“But as with your grandfather, I find myself wondering why he’s here.”
“Because Grandfather’s here,” I said. “He’s very loyal to Grandfather.”
“Loyal enough to take action if he thought Dr. Blake was in danger?”
“Yes, but also smart enough to know Edward Prine was no danger to Grandfather.”
“Baptiste didn’t suffer much damage from the vandal,” she said. “Just a few photos splashed with soy sauce. No equipment damage.”
“I doubt if he left any equipment where the vandal could find it,” I said. “He’s done a lot of work in less-than-idyllic parts of the world. Places where if you turn your back on a high-end Nikon for two seconds you can kiss it good-bye. If I ever find that photo bag of his without Baptiste a few feet away, I’ll be calling you, because I’ll know something has happened to him. And it’s not as if any of the other craftspeople suffered much equipment damage. Student projects took the brunt of it with most of the vandal’s attacks.”
“That’s true.”
“Do you have some reason to suspect Baptiste?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. “Except that he seems a bit of an outsider here. Most of these people have known each other for a decade or more. They’ve got a shared history.”
“I’d have called it baggage. Yes, Baptiste’s a bit of an outsider. He has taught photography before, but mostly at the Smithsonian or the Corcoran. So he never met most of these people before, and unlike them, he didn’t walk in preloaded with a reason to hate Prine.”
“Yes.” She nodded and stood up. “You’ll probably be relieved to know that I share your feeling that Baptiste is an unlikely suspect for the murder. But ‘I suspect everyone.’ Was it Sherlock Holmes who said that?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I think it was Inspector Clouseau in one of the Pink Panther movies. But an excellent policy, no matter where it comes from.”
She smiled and nodded farewell.
I realized I was, for once, glad to see her leave. Because while I’d hinted at it, I didn’t really want to discuss in detail the final reason I didn’t suspect Baptiste—my gut feeling that the murder had its roots in the relatively small semi-closed world of craftspeople—the murder, and for that matter, the vandalism that preceded it. And I was a part of that world. Normally I saw it as a friendly one, but in the last day or so I seemed to see nothing but its dark side—tensions, feuds, old secrets, jealousies—was one of them the motive for Prine’s murder?
“Meg?” Michael was standing by my table. “Everything okay?”
“You mean apart from the murder?” I said. “Just peachy.”
“You look like a woman in need of a movie fix,” Michael said. “They’re debating between Mary Poppins and 101 Dalmatians. Come cast your vote.”
I ended up casting my vote with the majority, for a double feature. To my surprise, I managed to lose myself in the movies and forget about murder and vandalism and seagulls for several hours. Not having the police around helped—although Chief Heedles did leave Officer Keech to sleep on the premises, in the room no longer needed by Edward Prine. But she’d changed into jeans and a University of Virginia t-shirt and morphed into just plain Lesley Keech, so it was easy to forget for minutes on end that we still had a police officer watching everything.
As I held my s’more sticks over the fire pit, I found myself thinking how much easier it would be to solve mysteries if all villains were as easy to spot as Cruella de Vil. And how much easier it would be to catch them if I had Mary Poppins’s magical powers.
At least the movies seemed to have restored everyone’s good humor—the movies, or for some of the adults, a few bridge games or a couple of hours of Rose Noire’s class. In fact, everyone seemed to be making more of an effort than usual to mingle instead of just hanging out with the people they knew from class. Even the Slacker joined in, although about the only concrete thing he actually said was that he was completely incapable of toasting a marshmallow without dropping it or setting it on fire—which caused Josh and Jamie to take pity on him and share a few of their own marshmallows.
I also noticed that Dad seemed to be spending a lot of time conversing with the Slacker. Or perhaps interrogating him. Yes, from the look of it, Dad clearly found him suspicious. Though even Dad in full Sherlock Holmes mode didn’t seem to unsettle the Slacker, who never lost his usual bemused expression. Luckily, about the time I decided that someone had to intervene, Josh claimed Dad’s attention. Was it just my imagination or was the Slacker settling back in his Adirondack chair with an ever-so-slight sigh of relief?
Eventually the children began singing songs from Mary Poppins, which made for a tuneful end to the evening.
The familiar evening ritual worked its usual magic on my mood. Especially since the boys seemed oblivious to the fact that we were watching them like hawks. To them, it probably seemed only normal that their mom, dad, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and assorted cousins would be hovering over them all evening. And they were basking in the attention. And before too long, Chief Heedles would probably catch the killer, and maybe the vandal as well, and things could go back to normal. But even if it took a while, with us watching over them, the boys were safe.
It took a while before the cheerful warbling of “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” died down in the caravan. And just when we thought the boys had gone to sleep, the soft strains of “Feed the Birds” came to my ears.
“They really do have nice voices, don’t they?” I asked.
Michael snored slightly, so I decided to postpone any discussion of the boys’ musical talents until the morning. I closed my eyes and let the boys’ voices lull me to sleep.
“Let’s hope it’s a quiet night,” I murmured.
Chapter 16
Something woke me up.
