A Familiar Tail

by Delia James

  “Did somebody push her?” called Frank.

  So much for good intentions. I not only stopped dead; I turned around.

  “What?”

  Frank was on his feet and shoving his hair back from his forehead. He stared past me at the garden and the apple trees, like he was hoping they’d have a different answer to his question. Alistair rubbed up against his shins, but Frank ignored him. “This thing—this Vibe or whatever you call it—did it tell you if somebody pushed her down the stairs?”

  He was serious. Dead serious. Which was not the expression I wanted in my head right then, but it was the only one that seemed at all appropriate as I met his eyes and saw they’d gone hard and sad.

  “The cops say it was an accident,” he told me. “They say Aunt Dot must have lost her balance and fell, or maybe tripped over the cat.”

  “Meow!” Alistair head butted Frank. Frank kept ignoring him.

  “What’s this Vibe of yours say? Was she pushed?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I told him. “It’s not like a vision. It’s . . . emotional.” I waited for him to make some wisecrack about female intuition, but Frank Hawthorne was, thankfully, way smarter than that.

  “So what did you feel?”

  I rubbed my hands together. I’d had a few people ask me about what my Vibe meant before, but not like this. Not when it was important, and deeply personal. I swallowed and made up my mind.

  I also sat back down on the wicker bench, because I had no idea what was going to happen next. Alistair wound around between my ankles in that snaky way cats do and jumped back into my empty lap. I took a deep breath, and slowly, carefully, I reached for the fading echoes of my Vibe.

  It turned out it was a good thing I’d sat down, because I was shaking again. Alistair meowed once and pressed close against my tummy. I put both hands on him, and the trembling eased.

  “I got . . . sadness. Worry. She hurt.” Frank looked away. “Not for long. I think . . . there was a sense that everything was going to be okay.” I frowned. There had been thoughts, words, but they were all jangled up with the sadness and the falling. “Help was coming. It . . . something . . . would be made right.” Won’t win. Those were Dorothy Hawthorne’s thoughts, Vibed into my mind. Won’t win. Can’t win.

  But was that about herself? Was Dorothy thinking, I can’t win? Or was it about somebody else? As in, They can’t win? I wrapped my arms around Alistair, and the cat purred, warm and reassuring, anchoring me in place. I didn’t want to say what came next. I didn’t want Frank to have to hear it, because it would be painful. But he’d asked, and some deep part of me knew it would be wrong to leave this out.

  “Hate,” I whispered. “There was hate and anger, and . . . and . . . waiting. For things to be over, for this to be done and gone.”

  A muscle in Frank’s cheek twitched. “Who did she hate?”

  “She?” I started. “I, no, I’m sorry. I’m not used to this. I don’t, I never . . . but it wasn’t her . . .” I stopped and played my own words back again, this time really hearing what I’d said and understanding it. “It wasn’t her. There were two sets of . . . of feelings. Two people.”

  Frank was staring at me, anger and tears shining in his eyes. I closed my own eyes. It didn’t help, because it was in me now. I didn’t want it, but it was not going away. Dorothy Hawthorne hadn’t just died in her home.

  She’d been murdered there.

  9

  THE CERTAINTY OF murder leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. It also puts a major damper on the conversation. Fortunately, we were both saved from having to try to come up with any kind of small talk by another voice filtering out from the house.

  “Hello? Frank? You in there?”

  Frank’s face twisted up in disbelief. “Oh, this is perfect,” he muttered as he got to his feet. “Just . . . perfect.”

  Before I could ask any questions, a trim older man in a tan business suit pushed open the kitchen door.

  “Hey, Frank, I was heading past and I saw the door open and—” He stopped as if he’d just noticed me. “Oh. I’m sorry. Am I interrupting?”

  Alistair hissed, jumped off my lap, and vanished into the bushes. Normal cat style of vanishing this time, not Cheshire cat style. Guess he saved that for special occasions.

