The Body in the Ivy (23 page)

The kitchen was empty. She crossed the room to get some paper towels. There might not be anyone here now, but someone
had
been here. The photograph that Chris had left on the counter was gone.

 

Faith wandered upstairs and went into her room. She'd made her bed earlier, and the only book she'd brought with her was Barbara Bailey Bishop's. It might be a page-turner, but Faith didn't feel much like turning its pages. She had only brought the one, assuming she'd be too busy and subsequently too tired, to do much reading. There was a bookcase on the landing and a floor-to-ceiling one in the living room. She could look in both places, but she felt too agitated to sit. She thought about going outside and searching for Brent Justice. At the least, she should check out his cabin again.

She assumed everyone was sleeping in, aside from Chris. It was still very early and there had been no sounds, save faint snoring from Maggie's room. Gwen wasn't typing. Elaine might be up and working, but Faith didn't go to that end of the hall. What had the author covered up so hastily when Faith came to tell her about Bobbi Dolan? It could have been nothing more than a new chapter, but why shield it? It wouldn't have meant anything to Faith.

She sighed heavily. The combination of boredom and anxiety was crippling. She almost crawled back into bed herself and would have if it hadn't been made. She was annoyed with herself. Inaction had never been a problem before and it wouldn't be now. She'd been hired to cook and cook she would. So what if no one was eating? She'd make chocolate chip cookies—big, chewy ones—and fill the house with their seductive smell. Then she'd bake some bread and make soup, chowder or perhaps the fennel soup Elaine had remembered. She went into the luxuriously appointed bathroom and splashed water from the brass, surely not gold-plated, taps on her face. So far, she'd taken showers, but after her labors today, she'd indulge herself with a long soak in the deep tub, using one of the bath oils from the veritable cornucopia of products laid out on the vanity table.

She left the bathroom and grabbed a sweatshirt and heavy socks before leaving. The first thing she had to do was try to locate Brent.

Downstairs she noticed that in her absence, the kitchen had had several visitors. Two mugs were in the sink and the basket of baked goods visibly diminished.
Someone appeared partial to Faith's maple walnut scones. She'd make some more.

She put on rain gear from the closet, struck anew by the assortment, and left the house. It wasn't pea soup, but cotton wool—a white fog that threatened to suffocate her. After walking a few steps and seeing the house disappear behind her, she turned back. Fog was a tricky thing, and without a ball of string, she would surely lose her way in the labyrinthine mist.

Instead she soon became lost in her labors. The time passed quickly once she filled it with the familiar motions of sifting flour, breaking eggs, creaming butter, and beating batter.

Phoebe James walked into the kitchen just as Faith was taking the last batch of cookies from one of the ovens. The scones were baking in the other and she had bread rising on the counter.

“It smells heavenly in here. I couldn't resist, although I should.”

“I was just going to take a break and have some cookies. I can't resist, either, especially when they're still warm. Join me?”

“Why not? Have you got skim milk? That will ease my conscience and drown out my girls' voices.”

Faith poured two glasses of milk and suggested they take a plate of cookies into the living room where they could be more comfortable. In truth, it was the image of Chris Barker on the same stool and her horrible words that she wanted to distance herself from.

“I'll take the timer with me. There are scones in the oven.”

“You devil, you! But I could always push my plate away.”

“If you don't mind my saying so, you are certainly not—”

“Obese? No, I don't mind. But I
am
overweight.”

“Okay, a little, but you, all of you, are very attractive women. I would never have guessed that it's been what, forty years, since you were in college.”

“Thank you.” Phoebe sat down on one of the couches facing the water, the view still totally shrouded in fog. Faith sat next to her and put the cookies on the low table in front of them. She took one and bit into it, the chocolate still soft. It was delectable. Phoebe seemed to think so, too.

“Mmmm, yummy. Food didn't start to matter to me that much until after I was married. In college, it was always Maggie who was fretting about calories. Of course, I'm small so every ounce has always shown. But food as solace, as reward, came later for me. At this point, it doesn't seem worth it, dieting, I mean. Every day I look at two gorgeous, skinny females who could walk into any ad you could name.”

