by Laura Childs
“She’s the pretty blond with the really good face-lift whose husband gave her the black Jaguar XKE for her last birthday, which nobody’s bothering to count anymore.”
“Now that you’ve described her so precisely, I do recall her,” said Theodosia, smiling.
“Well, the Popple Hill ladies took her house from early Dumpster to utterly dazzling. Gabby and her husband, Der-wood or Dellwood or something like that, inherited that great old house and all the furniture. The wooden pieces were okay, so-so seventeenth-century French that could be refinished and touched up a bit, but most of the dining room chairs were absolutely bedraggled. And nothing had been done to the interior, not a speck of paint nor snippet of wallpaper, in ages. Now it’s stunning, an absolute showpiece. I wouldn’t be surprised if Town and Country or Southern Accents wanted to do a big spread on it.”
“What about the exterior?”
Delaine wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t too keen on having her stories interrupted. “Yes, Hillary and Marianne masterminded a restoration on that, too.”
“They used wrought iron?”
“Oh, tons of it,” said Delaine, “because of the huge garden courtyard out back. You know that house, don’t you? You’ve been inside and seen that marvelous oversized fireplace?”
Theodosia ignored Delaine’s question. “Do you know any of Popple Hill’s craftspeople?” she asked.
Delaine frowned. “Their craftspeople? No, I wouldn’t know about that. I imagine they’re just ordinary workers. Hillary and Marianne are the real genuises.” Delaine paused. “I love that you’re thinking about updating your look.”
“Mm-hm,” said Theodosia, knowing she’d never let anyone tinker with the cozy interior she loved so much.
“Come to think of it, Popple Hill did some recent restoration work on Doe and Oliver’s home, too,” said Delaine as the ring of the telephone perfectly punctuated the end of her sentence.
“Chloe Keenland is on the phone,” Janine called to Delaine. “She wants to know if you’re still on for this afternoon.”
Delaine pushed back her sleeve, glanced at her watch, a Chopard rimmed with sparkling jewels. “Gosh, I’d forgotten all about Chloe.” Delaine chewed her lower lip as she gazed at Theodosia. “Garden Fest starts this Friday, and I’m on the opening night refreshment committee,” she explained. Swiveling her head toward Janine, Delaine smiled winningly. “Janine, could you be an absolute angel and work until five today?”
Janine looked glum. “I suppose,” she said.
“Wonderful,” declared Delaine. “Perfect.”
Back at the tea shop, Theodosia felt more confused than ever. Her somewhat strange and rambling conversation with Delaine hadn’t yielded much. And none of the theories she’d been tossing around seemed to make sense, either.
“Haley, did you—” began Theodosia, but her sentence was cut short.
Theodosia looked up to see Doe Belvedere Dixon striding into the Indigo Tea Shop for the second time that day.
“Miss Browning,” said Doe in a breathless, little-girl voice, “can we talk?”
Theodosia nodded and quickly steered the girl to one of the far tables. “Of course,” she said, her curiosity suddenly hitting a fever pitch.
Doe waited until they were both seated and was positive no one was in earshot before she began. “I came back to apologize,” she said. “Giovanni is still very touchy about Oliver’s death, and he often overreacts rather badly. But you have to understand, he was so very fond of his cousin.”
“Second cousin,” said Theodosia, watching Doe closely, wondering what the real agenda was.
“Yes, of course,” said Doe as she picked a tiny fleck of lint from the sleeve of her perfect buttercup yellow sweater. “But the two of them were extremely close. Giovanni’s mother died when he was very young, and Oliver was always like an older brother to him.”
“I’m sure he was,” said Theodosia, wondering again why Doe had come back. Her apology didn’t seem all that heartfelt.
Then Doe leaned forward across the small wooden table and her taffy-colored hair swung closely about her face. “Frankly, I think Giovanni was upset because I told him about Ford Cantrell and me,” she said.
Now it was Theodosia’s turn to lean forward, the better to catch every word.
“Ford and I met a few years ago at the University of Charleston,” explained Doe. “He was a grad student in computer engineering, and I was a Tri Delt pledge.” She stopped and smiled wistfully at Theodosia. “Were you ever in a sorority?”