I wasn’t sure what it was. I had a vague impression of a crashing noise, but couldn’t think of anything in the tent that would make such a noise—especially not one loud enough to wake me. Michael was sound asleep and not snoring at all. I felt around the side of my pillow for my phone. Three fifteen. Not a time when you expected to hear noises here at Biscuit Mountain. I grabbed my big flashlight, slipped on my flip-flops and crept out of the tent, but I kept the light off as I made my way quietly over to the caravan. No sound there, and the caravan door was still locked. Spike growled softly when I tried the doorknob, but I shushed him and he went back to sleep without waking the boys.
“I should just go back to bed,” I muttered. But by now I was wide awake. Had I imagined the noise that roused me?
I followed the path to the front drive. The campground was dark and quiet. I glanced over at the main building. Also dark and—
Wait. Was I imagining it or had a light just flicked quickly on and off somewhere in the building?
I made my way as quietly as possible up the front drive and went inside.
The great room was dark—a lot darker than outside, where there was at least some moonlight filtering through the scattered clouds. I stood just inside the door, listening and letting my eyes adjust.
I heard the ticking of the huge grandfather clock along the wall that divided the great room from the dining room. The whirring of an air conditioner unit. A creak that could be someone walking upstairs or even a ghost come to haunt us but was more likely just a floorboard making the kind of noises really old floorboards sometimes made when the temperature and humidity got to them.
Then I saw it again—just a quick flicker of light, coming from somewhere behind the building. On the terrace, perhaps. I crept over to one of the long line of French doors that led out onto the terrace and peeked out.
The light flashed again. It wasn’t on the terrace but someplace below it.
Like maybe near the kitchen door, on the floor below me. If I wanted to burgle the center, the kitchen door would be where I’d try first. It was on the narrow end of the building, so very few rooms
had a view of it.
I crossed the room to the stairwell, and slowly crept down. At the bottom I peered out into the kitchen. I didn’t know the layout here as well as I did in most of the rest of the building—Marty didn’t welcome trespassers in his domain, so I’d only been here occasionally when I had business. It took a while to study and identify all the unfamiliar silhouetted shapes. The pots hanging from the ceiling. The hulking coffee machine. An industrial-sized knife block.
The light flashed again—outside the kitchen door.
I pulled out my phone and made sure I had it ready to call 911. Then I crept over to the door and slowly eased it open a few inches. I heard a faint rattling, scrabbling sound outside.
I flung the door wide open, stepped outside, and turned on my flashlight.
“Freeze!” I shouted, pointing my flashlight in the direction of the noise.
The beam of light revealed Grandfather, slightly downhill from the doorway, frozen in place, holding a black plastic garbage bag in one hand and a slice of overripe cantaloupe in the other.
“Turn that blamed thing off before someone sees it,” he said.
Actually, that sounded like a sensible idea, so I turned the flashlight off. There was enough moonlight at the moment to keep an eye on him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Luring the gulls back. You could help me if you like.”
He tossed the cantaloupe into the darkness, reached into the bag, and pulled out a curved section of watermelon rind.
“I’m not going to help you strew garbage down the ravine,” I said. “If you ask me nicely, I will help you pick it all up before Cordelia finds out what you’ve been up to.”
“If you pick up my garbage, I may never find my gulls.”
“If Cordelia catches you doing this, you won’t live to find your gulls. Please tell me why you’re out here doing exactly what she told you that she absolutely didn’t want you to do? Don’t pretend she didn’t—I was there. She can call me as a witness that it was justifiable homicide.”
“She might be a little overly fussy about things like this.” He waved at the garbage at his feet. “But she’s a bird lover. I knew she’d come around once we found the gulls.”
“You hope,” I muttered.
“And she’s no fonder of that Venable creature than I am. She has designs on the gulls; I know it. Once we explain that to your grandmother—”
“I’ll let you do the explaining,” I said. “Look, you may not need the garbage to find your gulls. Chief Heedles is sympathetic. She’s going to tell you where Prine took his gull pictures. She’s just waiting for Horace to figure it out.”
“We already know where Prine took the gull pictures—on the terrace.”
“The ones Cordelia saw him take,” I said. “You never know. From what I’ve seen of Prine, he could very well have gotten curious enough to track them back to wherever they’re nesting. He could be pretty obsessive—almost fell off the terrace one evening trying to get a good angle on the sunset.”
“You’re not just saying that to humor me?” He was holding, but not strewing, a handful of potato peels.
Actually I was just saying it to humor him, but now wasn’t the time to confess that.
“And even if he only took pictures on the terrace, we can find your gulls,” I went on. “I know a couple of places not too far from here where you can spread your garbage. Places that aren’t on Cordelia’s land, so she won’t have any say over what you do there.”
He growled slightly.
“Places remote enough to be difficult for an old biddy like Mrs. Venable to find,” I went on. “You do realize that if you strew the garbage here, she’ll have just as good a chance to spot the gulls as you will. In fact better, because she’s here all day in the pottery studio, with those big windows looking over the grounds. But if you strew it somewhere out in the mountains, in a location only a few of us know about, you’ll have an advantage over her.”
