by Ann Ripley
Louise was now mixed up in the deaths of two strangers— attracted like a bear to a honey tree by anything resembling a mystery. One death appeared to be an accident, one a suicide—but who knew for sure? Certainly not that Boy Scout of a state trooper, Drucker, who’d had the chutzpah to drag Louise in on the investigation. Yet Drucker had cleverly issued the same invitation to them all, as Bill had discovered from talking to Janie and Chris and Nora. The trooper told each one of them that he needed any scrap of information they had, and that they should hustle it right over to him— even phone him at night—if they thought of anything.
Bill felt sorry for the guy. He had come upon an assortment of fifteen out-of-towners, practically strangers to one another, and needed to find out—quickly—about any hidden relationships, grudges, or alliances that might exist among them. And Drucker didn’t want anyone to leave Litchfield until the preliminary investigation was completed, around noon tomorrow—which was fine with Bill since their plane reservations from New York back to Washington were not until tomorrow evening.
It made him uncomfortable, though, that Louise was the one Drucker’d singled out to take to the Cooley bedroom and show the evidence. What especially annoyed him was that Drucker had called Detective Geraghty in Virginia to vet Louise before essentially signing her up as an extra detective. He would have to keep an eagle eye on his wife, because he knew from past experience how impetuous she could be. Geraghty’s imprimatur would encourage her to God knows what kind of lengths to “help the investigation”!
Now Louise, Nora, and Bill sat at a table on the nearly empty veranda with a brandy nightcap provided by Barbara’s staff. Off to one side, Sergeant Drucker was just concluding a conversation with the local reporter Louise had befriended today. His wife had apparently spilled the beans about Barbara Seymour’s plan to turn the mansion over to the Connecticut Trust. Then the young reporter had heard about Grace’s accident and probably ditched his Saturday night date to hustle over to the inn. He looked over at them briefly, and Bill could see a hunter’s gleam in his eye.
Through talking to the reporter, Drucker and his men solemnly gathered up their notes and prepared to go, leaving one trooper stationed inside the mansion tonight. An unhappy-looking Jim Cooley came out to speak with the sergeant then, and from the fragments of conversation he could hear, Bill guessed Cooley wanted to go to the morgue where his wife’s body had been taken.
He looked at Louise. She had heard the exchange, too.
“I suppose it would be a comfort to him,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe he wants to find out the exact cause of death. She may have OD’d on Prozac and then staggered up that hill and jumped.”
“Maybe,” said Louise, her eyes staring right through him. Then she seemed to come to her senses. She looked at him again, only this time she saw him and gave him a little smile, like a token gift to a friend. Her shoulders relaxed about a millimeter. “I’m exhausted—are you?”
“Certainly am. Why don’t we say good night to the veranda at the friendly old Litchfield Falls Inn and hike off to bed?”
“Just a minute—I’m thinking.”
Nora was sitting across the table observing Louise, and she nodded in a knowing way. “Her detective juices are flowing. Don’t disturb her.” Bill drew back as if Nora had struck him. Since when can’t I talk to my own wife?
Nora was beginning to get on his nerves. She had been down in the dumps ever since they heard about Jeffrey’s fall, and seeing Grace in that pool at the base of the falls had made her mood even darker. He wished she could find some little thing to be happy about. Maybe it would be less annoying if she hadn’t worn that black mourning outfit for a guy she’d known for ten hours total.
“So—what are you thinking about?” he asked Louise. He sat back carefully in his chair, trying not to feel left out, desperately wanting to become a member of her club.
Without answering him, she turned to Nora. “Would you have guessed Grace was suicidal?”
“I don’t know, Louise,” Nora said. “Today she acted intoxicated—all excited by the garden tour, I expect. And then just as quickly she was wounded, like a small, vulnerable animal, when Bebe said a cross word to her. That’s strange behavior. She could have been near the breaking point, for reasons we don’t even know.”
