Murder With Puffins

by Donna Andrews

  I came across Mother’s sheet, finally, and double-checked it. The private investigator had his facts correct, as far as I knew. Right address, and the dates she’d stayed on Monhegan seemed consistent with what Mother always related of her vacations on the island. High school and college data correct. And in the center of the report, the beginning and end dates of the two years she’d spent in Paris, living with Aunt Amelia, attending a French lycée, taking art and music lessons, and achieving a level of poise and sophistication I knew, even as a toddler, I’d never match.

  I had sometimes wondered how different Mother’s life (and mine) would be if when she was fifteen Grandfather hadn’t finally given in to her pleas to see Paris. If instead he had, for instance, sent her to stay for a few months on Cousin Bathsheba’s farm, learning to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That first trip to France was undoubtedly the watershed event in Mother’s life.

  So why had the private detective circled it in red? And printed five little exclamation points after it?

  And why had the biographer clipped a Polaroid of Mother to the back of the page—the present-day Mother, stepping off the Monhegan ferry, wearing a scarf I’d given her three months ago?

  I had a bad feeling about this.

  “Michael,” I said.

  “Mmm?” he replied absently. I glanced up. He was lost in the manuscript.

  “The biographer’s style must be improving,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he said, looking up with obvious reluctance.

  “What’s so fascinating? I thought it was a lousy book.”

  “Oh, it is! The writing anyway; but the contents—You’ve got to hear this. Wait a second; let me get back to the beginning of this chapter.

  He flipped back several pages and began reading.

  “‘It was at this formative stage of his life that young Victor Resnick underwent an experience, the impact of which would last for the rest of his life, an experience that, while producing no outward change in his demeanor or his countenance, would nevertheless affect the sensitive young artist in the most profound and permanent fashion imaginable. Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic? Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art? Who can possibly discern …’ Well, you get the idea. It goes on like that for about another page and then Jamie boy finally gets around to dropping a few actual facts. Apparently, young Victor fell in love.”

  “Don’t tell me; I know what’s coming. She told him to get lost.”

  “No, apparently the attraction was mutual.”

  “That’s a little hard to buy.”

  “According to this, young Victor was quite a hunk and a rising star of the art world to boot.”

  “According to the biographer, who we already decided was telling Resnick’s decidedly one-sided version of events.”

  “Well, I suppose,” Michael said, running his finger down the page. “Here we go: ‘She saw beneath his gruff exterior the sensitive artist whose soul had been blighted by calumny and neglect; she alone appreciated not only the force of his artistic genius but also the inner light that he had previously shown only through his brushes, and, bravely scorning the rigid strictures of her upbringing, daringly risking the calumnies and slings and arrows of outraged society that would be flung at her if discovered, she at last surrendered to their mutual passion.’”

  “Ick,” I said. “So she slept with him. I suppose there’s someone for everyone, even Victor Resnick.”

  “And no matter what the boomers may think, sex wasn’t invented with the pill. Anyway, we now have several pages about the progress of the affair, a little light on concrete details, but heavy with descriptions of things heaving and throbbing—the sort of stuff that might be mildly titillating if better written.”

  “Let me see that,” I said, looking over his shoulder.

  “Be my guest,” Michael said. “And if you should find any of it inspirational …”

  “You can forget the rerun of the From Here to Eternity surf scene,” I said as I scanned the text. “It’s vastly overrated, even on a tropical beach.”

  “You know this from experience?”

  “I know this from common sense,” I said. “And do you have any idea how rocky the Monhegan beach is, not to mention the subarctic temperature of the water?”

  “So we won’t be doing Burt and Debbie this trip?”

  “More to the point, I doubt Victor Resnick and his lady love ever did.”

  “We take this passage with a grain of salt, then. Want to bet the writer learned his—or, more likely, her—trade writing romances?”

  “No—most romances are far better written. And most romance writers have a better grasp of reality; that, for example, is anatomically impossible,” I said, pointing to one particularly florid paragraph.

  “Are you sure?” Michael said, quirking one eyebrow.

  “Positive, as I’ll happily demonstrate later. He’s obviously unreliable about the details—probably embroidered them over the years. This only tells us that some poor woman had the bad taste to sleep with Resnick, and he remembers her fondly, perhaps because that kind of thing was a rare event in his life. And then she came to her senses and broke his heart, or, more likely, dented his ego.”

  “It’s a bit more than that,” Michael said. “According to this, she was underage.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” I said, fishing out my Gatorade and opening the bottle. “No woman old enough to have any sense could possibly fall for him. How underage?”

  “Fifteen. Just barely.”

  “He’s scum.”

  “Resnick was twenty-five,” Michael added.

  “Pond scum.”

  “And her parents forced them to part, then packed her off to Paris to get over her broken heart. And then—Meg, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine; you can stop pounding my back,” I said, wheezing, once I’d finally cleared enough Gatorade from my windpipe to speak.

  “You’re not fine; I can tell,” Michael said. “What’s wrong?”

  I handed him the detective’s reports and sat back to cough a little more while he scanned them.

  “Oh, damn,” he said when he got to Mother’s sheaf.

