Motherhood Is Murder

by Carolyn Hart

  Laurel plucked insights from the swirl of information:

  Neither Ginger nor Mimi had an alibi.

  Each had the strongest possible motive, protection of her young. Mothers, whether lions or elephants or alleycats or humans, will fight tooth-and-nail for their progeny.

  The most incriminating point against Ginger and Mimi was the fact that the murder had occurred on the front porch of Cypress Cottage.

  There had been a public quarrel. Ginger had shouted at Hammond and that threat had been overheard.

  Also overheard was Hammond’s announcement that he was coming to Ginger’s this morning.

  That was all Laurel needed to know. Well, almost all. “Quickly, quickly.” She smiled to avoid any implied rudeness, though her darting thoughts were beginning to focus on time. Then. Now. The fleeting seconds of the present, lengthening into minutes. Who knew what mischief might the future—the very near future—bring? “Where did this scene occur?” Laurel did not obscure her request by explanations. She leaned forward, her posture inviting a swift response.

  Ginger threaded thin fingers through her wiry curls. “At the new bar and coffeehouse. Raffles. Do you know it? It’s in the old Carstairs house near Sea Side Inn.”

  Broward’s Rock was a small South Carolina sea island, population circa 10,000, excepting tourists. Locals always knew of any new business, and Raffles was definitely both new and a novelty, a mixture of a jazz club, genteel saloon, and coffee bar, with rattan and bentwood furniture; jardinières bursting with deep red flamingo flowers; paintings in heavy gilt frames; an elegant African gray parrot with spectacular scarlet tail feathers who observed from a spacious cage and delighted in wolf calls, whistles, and amazing comments in an eerily humanlike voice; and ceiling fans that whirred, stirring the leaves of two banana trees.

  Annie had visited once and later told Laurel the owner just looked blank when she asked him if he was a gentleman thief. “It turns out he had delusions of grandeur. He named the place after the hotel in Singapore. Would you believe it, he never even heard of Raffles!” The aristocratic thief who starred in the stories by E. W. Hornung was a favorite of Annie’s. In fact Max had recently found a movie poster of suave David Niven playing Raffles in the 1940 film and it was hanging near the coffee bar in Death on Demand.

  So far as Laurel knew, Annie and Max had remained true to Parotti’s, a longtime island watering hole, but most islanders and tourists were flocking to Raffles. Laurel had been there the week before and the rooms were jammed, the music loud, and the cigarette smoke near the bar thick as winter fog.

  “I know Raffles. Which room?” There were tables in the living room. The dining room was furnished like a gentlemen’s club. At the back of the dining room was a small horseshoe-shaped bar, reputed to have been in a nineteenth-century Arizona saloon. To the left of the bar, swinging panels led to the kitchen. To the right was an archway to a sun porch, a late addition to the house. The parrot’s cage was near a banana tree on the porch.

  “I met Jay on the porch.” A tight frown. “Lately he’d been going there every evening.”

  Laurel liked the sun porch. There were three groups of wicker chairs and love seats, separated by foliage. China planters held yellow ginger. And there was, of course, the banana tree. Laurel privately thought the greenery was a trifle overdone. Perhaps it was intended to provide a cheerful habitat for the parrot. In any event, the porch was small, so Ginger’s audience had been limited.

  “The porch. How fortunate. Now, quickly, who else was there?” Perhaps the solution to the mystery was going to be quite simple.

  Ginger’s eyes widened. “Do you mean…” Her voice faded away.

  Laurel nodded impatiently. Surely Ginger understood that the knowledge of Jay’s presence at Cypress Cottage this morning was likely limited to those overhearing their quarrel last night. In the mysteries Annie recommended to Laurel, sleuths and their cohorts seemed to be much faster on the uptake. Hmm, uptake…why not take up…oh, there was a difference…but Laurel was taking up the cudgels for a threatened innocent. Cudgels, now there was a Germanic word, without a doubt…oh yes. Focus.

  “Who else was on the porch?” That was what she needed to know.

  “Yes.” Mimi wriggled in anticipation. “Don’t you see, Ginger? Someone knew Jay was coming here and so they came and shot him, knowing you’d had a fight and knowing the police would suspect you at once. That’s how it happened. So we need to know who else was there.”

