“She is indeed, but she needs some perspective from the obnoxious photographer, who is totally living up to his name at this moment.”
He laughed. “I’ll be there once the sun goes down.”
I couldn’t help chuckling as I stowed my phone. If nothing else, McCarthy was always good for some comic relief.
Buoyed by the thought of conferring with McCarthy in just a few minutes, I walked up to the front porch. Priscilla still sat there, this time toying with some food on a wooden tray perched on her knees. There might not have been any place for her to sit down and eat inside.
I sat down beside her. “I talked with Ruth, who is doing much better. She was awake and ordering everyone around, just like I said. She asked me to tell you that she should be home in a day or two.”
Priscilla smiled at me, her vague smile that made me wonder if she had taken in anything that I’d just said. “The sunset is quite lovely, isn’t it, my dear. The red fades into pink on the edges just like a painting on a Chinese fan.”
“It is lovely. I have a friend who likes to take pictures of the sunset with his camera.”
“Isn’t that nice.” She nodded and pressed my hand.
We sat in silence for a few minutes before I got up. “I’m going to pop inside and say hi to Louise.”
She smiled and nodded, and picked at her salad. “Oh, could you ask her about my silver tea service, my dear? I noticed it wasn’t on Great-Grandmother Rachael’s side table yesterday. I can’t help thinking about Francisca’s stolen silver, you know.”
I didn’t, but I didn’t have time to worry about silver at the moment.
I ran inside and scanned the downstairs for Louise, then ran up the stairs to the third floor. I found her in her bedroom, slowly unpacking the suitcases she’d packed so hurriedly earlier. She looked up eagerly when I knocked and entered.
“Did you talk to Miss Ruth? What did she say?”
I stood in the open doorway. “I saw Ruth. She was awake and alert, showing no signs of having had a stroke or heart attack. She told me it was an overdose of sleeping pills.”
I didn’t get any further. Louise slapped a hand on her leg. “I knew it! Somebody tried to kill her.”
I held up both hands, hoping to slow her down. “It was kind of confusing, but I gathered that Ruth took the pills herself, on purpose.”
“What? She tried to kill herself? I don’t believe it! That ornery old lady would never take the cowardly way out like that. I could see her handing you a gun and ordering you to shoot her, but quietly taking a handful of pills?” She shook her head until her earrings rattled. “I don’t think so.”
I marveled at how perceptive Louise was, for all her rough demeanor. If she could see through this fabrication, what must she think of me in spreading it? “Did the police come by here to talk to you?”
She grunted, distracted by my diversion. “They never showed. They wanted to talk to Ruth first. Did they stop by while you were at the hospital?”
I shook my head. “The only one there was John.” A thought struck me. Louise, longtime member of the household and skilled eavesdropper, might know a lot about John. “What can you tell me about John Ellis?”
A calculating look came over her. “What do you want with John?”
“I don’t know, he just seemed kind of distant when I saw him with Ruth. He was looking at his phone while she was talking to him. Does he really care about her?”
“Does anyone really care about that witch?” Her hands flew to cover her mouth. “Did I say that out loud?”
I laughed, hoping to encourage her to talk. “Does he spend much time here?”
“Oh, he’s in and out. He takes care of the old ladies’ legal issues, so he has to get them to sign checks and things. He’s always checking out the art or the silver or whatnot. He’s probably looking forward to the time when it all belongs to him.”
“I wonder what he thinks about this whole renovation thing for the TV show.”
She laughed. “I’m sure he’s all for it, as long as we win the million dollars. That’d be something to add to his inheritance, wouldn’t it?”
I was sure it would be. Of course, that would be an argument for John to leave his mother alone until after the TV show aired and the vote was taken to reveal which property would win the million dollars. I shook my head sharply, marveling at how easy it was for me to cast John in the role of a murderer.
My phone dinged with a text from McCarthy. I checked it and turned to Louise. “My ride is here. So you’ll be sticking around, right?”
She nodded. “Yes, I’ll keep my eye on Miss Priscilla. Are you happy? You’ll be back in the morning for the TV wrap-up, right?”
I paused with my hand on the edge of the door. “Right, the final filming. Oh dear, I was supposed to talk to you about making you a period gown. It’s too late now.”
She shrugged. “I’m not planning to be on TV. I’ll just duck out of the way when the film crew comes through.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow.” I waved and scooted out the door. I felt a strong sense of letdown. I usually prided myself on my ability to come through with extras on my sewing jobs. This one felt like a failure.
I waved goodbye to Priscilla as I ran down the front steps and hopped into McCarthy’s car. “Can you take me back to the hospital? Fast!”
“Hi, Sean, how are you?” His falsetto immediately made me laugh. “I’m fine, you?” he went on in an unnaturally deep voice. His eyes twinkled at me, even as he shifted into gear and peeled out from the curb.
I leaned over to give him an exaggerated hug. “Hi, Sean. Thanks for picking me up,” I gushed. “You’re so awesome—I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
He pushed me away in mock revulsion. “All right, all right! So what’s at the hospital, anyways?”
