Murder at Longbourn: A Mystery

by Tracy Kiely

Happy New Year.

  CHAPTER 7

  He had the sort of face that makes you realize

  God does have a sense of humor.

  —BILL BRYSON

  I T WAS ALMOST four in the morning when I finally crawled into bed. Granted, I’d been up that late before on New Year’s Eve, but then it had been the result of an unfortunate combination of tequila and karaoke. I promptly swore off karaoke the next afternoon. This time my late night was due to relentless questioning by a humorless detective. All things considered, I preferred the tequila/karaoke debacle, even with all its nasty aftereffects.

  The detective who’d been put in charge of the case was a burly man by the name of Stewart. As far as I could tell, he had no first name. He was about forty years old, with thick black hair, cropped short. His hazel eyes hinted at a sense of humor and were framed by the thickest lashes I’d ever seen wasted on a man. But after spending less than five minutes with him, I found myself mentally humming the Eagles’ hit “Lyin’ Eyes.”

  I was glad Aunt Winnie had agreed to my suggestion that the reading room, rather than her cramped office, be used for the questioning. But even settled in the relative comfort of an overstuffed yellow chair, the interview process with Detective Stewart was a painful one.

  He had seated himself in the only hard-backed chair in the room, no doubt to lend an air of authority to his questioning. I suppose he felt it would be difficult to intimidate his subjects while being half swallowed by a gaily patterned club chair. But after my seemingly endless interview with him, I realized the man would be daunting even if lounging on a pool raft with an umbrella drink in his hand.

  After asking standard questions such as my name, age, and address in a raspy voice reminiscent of the chain-smoking aunts on The Simpsons, he launched into the heart of his interrogation.

  “Where were you when the lights went out?”

  I refrained from asking if that was the title of a song and obediently answered, “I was standing near the sideboard, opposite the door.”

  “Right. And where was Mr. Ramsey in relation to you?”

  “He was still sitting at the dinner table. It was in front of me, to my right.”

  “What was he doing?”

  He’d been glaring at Daniel or Polly or both of them, but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “He was watching his daughter on the dance floor.”

  “I see. And how was his demeanor?”

  “He didn’t seem pleased.”

  Detective Stewart looked up from his notes. “Really? Any idea why?”

  I could think of at least eight reasons off the top of my head, but somehow it didn’t seem right to assign motives to a dead man. I shrugged. “Not really.”

  Detective Stewart didn’t respond. Instead, he stared at me. I wish I could say my courage rises with every attempt to intimidate me, but I can’t. Instead, my reaction is Pavlovian: my palms begin to sweat and all the moisture evaporates from my mouth. In fact, his piercing gaze produced such a pronounced reaction in me that I briefly wondered if it was a skill taught at the police academy. If Detective Stewart noticed my reaction, he gave no indication. He merely noted my answer and moved on to the next question.

  “Who else was near him?”

  I tried to remember. “No one, really,” I said. “Everyone else was milling about the room. Mr. Ramsey was the only one still sitting.”

  “Okay. And then the lights went out. Did you know that your aunt was going to turn off the lights?”

  “No, I didn’t. She told us afterward that she was supposed to do it for the show, but I didn’t know that in advance.”

  “I see. Did anyone else?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, the actors must have been aware. But …” I thought about it. While I hadn’t known that the lights were going to go out, I wasn’t surprised when they did. Why? I was struggling to figure out why when it came to me: Aunt Winnie’s invitation.

  “Ms. Parker?” Detective Stewart prompted.

  “I was just remembering the invitation for this party. It said something about ‘screams in the dark.’ I was wondering why I wasn’t surprised about the lights at the time. It must have been because of the invitation.”

  “I see. Can I get a copy of that invitation?”

  “Yes. My aunt kept an extra one.”

  “Good. Okay. Now, what happened after the lights went out?”

  “Well, at first I think everyone thought it was part of the show. I mean there was no sense that anything was wrong. I saw a flash of green, then I heard a gunshot, and someone screamed—”

  Detective Stewart interrupted, “A man or a woman?”