  “On the porch?” The words came slowly, as if the porch were an exotic locale beyond Ginger’s experience.

  Laurel had not been a mother to three daughters and a son without developing a radar-keen sensitivity to stalling. And a definitive certainty that where there was reluctance to speak, there was always and inevitably and without fail information the speaker passionately desired to hide, such as a failing grade in algebra, a smashed fender of a car taken without permission in the still of the night, a rude encounter with the headmaster, too many Margaritas. These, of course, were youthful peccadilloes. Later there came more serious problems—love affairs gone awry, careers stymied, quarrels and mischances and disappointments.

  “On the porch.” Laurel emphasized each word.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t paying any attention. There were just—” she waved her hands “—people.” But her eyes were wide and strained.

  “You don’t recall anyone who was there?” Laurel considered persistence a virtue.

  “No. I don’t.” Ginger’s voice was hearty. Laurel remembered Jen’s fervent assurances over the phone one memorable spring break that everything was fine, just fine, and the discovery that Max had sent a thousand dollars by wire to bail Jen’s boyfriend out of a Tijuana jail, a little misunderstanding with the traffic police.

  Laurel gave up. For the moment. “When did this happen?” She fluttered her fingers, urging speed.

  “Last night. About seven.” Ginger wrapped her arms tight across her front. “Oh God, I yelled at him.”

  “But that makes everything so clear.” Laurel’s smile was brilliant.

  “Clear that Ginger will go to jail if he’s found here. Please, Laurel, go home.” Mimi reached out a shaking hand.

  Laurel cocked her head, studied the dead man, the porch. “Perhaps a shower curtain…”

  Ginger shot her mother a frantic questioning glance. Mimi lifted her shoulders, let them fall.

  Laurel took two steps, bent, picked up the car keys that had fallen from Hammond’s grip. Her shoulder bag swung low. Impatiently, she moved the bag until it hung over her back. Shoulder straps were so handy, making it possible to keep one’s hands free. Her gaze swung toward the white van in the circle drive. On the side black letters proclaimed “Hammond Antiques.” Smaller letters proclaimed “Jay Hammond, Prop.” She moved down the steps with the grace of a gazelle, hurried to the back of the van. She paused, lifted a blond brow. The back door was imperceptibly ajar. Hmm. She reached for the handle. Her hand froze.

  Mimi and Ginger had watched in increasing bewilderment.

  In cheerful tones, Laurel exhorted them, “We must work as one, my dears. Ginger, find some gardening gloves. We must take care not to leave fingerprints. That is quite basic. And if you watch ‘Law and Order,’ you will know our path is fraught with difficulties. Fingerprints, DNA—I always think of DNA like the petals of a posy, simply fluttering everywhere. Such a challenge, both for miscreants and now for us. We all need gloves.” She looked expectantly at Ginger.

  Ginger nodded and whirled toward the front door.

  “For the moment…” Laurel untied the sapphire silk scarf at her throat and wrapped it about her fingers. She polished the car keys, then pulled the rear door wide open. She stared inside the van. Not too surprisingly for a van driven by the owner of an antique shop, there was a stack of moving pads and a dolly. One moving pad lay in a crumpled heap just inside the door. Laurel gave a glad shout. “We won’t need a shower curtain after all.”

/>   Ginger clattered down the front steps of the house. She held an assortment of gloves.

  Mimi took the rubber kitchen gloves, pulled them on. Ginger donned thick canvas garden gloves. Laurel accepted a pair of crimson mittens. “Ginger, grab that moving pad, please. Now up to the porch…distribute his weight…we can manage…just like a shower curtain beneath a dresser…”

  In only a moment, the three of them had moved the body onto the pad. In another moment, they’d placed the body on the dolly. They maneuvered the dolly down the steps and to the van. Getting the body into the van was a struggle and not one Laurel later would care to remember, but the transfer had been made. When the body was safely in the back of the van, resting on the moving pad, they lifted the dolly inside.

  They stood for a moment staring into the interior, Mimi gulping for breath, Ginger grim faced, Laurel thoughtful.

