Santa Fe Mourning

by Amanda Allen

  “Mrs. Alwin,” Anton called, hurrying past the red-painted chairs and turquoise-draped tables of the dining room. “I’m so happy to see you again. I hope you’ve recovered from that terrible unpleasantness the other night?”

  “It was not at all fun, I agree,” she said. “But I am completely recovered. I hope your staff has, as well. It’s not the sort of thing anyone expects in their everyday world, I’m sure.”

  “They are doing splendidly—such bricks. La Fonda is usually a safe place, and I have assured them nothing has changed in that regard.” His smile flickered into a quick frown. “One maid is rather tearful still, but then she’s young. She probably reads those hideous novels about ghosts and vampires that are all the rage now. Last year, she wouldn’t use the elevator because she was sure it was haunted by a ghost bride.”

  “Really?” Maddie said with a grin. “How intriguing. I’ll have to ride the elevator sometime soon to see if she appears.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Mrs. Alwin. Ghosts are notoriously shy. But you may need to use the elevator soon anyway. Mr. Ryder is planning a palm court dance on the roof this summer.”

  “How delightful! I do look forward to it. We could all use a little distraction right now.”

  “I certainly agree.”

  Maddie remembered the sobbing maid, Harry’s sister, the one who worked at Madame Genet’s and couldn’t be found that day. “The maid who was upset—is her name June?”

  Anton looked surprised. “It is. Do you know her?”

  Maddie shook her head. “I just happened to see her after the terrible discovery. She was crying, and seemed most understandably upset.”

  “Of course. Aside from the tears, she seems well enough. She’s still doing her duties on time.”

  So she had come to work. “I’m glad to hear it. If I can do anything to help . . .”

  Anton sighed. “I fear no one can help. Such things must fade away on their own. If the unfortunate event was solved, I’m sure it would put a lot of minds at ease! A murder on our own doorstep. Who would have thought such a thing? It must have been a passing maniac.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  Anton moved on to speak to the next table, and Maddie studied her menu, even though she always ordered the same thing, the lobster thermidor. Anton was right. If the murder was solved and the culprit safely put away, everyone could move on with their lives in town, their minds easier knowing the villain was gone. The strings tied up with a clever explanation, just like in a Chesterton novel. Sometimes she felt like she was within grasp of what happened, but then she felt further away than ever. Tomas Anaya had lived in her house, and now she saw she hadn’t known the man at all. Nor did it seem like anyone else had, even his wife. He had too many secrets.

  She looked up to find David standing in the doorway, very tall and smart in a sharply tailored charcoal-gray suit, his blue eyes scanning the room. She waved at him, and he smiled. As he made his way toward her, past the other groups of diners, Maddie saw how the ladies stared at him as he walked by. One or two even patted their hair or reached for their compacts, just as she had.

  He was quite good-looking, she thought as she watched him. Very distinguished, and with a smile that brightened the room. And he was dining with her. She wanted to laugh, to twirl with excitement—and she hadn’t felt that way in so very long. It was like waking up after a very dark night.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late, Madeline,” he said, taking the chair across the table. He put a folder down on the turquoise-colored cloth. “I wanted to make sure I had all the reports to give you.”

  Maddie tapped at the thick pile of papers. “It certainly looks thorough. Would a novice like myself even understand it, or will it just look like random words?”

  He laughed. “It might very well. Lab reports have a way of doing that. I did type up a summary. It’s there on top if you want to take a peek.”

  Maddie opened it and scanned the neat columns. “How exciting.”

  “You won’t think so after you read it. Toxicology is interesting in its way, but seldom exciting.”

  “This will be. I was just thinking how everyone will rest so much easier once they know what happened.”

  “Sometimes knowing how something happened doesn’t tell us why. It just makes for more confusion.”

  “Sounds like life. One step forward, two back.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “At least this is one step, right?” Maddie smiled at him. “It was so kind of you to send a van to take Tomas back to the pueblo. Juanita will feel better once she can have a proper funeral.”