“How about this reason: a marriage about to break up?” asked Louise.
“That could explain it,” said Nora.
“Yes, sure could,” parroted Bill.
Louise touched his arm and said, “Honey, you’ll be interested in this, too.” These words made him feel better; he sat forward to listen as she pulled out a little pad of paper and read them the poem that Grace had written and left in her bedroom. “I wrote this down as best I could—I think I have it right.”
“How would you finish that?” said Bill, his mind instantly clicking into action. “Has to rhyme with ‘iris red,’ So it’s ‘dead,’ ‘fed,’ ‘head,’ ‘led,’ ‘said,’ or ‘wed,’” He grinned. “Or maybe it’s ‘abed,’”
Nora inhaled her cigarette and glanced at him disdainfully; his attempts to lighten the mood were not being valued highly. In a sad voice she said, “It sounds like a tragic goodbye to her husband.”
“Then Drucker damned well ought to find out what was going on between Jim and Grace,” observed Bill, returning to a serious tone. “I could tell that woman was ready to break.”
Louise leaned toward him. “We have to remember that there were two people unaccounted for when Grace disappeared from her room.”
“Who and who?” he asked.
“Bebe—you remember how Bebe had her dinner sent up, like Grace—and Fiona. Fiona scooted away from the dinner table as soon as she finished her main course. But Sergeant Drucker thinks she wouldn’t have had enough time to be involved. And Bebe? She was a wreck this afternoon. Could she have been strong enough to get Grace up to the falls?”
“There’s no exact time of death, I suppose,” said Bill.
“No. They never can cut it that close.” Louise smiled wanly at them. “Only in detective stories, where the murderer breaks the victim’s watch during a struggle.”
Bill was glad to see even this small bit of levity from his wife. “Or topples over the grandfather clock,” he added.
“So let’s conclude that Grace is a suicide, at least for the moment. What about Janie and Chris’s theory about Jeffrey’s being pushed? They’ve shared it with that Teddy Horton…”
“And inadvertently with Mark Post,” he added.
“Is it worth thinking about?” she asked.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Bill pontifically. “We have to remember to keep our minds open.” He looked at the two women guiltily. Since they had done him the honor of including him in the conversation, he wished he could have offered something pithier. “Maybe” and “maybe not” were not the brightest things he’d ever said.
They all fell silent for a moment, and then Nora said, “Louise, promise me something.” The woman’s large gray eyes focused in on Louise like a laser. Bill had a wild desire to wave his hand between the two women’s faces and break the connection.
“Of course,” said Louise.
“I realize this place will be swarming with police again in the morning,” said Nora. “But be careful, please—I beg you.”
Oh, oh. It was Nora’s sense of impending danger again. At this late point in the evening it bugged the hell out of him. Bill knew about her extrasensory powers, but it was the first time he had seen this oraclelike woman coming out with one of her prophecies.
He shoved his chair back roughly and crossed his legs. “Aw, c’mon, Nora,” he said, “you’re not telling us you sense disaster again. Do we really believe this?” His words were sharp, because he was feeling nervous, not wanting to be part of this crazy stuff, not wanting Louise to be frightened again. Though God knows at the CIA he had been involved in secret scientific studies of this very topic: first, the studies of ultra-low-frequency
ground communication with American submarines—a venture attempted in rural Wisconsin that failed miserably. And then, the corollary studies of ESP to see if men in airplanes could communicate with those same nuclear-equipped subs: This again was a super-secret, but eyebrow-raising, failure. Even the memory of it was embarrassing. He recollected how the U.S. secret services—army, navy, and CIA—resuscitated these efforts over and over in the ’70s because of repeated rumors back then of the Soviets’ success sending thought messages through space and water.
It was crazy then, he thought, and it was crazy now. As a young CIA officer at that time, he had suspected that the Soviets were putting the Americans on; but no one wanted to believe a low-ranking employee who had barely blown in from Harvard.