  That’s when the siren wailed.

  Laurel slammed shut the van door, thrust the keys toward Mimi. “Get it out of here, but first…” She wrapped her silk scarf in a turban over Mimi’s hair, handed her a pair of oversized sunglasses from her pocket. “There. Quite a transformation.”

  Mimi’s distinctive hair was gone; the glasses hid her eyes. She clutched the keys in her gloved hand, looked toward the road like a startled deer as the siren increased in volume. Laurel pondered the physics. As a sound came nearer…but perhaps she might think about that later. Mimi ran for the front of the van.

  Laurel recalled her island geography, called after her. “Park in the far lot of the Women’s Club. Leave the keys. Take the bike path to St. Mary’s. That’s only a few blocks from here. Get back as soon as you can.” There wasn’t time to urge stealth and caution, but Laurel doubted the advice was necessary. Mimi Andrews would slither through the maritime forest as unobtrusively as a swift black racer, a desperate mother protecting her young.

  The wail of the siren rose to a squeal.

  As the van churned out of the dusty drive, Laurel gestured to Ginger. They raced up the wooden steps, banged into the house.

  The police car roared into the drive.

  “The portrait?” Laurel panted, stripping off the mittens, stuffing them in a pocket.

  Ginger raced across the heart pine floor, skidded around the counter, plucked a frame from a shelf, faced Laurel. “It isn’t wrapped…wanted you to see it…”

  “Quick, wrap it. And your gloves…”

  Ginger tossed the gardening gloves beneath the counter. She hurriedly pulled brown wrapping paper from a spool, placed the frame face down, whipped tape from a dispenser. She handed the wrapped—although the paper was askew—package to Laurel.

  “Good. Now, outside. Anyone would check on a siren—hurry—”

  Ginger was in the foyer and flinging open the door, Laurel on her heels, clutching the parcel.

  As the police car slewed to a stop, acting chief Billy Cameron climbed out, face intent, eyes searching the drive, the porch, and them, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. Billy was a treasured friend of both Annie and Max, and Laurel was fond of him as well. An island native, Billy had begun his law enforcement career with Chief Saulter. After Saulter’s retirement, the new chief Pete Garrett had appreciated Billy’s island savvy, his good-heartedness, and his commitment to the department. When Pete’s reserve unit was called up, Sergeant Cameron was the city council’s unanimous choice to serve as interim chief.

  Ginger clattered down the steps, her face distraught. “What’s wrong, Billy? What’s happened? Oh my God, is it Teddy? Has something happened to Teddy?”

  Billy was quick, emphatic. “Easy, Ginger. Nothing’s wrong with Teddy. That’s not why I’m here.”

  Ginger took a deep breath. “Sorry. That siren scared me.” She tried to smile. “What’s wrong?” She brushed back a tangle of red curls.

  Laurel’s eyes widened. Ginger’s mud-streaked hands…An artisan waiting on a customer would be quite unlikely to have dirty fingers. Billy was a good policeman, but after all, he was a man. He might not notice. If he did…

  “I had a call…” Billy’s glance was puzzled as he looked about him.

  Laurel bustled down the steps, caroling, “Billy, how lovely to see you and to know that your wonderful siren is working so well.” Laurel moved in front of Ginger. “Are you in pursuit?” She looked toward the road. “I don’t see any cars but of course we’ve been inside—” The parcel cradled in one arm, she slipped the other behind her back, leaning forward as if intent solely upon Billy. As she spoke, she waggled her fingers, then made brushing motions, that hand hidden from Billy’s view. “—and are unaware of any emergencies. But the siren sounded so ominous we immediately came out to see what was wrong. I know that the island is in good—” her voice lifted “—hands, but even so there must be—” another high note “—pockets of crime. Ah, but your clarion arrival surely signals something of import. Oh dear, should we be fearful?” She peered past him at the patrol car, brought her arm forward, and now held the package in both hands.

  “Everything all right here?” His frown was heavy.

  Hands jammed in the patch pockets of her blue plaid cropped cotton pants, Ginger stepped toward him. “Oh, you scared me to—” she swallowed “—you gave me a fright. I thought something had happened to Teddy.” She frowned. “But the siren—are you chasing someone?” She glanced out at the road, curving into the thick darkness of the woods.

