Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  “An injunction!” I stormed to Joe. “All I wanted was…”

  “I know,” he said, “but the police don’t know you. They won’t know your interest has nothing to do with any worth the ring might have, that it’s about sentiment.”

  “You mean I’ll look like a grave-robbing type, a…a—what those cousins are!”

  He let me rant, but the bottom line was that this chair and my memories would be my souvenirs of Ellie. This was one orphan that would never be put up for adoption.

  Carrie saw me staggering to the truck with Ellie’s chair and rushed over saying she was ready to leave. “Look!” she said. “Look at this!” She’d found a delicately made cut-crystal cake stand, its base and top ringed with wide black, spotty bands. “A steal,” she said, “and when it’s resilvered it’ll be good as new.”

  “Lovely.”

  She nodded happy agreement, then she observed my haul, frowned, and bit at her bottom lip so I could notice with what difficulty she was controlling what she wanted to say about the chair.

  “I have this fabulous porcelain tiered cake,” she said instead. “I bought it at a flea market in Paris. Mountains of white china icing and tiny pink roses, and I’ve never known what to do with it, but now—I’ll set it on this. Won’t that be something?”

  I nodded. Happily, she didn’t ask me what that something was. The cake stand was like the one my mother used to use to show off her celebratory creations. It had been a real stand for real cakes. Now, it would be a still-life in Carrie’s fantasy of home.

  I annoy people because I am content, and they translate that into dull and wrong. Dull, maybe, but not wrong. I like the feel of rescuing old things and delight in their second chances. One of the many things I like about them and the process is the great stretches where time’s forgotten and I am lost in a swirling hum of color, texture and design. There’s a silence inside old things, a deep well of history and the memory of human touch, a story, if you listen, a record of time and usage, attention and neglect, functionality and frivolity.

  I’m lucky that Joe understands and is a kindred soul. He even wired the garage for sound, because music and good talk don’t interfere with the silence I hear in the pieces, and he put in heat and often as not, he joins me and sits on “his” rocker, the first piece I ever refinished. His immediate enthusiasm along with Ellie’s was the reason I continued on into a business. His rocker’s a pale honey color with deep green cushions and fine evergreen accents etched into the crevasses on the armrests.

  The whole idea of those pleasurable lazing times would drive Carrie Brigham up the wall. She’s told me so on earlier outings through quiet “tsks” because I hadn’t caught the new TV sitcom, or we hadn’t seen the movie that just opened. And most times, the books we’re reading aren’t the biggest, loudest best-sellers, either.

  “She’s so…so noisy,” I told Joe that evening. “I don’t mean loud—but did you ever know somebody who could deafen you without opening her mouth?” I was finishing up a chest of drawers that had been a pretentious wannabe Louis the Fourteenth number in its previous life. All white streaky finish and gilded edges. Now it glowed in muted blue-violet trim, and its bellied drawers were a subtle green-grayed yellow I don’t think has a name. I was enjoying putting on the final touches, but my eye kept wandering to the chair.

  “That was Ellie Darby’s,” I told Joe, who was rocking in his chair and frowning at the newcomer.

  “Looks torturous,” he said. “Not the best way to show your love.”

  “I think it is. The woman saved me and I’m saving her chair. Not an equal trade, I know, but the best I can do, given the circumstances.”

  “I meant not the best way for Mr. Darby to have shown her his love. He must have made this. No professional furniture maker could have done this and lived to do another.”

  I finished up the faux-Louis’s claw and ball foot, tempted as always to paint the toenails bright red. Why put animal feet on a bureau? Was there something appealing about the idea that your chest could walk away?

  “You couldn’t have done anything for her, you know,” Joe said, reading my mind.

  I sighed. “No fairy-tale endings in real life, are there? No heroic, magical rescues.” I checked that the back of the claw foot was completely painted, and declared the piece finished. “Makes me furious, though. Still does. I know that those two—those two—”

  “Let it go, Jen. You’re an otherwise sane woman.”