Right now, all that didn’t matter. He was in trouble. His facetious remarks had been bad enough, but the perceived insult was over the top. He could see that a distinct tremble had developed in Nora’s sensuous, pink bottom lip; she was going to cry. Here was their attractive neighbor, a woman Bill liked very much, one of the most composed women he knew, about to shatter into tears.
“Nora, look, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just that I’m not sure it does Louise any good—”
“—to be warned her life is in danger?” Nora said the words in such a low voice that he could hardly hear them.
“You think her life is in danger?” he repeated, feeling foolish.
Nora sat back in her chair, much as she had the evening before, as if she were closing Louise and Bill out, physically and spiritually. A picture of Athena popped into his mind, often described in The Odyssey as the gray-eyed goddess who directed the affairs of men. Whimsically, he imagined Nora as their very own gray-eyed goddess.
But the goddess was pissed off right now. She turned her back to them with quiet deliberation, and for the first time in his life he understood fully the term, “turning a cold shoulder.” The smoke from her cigarette floated around her like a filmy mantle as she stared into the shadows of the night.
“I believe you, Nora,” said Louise in a tight voice. “And I will take care.” She grabbed Bill’s hand. “Walk me up to my room, will you? Nora wants to be alone. But I surely don’t.”
She hurried him through the downstairs rooms. His banishment was to be swift. Without turning her head to him, she hissed between clenched teeth, “Did you have to fight with Nora? Surely, Bill, you can deal with that woman by now—she means only good.”
“Sorry, honey. But all that mumbo-jumbo ESP stuff…”
“That comes straight from her inner, poetic self. Don’t you understand?”
Understand Nora? He wasn’t sure he understood his own wife.
Softly, he muttered, “What you have to remember is that I’ve been there, done that …”
“What did you say?” Her voice was sharp. “What do I have to remember this time?”
“Oh, nothing important.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her pink charmeuse nightie riding up around her thighs, but she barely noticed it. The little pad of paper on her lap was illuminated only by the dim millefiori bedside lamp, the antique shade made of the pieces of glass left at the day’s end in the shop of some ancient glassblower. It cast a multicolored glow on her pad: cute but impractical, since she had to squint to see what she had written.
Scribbled on the pad was Grace’s unfinished quatrain. How had Grace intended to finish it? Granted, Louise and her husband and her friend Nora had agreed that Grace was the suicidal type. And yet Louise couldn’t quite lay the matter to rest, or get this poem off her mind. She knew if she could find the right words, she would be able to tell whether Grace had jumped or had been forced over those falls.
“It is all gone now, since last we kissed
Our precious flowers, our love in the mist
My love lies bleeding, near the Iris Red
And my pulsing heart is pleading—”
“’For I will be dead’?” she muttered to herself. “’Until I am dead’? ‘Why should I not be dead’? No, that’s not right.” Bill’s rhyming words also led nowhere.
Louise pressed the pencil against her lip. Bill. The thought of him made her guilty. She had been snappish with him this evening, over Nora. She thought philandering, not ESP, would be the issue that caused a flare-up with Nora.
ESP, indeed. Even Louise was skeptical. She knew in her heart when she was in trouble—she didn’t need Nora’s special powers to detect it. Only once had her friend pulled out of the blue a forecast of impending danger. The other times had been as predictable as a CNN weather map predicting a big storm. She thought, Snoop into the affairs of dangerous men, and of course I’m going to be in danger.
She would have to apologize to her husband first thing in the morning.
With that resolved, she turned her attention back to the quatrain. Grace appeared to have been a clever although not brilliant rhymester. Louise herself did not write poetry. She had in fact gone to great pains to avoid doing it her whole life, from grade school right through college creative-writing classes.
The lump on the right side of the bed moved, accompanied by the relocation of a mass of long yellow hair. Janie’s muffled voice said, “Aren’t you ever going to stop mumbling and go to sleep?”