  “He thinks Mother was Victor Resnick’s secret love.”

  “Obviously,” Michael murmured. He picked up the biography again and flipped over a few pages, frowning.

  “It’s ridiculous,” I fumed.

  Michael didn’t say anything, and his eyes remained ostentatiously glued to the manuscript.

  “Okay, it’s not ridiculous; it sounds plausible enough. I certainly don’t believe it, but people would if they heard it. And as long as Victor Resnick was alive, or even if he died of natural causes, the odds are no one would ever publish this travesty. But with his murder, they’re going to want to drag all the skeletons out of his closet.”

  “Including a few that just might belong to your family.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, with me staring at the wall, trying to absorb what I’d read, while Michael continued to read the manuscript.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” he said suddenly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Here,” he said, handing me the manuscript and indicating a paragraph with his finger. “Read this.”

  I tried, but between the biographer’s tangled grammar and his overly florid style, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the passage. Something flowery about a token of love, lost many years ago, that Resnick had sought ever since.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s this token thing anyway? Some kind of locket or something?”

  “Sorry,” Michael said. “It’s a little hard to follow out of context. Back up and start reading a couple of pages sooner.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “Since you’ve already suffered through it, why don’t you give me the gist?”

  “Okay,” Michael said. “The biographer thinks Resnick fathered a
child with his underage girlfriend. And she went to Paris to conceal her pregnancy.”

  “Impossible,” I said.

  “Impossible how?” Michael asked.

  I knew what he meant. Impossible for Resnick to have fathered a child with his girlfriend? No. These things happened, even circa 1950. But impossible for the girlfriend to be Mother? Yes, if you asked me. I remembered all the tales Mother told of her years in Paris—the art and music lessons, the exhibitions, the galleries, the fashion shows, the opera, the ballet, the midnight meals in bistros, the flirtations in cafés. How could even Mother talk so blithely of that time if she’d spent the first nine months of it waiting out an unwanted pregnancy?

  “I still don’t believe it,” I said. “But if he publishes that damned book, someone will believe it. Think of the embarrassment.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Michael said, the corners of his mouth twitching. “I’m not sure your Mother wouldn’t like a wild unsubstantiated rumor that in her youth she was the mistress of a famous artist.”

  “She’d eat it up,” I agreed. “But Dad would be mortified. And the cops would have yet another reason for suspecting him of Resnick’s murder.”

  “True,” Michael said. “Look, it’s freezing out here; can’t we finish reading this inside?”

  “What if someone sees it!” I protested.

  “I’ll pretend it’s a master’s thesis from one of my students,” Michael said. “I won’t let anybody else read it, and I’ll hide it in my suitcase, under the dirty socks, where no one would want to touch it even if they found it.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. “I have to admit, I’m not sure I can take much more of this cold.”

  And is Dad out in this cold? I wondered as we walked back to the house. Or has he hung on to his knapsack, with the chemical hand warmer and the body heat-conserving blanket? Is he curled up warm and dry somewhere? Is he …

  No, I’d worry about that tomorrow.

  When we arrived back in the living room, Rob had disappeared. Michael settled down with the manuscript. I picked up the photo albums and leafed through them until I found the pages that showed Mother and the young Victor Resnick, and brooded over the smiling black-and-white images.

  Mrs. Fenniman appeared occasionally with plates of food, sighed when she saw our third helpings of everything were untouched, and clomped back out into the kitchen without speaking.

  Suddenly, a shower of plaster rained down on our heads. I looked up, to see a large muddy Reebok protruding from the ceiling.

  “Oh damn,” came Rob’s voice from beyond the Reebok.

  “Rob? Are you all right?”

  The Reebok wiggled slightly, dislodging more plaster. I adjusted my plate to make sure my unwanted coleslaw got its fair share of debris.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Do you need any help?” Michael called.

  “No, I’m fine,” Rob answered.

  The Reebok gyrated wildly for a few seconds, then dropped down another six inches and was joined by its mate.

  “Actually, I guess I could use a little help after all,” Rob said.

  Michael and I abandoned our plates, grabbed our flashlights, and climbed upstairs, where, at the end of the hallway, the trapdoor in the ceiling gaped open and a small rickety ladder led up into the attic.

  The attic didn’t have a floor, just a rolling meadow of fluffy pink insulation crisscrossed by the two-by-fours that formed the rafters. Here and there, large flat pieces of plywood placed across the rafters formed storage spaces for boxes and trunks. None of them anywhere near the ladder, unfortunately. Evidently, Rob had stepped on a piece of plywood too light to hold his weight. Both feet disappeared into a rough-edged hole in the plywood, while he lay sprawled backward on the pink insulation.

  “I see you found the jigsaw puzzles,” I remarked. Several cardboard puzzle boxes lay nearby, and Rob lay half covered by the brightly colored pieces of several enormous puzzles.

  “I was looking for something to do,” Rob said. “I saw the puzzles up here when I fetched the photo albums.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t fall through,” Michael said. “You’re in the part of the attic over the living room. It’d be a long way down.”

  Rob shuddered.

  “What’s going on up there?” came Mrs. Fenniman’s voice.