  “Are you insinuating—”

  “Not at all. I’m saying it straight out. On this one point, you’re irrational. Even if you were right, and there’s no evidence for that, you’d never be able to prove it, so let it go. Make a big fuss, and people will think you’re angry about the ring, greedy for it.”

  “The ring has nothing—”

  “Let it go, Jen.”

  His skepticism and dismissal seemed another weight on the scales, making the balance of justice completely out of whack. Nothing felt Ellie-mentary.

  *

  I spent the next morning thinking about Ellie’s chair. Since I knew it was going to remain mine, I wanted to make it as personal as possible, so that the story lady, and the puzzle-maker, and the fairy-godmother in the park would stay alive with me as long as I could see it.

  First-aid first. I put on music and sanded and smoothed, starting at the top, the section that required the fewest body contortions on my part. The pine had nicks and scratches, bangs and even purple marks, as if someone had swung a felt-tip pen too close to it. I sanded and remembered, until the back was close to finished, and the morning was over.

  After lunch, I started in again, turning the chair onto its side so I could work on the legs. I saved the seat frame for last, because it looked like a real pain with its curves and grooves.

  I worked and remembered Ellie, and felt that rush of mixed emotions and hoped that by the end of this project, I’d have resolved all that.

  I started at the bottom of the legs—no claws on this one—and worked my way up, then repeated the process with the back. Sandpapering is my least favorite part of the process, and this nicked and battered piece had need of so much of it that my mind had time and opportunity to wander. I had almost smoothed an upper portion of a back leg when it registered that a patch of wood was worn and dull, and considerably paler than its surrounds. The front of that leg looked all of a color, and I couldn’t think what could fade a part of the furniture that never saw direct light.

  Actually, I could think of what might have done it, but I didn’t want to. I turned the chair around, and looked at the front again, shined a light on it to double-check. It definitely did not have the same coloration. Had I paid too little attention and sanded it away?

  I checked the other back leg. I hadn’t touched it yet, but there it was—a light patch on its backside at about the same height as the worn patch on the other leg.

  I took a deep breath. I did not want to jump to conclusions, be called a fool or a meddler by Joe, let alone anybody else.

  The phone interrupted my attempt to list everything that could possibly cause those light patches. “Mrs. Watson?” a young voice said, and without waiting for an answer, continued in a rush: “This is Lacey, the girl from the flea market. You gave me your card, and I checked out your website, and it’s great. I’m interested in folk art, and I wondered if I could interview you, watch you at work, something like that. For this paper I have to write, but also, because I’m interested.”

  Folk Art. I thought maybe I’d just been promoted up from craftswoman to cultural artifact, but I’m still not sure about those blurred lines. In any case, it was flattering to have somebody want to study me, so of course I agreed to a few hours observation. “I have a question for you,” I said, thanking fate for the good timing of her call. “You know the chair I bought. You’d seen it at Agnes’s house, correct?”

  She agreed.

  “Could you tell me where it was located, and whether it was in use?�
�� Maybe it had been stored upside down on a table, or… I was grabbing at straws, trying to not rush to judgment.

  “I stayed over one night, and passed her bedroom, and she was sitting on it, reading. It looked uncomfortable with that funny back, and I think I said something like that, and she insisted that it was her favorite chair, and that her husband had built it so that it fit her perfectly. Hard to believe. For starters, no arms, and a hard back with lumps that would hit you uncomfortably.”

  The lovebirds and the heart. Perhaps to Ellie, they were a constant reminder, a gentle pressure recalling her husband’s actual touch and a comfort in themselves. I thanked Lacey, confirmed our date, and resumed my pondering.

  “What could make these marks?” I asked Joe before dinner. “These light patches.”

  “Uneven sanding.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Not yours, of course, but maybe the guy who built or refinished it?”

