by Audrey Keown
As Renee’s significant other, he seemed an obvious suspect, so why wouldn’t the police see him that way? I didn’t know what I didn’t know about him or their relationship, but I was going to find out.
On the front patio of the reception building, an old couple shared a magazine. They nodded at me as I went inside.
“Clyde Borough?” I said to the small girl behind the desk.
She was school age, but it was a Saturday. I had a cousin growing up who’d had to pitch in like this at her family’s restaurant on weekends. It was an understatement to say her indenture made me thankful my dad didn’t own the plumbing business he worked for.
“Borough.” She checked a screen, clicked a mouse once or twice, and answered, “Cottage number six.”
Either she didn’t know better than to give out a guest’s room number, or my confidence and the box I carried (professionally, as if for a delivery) told a convincing story.
Every surface was lined with mountain stone here, including the snowy path she directed me to take and cottage six, which stood at the end of a landscaped walk past the pool.
Before coming here, I’d detoured to the hotel. All of Clyde’s and Renee’s possessions the police hadn’t taken with them were being stored in the office.
With his overnight bag over one shoulder and a box of his other things balanced against the opposite hip, I knocked at his door.
After a minute, it swung inward. Good luck at last.
It wasn’t Clyde but a blond girl (woman?) maybe twenty years old. Long straight hair. Hoodie. Flip-flops.
“Hi, I’m sorry—” I leaned back to check the room number. “I’m looking for Mr. Clyde Borough. I have some things for him from the last hotel he was staying at.”
She walked away, leaving the door ajar, and yelled into the room, “Dad.”
Clyde popped up a second later. “Oh, Ivy. How are you? Come in.”
He asked about my arm, and I explained briefly as I followed him into the open-concept living area dotted with wicker furniture and flowery curtains. Everything in here was precious as a baby bluebird.
Clyde’s chipper attitude was tuned to match the room’s pitch. Was he pushing his feelings down for some reason, or was he really not grieving for Renee?
He turned to me as we reached the middle of the room, and his face went blank.
I realized he was staring at the overnight bag. I held it out to him. “Thought you might need this.”
“Oh, ah, thank you.” He took it from me, but his face blanched as if I’d handed him a bucketful of spiders.
“I’m sorry. You didn’t want it?”
“Um, it belonged to … my girlfriend …”
“Oh. Sorry. I just—sorry.” It was plain and black, and I would’ve thought her bag would be a flowery print or maybe pastel, something to match her pearls and sweater sets. I offered him the box. “Maybe these are yours?”
He set the bag on a chair and the box on the breakfast table, then opened the flaps and glanced inside. “Yeah, thanks so much. I’ve been without clothes and things … as if it wasn’t hard enough, losing her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely for the third time, but I still couldn’t be sure there was genuine grief in his statement.
He gestured for me to sit down and did the same himself. “Please.”
“How are you holding up, Dr. Borough?” I took a chair.
“Call me Clyde.” It wasn’t a request.
“Okay,” I said.
He shrugged. “What can I say? I’m glad Selena’s here with me.”
“Your daughter?”
“Oh, yes, you haven’t met. Selena?”
She returned from what was probably the bedroom, her hips taking turns sinking as if the earth pulled harder at her than it did other people. Her frown was left over from opening the door for me.
“Selena goes to school here on the mountain,” Clyde said.
“Your alma mater, right?” I asked Clyde as I greeted Selena with a little wave.
“That’s right. She’s an excellent student.”
Hands in the pockets of her jogging pants, Selena scoffed, then retreated to a stool at the kitchen bar, where she perched, crossing her arms. Her eyes were alert and on her father.
“She’s a little annoyed with me right now,” Clyde said, his body relaxed in his chair like he was used to her attitude.
“A little annoyed?” Selena said.
“I don’t have to stay.” I bluffed as if to stand up.
“No, it’s kind of you to stop by and to bring the things.” He glanced at Renee’s bag. “See, Selena and I were just arguing about her—”
“Renee was a terrible person,” Selena said to me. “I’m not happy she died, but I’m not going to pretend I liked her just because she’s dead.”
Clyde clenched his jaw but smiled softly. “She’s defensive. Because of her mother.”
“Yeah, maybe I do take Mom’s side sometimes, but at least Mom doesn’t break promises to me.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said, then turned to me.
“And anyway,” Selena continued, “whoever’s side I take, it doesn’t change the fact that your girlfriend was awful.”
Clyde leaned forward in his chair, gripping both arms. “It was your mother who chose to leave. Now drop it.”
“Because she was tired of you controlling her.”
“I’m not—” Clyde caught himself yelling, looked at me, and lowered his voice as he started again. “I’m not controlling.”
Selena adopted an expression of feigned interest. “Oh, you’re not? So you didn’t ask Dr. Larsson to spy on me, then?”
He swallowed hard and mustered his patience with a deep breath, as if he were being asked to mediate a conflict between two hostile nations. “It’s only natural that an old friend of mine, who also happens to be a professor of yours, would be interested in your success as a student.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but he talked over her. “That’s all it is.”
She rolled her eyes, shot up from her stool, and stomped across the kitchen, as much as one could stomp in flip-flops, anyway.
