Castle Moon

by Mary Bowers

  Bill Weyer was still on the floor from when he’d gotten down to get a closer look at the train case. He was gazing at me alongside his partner.

  “You did find an elevator, right?” I said.

  They both nodded. “We did,” Frane said.

  “And? I deduced that it was there, but I haven’t seen it yet.”

  Frane supplied the details. “The door is camouflaged in Maxine’s office, the butler’s pantry, and presumably, the murder room, since measurements show that that’s where it terminates.”

  I was nodding. “That’s the old kitchen. We were in the murder room. I didn’t see an elevator door, but I’m not surprised. She had it disguised, like the old trick bookshelves in the movies that swung out like doors.”

  Frane watched me blandly with his mirror-like eyes. “But we can’t get it open. It works on a keypad, and Maxine won’t give us the combination.”

  “I may be able to help you there,” I said. “But first, let me tell you the rest of my reasons for suspecting an elevator. Charlotte told me that when her husband died, Maxine insisted she take a leave of absence. Well, you’ve met Maxine. Is it believable? Charlotte’s husband died three years ago, and guess what – the Coxes were hired three years ago. Coincidence? I think not. I think Maxine trumped up a reason for firing the Coxes predecessors, and while there was no other staff in the house, she also got rid of Charlotte by sending her off on a tour. Then she brought in somebody to install a small elevator in the old dumbwaiter shaft from the butler’s pantry to the old kitchen – now the murder room. Oliver said it was schematically possible to run the shaft right up to Maxine’s office, but he didn’t know she had gone ahead and done it.”

  Frane gave me another expressionless nod. “We’ve already found the construction company that did it. We thought they might have the combination to the keypad, but they don’t. It’s the kind the owner can reprogram periodically, and the default installation code of 1111 has been changed. You said you could help with that?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure, but I have an idea. Anyway, I think that’s why Maxine knew that Oliver had taken Ed and me into the murder room without bringing her along. If she had the elevator door open in her office, she probably heard our voices through the shaft. She didn’t come down in the elevator, of course. Didn’t want us to know it was there.”

  “It’s disguised as a bookshelf, in her office. The door in the pantry is trickier – it’s a fitted panel at the left corner of the doorway, just inside the kitchen, and when we opened it, it stuck, as if it had been painted shut. I don’t think Maxine used it much.”

  “She has a little staircase from her office to the kitchen. But she probably enjoyed keeping the elevator a secret all her own. She’s like that. She could have made it easier for the cook to bring meals up to her in an elevator, but she made her take the stairs. Typical. What about the door to the murder room?”

  “We haven’t been able to get into the murder room yet.”

  “Speaking of it, when we were touring the murder room, she came blazing in and scared the heck out of us. Pulled a weapon on us, as a matter of fact. Isn’t that assault?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, whatever. I can’t prove it now. Want to see the four pages? Because I think they really tell us something. Do you ever read Maxine Moon’s books, by the way?”

  “No,” said Frane.

  “Yes,” said Weyer.

  “Well, you’re going to see what I mean. Up off the floor, guys. We’re going to my room upstairs.”

  They rose obediently, and Frane said, “So far you’re batting a thousand. Lead the way.”

  So gratifying.

  Chapter 20

  When we got to the third floor, Ed was waiting on the settee in the suite outside our rooms. He stood up.

  “Ah,” I said. “Just the man I wanted. Come in, Ed. We’re going to talk to the detectives about those four pages I found.”

  “You told them?”

  “I had to.”

  I got the pages out of my modern, nylon, zippered cosmetic case. It wasn’t a great hiding place, but I figured nobody was going to be looking for them. Whoever had the manuscript probably hadn’t counted the pages. I handed them to Detective Weyer, who seated himself primly on the little bench of the vanity.

  “Read it,” I said. “See if it sounds familiar.”

  He did. He was a fast reader, and in a few minutes he looked up at me. “Okay, so it’s a Maxine Moon book. A forensic analysis of the syntax by an expert can probably prove it, but what’s your point?”

  “What was Fawn doing with it?” I asked.