  “I think it was a different kind of sanding. I think it was rubbing, a slow sanding by somebody tied up.”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Otherwise explain how they’re precisely where the wrists would be tied—and the ties would have gone around the front on her skin, so there aren’t any marks on that side of the legs. But as she tried to jiggle her hands, keep the circulation going or escape, slowly, slowly, those marks were made.”

  Joe was silent for a long time before he spoke with great deliberation. “This is frightening, this obsession of yours,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. You get any corroborating fact, proof that we could take to the police—and I’ll go with you. I’ll back you up. But it has to be more than a wild idea without foundation.”

  “The young girl who saw the chair in Ellie’s house said it was her favorite. She’d be the person sitting on it. Maybe her torturers would deliberately choose that chair, in fact. Besides, it doesn’t have arms, so it’s easier to tie somebody up. Poor woman. Poor, poor woman! I think they starved her to death.”

  He took another deep breath. “A real fact, Jen. A tangible something.”

  I understood what he meant, and I’d have loved one, but outside of fairy and ghost stories, people do not provide clues from beyond the grave, not even a person who seemed half a fairy-tale creation herself.

  I spent the next three days working on the old chest, transforming it into something that could be a coffee table, or a hope chest—did anyone have such things anymore? Whatever it would be, under its current layer of urethane, it was now populated with an imaginary world’s worth of wish-granting fairies and sprites, creatures I could have used to help with the riddle of Ellie Darby.

  “I’m sorry,” I told my memory of the woman. “I wanted to be your hero, but I don’t know how.” I had never been the one to solve the puzzle, to be the Sherlock who could say, “Ellie-mentary.” Instead, I was the dear, dull, Watson. I needed her smarts, and they were gone.

  The next day I considered the upholstered seat cushion on Ellie’s chair. The gingham must once have been charming, but now the blue was faded and the white was gray and all of it was frayed. I contemplated what texture and color I wanted, and as I sat looking at it, I noticed a thin edge of bright, ungrayed white at the edge of the seat.

  A crumpled piece of paper had been shoved inside a tear in the gingham. I unfolded it carefully and read a printed fragment that looked ripped from a book. “…in the night and then it became obvious to Rapunzel that…” It was mostly margins and the other side told me even less. “In that day, it happened that…”

  I stuck my finger into the rip and wiggled it, but nothing crackled. No more messages. No more paper.

  “Rapunzel,” I told Joe over dinner. “Locked in a tower.”

  “‘Let down your long hair,’ is what I remember,” Joe said.

  “So I might climb up your golden stair,” I said, finishing the story’s request.

  “So it might be taken to be a symbol about sneaking a guy into your room, or about excessive hair growth,” he said. “Or not a symbol at all. A scrap left at any point in the chair’s long life. When could she have done it, anyway, if her hands were bound?”

  “They had to leave her out now and then, don’t you think? To use the bathroom?”

  “They couldn’t have let her loose often—if any of your theory is true. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she call the police?”

  “Do we know if she had a phone in her room? Who knows what the threats and restraints were? But she had books—children’s books—used to bring some to the boys when she came—and even if she’d be out for a minute, she could grab an appropriate one, rip out a page—”

  “Any page?”

  “If needs be. There’s a rescue or test on almost every page of one. But maybe there was time to flip and rip, then hide it in her hand and—”

  Joe shook his head again. He considered my obsession with Ellie Darby’s death my inability to face my own mortality. As much as I wanted to bring postmortem justice to Ellie, I wanted as well to earn an apology from my beloved, whose attitude toward my concern was enough to drive me to contemplate murder myself.

  Nonetheless, the storybook scrap was not, I admit, something that the police would consider evidence. Give me something else, Ellie, I pleaded. Give me something real.

  And then I heard myself, and I realized how stupid this quest of mine was, and how futile. Don Quixote had nothing on me with his windmills. I saw stories in chairs and asked them to reveal secrets, to work magic.