“In a minute, darling.”
“You could at least quit talking to yourself.”
“Yes, darling, I’ll do that.” Louise looked at the door that led to the hall, and it came to her in a flash: If she could sort out what happened in that hall last night, everything else would fall in place—she wouldn’t even have to decipher Grace’s rhyme.
Without wanting to be, she was drawn to that door. The attraction was as strong as if she were a character in a Poe horror tale. Then, the millefiori lamp suddenly went black, and she had no choice. She put her feet on the floor and fumbled around until they found her mules. Then, in a kind of impromptu blindman’s buff game, she stretched out her hands to find the overstuffed chair, picked up her robe, and put it on. She silently moved to the door.
The hallway was a pit of darkness. In a shock of understanding, Louise realized that the lights had been deliberately shut off both last night and tonight. But why again tonight? The only explanation was that someone at the Litchfield Falls Inn intended to perpetrate a crime in the rich, velvety darkness….
She had released herself from the safety of her room and now felt as if she were adrift in a black sea. She took a few steps into the hall. What drew her there was the knowledge that the answers were there, among the occupants of this vast upstairs floor.
Like one of the lower, invertebrate animals, Louise slunk along the wall, making her way again to the relative safety of the bench under the windows. Her fingers found the highly polished ancient pine seat, and she sat down carefully, ducking so that her silhouette was not outlined against the window. She had seen the moon bright in the sky earlier—yet clouds had moved in and now stood in the way of any light reaching into this dark hallway.
After a few minutes, she began to hear the little noises again, as she had last night. Clicks of doors quietly shutting, the spooky sense of footsteps back and forth. A low murmur of voices at the far end of the corridor, and tonight, in the deep gloom, only a suggestion of movement by the window at the end of the hall. Then a thrill of terror surged through her like an electric current, as a big body crowded in next to her and arms encircled her. “Oh!” she started to cry out. A strong hand was clamped over her mouth. With every fiber of strength she possessed, Louise tried to pull away and failed. Then there was a loud whisper in her ear. “Shut up and listen.”
She had been overpowered so completely that until that moment she had been sure it had to be a man. But now there was the rich, feminine voice and the odor of perfume on the body next to hers. Nora? No. Bebe.
Louise shook her head vigorously, freeing it for a moment from the smothering hand. “For God’s sake, Bebe,” she hissed, and then the hand clamped onto he
r mouth again, tighter this time.
“I told you, listen, don’t talk! Half the people in this inn are wandering around this hall, but I’m only interested in you. If you promise not to yell, I’ll take my hand away. Promise?”
Louise nodded her head sharply, up and down. The hand was slowly drawn away, but Bebe continued to hold her in her viselike grip.
“Why are you doing this?” Louise whispered angrily.
The other woman talked directly in her ear. “I’m warning you, Louise. I’ll let you go in a minute. I know you’re the one working with the police. I want you to know all about me, because I’m the only one without an alibi for when Grace … went over those falls.”
“How do you know that?”
“I figured it out from talking to the others. So now I’m afraid they might charge me. How do I know what they’ll do to me?”
“Bebe, I don’t think they will. Why would they?”
“The same reason they did in my husband’s death: I’m around, and I don’t have an alibi, like the rest of you. So, Louise, I want you to know I didn’t do it. And I want you to call my brother—he’s in Mattson. He knows I’m not a murderer. He’s the only one that will vouch for me. Him and a bunch of old folks.”
Louise had dealt with strange people before, but she guessed Bebe was one of the strangest. “Now tell me, just what on earth have old folks got to do with this?”
“I teach dancing at the old folks’ home in Mattson. They love me, Louise. I come once a week and teach them everything— the waltz, the fox-trot, even the tango. I’m a volunteer, and they love me! They’ll speak for me. The ones that can, though some of them don’t make much sense—too senile. Them and my brother. The rest of the town thinks I did it”