  We extricated Rob from the plywood, helped him back to the trapdoor, and watched as he limped away to be patched up and cosseted by Mrs. Fenniman. Michael was about to follow him, but he turned to see why I wasn’t coming.

  “I’ll be down in a little bit,” I said.

  “You’ve found something?” Michael asked eagerly.

  “No, but it occurs to me that there’s an awful lot of old junk in the attic besides the photo albums,” I said. “I’m just going to poke around for a while and see what turns up.”

  “I’ll go down and guard the manuscript,” Michael said.

  Nothing much turned up in the first dozen boxes I opened. Actually, I’d have found some of the stuff fascinating at another time. Vintage clothes, trinkets, and souvenirs of bygone eras. More photos, this time in boxes. Even letters and diaries. A collection of taxidermy, including a stuffed squirrel wearing a jeweled collar and a wolverine in a Groucho Marx nose and a neon Hawaiian-print shirt. Fascinating stuff, really. But most of it more than fifty years old and none of it relevant.

  At the bottom of the last box I found about a dozen faded brown manila file folders, tied in a packet with some string. I was struggling to untie the knot when I suddenly heard a commotion down in the main part of the house.

  Now what? I thought, tucking the file folders under my arm and carefully walking along the rafters to the trapdoor. I heard Mother’s voice wailing.

  “I don’t believe you; she’s lost, too!”

  I stuck my head down out of the trapdoor. Mother stood at the edge of the upper hallway, one hand clutching the railing, the other pressed to her forehead, and her eyes raised heavenward. Vintage Sarah Bernhardt.

  “How could you let her do it, Michael?” she asked mournfully. “How can you sit there when Meg is out there in the storm, frantically searching for her father?”

  “Because I’m not out there in the storm, Mother,” said. “I’m up here in the attic.”

  Mother turned, looked at me, and blinked.

  “Well, what are you doing in the attic?” she asked in an aggravated tone. “Why aren’t you doing something useful? Looking for your father, for example?”

  I could see her working up to another dramatic scene, and I was tired of the game. I’d been calm, patient, and reassuring the last million times she’d popped out of her room. So by way of a change, while she continued to wail about poor Dad out in the storm, I stuck the folders under my arm, climbed down the ladder, and went downstairs, where I stepped over a pile of croquet mallets, dodged around an upended picnic table, and jerked open the front door.

  A gust of wind burst in, carrying with it a half-crushed lobster pot, sending Rob’s papers flying like giant snowflakes, knocking flowerpots and other breakable objects onto the floor, and spraying showers of rain halfway across the room.

  “Damn it, Meg, close that door!” Rob shouted, snatching at his notes. Mrs. Fenniman and Michael tried to grab as many breakable objects as they could and hold them down. Mother simply sighed and limped back into her room.

  Having presumably made my point about the impossibility of searching for Dad in the middle of a hurricane, I stuck the folders under the umbrella stand, got a better grip on the door, and began forcing it closed. But suddenly, I suddenly noticed something outside.

  There was a body on the porch.

  CHAPTER 16

  Travels with My Puffin

  I let the door crash open again and staggered outside.

  “What the hell are you doing out there?” Rob shouted.

  “Michael, Rob, come here and help,” I said, crouching over the still form on the po
rch. “It’s Aunt Phoebe.”

  Aunt Phoebe moaned slightly at the sound of my voice.

  “Meg?” she whispered.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You’re home.”

  Rob, Michael, and I carried her in and laid her on the sofa. She was soaking wet, her clothes were ripped and filthy, and after the first dozen I gave up counting the cuts and bruises on her face and arms.

  “I’ll get her some clean, dry clothes,” Mrs. Fenniman said, knocking over a stack of plastic lawn chairs on her way to the stairs.

  “Phoebe!” Mother cried, looking down from the balcony. “What’s wrong? Where have you been? Have you seen James?”

  “James? Why, isn’t he here?”

  Mother limped down the stairway and over to the sofa. She sat there patting Aunt Phoebe’s hand and giving the rest of us orders to go and do what we’d already started doing—fetching blankets, clothes, hot tea, the first-aid kit.

  “You boys come out in the kitchen while she changes,” Mrs. Fenniman said.

  “A nip of brandy in this wouldn’t hurt,” Aunt Phoebe said, inhaling the steam from her tea.

  “Good idea,” Mrs. Fenniman said, crashing her way toward the kitchen.

  “And some of that leek and potato soup, while you’re there,” Aunt Phoebe added.

  “And some toast?” Mrs. Fenniman asked.

  “Is there jam left?”

  I relaxed a little. Aunt Phoebe’s injuries couldn’t be that bad if she showed such an interest in food. Rob, Michael, and Mrs. Fenniman clattered about in the kitchen and Mother supervised while I helped Aunt Phoebe change, cleaned her wounds, and wrapped an elastic bandage around her hugely swollen knee. I hoped she hadn’t dislocated it or done something else serious, since we couldn’t possibly get her to the hospital for a day or two.

  “So where have you been all this time?” I asked when Michael and Rob had returned and Aunt Phoebe, under Mrs. Fenniman’s approving eye, was making serious inroads into a six-course banquet.