by Lane Stone
Note to self: work on improving sneaky eavesdropping skills.
It took me a beat to decipher the apologetic look Cordy was giving me. Whoa. She thought I was going to leave for them to talk, or strategize, or whatever? I laughed before I could stop myself. That was so not happening. I would have to have a much better reason to leave the lobby unstaffed than to satisfy these people I didn’t even know.
Cordy rested her arm on the reception desk. “This is Margo Bardot. She’s the executive director of the orchestra.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, but Margo, who couldn’t talk, was talking to Bess and didn’t respond. I wondered if I should tell them why Georg Nielsen wasn’t answering his phone but decided against it, not that I could have gotten a word in.
Margo glanced at me and saw I was still standing there. She looked annoyed but continued the call anyway. “Bess,” she said, “It’s Maggie. I wanted to run this by you. We’re dropping Cordy’s dog off at the…” She looked around until she found something with our business name on it. She zeroed in on the logo on my shirt. “The Buckingham Pet Palace.”
Bess must have tried to interrupt because Maggie said, “Wait, let me tell you something first. Yes, I want to hear whatever you have for me, but first let me tell you what I’m about to do. I’m going to call his agent. His,” she repeated in a reverential tone, “and tell him….”
From across the desk I heard Bess Harper yell through the phone, “Maaagggie!”
“Wait! No! You’re right. I’ll call our attorney first! Then I’ll call Maestro Nielsen’s…. Oh, damn, I said his name. Anyway, I’ll call our attorney and then I’ll call his agent and tell him that since the terms of the contract have not been adhered to, we’ve decided he’s in default. Do you agree? After all, our negotiations stipulated the performance of his new work.”
“Noooo!” said the disembodied, but nonetheless clear, voice.
I could not begin to calculate how many hours of meditation Bess Harper was going to need to undo this little exchange.
“Oh, do you want to consult with the board first?” Maggie asked. “Of course, I should have thought of that.”
I couldn’t hear Bess’s answer to that but the look on Maggie’s face, and the fact that she was speechless, told me she was learning that Maestro Georg Nielsen had been murdered. Ignoring my inconvenient presence, she put the call on speaker and held it out to Cordy. “Say that again.”
Bess Harper repeated the news about what had happened to Nielsen on Lewes Beach. I wasn’t breathing; I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The Nick Knightley shoe. When Bess added this in, Cordy took a step back like she had been shoved. Margo Bardot’s eyes widened. Bess wasn’t finished. “You should talk to a woman named Sue Patrick. She knows all about it.”
“Who is Sue Patrick?” Maggie asked Cordy.
The concertmaster and the executive director may have looked in my direction for an answer, but I wasn’t to know since I was tucked away in my office.
Chapter 11
Abby pressed her head against the side of my knee as I sat at my desk. I reached down and twirled her ears. “You’re so pretty,” I said. Mason had done his usual excellent job grooming her with a typical cut for a Standard Schnauzer. Her beard was long, as was the hair on her legs. She pressed against my leg again. Whatever she wanted, I hadn’t yet obeyed. She wore a bandana made from fabric covered with polo ponies in honor of the duke’s visit. “Want to take this off?” I asked her.
She looked at me with those big brown eyes. Yes.
I pulled the bandana over her ears, which were natural, not cropped, and stuck it in my pocket. “Just in case Mason complains.”
I stayed in my office until I heard the double doors open. We have classical music playing in the background during business hours and switch to Elvis at one minute after seven. The volume was kept low enough not to interfere with my eavesdropping on what was going on in Buckingham’s lobby as they made plans to make a statement to the press. Cordy said very little, which made sense. It was my understanding that the business side of the orchestra was the responsibility of Margo, or Maggie, as executive director, and Bess as president of the board, who was still on the phone. When I came out, they hadn’t made much progress in deciding whether or not to cancel the concert. And the bus was still parked across our parking lot.
Lady Anthea came in, followed by a rather tall man with strawberry-blond hair. Mason brought up the rear. He walked around the group and as he passed me on the way down the hall, he mouthed, “You owe me. Big time.”
I was still looking at his retreating back, wondering what had happened during the return drive from the airport, when he turned and looked back. He waited until he caught Lady Anthea’s eye. Then he grinned and gave a little half bow. Mason and Joey had a firmly entrenched tradition of bowing whenever they saw Lady Anthea. She told them that her title didn’t warrant the gesture, but they kept on and now it was like their secret handshake, and made her giggle every time.
As Lady Anthea and her brother approached the desk, Cordy and Maggie retreated to the side of the lobby where our small boutique was located. I smiled at the duke, but he wasn’t looking my way. He squinted as he examined the lobby, then looked over at the two women from the Potomac Symphony Orchestra, not attempting to hide his curiosity. It was fine with me that he hadn’t yet been bowled over by my charms, since now I had a little time for my quandary. I seemed to remember that reaching out to initiate a handshake with royalty, like the queen or a prince, was boorish, but what was the rule for dukes? They were, after all, the highest-ranking hereditary peers. His sister had been entangled in two murder investigations—one that he knew of and one he didn’t—thanks to me. Not to mention the current body count. I figured my reputation was starting as a negative number. I wanted to get this right.
Shelby returned with the Pekingese. “Lady Anthea, let me present Marin Alsop,” she said. She glanced at the duke, who was still scanning the room.