  Ed, from his seat next to me on the bed, said, “She’s referring to my theory that this manuscript fragment was written by Maxine, not Fawn, which of course, you will prove with your expert. You see, Fawn, when she found this, which you’ll have to establish because we haven’t, was horrified and stole it from her sister –“

  “Sorry, Ed,” I interrupted, “but I don’t think that’s what happened. Maxine Moon, the best-selling author, did write this. But not Maxine Moon, the terror of Castle Moon and sister of Oliver and Fawn. Maxine Moon has been the nom de plume of Fawn Moon for the thirty years that ‘Maxine Moon’ books have been published. She’d been writing them all along.”

  Ed goggled. Frane and Weyer merely looked cautious.

  “Let me try to be clearer,” I said. “Fawn Moon has been writing the best-selling horror books all along. But as the wife of a man in the House of Representatives, she could never have published them under her own name. In fact, I don’t believe she even let her husband know she was writing them. It was a dead secret, even to her children. Her grandson, Horace, I’m not sure about. He snoops. But I’m pretty darned sure that her secretary of twenty years, Julie Lang, did know.”

  “Why do you think that? It’s unproveable now,” Frane said.

  “If Julie didn’t know, how did she force Maxine to hire her as her literary secretary, when what Maxine really wanted to do was fire her? Like, out-of-a-cannon, fire her.”

  Ed’s mouth made a nice little “o,” and the detectives gave swift looks to one another.

  I began to expand on my theme. “And Fawn had arthritis in her hands. For some time now, she’s probably been having Julie type the books for her. Julie believed that Fawn committed suicide. She wasn’t afraid of Maxine. She probably went to her and told her that her assistance to Fawn in writing the books amounted to co-authorship, and she’d be willing to help Maxine the same way. Maxine was no fool. When Radley Hixon died, she must have realized that Fawn would think of publishing the books under her own name. On her desk, I saw something Maxine was working on, taking a stab at creating her own books. But it wasn’t working, and she must have known it. Her writing style was awful. Juvenile. For a moment, there, I wondered if Horace the younger hadn’t written it.

  “And I was confused by it. It was written in – what did you call it, Ed? – a ‘writer’s voice’ different from the Maxine Moon books. She just didn’t have ‘it.’ She didn’t have Fawn’s anger, her anguish, the macabre ideas that must have come out of her revenge fantasies. Year after year, she had to efface herself and hide her talent while her husband got all the glory and treated her like a nit-wit. Now that he was dead, she was free. Free to publish her own books under her own name, and that’s exactly what she was going to do.”

  “So she was going to announce to the whole family that she had been writing those books all along, and not her sister?” Ed asked.

  “I don’t think so. I think she was going to announce the beginning of her career as an author. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who would do something that nasty, even to a wretch like Maxine. But I think Maxine had been afraid of this for years, and understood better than Fawn what was going to happen next. That’s why she had to kill her. Any fan of the horror books she’d been publishing under her own name would have recognized that Fawn’s books were the real deal. Maxine would have been exposed as
a fraud.”

  “Maxine?” Ed said. “I thought we had decided that Oliver –“

  “Sorry, Ed. I never thought Oliver wanted to kill anybody.”

  “But somebody wanted to kill Oliver,” Ed said. “Somebody tried to kill him last Christmas, remember?” He looked at the detectives uneasily, not wanting to falsely accuse Ryan.

  “Nobody tried to kill Oliver,” I said. “Somebody tried to kill Fawn. Maxine tried to draw Fawn out of her room by tipping the suit of armor over onto the musician’s balcony. When Fawn came running out, she was going to get her to look over the railing, get behind her and give her a push. But the armor is awkward and Maxine is no spring chicken. It must have hit the railing of the musician’s balcony and tumbled all the way down into the great hall. It sounded like a bomb going off, and it brought everybody out of their rooms. Maxine couldn’t very well shove Fawn over the balustrade in front of a bunch of witnesses. Oliver assumed he was being lured out of his room to be killed, but if so, why was the commotion on the opposite end of the gallery?”

