The Realm of the Shadows (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 2) (8 page)

He ducked his head at me, then walked away with Charlie. I had to smile. I wasn’t the only one he had charmed – Charlie was actually taking him into the barn.

I turned back to the house, calling Ed as I went. There would be no cemetery vigil for him tonight, with Teddy prowling around.

“You get to sleep in your own bed for once,” I said.

“You’d better get here by a quarter to ten, so we have time to talk before we go over,” he said.

“I’ll be there in plenty of time.”

It was actually a little reprieve for me. It would postpone getting Myrtle to accept having Ed around the house. But I still didn’t know how she was going to react when she found out that Michael and I were living together.

Michael managed to charm her. He had stood by her during some legal trouble not too long before, and he’d been the Cadbury family lawyer for two generations. She respected him because The Family had.

She made a simple dinner of salad and spaghetti, followed by dishes of ice cream, because The Family had always had dessert, whether entertaining or not.

During dinner, with the three of us seated at one end of the enormous banquet table by the fieldstone fireplace, I considered recruiting Michael for Round Two of trying to get information out of Myrtle. But by dessert time, I decided it would have to be done without him: she had a semi-worshipful attitude toward Michael, and if the lady in the loft made Vesta’s family look bad in any way, it’d be hard to get her to speak about it at all, let alone in front of a lawyer.

After dinner, she insisted on leaving us alone while she went up to her room to read. I felt good about bringing her back then; she was obviously glad to be home.

That night, Michael and I made a mental-health decision. No matter what happened outside Cadbury House – a pack of Teddy-groupies, a flock of vampires, exploding cameras – or even exploding cameramen – nothing was going to attract our attention. As far as we were concerned, we were alone in a quietly elegant mansion on a remote riverbank and everybody else was out there fending off a zombie infestation, or some other matter that didn’t involve us. We watched a movie I’d last seen when it was first released back in 1978. It was a lovely evening.

To get to Edson Darby-Deaver’s house by a quarter of ten, I needed to leave by 9:15 or so, and I was looking forward to the drive. It was a clear, sparkling morning and autumn, such as we have here in Florida, was in the air. Running north along State Route A1A, I went over bridge after bridge, from island to island, until I finally came to Anastasia Island, the part of St. Augustine where Ed lived.

Santorini, the development in which he owned a house, was set crosswise between A1A and the Atlantic Ocean, and consisted of one block with four houses on each side. Ed’s house was the first one on the north side, and he was outside puttering around in his landscaping when I pulled up to the gate.

He walked over and called out, “The code is hash-tag 1234.”

I tapped the code into the keypad, the gates opened, and I pulled into Ed’s driveway.

“Not much of a secret code,” I remarked, getting out of my SUV.

“It’s the only one Dolores can remember.”

“Ah. Frieda’s daughter. Well, being the daughter of the builder has its privileges, I guess.”

I paused in the driveway and looked down Santorini Drive toward the dune and the ocean beyond it. The houses were ersatz Greek-island villas, white-painted blocks and chunks with lacy balconies of black wrought iron and boxes of red geraniums. Ed’s house, being on the end away from the ocean, was a small ranch with no real water view. But at the other end – the ocean end – were two mansions, the one on Ed’s side being impressive and the one directly across from it dwarfing them all. The smaller one was Dolores’s and the larger one was Frieda’s.

I expected to go into Ed’s office for our pre-interview meeting, but instead he said, “Let’s go sit on the walkover and talk first.”

“Glad to.” I live within an eight minute drive of the ocean, and I only seem to see it from my car windows when I’m driving by.

We went to the wooden catwalk (“the walkover”) that took us over the dune without disturbing the ecosystem, then sat down on a wooden bench at the other end, overlooking the ocean. This was Crescent Beach, which was a bit too far south for the tourists who stayed in the condos and hotels at the northern end of the island. In case they roamed too far, though, there was a gate blocking the walkover at the beach end, with another keypad lock. I pointed at it. “Hash-tag 1234?”

He sighed. “We can’t have Dolores stranded on the beach because she forgot the code again.”

“No, I guess not. So she’s slipping, is she?”

“A bit. I’m not really worried about her, but Frieda is. Actually, with Frieda it comes out more as irritation than concern.”

“If you haven’t seen Frieda in so long, how do you know?”

“Word gets around. We have
cleaning ladies
,” he said grimly. “Everybody uses the same ones.”

“I see. And what’s the word on the street about Frieda? Is her memory going too?”

“She’s sharp as a tack. Sharper. Be careful not to mention anything about Dolores’s memory lapses, by the way. She won’t tolerate anybody else noticing them.”