  I considered the question. “It was a woman,” I said finally.

  His pen scribbled. “Thank you. I’m sorry. You said you saw a flash of green?”

  “Yes. I guess it was the gun going off.” But that didn’t make sense. I had seen the flash before I heard the shot.

  “And then what happened?” he prompted.

  “Well, there’s really not much else. I heard the plates and glasses shattering. I guess that’s when I first thought that something seemed odd. I mean, I doubt if these actors usually break the hostess’s good china.”

  He nodded to his notebook. “Anything else?”

  “Someone pushed past me. And then the lights went back on. I saw Eric’s face—he’s one of the actors—and that’s when I really knew that something was wrong. He looked horrified.”

  “Do you know who pushed you?”

  “No. I just assumed it was someone moving around in the room.”

  “From what direction did he come?”

  “He ran toward me.”

  He noted all this down. By this point, I was nauseous and more than a little panicky. The last time I had been interviewed by a policeman, I was sixteen and had been pulled over for speeding. The officer’s name was Ed Tighe and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. In the end, he had let me off with a warning, but I had been so shaken from the encounter that when I got home, I promptly threw up.

  Detective Stewart was about a million miles away from Officer Tighe. Plus, he had that scary stare thing on his side. “What exactly was your relationship with the deceased?”

  “I had no relationship with him,” I replied. “I’d just met him this evening. I served him some hors d’oeuvres.”

  Detective Stewart studied me for a long time after I said this, as if he were debating the veracity of my statement. Finally, he wrote something in his little battered black notebook. No doubt something like, “Suspect is unstable and unreliable.” I was now officially nervous. Unfortunately, when I get nervous I tend to get “chatty,” which explains why I added, “He seemed particularly fond of the crab cakes.”

  Detective Stewart frowned. After a long pause he said, “Are you trying to be flip, Ms. Parker?”

  “No,” I mumbled, embarrassed.

  “All right. How did Mr. Ramsey seem to you tonight?”

  “Well, having never met him before, I really couldn’t say.”

  “I understand that, but why don’t you just give me your general impression of his behavior this evening.”

  As I’d been raised a strict Catholic, it had been ingrained in me not to speak ill of the dead. My personal view was that Gerald Ramsey was a self-important, controlling bastard, but I opted for a more sedate version. “He seemed to be enjoying himself.”

  My evasion did not go unnoticed. Detective Stewart leaned as far back as the wooden chair would allow. Raising his left eyebrow slightly, he said, “Come now, Ms. Parker. This isn’t a cocktail party where it isn’t polite to gossip.” Clearly he and I went to completely different kinds of cocktail parties. “This is a murder investigation,” he continued, as if addressing a particularly slow child. “I need absolute honesty, not polite double-talk. Now, if you can’t do that, we can continue this conversation at another time and in another place.”

  I was relieved that he hadn’t said “downtown.” If he had, my st
rained nerves would surely have given way to a fit of giggles. I had seen “downtown” on my ride in yesterday. It consisted of four antiques stores, three gourmet bakeries, two garden centers, and more boutiques than you could shake a credit card at. It certainly wasn’t the kind of atmosphere that inspired fear, unless maybe you were a recovering shopaholic.

  Nevertheless, something about his tone got under my skin. I sat up a bit straighter and looked him directly in the eye. “Fine, you want my opinion of the man? I’ll tell you. He struck me as a controlling, disagreeable, pompous ass. I don’t know what he was like on the other nights of his life, but that’s how he was on his last.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to laugh. His eyes glittered and his mouth twitched a little. But he merely said, “I see. You didn’t like him. That’s interesting.” Crap, now what had I done? I tried to undo the damage. “No, Detective Stewart, I didn’t like him. But if you’re insinuating that I killed a man because I didn’t like him, may I just add that there are a lot of people I don’t particularly like. My boss, for one. She thinks running her clothes to the dry cleaners is part of my job description. I’m also not particularly fond of the checkout clerk who routinely comments on my purchases. And don’t get me started about my mother’s boyfriend. But I think you’ll find, Detective Stewart, that I didn’t kill any of them.”