  He nodded solemnly. “It was the least I could do. I remember in the war, it was nearly impossible for anyone to have a proper funeral. So many families were left feeling incomplete.”

  “Of course. Oh, I forgot to tell you! Eddie is home! Mr. Springer got him out on bail. He’s very upset he can’t do his part in the funeral rites.”

  “I’m sure he is, poor kid. But it will help his mother more in the long run if he’s there with her for good. Jumping bail wouldn’t help him now.”

  “That’s what I told him. I left him with some work to do in the garden; hopefully that will keep him busy and at the house for a while. Out of trouble until his name is fully cleared, anyway.”

  “Good idea. Idle hands and all that, as my grandmother used to say.”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “A doughty Cornish lady. She had a different saying for every situation.”

  Maddie laughed and bent her head to study the pages in the folder. David examined the menu. The restaurant was getting busier, the sound of chatter and laughter winding higher, but Maddie felt as if she was in her own little world, tucked away in the corner with David and the strange words she tried to decipher. Only when the waiter arrived did she look up to give her order and watch as he poured out some sparkling water.

  “So it was the ethyl biscoumacetate in his system, just as you suspected?” she asked after the waiter had departed.

  “Yes. Commonly called warfarin. It would be easy enough to obtain for someone in the medical profession or who knows how to derive it from common rat poisons.”

  Maddie sighed. “It makes sense. I was hoping it would be something terribly exotic, though. Something there was only one source for. Even I have rat poison in my own garden shed.”

  “A civilian would have to buy a lot for it to have the effect it did on Mr. Anaya.”

  “Maybe one of the shops in town could help us, if they keep a record of sales?”

  “If it was bought locally. Someone could derive it themselves too, if they had the supply and a little knowledge. The taste could be disguised in something strong, like a coffee or cheap liquor.”

  “Interesting. What about the bottles from Mavis and Tomas?”

  “That was rather curious. Mr. Anaya’s did have some trace amounts of the warfarin. Not really enough to kill him quickly unless he had taken several bottles of the stuff, and it doesn’t sound like he did. More of it might have accumulated in the liver, though, and diminished the vitamin K we need for clotting. The other two bottles were just a bit of parsley water. Mavis had a bit of whiskey in hers too. It looks to me like someone else got hold of Tomas’s bottle.”

  Maddie nodded, feeling a bit relieved she hadn’t been handed a poisoned apple by Madame Genet. But Tomas had—unless the poison came from elsewhere, and the tonic was just a convenient receptacle. Those bottles seemed to be all over town, delivered by Harry. But where did he get them? “So maybe the poison combined with the beating led to a lethal effect?”

  “That could very well be. A symptom of ethyl biscoumacetate poisoning would be increased bleeding, especially of that bright-red, frothy sort you described. So we might be looking for two culprits working independently of each other, whether or not they knew their combined work would be deadly. Where exactly did the bottles come from?”

  Maddie told him about her visit to Madame Genet and how
the woman was wound together with Tomas. She also told him about how young Harry delivered crates full of the things all over the place and that Tomas was not known as a drinker. “However, I can’t figure out a reason why the medium would want to kill her regular clients. Her income surely depends on people coming back for repeat séances.”

  “Maybe Mr. Anaya found out she was a fraud and she was afraid he was going to spread it around.”

  “Very possibly. But Tomas wasn’t much of a believer, or so I used to think. He seemed convinced enough by Madame Genet to make Juanita confide in her priest, she was so worried. And Mavis seems to believe in the spirits too.”

  “What did you think of the madame?”

  Maddie thought of the dark room, the woman’s cold hands and faint words. “She was pretty good. Everything the public thinks a medium should be, I’d say. There was even a crystal ball. But she didn’t have much to say about Tomas.”

  “Discretion is probably as much a part of the job as crystal balls. Wouldn’t want anyone spreading rumors from the other side.”