Theodosia stared at Doe. “No,” she said. “Best time of my life,” she declared. “Anyway, Ford and I dated a few times, and then I broke it off.”
“Don’t look now, but it’s the prom queen again,” Haley muttered under her breath.
“You dated Ford Cantrell?” Theodosia said in a loud whisper.
Doe frowned, as though she were unused to any type of critical remark. “Honestly, Theodosia, it was no big deal.” She shrugged. “I said I broke it off. If you ask me, Ford Cantrell has never accepted being rejected.”
“She dated him?” Drayton tucked his chin down and stared over his glasses. His right eyebrow twitched crazily; he did not look amused. “You’re making this up,” he finally declared in a flat voice. “In a brazen attempt to completely muddle my poor mind.”
Theodosia shook her head. “Doe told me so herself.”
“Is that what you two were whispering about?” said Haley. “A date she had with Ford Cantrell in college? Hmm, she certainly holds herself in high regard, doesn’t she?”
“I think she was just trying to explain why Giovanni got so upset when I started talking about Ford Cantrell this morning,” said Theodosia. “In her own way, Doe was trying to be nice.”
“She’s got a funny way of being nice,” grumbled Haley.
“Indeed she has,” agreed Drayton.
Theodosia was inclined to agree with them, if the whole situation hadn’t been so bizarre. Bizarre bordering on Rip-ley’s Believe It or Not!
And when you tried to look at Oliver Dixon’s murder from the standpoint of pure motive, it was also terribly confusing.
Ford Cantrell supposedly harbored a grudge against Oliver Dixon, yet he’d worked for the man as a consultant. Ford had motive only if you took into account the long-standing family feud and their somewhat strange business arrangement, which could have been far from amicable.
Booth Crowley and Billy Manolo had both handled the antique pistol minutes before Oliver Dixon was killed by it.
Both men impressed Theodosia as being short-tempered and snappish.
But as far as motive went, the only connection Billy Manolo seemed to have to Oliver Dixon was through the yacht club and as an ironworker, possibly creating some decorative wrought-iron pieces for Doe and Oliver’s home via the Popple Hill people.
Would you kill someone because he might have criticized the scrollwork on your garden gate? She didn’t think so.
Booth Crowley was a suspect by virtue of his peripheral connections. He’d handed the pistol to Oliver just moments before he was killed and had put up most of the money for Grapevine. On the other hand, if Oliver Dixon had somehow gotten wind that Booth Crowley was going to shut the company down, he might have been forced to retaliate. That was a theory that certainly warranted more investigating.
As far as Doe Belvedere Dixon was concerned... well, Theodosia wasn’t sure where Doe fit into the equation, other than the fact that she stood to inherit a lot of money.
Of course, to make things all the more confusing, Ford Cantrell, Booth Crowley, Oliver Dixon, and Billy Manolo were all members of the same yacht club. Well, Billy worked there, but he was still at the club a lot of the time.
So what did all that information add up to? As far as Theodosia was concerned, it totaled a big fat zero.
Puttering about the tearoom for the rest of the day, Theodosia fretted about her inability to draw any kind of conclusion. She was unwilling to let it go by
the time evening rolled around and she found herself upstairs with Earl Grey in her little apartment.
As though Earl Grey had psychically picked up on her restlessness and disquietude, the dog paced about the apartment, toenails clicking against kitchen tile and hardwood floors.
They’d already taken their evening walk through the historic district. Starting on Church Street, they’d jogged up Water Street, then wended their way down Meeting Street to The Battery. After Earl Grey had romped in the park, they’d even walked home past the Stewart home on Lam-boll Street, where Billy Manolo, according to Delaine, had supposedly created tons of wrought iron to enclose their backyard garden.
And still Theodosia was restless.
What to do? she wondered. Take another walk? Sip some chamomile tea? Fix a tisane of Saint-John’s-wort to calm me down?