  There was no trace of the white van, no hint it had ever—

  Laurel determinedly looked away from the shiny glitter of the matchbook that lay a few feet away from her yellow convertible. When they’d struggled to move the dead man from the dolly to the floor of the van, the matchbook must have fallen from a pocket. Although the beleaguered heroine in the various versions of The Perils of Pauline from the first in 1914 to the last in 1967 faced more dramatic challenges, everything from a cliffhanger to a runaway space capsule, Laurel doubted Pauline’s heart ever thudded harder than hers at the moment. She managed an inquiring smile. “Billy, can we help you?”

  “You both been here awhile?” Billy looked from Laurel to Ginger.

  Ginger nodded, the sun burnishing her bright hair.

  Laurel held up her package. “Oh Billy, I must show you.” She moved toward him, blocking his view of her car and the drive. She pulled the brown wrapping paper loose and triumphantly held up the canvas in its silver frame. “Look at this lovely portrait of Annie’s mother. I thought it would be the most perfect Mother’s Day—”

  Billy looked like a man who had walked into a giant spider web and was struggling to get free. “Yeah, Mrs. Roethke. That’s great. You got it here?” He looked toward the cottage. He frowned at the sign: PINXIT PORTRAITS.

  “Isn’t that the most clever name?” Laurel tucked the brown paper under her arm. “Pinxit, of course, used to follow a painter’s name and it means he—or she—painted it. Ginger is so gifted at her computer! She can take a photograph and put it in the computer—oh I don’t understand the process, really it’s quite like magic—and by the time she finishes and the results are printed out on canvas, you’d think it was a painted portrait. Then Ginger adds varnish and a glaze that makes it look as though there are real brush strokes!” As she chattered, Laurel reached her car. She placed her purse, an open basket weave with pink leather handles, on the front fender and balanced the painting against the rim of the door. “Come look, Billy.” In the soft May sunlight, the painting glowed with youth and beauty, straight dark hair, sparkling blue eyes, chiseled features saved from severity by lips that curved in a sweet smile.

  Billy took a step toward her, shook his head. “Mrs. Roethke, I got a nine-one-one call—”

  “Nine-one-one!” Ginger shook her head. “There must be some mistake. We didn’t call.”

  “The call came from a pay phone.” Billy’s voice was polite, but his gaze was sharp. “Said there’d been a murder here.”

  Laurel might have shouted Eureka! She forbore but she exulted in the sam
e sense of confirmation enjoyed by Archimedes. The 911 call was another indication of Mimi and Ginger’s innocence. A passerby seeing murder done would surely have used a cell phone or driven straight to the police station. A surreptitious call from a pay phone—that relic of pre-cell days—was much more likely the work of the murderer. And how interesting—how simply fascinating—that the murderer had not been content to leave well enough alone. Laurel tucked this conclusion back in her mind—a process her son might have considered tantamount to plunging into Poe’s maelstrom—for later consideration. For now, the challenge was clear. The adversary, though faceless and nameless at this point, was out there to be found. And she was just the person to find him. Or her.

  “Murder! My goodness, who could possibly think…” In her own way, Laurel was a devotee of the truth. But as she’d once heard a successful lawyer explain: there are many ways to tell the truth. “Why, we haven’t heard a thing. Have we, Ginger?”

  Ginger, hands still deep in her pockets, looked directly at Billy. “Mrs. Roethke came to pick up the portrait for her daughter-in-law. We were inside.” She glanced toward the house. “We came out when we heard the siren. But please, do look around.” She shivered. “It’s frightening to think there might be a body somewhere. And if you want to come inside, that’s fine.”

  Billy nodded. “Thanks, Ginger. I’ll—”

  As Laurel leaned forward to place the portrait and the wrapping paper on the passenger seat, she knocked her purse to the ground, the contents spilling onto the drive, a gold filigree compact, a blue leather address book, blush, eyeliner, lipstick, a silver pill case, a slim volume of poetry—who knew when the moment might be right?—a vial of perfume, a Mont Blanc pen, a filmy handkerchief…