  Maddie laughed. “Of course not. Who would? I just wish I could communicate with the other side. It would make things so much easier.”

  Their food arrived, and as they ate, they talked of more pleasant things than murders and spirits. They chatted about travels and their families, of favorite art and books read lately. She quite forgot everything else as she laughed at his stories of his grandmother and all her sayings. His funny stories made his blue eyes glow and made Maddie feel ridiculously happy.

  When the dessert arrived, she looked up in surprise at how long they had been sitting there. Talking and laughing with David had made the time fly by. Only a few people were left at their tables, but she could hear a crowd in the lobby.

  She saw two people standing outside the door, a man with his back to the restaurant as he talked to a woman in a bright eau-de-Nil dress. Maddie recognized her as Elizabeth Grover, but her blonde hair was tousled, her mascara smudged. She waved her hands and seemed to be angry, but the man in the cheaply shiny evening suit just shook his head.

  Maddie remembered Elizabeth in the ladies’ room with her white powder. “Excuse me for a moment, David,” she said and slid out from behind the table. By the time she reached the lobby, Elizabeth was hurrying away, and the man was nowhere to be seen.

  “Elizabeth,” Maddie called. Elizabeth turned to face her, a determined, overly bright smile on her face. “Elizabeth, are you okay?”

  “Absolutely wizard, Maddie. Why do you ask?”

  “You just—when I saw you just now with that man, you seemed a bit upset.”

  Elizabeth waved her hand. “What, him? He’s been after me for ages, trying to get a date, and I found out he’s engaged to some chambermaid here! I was just giving him what for, telling him off for treating a girl like that.”

  “He sounds like an odd bird.”

  “He is! Men. They’re the worst.”

  Maddie thought of David, who was waiting for her in the dining room, his smile, his attentive eyes. “Sometimes. Are you sure you’re all right? Should Anton ring for a ride to take you home?”

  Elizabeth laughed a bright, brassy giggle. “It’s so early, Maddie! Don’t be a fuddy-duddy. I’m just off to the ladies’ room, then going dancing. We’re only young once, you know.”

  “Elizabeth,” Maddie began, worried by the bright sheen to her eyes. “Do be careful. If you need anything . . .”

  “I don’t need anything at all,” Elizabeth said, her voice shrill. “Or nothing you can get for me. Won’t everyone just mind their own business? Isn’t that why we came west? To do as we please?”

  She rushed away down the hall, and Maddie slowly turned back toward the restaurant. On impulse, she went instead to the front desk and asked for June. Maybe Harry’s sister would know more about what task her brother had worked on or about the mystery man arguing with Elizabeth Grover.

  “She’s just finishing her shift,” the desk clerk said. “She should be leaving soon. Maybe she’s downstairs in the maids’ cloak room?”

  “Thank you,” Maddie said. She thought of her waiting dessert and David but decided she would just get a quick word with June before the maid left work.

  She made her way downstairs and through the narrow labyrinth that let the staff move quickly through the hotel. A few waiters and chambermaids hurried past with covered trays and stacks of towels. One of them pointed her toward the cloak room.

  She could hear voices—a soft murmur—as she turned the corner that led to the staff cloak rooms, and she caught a glimpse of June’s blonde hair at the end of the hall. But the girl wasn’t alone. She was talking quietly, intimately, with a man Maddie recognized as the one who had been arguing with Elizabeth just a few minutes ago; he wore the same cheap evening suit, had the same slicked-down dark hair. This time, she could see his face. It was Mike, the waiter from Rob’s club who she’d met chatting with Gunther.

  June put a beseeching hand on his arm, and he shook her off. Maddie ducked behind a row of laundry carts and tried to creep closer to hear what they were saying. Their voices were too low for her to understand more than a few muttered words.

  “. . . won’t do us good now,” the man was saying. How very different he was from the man she met at the club, his accent now rough. “. . . missing sales and that.”

  “Harry says it’ll be soon,” June answered. “Things just have to calm down a bit. There’s . . . much attention now. All that blood . . .”

