Plundered Christmas (18 page)

Frau Schmidt pulled us over to the back door, and we looked through the window. She pointed towards the cellar. “Last I saw, she was running that way and dragging him after her.” She looked down at her ample stomach. “I tried to run to rescue your Jelly. But this didn't let me run. It's much better at cooking than running.”

I put my arm around her. She seemed to need it. “I know you did your best, Frau Schmidt. Don't worry, he knows, too.”

James, as he had been most of today, immediately got the troops in order. “Josie, take the box we found to Papa. He can show it to Miss Margo, and they can help us decide what to do about it. Justin, you and I will take off after Juliana and Jelly.”

“And me?” My voice cracked and sounded like a lost little child.

James pulled me for a kiss. “You, my dear, use that famous “curious” of yours to figure out why Juliana would take our dog and what she has to do with all of this.”

 

 

 

 

 

11

 

I stayed and helped Frau Schmidt assemble lunch.

After Josie'd given our find to an excited Papa and Miss Margo, she joined us to help prepare the meal.

We'd grown quite comfortable with the German cook. And Josie talked more German with her than I'd heard her ever practice at home.

“
Wie lange hat Juliana
…?” I could tell Josie was trying to do it right.

“How long?” asked the woman while she chopped up some celery for a salad. “She actually joined me about two months ago. She came with very good references and she worked hard. Until today, I had no cause to complain.” She thought a moment. “That's not exactly right. I scolded her something fierce a couple of days ago. It was very strange?”

“Do you mean bizarre?” I asked.

“Ja. Bizarre. We had a call to set out some food, and Mr. William asked for a special sandwich. I told Juliana to take out the special sandwich to him, and she would not do it. She tried to tell me that Mr. William scared her.” The cook brought the knife down hard on the cutting board as she thought about it.

I would never want to be on her bad side. “Did she give any other reason?” It seemed quite odd that Juliana didn't want anything to do with William. Especially since the man was now dead.

“Nein. She simply refused to do it. When I told her she must, she stood in that corner,” Mrs. Schmidt pointed over by the sink with her knife. “So I gave her potatoes to peel, and I took out the sandwich to William. She knows that peeling potatoes is the worst punishment.” She looked at the freezer. “And I gave her
all
the potatoes to peel. And she did it, too. All fifty pounds of them. I made a huge batch of potato cakes and mashed potatoes and froze them all. I won't have to make mashed potatoes for two months.”

So Juliana wouldn't have anything to do with William. And now she'd taken my dog. What on earth was going on?

Just when I thought things couldn't get any stranger, my brother burst into the kitchen. That set alarm bells ringing. This was my brother. He never willingly set foot in a kitchen. I remembered all the bribery and older sister rights I had to call in at Thanksgiving just to get him to agree to check on the turkey.

“I hoped I'd find you here,” he said. “Aimee ran off, and I can't find her anywhere.”

My poor brother. Was this another failed romance? “Did you two have a fight?” I put the last of the ham that I had been asked to slice on the platter and turned all my focus to him.

He grabbed a small piece and popped it in his mouth. The carnivore men in the Jensen clan didn't need to wait for anything as silly as bread or vegetables before eating meat.

“Frank!” I scolded. “That's part of lunch!”

But Frau Schmidt immediately came to his defense. “No, no, Miss Jeanine. It's good to see a man enjoy his meat.” Then she unobtrusively asked Josie to help her take the platters and bowls they had prepared out to the sideboard, so Frank and I could talk. As she left, she purposely did not take the platter of ham. She patted Frank on the arm. “You just eat as much of that as you'd like. Good to see a man eat.”

In spite of his agony about Aimee, he gave me that “see” look that he'd always done when he got one over on me as kids. Then as the door swung closed behind the cook and his niece, he opened up.