I settled into my seat and double-checked the seat belt. “Ruth is in the hospital. She ended up with an overdose of Seconal, which is a medication that Priscilla takes.” I clapped a hand over my mouth. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. You can’t tell anyone where the pills came from—promise me! If any of this gets published in the newspaper, Ruth will absolutely kill me.”
He looked at me, bemused. “Suppose you start at the beginning, cruise through the middle, and come to the end in due time.”
I almost clutched his arm, despite the fact that he needed both hands to drive. “You have got to promise me that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I mean it, Sean! Swear you won’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”
He frowned. “I don’t usually swear to something until I know what I’m getting myself into. I’m a big fan of the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and all that. I will tell you that there’s a long tradition of anonymous sources in journalism. But I can’t promise not to say something until I know what I’m promising not to say.”
I folded my arms and looked out the window, feeling like a petulant child. “Then I can’t tell you.”
McCarthy slowed the car to a respectable speed nearing the actual speed limit. “Daria, what if I promised not to tell anyone and then you told me that you were about to massacre all the lions in the zoo? If I couldn’t talk you out of it, then, yeah, I would tell someone, even after I’d promised not to. What good would my promise be then?”
I felt my lips twitching, even though I could tell he was taking this seriously. “But I’m not going to massacre all the lions in the zoo.”
“No, thankfully you are not a lion massacre-er, if that’s even a word. But if you were and I promised not to tell and then I did tell, how could you ever trust me again? Wouldn’t we be better off if I didn’t promise at all?”
“But that’s what I’m talking about. Trust. If I can’t trust you to keep a confidence, then I just can’t tell you anything.”
He sighed.
“I don’t go around publishing everything you say to me. Really, I don’t.” He pulled into the parking lot at the hospital. “So do you want to fill me in on what’s going on with Ruth, or should I just wait in the car for you?”
Provoking man! “I guess you should just wait, if you can’t guarantee that you won’t publish her whole story.” I got out of the car and leaned on the open window for a parting shot. “I would have expected more of a code of journalistic ethics from you.”
McCarthy threw up his hands. “This is an ethics code. I don’t make promises I don’t intend to keep. You can’t get much more ethical than that.”
“Well there it is! You ‘don’t intend to keep’ my confidences. I can’t trust you.”
He shook a finger at me. “That’s not what I said and you know it.”
I turned on my heel. “Don’t bother waiting. I’ll take the bus home.”
McCarthy smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Fine!” He peeled out of the parking space before I had time to regret what I’d said.
But I didn’t regret it. I fumed all the way up to the third floor of the hospital. I felt absolutely justified in not telling him Ruth’s whole story. He as good as said that I couldn’t trust him to keep it confidential. I was glad I hadn’t told him about Major Compton’s betrayal of his own troops. McCarthy would have published that tale for sure.
I paused in the third-floor hallway, trying to collect myself. I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing there in the first place. Acting on a hunch, I guess. I wanted to be sure that Ruth was safe.
I peeked in her room to find her alone and asleep. Could I be sure that this was a natural sleep? I tiptoed into her room and listened to her regular breathing. I laid a finger on her wrist to feel her pulse, and compared it to my own. As far as I could tell, everything was normal. I backed out of her room, wondering what I was so worried about. But what if someone tried to harm her in the night? There was no kind of security—again I was able to just walk right into her room.
I backtracked to the nurses’ station, and found a young nurse barely out of her teens filing a mountain of paperwork at the desk. I put on a stern expression and slapped my hand down on the counter, channeling Ruth as I spoke. “I just stopped in to visit my grandmother, Ruth Ellis, and I was shocked that I could just walk right in on her without anyone asking me who I was. Don’t you know that there was a murder in her house just last week? What if I was the murderer? Isn’t there any security at all around here?”
The nurse dropped her pile of papers. “I’m so sorry. We do have someone at the security desk downstairs from nine o’clock until seven in the morning. If you had come in a little later, you wouldn’t have been able to just walk right in.”
I frowned at her. “Well I can’t hang around all evening waiting for nine o’clock to come. Can I count on you to keep watch over her? Make sure no one goes into her room who’s not supposed to be there?”
“I’ll do my best, but I do have other patients to take care of.”
I heaved an aggrieved sigh. “All right, I guess I can stay for a few minutes.” A quick glance at the clock told me that it was only twenty minutes before nine. “I’ll just be in her room, then.”
The nurse nodded, and bent to pick up her fallen paperwork. I walked back to Ruth’s room, wondering if I was wasting my time or not doing enough. If Priscilla had accidentally poisoned Ruth with her pills, there was no threat here at all. But if her son John had tried to kill her, then added security wouldn’t help, because no night nurse was going to keep a son from visiting his aged mother.
I sat listening to her breathing, and wished that I had been able to confer with McCarthy. I’d told him I needed some perspective, and I fervently wished I could have gotten that from him. He should have just promised not to tell anyone about Ruth’s story!
By the time nine o’clock rolled around, I had made peace with the idea of leaving Ruth alone at the hospital, protected by security downstairs and a rookie nurse upstairs who didn’t want to get chewed out again by the critical granddaughter of a human dragon. I said goodbye to the nurse with stern instructions to check on Ruth every fifteen minutes, and went out to catch the bus home.
