The Lamorna Wink

by Martha Grimes

“Seventeen. He’s a magician. Amateur, but pretty good, I think.”

  “No kidding?”

  Plant nodded. “He loves gambling. Not that he can get into it much in Bletchley. But you know what he wants to do? Go to Las Vegas. That’s what he wants. I guess for somebody like that, Las Vegas is the Promised Land. He wants to go to the Mirage and see Siegfried and Roy.”

  “Don’t think I know the lads.”

  “No. Well, you don’t know much about the States.”

  “Does not knowing Siegfried and Roy constitute not knowing much about the States?”

  “Everybody knows them. They’re the magicians with the white tigers. They can make an elephant disappear. They can make anything disappear.” Melrose looked up at the ceiling. “Except Agatha.”

  “An elephant? Jesus. How do they do that?”

  “Well, they don’t, do they? Charlie told me you obviously begin with the premise that they don’t do it. If you accept that premise-and it’s amazing how often people really don’t-you go on with that in mind. It’s mirrors, or something. I didn’t really understand-” Melrose stopped abruptly, thinking.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Why didn’t we do that with Johnny?”

  “What?”

  “Accept the premise that his aunt wouldn’t go off without word to him? And if we accept it-well, it means she did leave word-a note-or she told somebody else.”

  Jury sat up. “The disappearance was all staging.” He shut his eyes and leaned his head back. “Siegfried and Roy.” He sighed. “We could use a little magic.”

  52

  He wished he’d got some exploding cigarettes from Charlie. But with his luck one would go off in Brenda’s face and she’d shoot him.

  A cigarette was what she wanted, and he found a pack in the pocket of Chris’s blue wraparound apron, the gardening one. Chris wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but the apron pocket was safe enough. He never did any gardening. “A putter about” was the way Chris referred to digging on her hands and knees.

  She had stood in the kitchen with the gun in her hand, watching him crush all the meringues and toss the crumbs in the sink and wash them down the drain.

  Now they were seated in the living room. Instead of the green baize-covered table for performing card tricks, he’d chosen the trunk in the alcove, with Brenda across the room in Chris’s favorite overstuffed chair. Johnny motioned toward the gun Brenda had placed on the gateleg table by the chair and which, he knew, she could retrieve in far less time than it would take him to lunge for it. “What’re you going to do?” he asked.

  She did not so much exhale smoke as let it slowly escape through her slightly open mouth. It made Johnny think of ectoplasm. “I don’t know, do I, sweetheart? I may have to leave Bletchley, and that might mean taking you with me.”

  He tried to hide his anxiety and was grateful for the time he’d spent in perfecting a poker face and the attention he’d paid to body language, his own and that of others. His own he had under control. And he had trained himself to notice the tiny “tells” that give people away. Others didn’t have themselves under control unless they were also in the business of not-giving-away-police, for instance. That detective, Macalvie, would have made a good magician.

  “What are you thinking about?” Brenda frowned.

  He didn’t answer immediately. Silence, Johnny had found, could be a formidable weapon. After a few more beats of it he said, simply, “Nothing.”

  She smoked and watched him. “You’ve very cool, sweetheart. You know that, I guess. Quite amazing for someone your age. Quite stunning.”

  He didn’t comment. She wanted him to ask questions. He could tell that in order for her to maintain her belief in her control over this little tableau, she needed him to appear the one without the answers. Thus, if he did ask a question, it would be innocuous. He would not ask her again about Chris. Whatever had happened to Chris, that was Brenda’s ace in the hole with him. It could be dangerous to thwart her, but he had to try every trick in the book to get himself out of this. He picked up the deck of cards he’d left on the table hours ago-a lifetime ago, a childhood ago. He held the deck up. “Mind?”

  “Yes.” She picked up the gun.

  He set the cards down. “Why?”

  “Because you want to. I don’t trust you, sweetheart. You’re up to something.” Her smile seemed to snag on an unhappy memory.