  “No, you’re not interrupting.” With a certain amount of effort, Frank relaxed his face into something approaching a neutral expression. “Ellis Maitland, this is Anna Britton. She’s staying over at the McDermotts’. Anna, this is Ellis Maitland.”

  Son of the very blond, very rich, very regal Elizabeth Maitland. I smiled politely and took the hand Ellis held out.

  Banker, I thought. Or maybe real estate agent. Every inch of him seemed designed to inspire confidence, from the perfectly calculated handshake to the tailored suit with crisp white shirt to the neatly combed chestnut hair with just the right amount of distinguished gray at the temples. I had the sneaking and rather snarky suspicion the rest of it might be dyed. He was definitely not a young man. Although it was early in the season, he already had a good suntan. He probably got it on the golf course. Ellis Maitland looked like the kind of guy who talked business with a nine iron, or whatever it was golfers used to knock helpless small objects around.

  “Pleased to meet you.” Mr. Maitland looked from Frank to me and back again, like he’d caught us in the act of something adolescent. “Are you in town on business, Miss Britton?”

  “Vacation.”

  “Something I can do for you, Ellis?” asked Frank.

  “I’d heard you finally wrapped up Dorothy’s probate,” he said to Frank. “That must be a relief.”

  “Yeah, it is.” Frank’s answer wasn’t exactly hostile, but it sure wasn’t welcoming either. I wondered why, but not for long.

  “If there’s anything . . . ,” Ellis began, but Frank held up his hand.

  “I’m still not ready to sell.”

  “That obvious?”

  “’Fraid so, yep. ’Specially since you’re showing up in the super-agent suit.”

  I rubbed my face to cover the smile. I’d been right. Ellis Maitland was a real estate agent.

  “Okay, I admit it.” Ellis chuckled and held up his own hands in surrender. “I want the house. It’s a terrific property.” He stopped, probably because he saw the genuine distaste that tightened Frank’s jaw. “But that’s not why I’m doing this, and you know it. Or you should. We’ve known each other a long time, Frank, and I really do want to help.”

  Frank’s shoulders sagged. “I know, Ellis, I know. It’s just . . . it’s been a lot . . .” He glanced toward the house, and I knew he was thinking about the basement stairs and what had happened in there. I sure was. “I need more time to think.”

  “Sure, sure. I just hope that with Dorothy gone you haven’t started . . .”

  “Do not go there, Ellis,” Frank snapped.

  “Okay, okay. I won’t.”

  Where? Where!

  But Ellis Maitland, darn him, had already sighed and moved on. “But it has been six months and—” Ellis paused and glanced at me again. I tried to look harmless, or at least like I wasn’t on the edge of my white wicker seat to hear what came next. Frank just shrugged. The combination must have worked, because Ellis kept going. “I know how much you sank into the Seacoast News to get it up and running. You’re going to need more cash soon, and you know it. Just like you know you risk sinking the whole enterprise if you have to take out another big loan. This house is a real asset. At least it can be if you move on it before the next bubble bursts.” He looked at me again. “Unless you’ve got some other plans . . . ?”

  “No. Nothing,” answered Frank a little too quickly. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he swore as he pulled it out and checked the screen. “In fact, I’m late to an interview for that newspaper, which, as you so helpfully pointed out,
is on shaky ground. So if you both will excuse me. I need to lock up.” He fished around in his jacket pocket and came up with his keys. “You’ll let me know if you see Alistair again, won’t you, Anna? If he’s letting you feed him, maybe you can coax him into staying put long enough for me to catch up with him.”

  “Sure.” I got to my thankfully steady feet. Frank and I locked gazes. His said we weren’t done here. Mine agreed. It didn’t matter that I had no way to contact him. Portsmouth was not a big place. We’d find each other whether we wanted to or not.

  Ellis held out his hand to the other man. “We’ll talk later, all right, Frank?”

  “Yeah, sure.” There was no enthusiasm in Frank’s answer, or the handshake. Then he walked us back through the shadowy house and out the front door, which he shut on us both. Firmly. That was followed up with the clacking of locks and dead bolts being turned.