I’d timed it right so I didn’t have to wait long. I found a front seat in the nearly empty bus, and pulled out my phone. I tried again to reach Noah, with no success. I was really starting to worry about the guy. I leaned back against the bus seat and closed my eyes, taking a deep, calming breath. I had done everything that I could do right now. Ruth was sleeping, safe in the hospital. Priscilla was at home with Louise to take care of her. All I still needed to do was discover who killed Professor Burbridge, find out if Ruth’s overdose was an accident or attempted murder, figure out why someone was targeting my house with malicious vandalism, and deliver a wedding gown to my ex’s fiancée. No worries.
The bus let me off at the end of the block, close on to ten o’clock at night. I felt a strong sense of apprehension as I approached my house. What would I find on the porch this time? All the windows were dark, giving the house a forlorn look. I tried to remember if Aileen had a gig tonight. If so, she wouldn’t be home until long after I’d gone to bed. Pete, of course, was working his long days. I marveled at his ability to function on so little sleep.
I took my phone out to light my way up the porch steps. I swept the light from side to side to make sure that I wasn’t about to step on something nasty. As far as I could tell, the porch was clear. The only thing I saw was a bunch of dirty dishes sitting on the metal table, and some empty plastic cups scattered around. Aileen must have been entertaining her bandmates. Well, she could clean that up. I unlocked the front door and let myself in.
The house was dark, and Mohair meowed and rubbed against my legs when I came in. She must have been lonely. I scooped her up and scratched her in her favorite spot under the chin. She purred her approval.
I carried her through the dark front hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house. I hung up my keys on the hook under the mirror by the kitchen table, and deposited Mohair onto the table. I didn’t normally let her sit on the table during meals, but I felt like she needed some extra loving since I was spending so much time at Compton Hall. Plus, I needed her warm, nonjudgmental presence.
I felt especially low this evening. I had failed to come through with a period gown for Louise. True, she had initially refused to consider dressing up for the TV show, but I could probably have talked her into it if I had persisted. But I didn’t. Tomorrow Cherry would ask me for Louise’s gown, and I would have to confess that there wasn’t one. That didn’t look good for business. I was still trying to launch my historical sewing business, and a lot of my success would rely on word of mouth from satisfied customers. As I sat at the kitchen table with my warmed-over soup and my cat, I didn’t know if the TV show My House in History would count themselves among that group. Not an uplifting thought!
Then there was that argument with McCarthy. I couldn’t say that this was the first disagreement we’d ever had. He came by his nickname, “obnoxious photographer,” naturally. We had had a number of encounters in the days after I’d first met him. The fact that I suspected him of murder at the time didn’t make for a trusting relationship, of course. But this argument felt different. This time I couldn’t trust him because of who he was. He wasn’t willing or even inclined to make a change. In fact, he considered his position to be honorable. He’d said, “You can’t get much more ethical than that.” That didn’t satisfy me at all. I felt like we were looking at something through opposite sides of a window, so that it was impossible for either one of us to see what the other one saw. How could we go forward together if we were facing in opposite directions?
I pushed aside the half-eaten bowl of soup and laid my head down on the table. “Maybe I could get a do-over?” I mumbled to Mohair.
That’s when the doorbell rang.
My mother always told me not to let the doorbell or the telephone dictate my actions. “If you’re busy, you don’t have to answer,” she would say, while blithely ignoring the jangling ring of the telephone. “Just because they want to talk to you doesn’t mean you should talk to them.” I could never seem to follow this sage advice, even after ten o’clock at night. I gave Mohair one last caress, and nipped into the hall to answer the door. I peeked through the leaded glass to see who was standing outside, but the wavy glass obscured my vision. I eased the door open. There on the stoop stood Randall.
He put up a hand to keep the front door open, but he didn’t push on it or attempt to force his way into the house. “I stopped by to see how you’re doing, Daria. I know you got a shock this afternoon.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Here he was being all compassionate again. What was going on?
He smiled his slow, sensual smile. “Can I come in?”
I stepped out on the porch and shut the door behind me. “Let’s sit out here. It’s a nice night.” Indeed, the moon was peeking out from behind a bank of clouds, bathing the yard in moonlight and shadow. Mohair had followed me out and curled herself up on the front mat. The faint scent of burnt brush was the only thing that marred the peaceful atmosphere.
Randall sat down on the porch swing and patted the seat beside him. I hesitated, and then scooped up Mohair and sat down next to him. I stroked Mohair’s soft fur and felt her purring vibrate against my legs. Nothing like a contented cat to help you relax!
Randall pushed ever so slightly with his feet to set the swing in motion. I kept my hands busy smoothing Mohair’s fur along her head and ears, over and over.
“Pretty scary to find an old woman unconscious on the floor, isn’t it?” Randall sounded genuinely concerned. “Is she all squared away at the hospital?”
I tensed, and tried to cover it with a cough. Was he fishing for news about Ruth? “I stopped by to see her. She’s well taken care of.”
He nodded, and swung the swing back and forth. “I’m glad she’s going to be all right. How about you?”
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