  Briefly, he laughed. “A pack of cards wouldn’t stop a gun.”

  Surprisingly, she found that amusing and laughed, too.

  Johnny wondered what she really thought of him right now. He knew how much she had always liked him, and he felt sad. Even now, and her over there with a gun she just might use, even now it saddened him. But this feeling he could box off until it was safe. That she did like him so much was in his favor because it left her more vulnerable.

  She said, “Oh, go ahead,” and sighed as if he were an obstreperous child. “Show us a trick, why don’t you?”

  He took up the deck, feeling for the slick card, shuffled it, fanned the cards out in a half-moon, swept them up again, shuffled again. None of that made the slightest bit of difference to a trick, but it gave him a few seconds to think. That was what he needed, time to think while appearing to be concentrating on the cards. He could do one slick card trick after another without thinking about the tricks themselves. He saw the pack of cigarettes she’d put down on the coffee table and looked around the room and spotted an ashtray he’d missed earlier. He said, “Mind if I get a cigarette?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “And that ashtray over there?”

  Holding the gun, she brought the ashtray and picked the cigarettes up with the same hand. The gun never faltered. “Just when did you start smoking?”

  His answer was a smile. “Thanks.” Her eyes were on his movements as he took out a cigarette. “Match? Or there’s a lighter in that desk drawer. Charlie left it.”

  Her smile was rueful. “Now why would you want me to go and get the lighter when there’s a book of matches right inside this.” She turned over the pack of cigarettes to show the matches nestled inside the cellophane.

  It was a wonderful fact of human behavior and the mainstay of magic: distraction. Make them look at what is completely irrelevant and they’ll miss what’s right under their noses. It worked every time. Brenda thought she was being so careful-the cigarettes, the ashtray, the drawer, the “don’t-moves”-but she was missing the whole thing.

  Johnny lit a cigarette, pulled the astray closer. It was quite heavy, he knew. “While you’re here, pick a card.” He held out the cards, the slick card as usual in the middle. He didn’t think she’d reach for one, not that it mattered, but she did. Then withdrew her hand before she’d taken one.

  “I don’t think so.” She backed away and found the chair she’d been sitting in.

  He squared the deck, tapped it a couple of times, and fanned out the cards again. His movements were so smooth you could have skated on them. That, of course, was what did it. The card, except to be turned over, had never really moved. It was dexterity, all dexterity.

  Brenda had lighted one cigarette from another and stubbed out the first. “I’ve seen you do that a dozen times and still don’t see how.”

  With the cards he took a few steps toward her. She snatched up the gun. “Uh-uh. Stay back. I told you. I don’t trust you.”

  Back was where he wanted to be, which is why he’d moved forward. “Okay, something more elaborate. But I’ll have to get the props out of a drawer in that sideboard.” He started toward it.

  “Johnny. I’m not stupid.” The gun gestured him back.

  He stepped back into the alcove, this time a bit farther to the right. “Another card trick then. But I don’t know if you can see this from that distance.”

  “I’ve got good eyes.”

  “Watch.”

  53

  Sleep, he knew, would elude him, so he sat in the library and read one of Polly Praed
’s thrillers. He didn’t like it at all but felt compelled to read a book written by a friend. The trouble was, Polly had published so many of them he could spend all his reading life trying to beat the detective to the denouement, which he never did, because he couldn’t sort out the puzzle, much less the solution. The one now in his hands had a plot that had lost him somewhere in a Wales wilderness, the mise-en-sce‘ne (one of Polly’s favorite phrases) having shifted from Aruba to Wales. Melrose imagined the only thing that could move one from Aruba to Swansea would be a gun at one’s back, as was the case here. He hoped the hero would be riddled, he was so boring. The hero should have sent him straightaway into the arms of Morpheus. But the hero didn’t, nor did the chase scene. Melrose set it aside and picked up his drink, hoping brandy and soda would have a more salubrious effect. It didn’t either.