  “You have to excuse Frank,” Ellis said. “Dorothy’s death hit him really hard.”

  “That’s not surprising, I guess.” I also backed up as much as the small porch allowed. I needed some breathing space. Ellis Maitland was a tall, broad man, and whether he meant to or not, he loomed. “It sounds like they were really close.”

  “They were, but, you know, there’s mourning and there’s hanging on to the past for no good reason. It’s not like Dorothy was . . .” He stopped and chuckled. “Well, she was a character, right? We all get like that when we pass a certain age, I guess.”

  He was saying this to the house as much as to me. I wrapped my arms around myself. I really wasn’t ready to leave yet. There were too many unanswered questions. They included whether Frank had gone back to looking for stuff that might have gone missing, like the wand from his aunt’s altar. Abruptly and ridiculously, I wished Alistair was still here. I wanted something to hold on to.

  At the same time, I felt like I owed Frank for what I’d just put him through. The least I could do was get this guy off his porch. There was definitely history there, and not the good kind.

  “I heard Dorothy’s death was very sudden,” I said as I started down the short stone path toward the picket fence and the front gate. “That’d be hard on anybody.”

  “Sure, sure. Of course.” Ellis gestured me through the gate ahead of him. “Dorothy raised Frank, you know, after his mother died. His father did his best, but he was always on the road . . .” There was a sleek black BMW parked at the curb. Ellis paused at the passenger side and drummed his fingers on the roof. “I just wish he could get over feeling guilty about this house.”

  “Why guilty?”

  “He was trying hard to get Dorothy to sell right before she died.”

  “Oh.” I hitched up my purse strap.

  “Yeah. Oh.” Ellis shook his perfectly groomed head. “I’m sure Frank was really worried about all the stairs in the old place. Dorothy was sharp as a new pin—nobody could say she wasn’t—but she was eighty and her balance wasn’t what it used to be. A house like this takes a lot of upkeep, too.” His fingers stopped their drumming. Instead, he brushed at some speck of dust on the glossy black paint job. “Unfortunately, people knew that they were fighting about the house. So when Dorothy did fall, some of them jumped to a set of really shameful conclusions, which hasn’t made things any easier for him.”

  “It’s a reality-show world.” I murmured Sean’s words. “Nobody wants to believe in normal anymore.”

  “Exactly. The most dramatic conclusion has to be the right one.”

  There was one problem. In this case, I happened to know the most dramatic conclusion was right. A murder had been committed. Somebody had stood at the top of those stairs and watched Dorothy die.

  “So,” I said, with what I hoped was a tone of gossipy curiosity. “You think this house really is a solid investment?”

  “Oh, yes. Real estate prices all around Portsmouth have rebounded nicely over the past couple of years.” Ellis Maitland was looking at me thoughtfully, but not in a maybe-we-could-be-friends way like Frank had. This was a maybe-she’s-useful kind of way. “If you’re a friend of Frank’s, maybe you can talk some sense into him. Everybody knows how hard it is to make a newspaper pay, even with a good business plan and a strong Web presence. If this house stays empty, it’ll turn into a real white elephant. Then he’ll either have to sell too fast or he’ll lose the paper, and he’s worked so damn hard.” Ellis shook his head again; then he saw the expression on my face and chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  I wouldn’t bet on it. But I bit my tongue before I said that out loud. Not that Ellis was waiting for me to talk. “You’re thinking, ‘This guy, he’s in real estate. He’s only interested in the money.’ Am I right?”

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  “Don’t bother.” He waved his tanned hand again. He had a chunky gold ring on his pinkie, I noticed, but no wedding band. “I know our reputation. But I really do care about Frank, and about Portsmouth. This town is my home. All my roots are here, and I want to see it thrive. A good source of local news is part of that.” He fished in his pocket for a set of keys and hit the button on the fob. In answer, the BMW beeped and the driver’s side door popped open. “Maybe you could at least find the cat? If Frank knew Alistair was safe in a good home, it might give him what he needs to finally let go.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” This statement had the virtue of being both true and completely noncommittal.