  Detective Stewart’s eyebrows rose so high they were in danger of disappearing into his hairline. “Are you always this angry, Ms. Parker?”

  I sighed. “No. I think I’m usually a very nice person. But it’s been a stressful night.”

  “I can understand that,” he said. “And I’m sorry to add to your apparently considerable stress level, but we do need to get as much information about what happened here tonight as we can. Let’s try this again.”

  He read something in his notebook and said, “Why don’t we skip over Mr. Ramsey for now, other than to note that he was not to your liking.” I searched his face for any traces of irony but found none. “Who did he talk to?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to remember. “When he first arrived, he was with his wife, daughter, and their friend, Daniel Simms,” I replied. “But they weren’t really talking to each other. Mr. Ramsey did all the talking.” I vividly remember what happened next: Gerald had all but threatened Aunt Winnie that he would force her to sell him the inn. Gerald’s words hadn’t bothered Aunt Winnie in the least. She wasn’t afraid of bullies and she wouldn’t have lost a minute’s sleep over his threat. But I knew Aunt Winnie and the police didn’t. To an outsider, their exchange about the house could look incriminating. I had to make sure that Detective Stewart didn’t get the wrong idea about Aunt Winnie.

  “He commented on the changes that my aunt had made to the inn since she’d purchased it,” I continued. “From what he said, I gathered that when this place went on the market, Mr. Ramsey was interested in buying it, but the owner took a liking to my aunt instead. Mr. Ramsey indicated that he was still interested in owning the place and was hoping to convince my aunt to sell it to him.” I remembered what Aunt Winnie had said about Gerald’s influence with the zoning board and I could still hear Gerald’s “by fair means or foul” threat. “He was, in my opinion, somewhat rude about the whole thing, but my aunt just laughed it off.” There. That should downplay the exchange on the off chance that any of the other guests had repeated Gerald’s exact words.

  Detective Stewart thumbed through his notebook, apparently in search of something. Finding it, he tapped his blunt forefinger against the page and said, “I have here that Mr. Ramsey was using his influence with the zoning board to put your aunt out of business and threatened your aunt regarding the inn.”

  Shit. I had little doubt who would have repeated that bit of information to the police and I silently cursed Jackie. “Threatened?” I said, with what I hoped was an authentic tone of disbelief. “Mr. Ramsey was, I suppose, confident in his skills as a persuader, but he clearly didn’t know my aunt. She loves this place.”

  Even before he continued, I knew I had phrased that badly, but still, the starkness of his next words took me by surprise. “Enough to kill for it?”

  “No!” I said, scrambling to undo the damage. “You’ve got it all wrong.” My mouth went dry and my heart hammered in my chest. The police couldn’t suspect Aunt Winnie. It was absurd! “My aunt is the sweetest woman I know! As a kid, she wouldn’t even let me kill spiders in her house. Yes, she loves this inn, but she’s not insane. And besides, she’s not the kind of woman to let herself be pushed around by someone like Mr. Ramsey. She can take care of herself.” I realized I was shouting and struggled to compose myself.

  Detective Stewart said nothing but raised his left eyebrow again, a trick I found increasingly irritating. “So, by your account,” he said slowly, “your aunt, who was being bullied by the deceased, could have had nothing to do with this, despite the fact that the murder took place in her home after she turned out the lights? In short—according to you—she is a harmless woman, incapable of violence.”

  “Yes,” I said emphatically, even as some far-flung memory swam to the surface of my consciousness. Hadn’t there been a terrible altercation between Aunt Winnie and a friend’s husband long ago? As the details came back to me, I inwardly blanched. But surely the police here couldn’t know about that, could they? And besides, that had been a completely different situation. In that case, Aunt Winnie’s actions had been justified—almost noble, in fact. But to someone of limited imagination—I sized up Detective Stewart and sighed—it could look damning. I resolved to say nothing of the incident.