  So Melrose left the little library and climbed the stairs to the music room, where he could plunge himself into sadness, the sadness that had overcome him last night and whose source seemed to be the history of this house.

  It was not difficult to plunge, given the black sky beyond the long windows and the implacable, repetitious drone of the waves. He thought of Daniel Bletchley’s wonderful, unself-conscious playing and how it had filled the room. His mind on this music, he was looking down, expecting, surely, Nature would indulge him and let the wind whip up a storm of water…

  Something moved down there.

  Because of the angle of the windows, part of the path was cut from his view. But someone, he was certain, was standing or walking down below.

  When the figure came into partial view, he assumed it must be Karen Bletchley. It was a woman, but the hair was not light, not Karen’s; it was dark, the color of mahogany. And suddenly, she looked straight up and straight at him. It was the middle of the night, but the moon glowed like white fire.

  The glass dropped from his hand, splashing brandy down the leg of the immaculate flannel and drowning the top of his shoe.

  He would have known her anywhere.

  Stella.

  PART IV. Stella by Starlight

  54

  Dan.

  Standing down here and looking up at the dimly lit window, seeing a tall man with light hair in the room that held Daniel’s piano and where he wrote his music, of course she thought it was Dan.

  It was easy enough to make the mistake, wasn’t it? No, not really, if there was no music. That alone should have told her. She would have heard the piano. God, if only she had heard it!

  It had seduced her before she’d ever seen him, that music, even though she’d never thought of herself as an ingrained music lover. She listened to it, of course, and liked it. (She was afraid her taste might be somewhat banal.) But music had never affected her like that, never.

  That day she had brought boxes of pastries for a children’s party-the little boy’s birthday-and while she’d been standing in that huge marble and granite foyer, the piano, from somewhere at the top of that magnificent staircase, had started. Thundered, really thundered, making her sway where she stood. The rolls, the flourishes, the arpeggiated chords were so beautiful she had to keep her eyes on the marble floor to keep from doing something really stupid-weeping or something.

  “My husband,” said Karen Bletchley in uninflected tones, by way of explanation, as she tore off the check she’d been writing for the pastry.

  Chris’s mouth went dry as she took it. She knew that Karen Bletchley was looking at her as if she was used to women swooning on her doorstep.

  And was she, Karen, so used to that music, to hearing it, she could define it simply with “my husband”?

  Chris could think of no excuse to linger; she wasn’t much good at the kind of conversation that would allow her to do so, especially with this woman who was so smooth and so cool. Ash-blond hair architecturally cut, as if the face had been born with this hair framing it. But the gray eyes were as opaque as the pottery itself. They had no depth.

  So Chris had left quickly and got in her car, parked thankfully out of range of the front door but not out of range of hearing. With the window rolled down, the music came as vividly as the sound of the waves. How could a person do that? How could a mere man split you open, rearrange everything, heart lungs flesh bone?

  She had rested her forehead on her hands, crossed over the steering wheel. So she was (and it amused her to think this) a goner even before she’d met him. If he’d been the Red Dwarf she’d have followed him to hell. And Dan Bletchley was anything but the Red Dwarf. Was it because she’d romanticized him so completely that she was bound to find him physically beautiful? No. He simply was.

  When she finally met him-by accident, thank God, and alone, thank God again-the same feeling came over her as when she’d heard him playing. She’d come apart again, everything got rearranged again.

  A goner. Then, a double-goner.

  Heart lungs flesh bone.

  The face disappeared from the window-had he seen her?-and Chris looked down at the ground, crunching some gravel around with the toe of her shoe, one of the several habits she had that had made Dan smile and put his arms around her. Chrissie. No one had ever called her that but Charlie. Chrissie.

  “Hey, Chris,” Johnny had said, “hey, Chris, you look weird, you look enthralled you look like you’re in the kingdom of thralldom.”

