes,” Eileen replied. “Mr. Feder’s nephew has already arranged for the sale of his other things, as you can see, but he thought the furniture should remain, since it was designed especially for the house.”

“It’s lovely,” said Charlotte, running her fingers over the antiqued surface of the massive sideboard, and admiring once again the long dining room table, with its sling-back chairs of Spanish leather.

“It’s really a wonderful house,” Eileen said. “There aren’t many like this around anymore. Unfortunately, a lot of them have been torn down. People want to build something bigger, more pretentious.”

“Yes, it is a wonderful place,” Charlotte agreed. She loved its hidden-away quality, and the way the shafts of sunlight filtering through the vegetation rippled over the walls, like sun shining down through the water.

Without Paul’s personal belongings, it was easier for her to see how she might make the house her own.

As they climbed the spiral staircase to the tower a few minutes later, Charlotte could feel herself falling under the house’s spell once again. And by the time they reached the tower room, she had talked herself into buying it.

The tower room was empty now—its contents packed up and hauled away, including the album that was missing a couple of photographs, she thought, making a mental note to return them to Nikolai. Looking out at the waving crowns of the palms on the golf course, she could easily imagine herself spending the rest of her life here—or at least the rest of her winters.

But she had at least two reservations about buying her castle in the air. The first was the fact that its previous owner had been murdered. She wondered if that event left a taint on the house. She wasn’t superstitious, but she imagined that even unsuperstitious people might hesitate before buying a house under such circumstances.

“That’s easy,” said Eileen, when Charlotte broached the subject on their way back down the stairs. “There are all sorts of things you can do to purge a house of bad vibrations. You can burn sage, you can conduct a cleansing ritual, you can even call in a priest to do an exorcism,” she said. She stopped and turned to Charlotte. “But you know what I’d do?”

“What?” asked Charlotte, who found it hard to imagine herself participating in a New Age cleansing ritual.

“I’d sweep,” Eileen said.

“What?”

“I’d sweep. Isn’t that what women have always done down through the millennia? Swept in caves, in tents, in tipis; swept in log cabins, tract houses, castles. It’s always been the woman’s job to get rid of the old stuff. Superimpose their energy markings.”

“Swept in one-point-seven-million-dollar Palm Beach houses,” Charlotte added, then asked, “Do you mean sweep, literally?”

“Literally, and figuratively too,” Eileen replied. “Literally, what you need to do is clean the place up, especially the surfaces. Paint the walls, sand the floors, wash the windows.” She waved a bangled forearm around the entrance foyer, where they were standing. “It wouldn’t cost that much.”

“Not in comparison with what the house is going to cost.”

“Besides, the house needs some freshening up,” Eileen continued. “And figuratively. In the sense of starting over. Think of living in this house as the beginning of a new phase of your life.”

“Sweep!” Charlotte repeated. The idea of sweeping as a metaphor had captured her imagination. She pictured herself in the coral block-paved courtyard with an old corn broom, sweeping the past away: not only the past inhabitant of the house, but her own past as well.

But her other reservation couldn’t be dealt with as easily. It had to do with Eddie. She wondered if she should consult with him about buying the house. She didn’t want to push things with him, and consulting him certainly presumed a future relationship. But neither did she want to exclude him if he was going to be part of her future. On the other hand, would she want to have a relationship with a man who disapproved of a house that she loved?

Finally, she dismissed the issue altogether. Who said Eddie would even consider leaving Pasadena? There was no point in making a decision based on information that wasn’t pertinent. It was Occam’s Razor again: she was eliminating all unnecessary elements in the subject being analyzed.

From the entrance foyer, they headed out to the kitchen, which was small and dark—a remnant of the days when the kitchen was the realm of the staff. But that didn’t matter—Charlotte didn’t cook anyway.

Then Eileen opened the back door. “I have something else to show you,” she said, leading Charlotte out to the rear patio.

“The garage?”

“That—and something else,” she said mysteriously. After pausing to greet Lady Astor, who was lying down in her lean-to, Eileen led Charlotte into a narrow passageway between the back of the house and the back of the garage.

They emerged a moment later in a small courtyard with a latticework roof from which hung a collection of orchids. Pots of the exotic plants also stood on tiered shelves against the wall, their blooms perfuming the air. The center of the small space was occupied by a wrought-iron table and chairs.

“It’s a slat house. For orchids,” Eileen added. “Mr. Feder cultivated them as a hobby.” She took a seat at the table, on which the sun filtering through the slatted wooden roof had cast a basket-weave shadow. “Just the place to have your morning coffee,” she said, quick to point out the house’s best features.

“How wonderful!” said Charlotte, thinking that the orchids that hung from the trees in the garden must have been raised here. Stepping up to the shelf of plants, she leaned over to smell an unusual yellow specimen whose petals were mottled with orange. “Are they hard to grow?”

“Some kinds are,” Eileen replied. “But a lot are very easy. Most of these are moth orchids, which are very easy. They’re called that because the blossoms look like a group of moths in flight.”

Taking a seat at the table, Charlotte could indeed imagine herself sipping her morning coffee in the cool, shaded, intimate space, or lying in the hammock that was suspended across the opposite end of the courtyard, reading a script.

“Well,” said the real estate agent, “what do you think?”

“I think I’d like to buy it,” Charlotte said.

“Excellent,” said Eileen with a broad smile.

Reaching into her handbag, Charlotte pulled out her checkbook and set it on the table. Sometimes, she thought, being a goddess had its rewards.

After signing the purchase agreement, Charlotte walked down the street and past the clubhouse of the Everglades Club, following the route that she expected to become a daily part of her future routine. She had wanted to treat herself, and she had. She had bought a house. It was an act so extravagant that she could hardly wrap her mind around it. Like Mizner and Singer, she had come to Florida to recuperate (or at least to get away from the cold), and she had ended up with a castle in the air. Emerging on Worth Avenue, she turned right at the Spanish-tiled water trough with the “Dog Bar” sign above it (leave it to Palm Beach to have a water trough for dogs) toward the street that she was planning to take back to her hotel. She was so elated about the fact that this walk was to become a daily custom that she felt as if she was walking on air. Charlotte was a walker—a day in her life was not complete without a couple of miles around her East Side neighborhood, and what delighted her about Palm Beach was that it was a walker’s town. “It is a great art to saunter,” said Henry David Thoreau, one of her favorite philosophers. One could choose a vigorous walk on the beach or on the Lake Trail, or a more leisurely stroll down Worth Avenue, which Mizner had laid out specifically with the needs of the walker in mind. He had incorporated meandering alleyways, which he called
vias
, into his design for the town, which gave it the mysterious charm of an Eastern bazaar, albeit with somewhat overpriced merchandise. Charlotte loved the sense of surprise that came from wandering among the shops tucked away in the vias. One never knew what one would encounter next: a spiral staircase ascending out of sight, a niche containing an urn overflowing with colorful flowers, an aviary filled with brilliant tropical birds, a courtyard occupied by stylish shoppers drinking coffee at umbrella-shaded tables. To say nothing of the exotic and unusual wares—so removed from the oh-so-ordinary merchandise of the standard (for Palm Beach, anyway) Cartier, Gucci, and Tiffany.

And so it was that she found herself entering one of the cloistered walkways, drawn by the intriguing vista of a sunlit courtyard with an elegant marble fountain at its center. Once she reached the courtyard, however, it was the window display in the shop opposite that caught her eye. Standing in the window was a manikin wearing a Russian military greatcoat. It was identical to the manikin that had stood in the tower room at Château en Espagne. Her curiosity aroused, she headed across the courtyard to the store, which was called L’Antiquaire Militaire.