“Your daughters?”

“Yup, the twins. Apples of their father's eye. Mine, too, until ‘Mommy' changed to ‘Mother!' and became a pejorative.”

“Hang in there. The teen years have been rocky for every mother and daughter I know. I fully expect my eight-year-old to reject me completely when she hits adolescence, which starts at eleven, if my son is anything to go by.”

Phoebe took another cookie and curled up on the couch.

“One can but hope. Anyway, they'll be off to college soon and after that you never really come home again.”

“Will they go to Pelham?” Faith was steadily steering her course.

“Oh no, well, I doubt it very much. They would never choose a women's college.”

“Did you like Pelham?”

“It was a wonderful education. I hadn't thought about that part much, how great the classes would be. I was used to good teachers, but not to being in a community of learners, people who were excited about what they were studying, people who were excited to teach you what they knew and get you to think, really think.”

“It does sound wonderful,” Faith said. “That's what Pelham was like for my sister, too. She's a more recent grad. And besides the classes, it's the friendships she treasures. You seem to have picked up again with the women here, your old friends.”

“It's been good to see them, some of them.” She stopped, seemingly unsure how to qualify her statement.

“What was your major?” Faith asked quickly.

“Economics. It was an unusual choice for women at that time, but Pelham encouraged its students to take risks and it was a wonderful department. I also loved my English courses and my thesis bridged both subjects—an analysis of the symbolic discourse of Madison Avenue.”

“And what about Prin? She was an art history major, someone said. Did she do a thesis, too?”

A shadow crossed Phoebe's face. “She did and she didn't. It was an exploration of the relationship between the Museum of Modern Art's Good Design shows and the retailing of those products, specifically furniture by Eames and other pioneers.”

“Sounds interesting. Both of them,” she said. “You all lived together, right, in the penthouse of the dorm?”

“We all had single rooms. We were really very separate those two years. Everyone was very independent.” Phoebe set her empty glass on the table, but didn't reach for a cookie. She uncurled her legs and sat up straight.

“Your thesis was published in a journal, I understand. What about the one you wrote for Prin?” It wasn't a very wild guess, just a daring move.

“It wasn't, wait…I didn't, that is, maybe I…” Phoebe's face was flushed with confusion.

“But why? Why would you write a whole thesis for her?”

The Prince sisters seemed markedly adept at plagiarism.

Phoebe's face shut down completely.

“I don't want to talk about it. It's none of your business.”

She got up and started to leave the room, pausing at the door to say politely, “Thank you for the cookies. They were delicious.”

Old habits die hard.

 

Faith put out various things for lunch and all the women except Phoebe and Gwen came, some overlapping. Elaine commented on the fennel soup (see recipe, p. 320), liberally sprinkling hers with the pomegranate seeds Faith
suggested as a garnish, saying it was better than she had remembered. Besides the soup, Faith offered to make sandwiches, and there was fruit, plus the chocolate chip cookies to fill in any cracks. For a moment, when Lucy, Chris, and Rachel were sitting companionably at the dining room table, talking about their inability to duplicate Pelham's famous fudge cake, it seemed just like any other fog-bound vacation afternoon—warm and relaxed. Faith resolved to try the recipe she'd concocted after she'd been hired. She knew about the cake from Hope and decided to make it for the group, since Hope had declared her effort a reasonable facsimile. It would serve as tonight's dessert.

She knew Phoebe wasn't suffering any hunger pangs, but she thought she should check to see whether Gwen wanted another tray. She may have come down at some point in the morning, but she hadn't appeared for lunch. Faith went upstairs and knocked on the door.

“Ms. Mansfield? It's Faith. Would you like me to make up a tray for you?”

She knocked again. There was no reply. No sound at all. She put her ear against the door. They weren't hollow—thick oak or pine that had been painted—but she had been able to hear the sound of Gwen's typing yesterday and she could hear Rachel's guitar from her room. She turned the door handle, and as she expected, the door was locked.