“You see this?” He looked at me. “I move up to this hotel to be near her, and this is how she thanks me! Now. While I’m grieving.”
I frowned sympathetically but didn’t want to say anything so supportive as to alienate Selena. I might need to talk to her later.
He turned his head back to yell into the kitchen. “If anything, you should talk to your mother about how she’s treated me.”
Selena leaned against the wall and squared herself to him. “I’ve told you. She’s not the one vandalizing your house.”
Hello. What was that? Vandalism?
“Who else would have a vendetta against me?” He spread his hands. “In fact, I wonder if your mother had anything to do with—”
“That’s too far.” Selena shoved a finger at him. Her face held more anger than I’d thought possible a few moments before.
He’d been about to say with Renee’s death, hadn’t he? And why was he looking for someone who had something against him? Why make it all about himself? That seemed a touch narcissistic.
The two of them stared at each other silently but not without communication. It was almost like they’d forgotten I was here.
“So someone’s tearing up your house?” I said to Clyde. “Back in Pittsburgh?”
“Yes,” he answered, still staring at his daughter.
“Is that where your ex-wife lives, Clyde?” Although he’d asked me to use his first name, the word felt cottony in my mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
“No,” Selena said at the same time.
He threw up his hands and slipped me a wry smile. “I’m sorry, Ivy. We’re evidently not in a position to entertain here.”
Oh, I was plenty entertained. “Of course not. I should be getting back anyway.”
He walked me to the door.
There was one more thing he cou
ld tell me. “Could I talk to you sometime about your visit to the hotel before—”
“I’ve never been to the hotel before.” He opened the door.
“I mean, when it was a house—”
“No, I was never there.” He smiled politely.
“But you said at check-in—”
“That the city was just how I remembered it, when I lived here on the mountain, as a student.”
“Oh.” I didn’t buy that for a second.
Behind him, in the window on the other side of the room, there was a flash of movement, as if someone had been watching us through the glass.
“Thanks again.” He shut the door behind me.
I zipped around the back of the cottage as fast as I could, but no one was in sight. I spent another minute circling the little house and still didn’t see anyone. Maybe it had only been my imagination.
But under the window where I thought I’d seen someone peeking in, a Cheez-It bag littered the flowerbed. Two footprints, big enough to swallow my own, were just visible in the thick pine-bark mulch.
I positioned myself back at the cottage window where the snoop would’ve stood.
Yeah, it was an excellent vantage point. I was mostly hidden by the curtain and could see straight into the suite’s living room.
Clyde, alone now, paced the floor and looked at his phone.
“Jill says the transfer still hasn’t come through,” he said as if to someone in the next room, plenty loud enough for me to hear him through the windowpane.
Whoever had been standing here would have been privy to Clyde’s and my entire conversation. But what were they looking to find out? And why at this moment? Had I been followed here from the hotel?
“I swear it’s on the way,” said a woman coming out of the bedroom, not Selena but Autumn Truman, the stern redhead from the grave group.
When had she gotten here? And why had she come?
A wisp of cigarette smoke hit my nostrils, and there was a short hmph behind me.
I swung around.
Selena, a few yards away on the path, was smoking a cigarette and smirking at me.
I slipped a hand awkwardly in one pocket. “Oh, hi, again.”
“Don’t let me interrupt your eavesdropping.” She looked at me pointedly, then continued along the path to the far side of the cottage.
I considered going after her and trying to explain, but inside the cottage, things were heating up.
Clyde crossed the room to stand just a few inches from Autumn.
His body language was intense, threatening. He grabbed her pale, thin arm, and even from the window, I could see her skin go white around his fingers from the pressure. He pulled her close, close enough to kiss her, and said something in a low, menacing tone. I didn’t have to understand the words to know they were a threat.
Autumn jerked away from him, grabbed a purse from the coffee table, and marched out the door. Clyde’s temper flare alarmed me, but I didn’t know Autumn well enough to tell if she was more frightened or riled by it. She played her cards so close to her chest.
I didn’t have long before I needed to head to work. It was a twenty-five-minute drive downtown from here. But without Mr. Fig at the hotel, the only person to be concerned about my lateness was Doyle, and the idea of pissing him off turned the corners of my mouth up against my will.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be annoying Doyle in vain. I couldn’t miss this chance to talk to another member of the grave gaggle in relative privacy. Now that I’d been seen in the Achilles Room, I had to be more careful not to let Renee’s killer know I was hunting them.
Had Autumn entered the cottage the second I left, or had she been in another room of the cottage the whole time and able, along with whoever was at the window, to listen in on our conversation? Maybe that gave me a hook that would open her up to talking.
In a few seconds she rounded the corner of the cottage and continued down the stone path toward the parking lot, head up and eyes alert.
I took off in the same direction. Autumn was more removed from Renee than Clyde, so I felt better about pumping her for information.
It turned out I didn’t need any sort of lead. She was a direct person.
She spotted me just before getting to her car and jetted toward me, swinging the hand that gripped her keys to propel her. “So the hotel told you to give Renee’s things to Clyde?”
I shrugged. “The police have released all of the belongings that they didn’t take to the station.”