  The detectives, probably hearing about the incident for the first time, looked doubtfully at one another. Frane shook his head, and they didn’t pursue it just then.

  “Let’s get back on track,” Frane said. “Your theory is that Fawn has been writing Maxine’s books since the very beginning. And Maxine killed her because she didn’t want to be exposed as a fraud. Fawn could have done that at any time, and as early as last Christmas, Maxine had murder on her mind. She felt threatened by the hold Fawn had over her, and now that Radley Hixon was dead, it was imperative to get rid of her. She was out of time. Sounds logical. I think a jury would like it. But we’re going to need more. What now?”

  “Follow the money. Maxine and Fawn have probably been splitting the royalties. If so, they may have formed some kind of a corporation. There would be a paper trail on that. And that typescript is a computer print-out. Get Fawn’s computer. I bet all the books are on its hard drive.”

  Weyer was nodding, writing in a little notebook on the vanity tabletop.

  “And things came to a head on Horace Moon’s birthday,” I continued. ”I think Maxine got to Fawn and talked her out of making her big announcement just yet. Fawn’s meeting with Oliver didn’t happen, because Ed and I were keeping him busy that morning, and Fawn was busy with Julie. But Maxine had been listening to our conversation from her balcony.”

  I took a sidebar and described the breakfast on the terrace to the two detectives.

  Then I went on again. “Maxine called Fawn up to her room, probably knowing exactly what she was planning to announce at the birthday dinner. This wasn’t their first go-round about it: I heard them arguing about something the day I arrived here. And Fawn would have been easy to manipulate. ‘Oh, you can’t do it at the dinner! You’d be upstaging our revered progenitor,’ or some bullsh- ah, some nonsense like that. Maxine would have known just how to play her, and even with her talent and her beauty, Fawn didn’t have the self-esteem to go head-to-head with Maxine. She probably brought this new draft of a book along to soften the blow, giving Maxine one last book to publish under her name. But Fawn was serious about pursuing her own career, and planned on using her own name after that. If she’d just been considering a more open collaboration, she probably wouldn’t be dead. But would you want to try to work with Maxine?”

  Ed raised his hand and objected. “But you said Maxine wasn’t capable of writing her own books. With Fawn dead . . . ?”

  “She probably would have announced that she was too distraught to go on writing after the death of her beloved sister. Something like that. Then she would have retired from writing altogether.”

  “Great, nice neat wrap-up, but it’s mostly speculation,” Frane said. “How are you going to prove it?”

  “Let’s go use a little detective-interrogation strategy on Maxine,” I said, standing up. “Trick her into telling us some incriminating lies. And about that elevator keypad combination? Everything in this place seems to be about old Horace Moon. Let’s just try his birthday: May 15. Oh-five-one-five. It isn’t going to be anything tricky; just something she could easily remember. Keep in mind, she never thought anybody would find out about the elevator. If that doesn’t work, we can always try young Horace. He’s a sneaky little baggage. I bet he knows a lot more about what’s going on here than anybody realizes.”

  * * * * *

  In the end, we didn’t have to consult with the young pioneer. My suggestion worked.

  And after swearing up and down that she did not have a manuscript created by her sister – something new and unpublished – we opened the elevator door and found the remainder of the book, right where only Maxine could have put it, since no other family members even knew about the elevator.

  There was some back-and-forth, her daring me to prove it, and me being a smart-aleck and saying I didn’t have to. The typescript was a print-out. Fawn’s New York computer would have that book on the hard drive, along with all the others. I could tell from the look on her face at that moment that it was over.

  “But how did she get into Fawn’s room?” Detective Frane asked. Maxine was standing right there, but he was asking me. “After all, we never did find a communicating door between her office and the other bedroom.”

  “Oh, that,” I said, feeling cocky now. “Step into my office.” I got into the tiny elevator, but it turned out only Frane could fit in with me.

  “Watch her,” Frane said to the cop standing next to Maxine in the middle of her office.

  “Meet us down in the dungeon,” I told the rest of them. “I’ll open the door to the murder room for you in a few minutes.”