  I was a rapidly aging fool, turning guilt in having not shown enough concern for a dear old woman into someone else’s having murdered her. I was ashamed of myself.

  The next morning, I took a long walk that took me to Ellie Darby’s street. I stood looking at her house, thinking about her and about Rapunzel. I’d expected to see bars on the bedroom window—perhaps disguised as a fancy grill, but jail-like bars all the same.

  Instead, the windows were no more than glass panes and wood trim, and so I returned home.

  Today I was ready to tackle the wooden band that cradled the seat cushion. Someone had varnished the piece a while back, and had done an inept job of it, so that hard beads were trapped in the grooves Mr. Darby had cut around the circumference.

  I was almost all the way around, brushing away bits of stuffing leaking out of the seat cushion, making the wooden band as smooth as possible, thinking again about color combinations that might work, when I noticed a certain regularity in the scratches on the right side, close to the back. Straight lines, curves, none of the lines bold and definitive—scratches, no more no less. I was afraid I was once again reading a great deal into something that was in essence nothing.

  But they were something. They were letters. w-p-n-p and a curled thing at its start that looked like the ribbons that symbolize AIDS and breast cancer et al, only upside down. I wasn’t sure that any of it was truly intentional, most of all that little ribbon.

  w-p-n-p? Will you please not… Who put nifty pepper…Wipnip? The call letters of a radio or TV station? Western Pennsylvania National…

  I was overreaching again. Even if it was a scratched message, even if there was the slightest possibility they’d allow Ellie an instrument so sharp it could scratch the wood, even if she’d wanted to leave a message—it wouldn’t be an unintelligible series of letters.

  I didn’t intend to say anything about it at dinner, but Joe saw that I was upset, and bit by bit, he got it out of me. “Don’t you dare say I’m looking at it from the wrong side,” I snapped. “I am so sick of that ex…” And I stopped. I was quiet for so long Joe thought I’d had a stroke and he jumped up and rushed to me.

  I put my hand up signaling him to halt. I needed to think. In fact, I needed to write. Little upside down ribbon. wpnp. “Thanks,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For clichés about looking at things the wrong-way round. They say expressions become clichés because they’re truisms, and that one was.”

  �
��I hope you’re going to say something that makes sense, or I’m dialing the paramedics. Maybe that really was a little stroke.”

  “Stroke nothing.” I turned the paper to face him.

  “w-p-n-p,” he said.

  “And the ribbon.”

  He nodded.

  “What if I said ‘you’re looking at it from the wrong side’?”

  “I’d promise to stop saying that and know I deserved to be made fun of.”

  “No. Do it. Look at it from the other side. Turn it around.” From where I sat, while it faced him, it made perfect sense.

  “d-n-d-m—and a lowercase ‘e’ in script?”

  “She was trying to write it—that’s why those rub marks. She pushed her hand forward until she could scratch out a message. It was facing her, upside down when read normally.”

  “d-n-d-m-e?”

  “Say it.”

  “Dee End—”

  “Deanne, the cousin. Dee.”

  Even he had to give me a grudging “maybe.”

  “Dee En Dee Em EE?”

  “I think it’s a combination of “Dee End Me.” Deanne is ending her, killing her.” I was practically jumping on my seat, eager to get on, to prove this.

  “Interesting. Really.”

  “She loved words and games—and this is the most efficient way of spelling out what would otherwise be too long for a tied up hand.”

  He looked at the letters again.

  I couldn’t sit still another minute. “You wonder—don’t you?—what cut those feeble letters into the wood, and I think I know. If I’m right, then that message definitely was for me. She knew I’d come. She knew I’d try to rescue her. Even if it was too late to save anything except the truth.”

  I pushed back my chair and headed for the garage. Joe followed me. I refused to believe I could be wrong. I knew Ellie, and she knew me, and she knew I believed in community, in ties that bind, in doing the right thing—and in promises. And we’d had more than one conversation about old furniture and the stories those pieces could tell.