“But she’s quick to point them out herself. Nice.”

He shrugged and said nothing, gazing at the wind-ruffled ocean. It was coming up to high tide again, and the breeze was still coming out of the east, bringing tangy smells and raggedy ropes of seaweed up from the ocean.

“So what else do I need to know before we tackle her?” I asked.

“How well do you know her?”

“Not at all, really. I’ve only seen her at fundraisers.”

“Well, another thing you shouldn’t mention is marriage. I know you were married once yourself, and it didn’t last long.”

“It didn’t,” I said shortly. “That was a long time ago. Why would I bring it up?”

“I can’t imagine, but these things do crop up.”

“So you’re saying Frieda had an unhappy marriage?”

He sighed. “It was because of her mother, Alice. She was one of those social climbers who’d feed their own children to the wolves to get a better place at the banquet table. Actually, she did feed Frieda to the wolves, in a way. She forced her to marry a lush who happened to have a title. Fortunately he wasn’t around long. He drank himself to death shortly before Dolores was born, and Frieda never remarried, even when Alice came up with a minor prince from some eastern European country he’d escaped from when it was overrun by Communists. That time, Frieda stood up to Alice and refused to become a princess, and she’s been standing up to the whole world ever since. And she never, under any circumstances, mentions her marriage.”

“Anything else?”

He thought about it. “Actually, she may like you. She grew up at a time when women of her class were expected to get married, have children, give parties, and look the other way while their husbands had affairs. Instead, once her husband was dead, she went into business and made herself even richer than she already was. That got her a dragon-lady reputation, which she’s been living up to ever since. She’ll probably like you for being an independent woman, but the very fact that you are may make her challenge you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m used to standing up to bullies.”

He gazed at me a moment. “You’re a strong lady, but she’s eaten tougher people than you for breakfast.”

I stood up and shook out my short hair in the ocean breeze. “Then let’s go feed the lion. It’s about time she had breakfast.”

Obsequious. The word kept drifting through my mind during our audience with Frieda. It’s how she liked her underlings. Obsequious. It made me want to rebel.

Drab little Dolores turned out to be about my age, but so much older. Even her hair looked defeated, and what was left of it had been dyed a tired brown. Her dark eyes looked like they were always wet, but not quite runny. She wore a wedding ring, which explained why she had a house of her own, but Mother had a greater claim on her than her husband did, because according to Edson, she spent her days taking care of Frieda.

She spoke pleasantly enough when she met us at the door, and was very gracious when Ed introduced me to her. I could see that she liked Ed. He joshed her a little, and she showed a bit of life. But when she conducted us to the second floor, a change came over her before the elevator even stopped. By the time she had the elevator door open, she was a different woman. She was obsequious.

We walked about half a mile over polished hardwood and Oriental carpets, to the monumental window overlooking the beach, where a small, gray, dried-up lady with feisty brown eyes was waiting in a wheelchair.

“Mother,” Dolores said in a muted voice, “you remember our neighbor, Edson Darby-Deaver? And this is his friend, Taylor Verone, from Tropical Breeze. She runs a shelter for homeless pets.”

“Of course I remember Ed,” she snapped. Then she turned the headlights on me and tried to push me back. “A shelter? Why?”

“Because nobody else around here thought of it. It needed to be done.”

She lifted her head a bit, as if she hadn’t expected that. “Well, sit down, sit down. You’ve got the Cadbury House, eh? Going to fill it up with cats and dogs? Well, the whole world’s going to hell. Why not Cadbury House too?” She claimed first blood for herself and looked away out the window, pleased with herself.

Ed lifted a hand slightly, keeping me from saying anything, and asked, “Do you mind if I record this, Miss Frieda?”

“Go ahead.”

He started his recorder. “Do you remember the first time you went to Cadbury House?”

“Of course I do. The Cadburys took over an old hunting lodge and completely remodeled it as a winter home, back when old Kingsley was still alive. He claimed to be an archaeologist, but he was just a dabbler. He attached himself to some British expedition that took itself seriously, and did a few sketches for them, and amused the English ladies who came to Egypt on holiday. Then he came to the States and settled the family on the river near Tropical Breeze. Sometime in the ‘thirties it was. They threw a ball and invited everyone who was wintering in St. Augustine at the time.”

“Everyone?”

She stared at him. “Everyone that mattered.”

“Society people.”

“
My
people. Robber barons and their no-good sons, fly-by-nights, socialites and parasites. They all came together in a rolling gang on those trains Henry Flagler put in back in the day, and then they got another notion and rolled on somewhere else again. I came here for the first time that winter, when the Cadburys had their housewarming party.”