  Detective Marty and I rode the tiny elevator car down to the dungeon, practically belly to belly. I wasn’t actually calling him Marty, but by that time I was feeling considerably less creeped-out by him. Actually, kind of chummy. I hadn’t seen Bastet in Maxine’s room when we’d opened the elevator, but when I felt something warm and furry moving around by my feet (Marty and I were too close together to see down to the bottom of the car), I hoped it was Bastet. I love all animals, but I don’t necessarily want to cuddle up with, for instance, a rat.

  The elevator doors slid open inside the murder room and we stepped out of the car and fumbled for a light switch. Bastet had streaked out ahead of us, and I’d been able to reassure myself that it was her and not some other furry thing. Only the elevator car’s dome light helped, but we groped around and found it without managing to grope one another by accident. Marty gave me the honor of opening the door to Bill Weyer and Ed. After that, I walked back across the room and took one last chance at showing off, hoping for the best.

  Actually, I was pretty confident about my gambit. Bastet, after exiting the elevator, had taken a seat on the shelf displaying the skulls and posed herself beside them, gazing at us placidly.

  “I have a skull just like this one,” I said, going to the resin one hidden in plain sight among the real ones. “It has a hinged flap at the back. Ah, yes.” I let the master key fall from the skull into the palm of my hand. “Somehow or other, some year or other, she got hold of Oliver’s master key and had it copied. Heck, she had her whole life to get a master key. She’s always lived here. It didn’t make sense that she didn’t have one, but she’s always denied it because she didn’t want Fawn to know she could get into her room when she wasn’t here.”

  “Cute,” was all Frane said. He held his hand out for the key and I gave it to him.

  “She must have given that to Julie and told her to go to Fawn’s room to retrieve the new manuscript. Julie would have known about it, because she was doing all of Fawn’s typing. Whether or not she knew where Fawn had hidden it, she did manage to find it for Maxine. But she must have let her guard down. Once she had what she wanted, Maxine either lured her out to the balcony and pushed her over, or – much more likely, I think, since Julie wouldn’t have trusted her yet at that point – she whacked her one with one of her many toys d
own here, dragged her out to the balcony and pitched her over. There has to be forensic evidence of that – in the room, on Julie, and maybe even on Maxine’s clothing.”

  “And on whatever she used to, as you so sublimely put it, ‘whack her one.’ We’ll have to check everything down here.”

  “I don’t think it’s here anymore,” Ed said.

  “Oh. What are you thinking?”

  “That glass-topped table. The bludgeons. I remember thinking there were an even dozen. Now there are only eleven.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “They’ve been rearranged. You can tell.”

  “You actually counted them?” Frane asked.

  Ed, always self-effacing, told him, “Every now and then, being excessively detail-oriented pays off, instead of just looking weird. But I wonder why she didn’t acquire the weapon before we were shown the murder room in the first place?”

  “She didn’t know she was going to need it then,” I said. “When she found out Fawn’s plan to put her own name on her books, she decided to kill her, possibly on impulse when the opportunity arose. Their balconies line up, and if Fawn had gone out on hers in the middle of the night, Maxine could have seen her standing by the railing. She had a master key. She could have quietly slipped inside, crept up behind her sister and given her a quick shove. Easy peasy.

  “But then Julie blackmailed her for a job and tried to force her way in on the book deals. And I still think she was after Ryan. A match between them would have been the last thing Maxine wanted. Julie believed Fawn committed suicide. She wasn’t afraid of Maxine. Once Julie handed over the typescript, Maxine just needed to get behind her, and, well . . . Maxine’s in her seventies, but she looks pretty sturdy to me. She must have dragged her to the balcony and managed to flip her over somehow.

  “Somebody was moving around in the room when Ed and I were standing outside the door at midnight. We heard them. I was . . . a little groggy, but Ed wasn’t. So Julie was already there at midnight, and she was probably dead soon after that, which left Maxine plenty of time to tidy up before morning, hide the typescript and master key, and get rid of the weapon. You might want to send divers down, about the distance from the terrace that an old woman would be able to throw a blackjack. If they find it, it’ll be washed clean, but –”