“No, we didn't fight,” he said after he swallowed. “Just the opposite. She came to find me about an hour and a half ago. She said that she'd seen all of you out front and learned that I was looking for her. For some reason, she had thought I wanted her to meet me down by the beach.” He found another small piece of ham and gobbled it down. “I hadn't sent her that message, so she got all confused. For a moment, it seemed to upset her. Then, I suggested we go try out the swimming pool since the generator was on and the filters would be working again.”

I gathered my brother probably had an ulterior motive for wanting to go for a swim with his intended. “Did she look good in her swimsuit?”

He rolled his eyes expressively. “And how! But we swam and talked a lot too. Then, when we were sitting by the side drying off, her phone buzzed. She looked at the text message and immediately things changed.”

“How so?”

“She looked like she was going to cry. Then she said, ‘Oh Frank!' After that, she kissed me and ran away.” This time, he didn't even bother to hide his enthusiasm for the meat. He grabbed the biggest piece he could find.

While he chomped away at the ham, I tried to piece things together. Something had clicked in the back of my mind, but it refused to make it all the way to the front. I knew that somehow Juliana running off with Jelly and Aimee scurrying off in tears were related. I just couldn't figure out how.

“Did she say anything else?”

“She told me that she really and truly loved me.” He looked down at the platter, trying to choose his next victim. “That was the way she put it, too. The really and truly part. It was like she was trying to convince me. I didn't get it. I mean, she agreed to marry me and told me she loved me before. What was all this ‘really and truly' business?” He selected a piece of ham that had a good amount of the seasoned outside connected with it. That part he pulled off first with his teeth and savored. It looked disgusting as he slurped it into his mouth like a piece of spaghetti.

I really hoped he hadn't done anything like that with Aimee. I liked the girl and could picture her as a sister-in-law, Banet roots or no. But I had to admit, she'd behaved oddly ever since William pointed out to Margo that she was a Banet.

William and Juliana. She wouldn't go near him. William and Aimee. He told her secret. What was I not getting?

“Well, if it's any consolation to you, brother of mine, I don't think it has anything to do with you. She's been acting strange on and off since we got here. One minute she's absolutely normal, then that phone buzzes or someone talks about her and she goes off the deep end.” Then I told him about Juliana and Jelly. “Somehow, I think it's all connected, but I can't figure out how.”

Frank liked Jelly so what he did next shouldn't have surprised me. “If you think that, then I'm going to help James find that dog of yours.” He grabbed another large piece of ham and headed for the back door.

The back door. Somehow, that fit in, too. The ghost on the night of the power outage. The one who knocked Charlie over. He had come in the front door, simply ran through and exited the back door. What of all this strangeness did the officials know?

Even though he probably didn't want to hear any more from me, I planned to go into the house and find the Coast Guard lieutenant. Someone had to let him know about all the rabbit trails. Maybe a totally impartial outsider would see the way to connect them.

As I opened the kitchen door, Josie came bursting through. “Do you know where the Coast Guard doctor went to? We have to find her!”

I caught her to slow her down. “What's going on, sweetie?”

“It's Miss Margo! Papa thinks she's having a heart attack!”

 

****

 

Let me say this against anyone thinking of owning a really big house, it makes it incredibly hard to find one particular person.

Mary had given her mother a baby aspirin because she'd read that helped in case of a heart attack, and she was the only one who knew the combination.

I sent Dad down the east wing because he wasn't essential, and adding legs to his worry would probably help him.

I went down the west wing.

It took me ten minutes, racing as fast as I could, to go to each door, open it and look inside to see if someone was there, then close the door and then run on to the next room. Remember, like a hotel, it had rooms on both sides. I checked all of them. No Coast Guard anyone. They hadn't all left with the helicopter, had they?

When I returned to the great room, Dad had found Lieutenant Owen. The lieutenant was on the phone, perhaps trying to find the doctor, or find out how to treat Margo.

I couldn't be sure because I couldn't hear him and his back was to me, too.

Mary had loosened the clothing her mother wore by unbuttoning the suit coat she had on and untucking her blouse from her skirt. Between this and the shark attack, the poor, very formal woman had suffered many indecencies.