No, she finally decided, there was something far better that she could do. She could put it all down on paper. Or rather, computer. She would compose and organize her thoughts, making notations if she was seriously bothered by any glaring facts or strange coincidences. Then she could hit a single key and E-mail the whole shebang to Detective Burt Tidwell. She could put him on the same page with her, so to speak. Get him alerted to or caught up on all the details. After all, she told herself, two heads were better than one. And from the looks of things, her head seemed to have borne the brunt of worrying about Oliver Dixon’s death these last nine days. Not even Oliver’s wife, Doe, seemed to think the accident hadn’t really been an accident.
That resolved, Theodosia sat down at her computer and began the task of putting it all down.
The writing and rewriting took her a good while. But when she was finished and the information sent, it felt like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. And Theodosia, sleepy at last, padded into her cream-colored bedroom and slid into bed between indigo cotton sheets that were cool and feather light and infinitely conducive to pleasant dreams.
Chapter 24
“Theodosia? It’s Bernard Morrow.”
Clenching the phone tighter, Theodosia straightened up in her chair. “Professor Morrow, hello. I’ve been hoping to hear from you.” She glanced out across the tearoom. Haley was sliding gracefully between the small tables with a tray that held samples of their new South African Redbush tea. Drayton was chatting with two regulars who came in every Tuesday morning, dressed to the nines and wearing hats and gloves. Sunlight streamed in through the heavy, leaded panes, lending a shimmering glow to everything. With the morning’s sunlight came a ray of hope as well.
“Yes, well, I meant to get your little project dispatched with sooner,” said Professor Morrow, “but I’ve been serving on this confounded academic search committee. Everyone on it worries endlessly about adding new, untenured faculty to the department and pontificates over their own specialized area. All in all, it gives you the sense that your career is drawing to a close, and it’s time to take a final bow.”
“You’re not thinking about retiring, are you?” Theodosia asked in alarm. Professor Morrow was one of the most caring, humane professors she had ever encountered. It would be a profound loss to the University of Charleston if he were to retire.
“Considering it, but not planning my exit in the near future,” said Professor Morrow. “Anyway, I didn’t call to tell you my problems. You asked me to analyze the material on the linen tablecloth, and I did exactly that. Not the blood, of course, you’d need a chromatograph to do that, and our lab is simply not equipped that way.”
“I understand,” said Theodosia.
“Anyway, I took a look at the ground-in matter. It’s dirt, all right.”
“Dirt,” repeated Theodosia.
“Not flecks of metal or gunpowder as you had initially suspected. Just garden-variety dirt.” He paused. “I could run a couple more tests, see if I can break down the compounds, measure phosphorous and potassium, things like that.”
“Would you?”
“No problem. Those are simple chemical analyses I can do with reagents we have right here in the lab. Take me a day or two.”
“Thank you, Professor Morrow.”
Theodosia hung up the phone and hastily replayed their conversation in her mind. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. She’d been fairly convinced that the pistol had been tampered with in some way and that the fine dust on the linen tablecloth would reveal metal shavings or some type of unusual gunpowder.
But dirt? What the heck did that mean? Had someone kicked it around in the mud before Drayton snatched it up and stuck it in the trunk of his car?
“You look as though someone just delivered some bad news,” said Drayton.
“Professor Morrow just called with his analysis of Haley’s schmutz,” replied Theodosia.
“And?”
“Dirt,” she replied.
Drayton looked skeptical. “Dirt? That’s it?”
“That’s it. Now you can see why I’m disappointed.”
“You’re disappointed? I’m disappointed,” said Drayton. “I’ve been envisioning endless scenarios involving strange resins or chemicals that could be traced, by means of sophisticated forensics, to a particular suspect who would then be summarily apprehended.”
“Drayton, you watch too much crime TV,” said Haley, who had been filling teapots and eavesdropping at the same time.
“I rarely watch television,” he said with an imperious lift of his gray head.
“I stand corrected. Then you read far too many mysteries,” said Haley. She furrowed her brow as if to lend solidarity to Theodosia’s dashed hopes. “Sorry the tablecloth didn’t lead somewhere,” she said.
Theodosia nodded.