  “Besides,” I continued in a calmer voice, “how do you even know that Gerald was the intended victim? I mean, it was pitch-dark in the room. Any one of us could have been shot.”

  “We considered that possibility, Ms. Parker. However, there is no question that Mr. Ramsey was the intended victim. We found a piece of reflective tape, the kind that glows in the dark, on Mr. Ramsey’s suit coat. That was probably the green flash you saw. It is our theory that the murderer put the tape on Mr. Ramsey to ensure that he, or she, wouldn’t have any trouble hitting the target once the lights went out. Derringers generally hold only one or two shots. Our killer couldn’t risk wasting bullets.”

  “Then you believe that one of the guests did this? There’s a door to the outside in the dining room. Someone could have opened the door, shot Gerald, and then run off.”

  “Yes. Funny enough, but we actually came up with that possibility on our own, Ms. Parker. However, unless you are suggesting our murderer can fly, I don’t think that theory works. While there are footprints in the snow just outside the door, there are no tracks leading away from the house. Furthermore, the footprints outside the door were not fresh. A significant amount of snow had fallen on top of them. So much so that it seems unlikely that an intruder made them at the time in question. Did you happen to see anyone go outside during the evening?” he asked.

  “Yes, actually. Joan Anderson and Polly Ramsey went outside.”

  “Do you know about what time that might have been?”

  I tried to remember. “Maybe around eight-thirty? I’m really not sure. I know I was still passing around the hors d’oeuvres. I had just refilled my tray in the kitchen and was returning to the dining room when they came back inside.”

  Detective Stewart noted something down before he continued. “Do you know what they were doing out there?”

  “They said they were looking at the snow.”

  The eyebrow went up again. “Looking out the window wasn’t sufficient?”

  It was an interesting point. I had been too busy making my rounds at the time, but now that I thought about it, it was strange. I don’t care how much of a kid you are at heart: adult women in evening gowns generally do not willingly go out in the middle of a snowstorm unless their car has broken down or they’ve partaken too much of the holiday spirit. As far as I could tell, neither Joan nor Polly had had too much to drink.

 
; One of the many uniformed officers who had descended on the inn quietly walked into the room. Avoiding my eyes, he went straight to Detective Stewart, leaned in close, and whispered in his ear. Detective Stewart whispered back and they both glanced at me. I tried to radiate innocence and stared at the contents of the evidence box while they continued their conversation. In one sealed bag lay the gun. In another, lay the unisex, right-handed glove worn by the killer. Hearing a noise in the foyer, I saw the medical examiner putting on his coat to leave. Behind him, two officers rolled the gurney bearing the body of Gerald Ramsey out of the dining room and toward the door. The words from Aunt Winnie’s invitation came back to me: “Many will come, but one won’t be going home.” I felt sick.

  The officer finally left and Detective Stewart shifted his attention back to me. “Sorry about the interruption. Let’s see, where were we?” He contemplated his notebook. “Oh, yes. How did Miss Ramsey act around her father?”

  I thought of how Polly and I had stood talking after she had come back inside. When Gerald called her over like an errant dog, there was no mistaking the look of hate on her face. But I felt funny about telling the detective what I’d seen. I was sure that most people who encountered Gerald Ramsey had, at one point or another, made a similar face. It seemed unfair to cast Polly in a guilty light over what I considered an honest and justified emotion. But, I reminded myself, someone in that room tonight had shot Gerald. I knew it wasn’t me and I knew it wasn’t Aunt Winnie. My main goal was to convince the police of that. As for the others—well, I’d just have to tell what I knew and let the police sort out the rest.

  Feeling like a parrot reciting my lines, I dutifully told Detective Stewart that I thought Polly resented her father’s dictatorial nature and that while I thought Lauren was firmly under Gerald’s control, she seemed unhappy. I did not, however, repeat Jackie’s unfounded assertion that she suspected Lauren of having an affair with Daniel. I told myself that it was because I didn’t want to spread vicious rumors, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be hooked up to a lie detector when I made that statement. The simple fact was, right or wrong, I liked Daniel.