  Johnny. She should have gone directly to the village, but she had felt compelled to stop here at this house that no one had lived in since the Decorators, an appellation that always made her smile. The house had been standing vacant, but Morris Bletchley didn’t have to sell it and, she suspected, really he couldn’t. He couldn’t turn over the place where his grandchildren had died. Keeping it might mean to him keeping hold of some part of them. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to Morris Bletchley.

  It was what had ended them, of course, ended Chris and Dan. He’d been with her that night and she knew-though he’d never said it because it might seem he was blaming her for being there-that he believed, somehow, it had been his fault.

  Up to then, they had been so buoyant; for that year they had known one another she had felt untethered, not bound to earth. They had been weightless and guiltless. Until the children.

  A door opened and slammed shut in the wind.

  Well, he had seen her.

  Trespasser, she tried on a smile. After midnight; no wonder this man thought it odd somebody was out here, on his property (even if rented), staring at the sea, staring up at the music room.

  Who was he? He, too, was handsome, another reason she might have confused him with Dan. But he was slightly taller, slightly thinner, and looked mad as a hatter.

  55

  He was downstairs and out the back door in a shot.

  She was still standing there; the face that had been turned toward the sea (as if it had comforts to offer beyond the scope of what humans had to offer) was now turned toward him.

  The wind blew her black hair across her pale skin, and he saw how much she looked like her nephew, the coloring a genetic trait, like the straight nose and narrow, squared chin.

  He wondered as he came through the door why that look of happiness had flashed across her face as if light had struck warmth into marble; he wondered now, walking up to her, why the look was just as suddenly withdrawn and she stopped and took root where she stood.

  His feelings were a total muddle. He was genuinely-even rapturously-glad that she was alive, but at the same time was only too aware that he had been, all along, daydreaming about this woman, or about some woman, from the moment he’d set foot in this house. And now it was as if a dream had thickened to flesh and blood, only to mock him.

  His mounting anger surprised him, but he let it mount. Melrose was not a rash person, nor did he make rash judgments, but he was growing angrier by the second over this woman’s nonchalant reappearance and her failure to see she wreaked havoc in people’s lives. How could she simply turn up like this and stand gazing seaward?

  He
knew the anger showed in his clumsy attempt to grab her arm. That she was genuinely shocked and bewildered by his movement was plain. That she had not carelessly mislaid herself was equally plain. He knew that and knew at the same time that when she had seen him so briefly before he turned from the window above, the moonlight on his light hair, she had thought he was Daniel Bletchley. And this was intolerable, but why? It had been clear three days ago when Bletchley spoke of her where his sympathies lay-his heart, his music, his past, but not (the music said) his future. Chris Wells had been the woman Daniel had been with but had never named (despite the fact she would have provided him an alibi).

  If she was anywhere, anywhere as charming as her young nephew-and she was certainly as handsome-Melrose could easily understand why Bletchley had wanted her, and just as easily understood why she had wanted him. All of this went through his mind in the seconds it took him to walk up to her and grab her arm.

  “Where in the hell have you been?”

  Her astonishment robbed her, for a moment, of speech. Then she laughed uncertainly and said, “Who are you?”

  Melrose dropped her arm and felt the spread of a furious, adolescent blush. He smiled and answered, “The Uninvited.”

  The first thing he did was lead her to a telephone so she could call her house. No one answered.

  “Could he be out in his cab? There’s a dispatcher, isn’t there? Try calling there.”

  “Shirley. Yes. But it’s after midnight.”

  “Try anyway.” He stood over her as she placed the call, as if fearing she might disappear again.

  Chris still did not know what was going on, but she took him at his word and made the call to Cornwall Cabs. Shirley was speechless for a few moments, so that Chris had to keep saying Hello, hello.

  Finally, Shirley found her voice and told Chris, Yes, she would make every effort to get hold of Johnny. He’d borrowed one of the cars to go to Seabourne, but that was nearly three hours ago. “But where’ve you been, love? Are you all right? Johnny’s frantic.”