  “We’ll lose business! Our boss says . . .”

  But Maddie wasn’t to know what the boss said. Two girls in laundress smocks came clattering along the corridor, their arms full of sheets and towels, their laughter loud. They teased June, whose cheeks turned bright red.

  “I have to go to work,” Mike said. “Tell Harry. He knows what he has to do if he wants his money.”

  June tried to catch his arm. He shook her off and strode away. June watched after him for a long moment, biting her lip as if in indecision, and then she went inside the cloak room.

  Maddie made her way back upstairs and found David sorting through the autopsy papers at the table. Their coffee and cake were waiting.

  “Sorry that took a while,” she said as she slipped back into her seat. “I saw something a bit interesting.” She quickly told him about Elizabeth, June, and the man from the club.

  “Cocaine, eh?” he said. “Here in Santa Fe?”

  “Could it have something to do with the poison?”

  “Maybe. It’s been a while since my toxicology class. I would need to . . .”

  Maddie suddenly realized a few tables near theirs were watching them with interest. Town gossip did love a new romance—or even better, romance and murder. “Maybe we could talk about it later?”

  He followed her gaze and nodded with a knowing smile. “I see. I think you are quite right, Mrs. Alwin. This isn’t the best subject for such a lovely evening. Maybe you would walk with me around the plaza?”

  Maddie smiled. “I would love to.”

  Elizabeth was right about one thing—the night was young, and the plaza was crowded with people enjoying the warm evening as Maddie strolled its gravel pathways on David’s arm. A band played in the lacy iron gazebo, and a few couples danced on the flagstones in front of it. She almost felt like she was tiptoeing on clouds, it was all so nice.

  She glimpsed a light on in the second-floor office of Madame Genet. She wondered if there was a séance tonight.

  But the beautiful Santa Fe evening seemed far away from anything as frightening as ghosts sending warnings from the other side and from smoky clubs and drug smuggling. The air was soft, just touched with the first warmth of spring, and everyone around her was laughing.

  David made her laugh too, with stories about his English childhood, and he listened closely when she answered with tales of her own New York upbringing, playing in the park with her brother, classes with her school friends. It felt good to remember s
uch days, mostly good days really, and to perhaps look forward to more good days to come. Maybe there really was happiness yet to have for all of them. It had been too long since she felt that way, too long since she could remember the past without pain.

  But when he left her at her door with just one sweet lingering kiss on the cheek, she had to admit she felt a bit disappointed. Yet he had promised to come back for tea the next day to talk over everything in the lab reports, so all was not yet lost.

  It was rather amazing to feel that excited little flutter once more. Maybe she was still young enough after all.

  CHAPTER 19

  The next day, Maddie was in the kitchen, trying to stir up a batch of drop scones that her mother’s cook in New York had once taught her. It wasn’t quite as easy as Mrs. Brown had made it look, but Maddie had invited David Cole to tea, promised a treat for Eddie, and also sent a note to Gunther inviting him, and for some reason, she wanted to impress them all with her domestic wizardry. If only she had any domestic skills to speak of, she thought ruefully as the dough slid like liquid through her spoon. Even Buttercup, sitting next to the stove, didn’t want to eat any stray lumps. They all obviously missed Juanita.

  At last she was able to mix up a batch that held together, prettily spotted with dried currants, and she sat down at the table as they baked. As she waited, she got out the threatening note she had received and the letter she’d taken from Madame Genet’s office and laid them next to each other. The letter was unsigned and was mostly about the office that was for rent and someone urging Madame Genet to come to town soon to help with “some matters.” The handwriting wasn’t quite the same, the block letters of Maddie’s note being an obvious ruse, but the paper and very dark ink looked similar. She wondered who had brought Madame Genet to Santa Fe in the first place.

  She took out a notebook and tried to write down what she knew so far about their sad predicament. She realized she had actually found out rather a lot in the last few days, but none of the details seemed to stick together to make a whole story.