Up close, Autumn’s eyes were cold and lichen colored.
I thought of gray-eyed Athena. Like the goddess, Autumn came across as proud, tactical, and single-minded.
“Is he listed as her beneficiary somewhere?” she asked. “Yinz contacted her lawyer?”
Yinz? “Um. I guess Ms. King, the hotel’s owner, must have.”
Autumn was interviewing me. I needed to turn this around. “Do you know Clyde in some way other than the grave society?”
“Why’re you asking me that?” She took a step backward.
“I’m wondering …” I said. “Do you think the police are on the right track, arresting the hotel manager for her murder?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine what motive the manager would have. Renee didn’t mention knowing him. She didn’t mention him at all.” She tightened her lips. “Although I guess some people are sociopaths and don’t need a motive.”
Explaining away hot-blooded murders with sociopathy was comforting to people. But so far, this murder didn’t point to that kind of killer. Sociopaths had trouble forming connections with people (even more than I evidently did), and they usually committed crimes that were spontaneous and disorganized, leaving fingerprints and DNA at the scene.
If this was that kind of murder, the police wouldn’t have arrested Mr. Fig.
I changed gears. “Have you met the ex-wife?”
“Linda?” She glanced behind me at the cottage. “Yes. She worked for me a while.”
“You’re in the security business, right? What did Linda do for you?”
“That’s right. Linda was my office manager.” Autumn turned ever so slightly toward her car and clenched her keys in her hand.
“And Renee was …”
She sighed. “I gave her Linda’s job.”
Wow. So at the time of her death, Renee had not only Linda’s ex-husband but her former job too. At the risk of pushing her away, I pressed on. “So … she quit?”
“I had to let her go.”
I opened my mouth to ask why.
“But let’s not get into that,” Autumn said, slicing one hand through the air.
“What about Clyde? Does he have it in him to hurt someone?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, and her cheeks hardened. “I can tell you that I never liked Renee being with him. Selena and I agreed on that, if nothing else.”
I wasn’t the only one feeling possessive about my friends. “What is it about Clyde that you don’t like?”
“He steamrolls people, and Renee made herself easy to run over. I joined this little club of theirs mostly to keep an eye on her, but it wasn’t enough … obviously.” She folded her arms, tightened her mouth even more, and shifted her weight. “And Clyde can be weirdly obsessive. Do you know what he gave her for Christmas? This bizarre Victorian mourning locket, jet black with a curl of some dead woman’s hair inside. Makes me think something’s wrong with him sometimes.”
“Yeah, that’s a really strange present,” I said, nodding. As much as I loved my dad, I couldn’t imagine walking around with his hair in my jewelry. “And what about Selena? Is she into that sort of thing too?
“Ha. She doesn’t like anything her dad likes. But Selena is … volatile is a good word, I guess.”
“You think she could have …”
“Committed murder? I wouldn’t have thought so, but then, how could anyone?” Her neck reddened. “When I think about how she reacted when he proposed, I do wonder.”
/>
“Clyde? He proposed to Renee?”
Autumn nodded.
“What did Selena do?” I asked.
“Wrecked her car to spite him. And then she bought that motorcycle.” She nudged her head in the direction of a scarlet Yamaha in the nearest parking bay.
“Wow, all because her father got engaged?”
“No. Because he proposed.” She smirked. “Renee turned him down. Selena doesn’t know it, but Renee and her father weren’t even sleeping together for months before this trip.”
“She told you that? You must have been close.”
“Yeah. She was my little sister.”
IX
Found Objects
I got to work right at four and was only ten minutes late to the entry hall by the time I changed. My mouth watered instantly. The whole place smelled of the garlic focaccia George was baking.
Doyle, who was talking on the phone, slammed down the receiver, and his mud-brown eyes glared at me.
“Was that a potential guest you were talking to?” I said.
He grunted at me like an angry pig, turned on his heel, and left without giving me a chance to apologize for being late.
Not that I was going to.
Now that I was sure Mr. Fig hadn’t left the desk during the gravestone tour and that someone must have found some alternate route to the Achilles suite, I had new goals to add to my usual work duties. Top priority was figuring out where the servant staircase ended and if it could have been reopened.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have the time to find a mystery staircase or anything else until most everyone was asleep. If I was quick, I could squeeze in a little exploration after turndown service while the guests were at dinner. But I had a feeling I’d need longer than that short window would allow.
Part of me wished I had some kind of sedative at hand that I could add to all their drinks at dinner (and that doing so was within the universe of ethical behavior). I envisioned them all conked out, leaning on the dining table—Leonard Chaves’s drooling face smushed into Autumn’s severe shoulder, Tom’s giant hand slipping into the cream sauce on Velvet’s plate. No, I wouldn’t really do that, not to them or anyone else, but I let myself smile at the image.
The desk ledge was a mess by Mr. Fig’s standard, so I set about aligning everything perpendicular or parallel to everything else. I straightened Clarista’s freshly printed copy of the 1911 edition of the Chattanooga News, but it read the wrong date—yesterday’s. Replacing it must have been one of the many tasks Mr. Fig did daily without anyone noticing.