She knocked once more, harder. Perhaps the woman was running a bath, or using the whirlpool feature. Faith decided to wait, make the cake, and try again, calling on the room phone. She should have done that in the first place, she realized, but the sense of being
cut off from everything was so absolute that she had almost forgotten about the internal communication system.

An hour later she was feeling distinctly uneasy. Gwen Mansfield hadn't answered the phone—a bath that long would leave her looking like one of the Dancing Raisins. Faith went into the pantry and back to the pegboard with all the keys. She thought about taking the one to Gwen's room, but as she reached for it, the image of the woman's reaction if she
was
there forced Faith to pull her hand back. Unlike Chris, Gwen didn't strike her as the outdoors type, claustrophobic after any extended time within four walls, yet she could be outside, sitting in the fog on the patio or porch now that the wind had died down and the rain become a drizzle. Faith went to the porch, but no one was there. She walked down the stairs, circling around to the patio, which was on the same side of the house as her room, and Gwen Mansfield's. It was empty, too. A portico for shade covered part of it during the summer months. The sides of the portico were latticed, and until the storm blew them away, there had been vestiges of wisteria vines that would have been in full bloom by the end of July. Faith eyed the construction. It did not appear to have been damaged and presented itself as a sturdy ladder to the flat roof above. Gwen's room overlooked it. Glancing around for she knew not what, Faith climbed up and pulled herself onto the roof. The window was set above it so as not to impede the view, but Faith could still see in. The curtains had not been drawn and the desk lamp, as well as the lamp next to the bed, were both on. She'd claim eccentricity if Gwen caught her Peeping Tom act.

It wasn't going to be necessary.

Faith couldn't see the entire bed, but what she could see caused her to turn around and rush down the latticework. Gwen Mansfield was lying across the foot of the bed facedown and motionless.

Faith entered one of the French doors, ran past the pool, and upstairs into the kitchen. She pulled open the pantry door and grabbed the key to Gwen's room from the pegboard. As an afterthought, she scooped up all the keys from the board, put them in a Baggie, and tucked that into a flour canister. Then she put the canister behind a phalanx of cleaning products and pails on the floor under the bottom shelf.

No one was in the kitchen and no one was upstairs in the hall. She opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind her.

There was no question that Gwen was dead. The air had that empty feel to it, the feel that's produced when no living creature has been breathing for a long time. The knife in her back, which Faith recognized as coming from the desk set that was a duplicate of the one in her own room, and probably every other room, was an unnecessary confirmation. The woman had been dead all day, killed sometime after eating the dinner Faith had prepared for her.

Bobbi Dolan. Gwen Mansfield. What had they done? What did they know?

Gwen's computer was on sleep, the tiny light blinking softly. Trying to avoid seeing the owner, awkwardly sprawled in the indignity of violent death, her blood dyeing the bed linens a grotesque red, Faith opened the laptop's lid and pressed a key. She knew
she was contaminating a crime scene, but it would be a long time before any investigators made their way to Bishop's Island, and she needed some answers now.

A line of icons indicating various programs and files stretched across the bottom and left-hand side of the screen. One read
Personal
. Faith clicked on it and it opened, displaying a request for a password. Of course. Gwen would never have left her life open to the casual, or not-so-casual, onlooker. Faith tried various combinations of Gwen's name, realizing that it would not be that simple. Ms. Mansfield was much too savvy. Even if Faith knew Gwen's birthday or Social Security number, it wouldn't be those. And then it hit her, and she typed in “PELHAM.” The file opened immediately:
Correspondence, Addresses, Birthdays, etc., China Inventory,
and
Misc.
She started with
Misc.;
it was empty. Then each of the others. They were all empty. Gwen, or more likely her murderer, had erased them.

Nothing was out of place in the bedroom or the bathroom. There was no sign of a struggle. Ashes were in the fireplace grate. She must have had a fire last night or at another time. Faith left the room, locking the door behind her, and thought of the vibrant, bold, successful woman lying there, snuffed out as completely as the flames in the fireplace.