I could see that had an effect.
“So for now, let’s just wait until the chief gets back to us, so we can strew the garbage as close as possible to where Prine was taking the rest of his pictures. Or if he only took them here, we strew garbage in a bunch of locations, in all directions. Just not here.”
He scowled at me for a few moments. At least as far as I could see in the dim light, he was scowling. Maybe I just assumed the scowl because it was one of his most common expressions.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll postpone Operation Gull Quest for a few days and see if you come through with the goods.”
“Operation Gull Quest?”
“Here.” He handed me two black plastic garbage bags, one half empty, the other completely empty.
“Please tell me these were the only bags of garbage you brought.”
“Yes,” he said. “The stuff gets pretty heavy, and I had to haul it all the way uphill from the composting center. Pretty exhausting. I’m going to bed now. I have to get up early for my class.”
“And you think I don’t?”
“Don’t forget to—”
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” came a voice from behind me.
I turned to find Marty standing in the doorway, holding a really large knife. Marty was well over six feet and looked burly and athletic. Especially his arms, which showed the benefits of all those hours of kneading and chopping. He looked a little wild-eyed, so I put some more distance between us.
“Marty, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s me, Meg. And Dr. Blake.”
“I said stop or I’ll shoot,” he repeated.
“You’re holding a knife,” Grandfather pointed out. “What’s this ‘stop or I’ll shoot’ nonsense?”
What did he expect—stop or I’ll slice? And did he realize that provoking someone Marty’s size—with or without a knife—wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do?
Just then Marty flipped the knife down into the ground in front of him. It landed in a half-rotten cantaloupe at his feet with a satisfactory thunk and remained there, quivering slightly. It hadn’t come anywhere near me, but still, seeing him throw it was unnerving.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing out here in the middle of the night?” he snarled. “I thought maybe the damned vandals had come back and made the mistake of targeting my kitchen. You’re lucky I recognized you.” His voice sounded less angry than … unnerved. Not surprising, really, if he’d been expecting to encounter a trespasser—and one who could very well also be a murderer.
“Sorry,” I said.
He turned on his heel and stalked back into the kitchen. I heard him muttering something as he went. I only caught a few phrases like “idiots” and “waking everyone up in the middle of the night” but I got the gist.
“Well, that was interesting,” Grandfather said. “I’m going to bed.”
“Let me go in with you,” I said. “Make sure everything’s okay.”
“He just disarmed himself, or didn’t you notice?”
“Oh, and are you under the delusion that this is the only knife in the whole kitchen? Plenty more where this came from.” I plucked the knife out of the melon. “What if he only threw this one away so he could go back in and get a longer, sharper one? I’m going in with you. He knows me better.” I decided not to mention that I could probably defend myself more effectively if Marty was lurking inside. It would only offend Grandfather.
Luckily by the time we went in Marty had disappeared.
“Gone back to bed, I assume,” Grandfather said. “Figured out we weren’t the vandals.”
“Go follow his example while I clean up after you.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. Should I follow Marty and give him a piece of my mind? I knew where his room was—at least approximately. I could tackle him—verbally, that is—about his weird and unacceptable behavior. See if it was just the thought of having the vandal target his kitchen that had him so upset. Put him on notice that any more knife throwing would get h
im in trouble with the police and Cordelia. I thought better of the idea almost immediately. I considered notifying Officer Keech, and vetoed that, too. She’d had a long day, and there was no real emergency. The sensible thing to do was to get out of the kitchen as quickly as possible and save any confrontations for the morning, when no doubt Chief Heedles and her troops would be back in force.
I spent a miserable fifteen minutes or so picking up the rotting garbage Grandfather had scattered around the ravine, somewhat hampered by the fact that I didn’t have three hands. After all, there was still a murderer on the loose. I wanted to keep both the knife and the flashlight handy, and neither left much room in my hand for picking up the garbage.
“I give up,” I said after the fifth or sixth time I’d tripped or stubbed my toe while hunting down a chunk of garbage. Flip-flops weren’t ideal for this kind of work. “I can come back for the rest in the morning.”
Maybe there wasn’t that much more—maybe Grandfather hadn’t completely filled the two garbage bags. Everything I’d picked up so far seemed to be vegetable matter—half-rotten, highly smelly vegetable matter—so I emptied the bags into one of the compost holding bins just outside the kitchen door and went back inside.
I turned on the lights and washed my hands thoroughly. I scrubbed the cantaloupe guts off the knife and returned it to an empty slot in the huge knife block. Then I hit the lights and went back upstairs to the great room, feeling more cheerful with every step I put between me and the kitchen.
When I emerged from the stairwell, the great room was still dark, but I saw a line of light showing under the door that led to the studio wing.
“Now what?” I said it aloud, but softly, in case someone—the vandal?—was on the other side of the door. The smart thing would have been to rouse Officer Keech, but that would take time and effort. I was tired and cranky and wanted to get back to bed.
Gone Gull Page 13