“Is that when you met Vesta for the first time?”

“Vesta was just a toddler then. I was a teenager. As soon as she’d been properly displayed in her little white dress with the pink sash, her nanny took her away. There was a boy there that interested me, I remember. Old Kingsley’s nephew, Chipper. They had a little group of musicians playing, and Chipper danced with me all night. His family wasted him on a drippy little blond from the Castle family, about a year later. I never did see him again.”

We were getting dangerously close to the subject of marriage, and Ed quickly steered the interview in another direction.

“Did the Cadburys keep horses then?”

“We had
cars
, Edson. It wasn’t
that
long ago. But yes, they had some horses. Hunters and a few gentle ones for the ladies, and a saggy old mare they kept just because they didn’t want to put her down. But we traveled by automobile.”

“I see. So was the barn eventually used as a garage?”

“I have no idea. Whatever are you trying to get at?”

“Just trying to get a feel for things. Did they have a chauffeur?”

She stared at him.

“I only ask, because some families from that era had an apartment for the chauffeur over the garage.”

“Well the Cadburys didn’t,” she snapped. “They had living quarters for the servants in a separate building next to the house. As I remember, their chauffeur also skippered their yacht and worked as a groundskeeper. Cranky old man named Evans. Nobody lived in the barn but the horses. Why the interest in the barn?”

I made a note of two things: Ed wasn’t as subtle as he thought he was, and there was definitely something about the barn. She’d been waiting for this,
knowing
it was about the barn. I decided I’d had enough of being obsequious.

Ed opened his mouth and I spoke over him. “What about the Betsy-in-the-water story?”

She gaped at me. I returned her gaze, composed and waiting, and sure enough, she got it. She roared with laughter. Not the dry, bitter cackle I had expected. Wild, juicy laughter.

“Who told you that story?” she asked, ignoring Ed.

“A little bird in Tropical Breeze.”

“A little bird with ink on her fingers?”

“Newspaper ink? Nah. These days, she uses a computer.”

She roared again. “So Bernie Horning is still alive, is she? That old cigarette-smoking suffragette!”

“And still stirring up gossip.”

“Well, good for her! I always liked that meddling little busybody, even when she gossiped about me, not that I’m able to get out and cause scandals any more like I used to. How in the world did that old story come up?”

“We have an infestation at Cadbury House that we’re trying to get rid of.”

“Oh? Insects?”

“Worse. A television reality show. Ghost-hunters. They cooked up some story about Elizabeth Cadbury heroically jumping into the river to save Vesta, and drowning herself.”

She laughed so hard that Dolores came running into the room to see if her mother was having a fit.

When she was able to speak again, Frieda said, “Go away, you nitwit! I’m fine. Can’t you see I’m enjoying having a little company for a change? And why haven’t you served refreshments? Miss Taylor must be dying of thirst by now.”

Awestruck, Dolores looked at me and asked politely if I’d like some iced tea. Ed had been forgotten, and was trying to make himself invisible. We were rolling.

As soon as Dolores had finished serving drinks and left the living room, I looked up to see Frieda gazing at me brightly over the rim of her glass. Then she set her iced tea aside and said, “Now, young woman, why are you
really
here?”

I had the strongest urge to glance at Ed for guidance, but was quick enough to realize that this would be fatal.

“I hate to admit it, Miss Frieda, but you hit the nail on the head. We’re having problems with the barn.”

Bright-eyed and somewhat triumphant, she took it in, settled down, thought it over, then said, “Yes. They’ve been having problems with the barn over there for a long time now. But first I want to know about Betsy-in-the-water, as you so picturesquely put it.”

I entertained her with the story Teddy had come up with, making her howl with laughter again, then gave her the less colorful, but still heroic, story of the dog’s rescue.

She nodded as soon as I mentioned the dog. “Toby. His name was Toby. I remember that dog. Little black terrier with white paws. It jumped onto the seawall after a stick Vesta was throwing, and went into the river. Vesta was hysterical. The creature was able to tread water well enough, but it couldn’t get back over the seawall again. It would’ve dog-paddled in the water until it got exhausted and drowned, the foolish thing, but Betsy went in after it, with half of St. Augustine having juleps on the veranda and knocking their drinks over as they stood up. They talked about it for the rest of the season! How she set the little dog back onto the seawall and then hauled herself up with the help of about four of the men, who got soaked themselves, all of them laughing themselves into a fit and Betsy calmly telling the servants to bring towels.”