  Ellis had that thoughtful look on his face again. I had the sense of being sized up, and my shoulders stiffened. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again, Miss . . . ?”

  “Britton,” I told him. For a second I debated whether to add the rest of it. Diplomacy and self-preservation said keep quiet. Diplomacy and self-preservation lost. “Annabelle Blessingsound Britton.”

  Ellis’s direct gaze went vague and distant. I could see him scrolling through associations in his mind like he was flicking through his phone’s contacts list. Finally, he had it. “Your family’s from here, too? A”—he looked at me, and this time I got to watch him estimate my age—“grandmother, maybe?”

  “That’s right. Annabelle Mercy Blessingsound.”

  “Well.” A half dozen different emotions chased each other across Ellis Maitland’s face, momentarily overriding his professional pleasantness. “This is some coincidence. My mother will want to know you’re here.”

  “She does. We met yesterday when she stopped by the Pale Ale.” I paused, looking for a properly vague yet leading untruth. “Actually, I was hoping to have a chance to look up some of Grandma B.B.’s old friends while I was in town. Maybe . . .”

  “Well, I don’t know if she and my mother were friends exactly . . . You know how women of that generation can be, especially in a small town. Lots of little rivalries and old grudges.”

  Nice try. I gave Ellis the calmest smile I could manage. “Maybe we can see about making peace.”

  “It’d be a worthwhile effort.” Ellis tapped the BMW’s roof a couple of times, like he was knocking on wood. “I’ll send out some feelers. See what comes back. Glad to have met you, Miss Britton.” While I was still drawing breath to ask my next question, Ellis ducked into his shiny black car and shut the door on me and the rest of the world.

  10

  I WATCHED ELLIS Maitland’s car as it pulled away down Summer Street. Since I didn’t have a high-priced automobile, I just drummed my fingers on my purse. “Well, A.B., doesn’t look like you’re getting out of this mess anytime soon.”

  Because never mind the wand I’d accidentally taken without permission, or the fact that somewhere on the streets of Portsmouth, there was a startled would-be burglar with a recent cat-inflicted injury. Never mind that Grandma B.B. (who still had not called me back) had once lived in Portsmouth and made an enemy of Elizabeth Maitland and never talked about either event. Even put aside Alistair the Spooky Cat. I still really needed to know just how my p
icture came to be on that altar in Dorothy Hawthorne’s attic.

  Dorothy Hawthorne, who I now knew had been murdered.

  About then it sank in that I’d been standing there talking to myself for a long time, and Frank—who’d said he had an interview to get to—hadn’t come out of the house. I tried to tell myself that it was probably a phone interview. Or he might have gone out the back. My shoulder blades tightened, but I didn’t let myself look around. Frank might be watching from the house, and I didn’t need to look guilty for him.

  It occurred to me right then that there was somebody I could talk to—Valerie McDermott. She and Dorothy Hawthorne had been good friends. At least, she said they had. As soon as I thought that, the events of this long, strange day sort of shifted sideways in my head to make room for a new question. I checked the time on my phone and saw it was nearly five o’clock. I hit Martine’s number even though I knew she would be in the middle of getting ready to reopen for dinner. I also walked a discreet distance up the block, just in case Frank Hawthorne really was watching.

  “Busy here, Britton,” Martine answered briskly after the fourth ring. In the background I could hear a kitchen’s worth of shouts and clatter.

  “I know, I know. Sorry. I just . . . why’d you pick McDermott’s for me?”

  “Why? Something wrong with the beds?”

  “No. Nothing. It’s great. Just . . . why McDermott’s?”

  Martine’s sigh was sharp and short. “I told you. Val’s a friend, and she’s fighting to keep the place running. You know how it goes. So I was pretty sure there’d be room for you on zero notice.”