Josie had the hand attached to Margo's good arm held between her two smaller hands and she was patting the top one. “Stay calm, Miss Margo,” she said over and over. “Breathe nice and easy.” She must have read somewhere that it was best to keep heart attack victims calm and quiet. Why ever she was doing it, it seemed to help the older woman. At least that one.

The other woman, Mrs. Schmidt, paced consistently in front of the sideboard of food. Whether it was the emergency at hand or the lack of people eating that caused her such consternation, I didn't know.

Finally, the Lieutenant put down his phone. “The doctor, Captain Gregory, had gone with the helicopter. But when they heard about the emergency, they turned around to bring her back. She'll be here in less than five minutes.” Then he went over to Josie and commended her on her bedside manner. “How did you know what to do?” he asked her.

“I read it once,” she answered, distractedly and continued to comfort Miss Margo.

I turned to my father who stood by one of the pillars. I wasn't sure if he was trying to support it or have it support him. “What happened, Dad?”

He ran a hand through his hair distractedly as he tried to focus on me and gather his thoughts. “I'm not sure. She was excited about the box with the letter and earrings, but she had me put it away in her room in the safe. When I got back, she and Josie were talking while Mary applied some of the ointment the doctor left and reapplied the gauze. Right after that, she complained about pain shooting down her leg, she began to sweat and she couldn't seem to catch her breath. It was the oddest thing.”

He looked over at my daughter with pride. “It was Josie who told us all that Margo might be having a heart attack. She said she read about the symptoms for women while she waited to see the doctor at her last physical. As soon as she mentioned that, Mary remembered the baby aspirin advice and rushed to get one from the bathroom.”

OK, I knew heart attacks could just happen anytime. But Margo seemed in good shape. I knew she swam (or did before the shark bite) in her pool nearly every morning, and she enjoyed walks around the island. The sudden heart attack seemed too convenient with everything going on. It pulled me away from what I had meant to do.

I looked at Margo. She was in good hands while waiting for the doctor. I turned to the uniformed man behind me. “Lieutenant? Can I talk to you about some of the other odd things that have happened on this island in the last three days? Maybe they'll help with your case.”

The expression on his face read
doubt
. But he looked at his watch and the situation around us. “Sure. You have five minutes.”

I led him over to the third couch that was still sitting by the fireplace. Was it just yesterday that we needed this burning full force just to keep some light and heat?

Then, I launched, as quickly as I could, into the taking of my dog and the parchments found. I repeated the part about the map that had been stolen from my pocket while I slept, the potentially drugged hot apple cider, the strange reactions of Aimee and Juliana to the dead William, and my missing coffee cup. I hadn't finished when I heard the whirring of the approaching chopper.

“Stay right there, Mrs. Talbott,” said the lieutenant. “I want to hear more of this when I get back from escorting the doctor back to the house. Actually what you're telling me could lend to motive.”

I promised to wait. I broke my promise before he got back in the building.

“Mom! Mom!” Justin came running into the backdoor. “Dad has caught Juliana. But Jelly's not with her, and she won't tell us where she took him.”

I turned to my father. “Dad. Tell the lieutenant where we went.” I asked Justin, “Just where are we going?”

“To the yellow boat at the docks.”

I asked my dad if he heard that. He raised an eyebrow like a certain Vulcan. Why did I seem to provoke that reaction in people? “But will you tell him I didn't mean to break the promise?”

He nodded. “Shoo.” He waved me to the door. “Get that girl to tell you what's going on so we can begin to have a real Christmas.”

As I left, I noticed Josie still patting Margo's hand. But they were talking quietly to each other. And Margo was crying. Not a sad crying, because she smiled at my daughter, but the tears poured down. I'd have to ask Josie later what they were talking about.

I followed Justin out the back door and down to the docks. It was still a beautiful day. The warm breeze seemed to call, come play with me. But I couldn't. Too many things pulled and tugged on my mind and on my time.