“What’s next, then?” asked Haley. Boundlessly optimistic, Haley was never one to be discouraged by a little bad news. She was always ready to move on, explore another angle.
“I think I’ve got to pay another visit to Timothy Neville,” said Theodosia.
“You mentioned that a couple days ago, but I haven’t seen any forward progress yet,” Drayton commented in a dry tone.
Theodosia undid her apron, balled it up, thrust it into Drayton’s hands. “On my way.”
“Mr. Neville?”
Timothy Neville looked up from the antique map he was studying, a schematic diagram of old Fort Sumter.
“Yes, Claire?”
“Miss Theodosia Browning is here to see you?”
“Is that a statement or a question, Claire?”
Flustered, Claire just stared at him. She loved working at the Heritage Society but had long since decided that Timothy Neville was the strangest little man she’d ever encountered. “Perennially puckish” was how Theresa, one of the longtime curators, had described him, and Claire had the feeling that Theresa had hit the nail squarely on the head.
“It’s both,” said Claire finally. “She’s here. Do you have time to see her?”
Timothy Neville smiled to himself. “Kindly show her in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Claire?” said Timothy.
Claire hovered in the doorway. “Yes?”
“Thank you.” Timothy Neville smiled to himself as he carefully rolled up the fragile parchment map and slid it into a cardboard storage tube. He waited until he heard the Browning woman enter his office and cross over to his desk before he looked up. When he did, he was struck by the keen intelligence in her eyes.
“Hello,” he said to Theodosia.
Theodosia stared back at Timothy Neville, noting that his eyes were the sad, unblinking eyes of an old turtle. “Hello, Mr. Neville,” she replied.
Timothy Neville lifted his gnarled fingers slightly, inviting Theodosia to be seated in one of the French deco leather club chairs that flanked his desk. She did.
Watching her closely, Timothy Neville was somehow pleased that the woman sat poised so straight in her chair and kept her eyes focused directly on him.
“You have questions,” he said. “About antique pistols.”
�
��Yes,” she said.
Timothy bobbed his head and managed a half smile. “Drayton called just a few moments ago. Begged me to be civil to you.”
“Will you be?” she asked.
“Of course. I’m generally civil to everyone. It’s false benevolence I abhor.”
Timothy Neville sat down at his desk and faced her. Theodosia noticed that they were at eye level with each other and suspected that the small-of-stature Timothy had adjusted his chair to a higher level, the better to be on an equal parity with visitors.
“You have considerable knowledge about the workings of antique pistols,” said Theodosia.
“I have a collection of them, a small collection. Two dozen at most. But I’ve been collecting for more than fifty years, so I have a couple choice pieces that are now exceedingly rare.”
“Can you tell me how a person might cause an antique weapon to explode?” she asked him.
“I take it the antique weapon you so coyly refer to is the offending pistol that brought Oliver Dixon’s life to a crashing conclusion?”
“That’s right,” she said, wondering why Timothy Neville seemed to want to footnote everything. She supposed it was his lifelong involvement in all things historical.
“As chance would have it, I have a pistol of the same ilk. Crafted by the old E. R. Shane Company in Pennsylvania. It’s not a perfect mate, but it’s very, very close.”
“Have you ever fired it?” asked Theodosia.
“Not recently,” said Timothy. “But to answer your question, the simplest way to cause a pistol to explode is to overpack it.” Timothy folded his arms protectively across his thin chest and posed gnomishly, awaiting her next question.
“With gunpowder?” she asked.
Timothy Neville gave her a thin smile. “That’s one way. Not the best, though.”
“What else could you use?” Theodosia asked. “Dirt?”
“Pack a pistol with dirt, and you’re almost guaranteed it will explode,” said Timothy.
Pinwheels of color flared in Theodosia’s cheeks. Dirt, she thought. Simple dirt. She leaned back in her chair slightly and envisioned the scenario. You take an old pistol that had been hand-wrought almost two hundred years ago. You pour in a handful of Carolina dirt, pack it in tight, tamp it down. When the trigger is pulled... boom. The amazing exploding gun trick.