Lady Anthea looked down and said, “Welcome to Buckingham’s. Lovely to meet the first woman conductor of a major symphony orchestra!” She laughed and petted the small dog’s head, then she rose and looked around for her brother, who had wandered off to stand near Cordy and Maggie.
Shelby took advantage of Lady Anthea’s diverted attention to mouth, “Is that him?” as she nodded in the direction of the duke.
I nodded and whispered, “The Duke of Norwall.” Then I grabbed my phone to google my etiquette question but soon had to stop to eavesdrop.
“We have to make a decision!” Margo was saying.
“We don’t have a conductor, so we should cancel and go back to DC now,” Cordy answered, finally adding her two cents and speaking in the direction of the phone in Margo’s hand.
“We may have to,” Bess said. “We can’t bring Daniel Laurent back. He’s the guest conductor for the Bath Symphony Orchestra for the season. I was surprised he accepted the invitation since that’s an amateur orchestra, but he took it because this is their seventieth anniversary year.”
Cordy nodded but didn’t speak.
“Uh, aren’t you Cordy Galligan?” the duke asked her, practically breathless.
Neither woman appeared to have heard him and he took a step back. He clasped his hands in front of his body and seemed okay with waiting to be acknowledged. There was something about the way he stood that made me think of a schoolboy.
Finally, Cordy lifted her head. “We might appear, well, insensitive if we go ahead with the concert.”
“He was one of the most famous conductors in the world,” Margo said. She spoke slowly, like she was hatching a plan. “After this week’s performance, celebrated composer was certain to have been added to his name, too. Perhaps we could perform his piece to honor him.” By the end of the sentence her voice had taken on a dreamy quality. “If only we had a conductor.”
“Ladies,” the duke said, “allow me to introduce myself. I’m Albert Fitzwalter, Duke of Norwall.” He had moved forward and gave a slight bow. Thanks to the way he’d identified himself, he had their attention. “I’m at your service. I shall be happy to be your conductor.”
Lady Anthea lurched forward onto the reception desk. “Sue!” she gasped.
Cordy and Maggie looked around the duke to me, one craned around his right arm and the other around his left. “You’re Sue?” they asked in unison.
Chapter 12
Lady Anthea was whispering something to Shelby and me, across the reception counter. “We have to stop this!”
Cordy and Maggie glanced at the duke, then looked at one another, exasperated and conspiratorial, acquiescing to the reality that they would have to deal with this fan before they could find out what I knew.
“Are you a conductor?” Cordy asked. The skeptical expression on her face said that if he was, it wasn’t with a major symphony orchestra or she would know him—and she didn’t know him.
Maggie examined him with narrowed eyes, then began thumbing her phone at lightning speed, occasionally looking back at the duke. Oh yeah, she was googling him. I didn’t hear anything from Bess and I imagined her dual-tasking on her phone, also checking Albert’s online presence.
“Sue?” Lady Anthea hissed. “Did you hear me?”
Nodding, I whispered, “There’s no way he’s not going to find out about the two murders if he spends time with them.”
She mumbled something that sounded like, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“A double murder is nothing compared to some events that have escaped his notice in the past,” she said, keeping her voice low, “but can we chance it?”
Shelby answered her, “Yeah, we need to stick to our plan to keep him out of town with day trips.”
“He has absolutely no idea what’s involved in conducting an orchestra,” Lady Anthea said.
“He knew who Cordy was, so he must know classical music,” Shelby said.
“I couldn’t have picked her out in a lineup,” I said.
“Of course we know who Cordy Galligan is!” Lady Anthea said.
Maggie’s phone was talking so I turned my attention to that conversation. Bess said, “Thank you, and…”
At the same time Cordy said, “Thank you, but…”
Two very different futures had been laid out. Bess won. “It would be our pleasure to have you as our honorary guest conductor,” she said.
“Why can’t he still be gone all week? The murders should be solved by the night of the performance,” I whispered.
Lady Anthea shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Most of the work is done prior to the concert. He’ll be with them all week.”
Cordy spoke again and we turned our attention to that group. “That’s asking a lot of you,” she said. “I doubt you have time for our daily two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals.” She had emphasized daily like she was writing it in blood. “You’re probably very busy.”
“Not really,” he said.
“Every day,” Cordy added, in case the word daily had a different definition in the United Kingdom.
“That’s perfectly fine,” the duke countered.
My phone pinged, informing me I had a new text message. “This is from John,” I told Shelby and Lady Anthea. “He says Bess is going to make a public statement on Lewes Beach in about half an hour.”
Lady Anthea clutched her pearl necklace. “Are they going to announce that?” She tilted her head toward her brother.
“I’m sure they’ll at least talk about Georg Nielsen’s death!” I said. “Keep him busy and away from Lewes Beach!”
Shelby wagged her head side to side. “He’s still going to find out.”
“We can at least buy a bit of time. When it occurs to him that this could be real work, maybe he’ll change his mind.” Lady Anthea walked over to join her brother.
After introducing herself to Cordy and Maggie, she took him by his arm. “Let’s get you settled in.” She turned him around and he let himself be led in the direction of the door. She called to me over her shoulder, “We dropped his luggage off earlier, so we’ll walk.”
His glance back offered me a couple of seconds to look at him more closely. He did look dog-tired from traveling. Hopefully he would nap like an old dog in the sunshine or Abby on a car trip when she was a puppy. I waved a hand to say goodbye but he was scanning the lobby again and looking down the hallway, and didn’t see me.
His departure took care of one of my problems, although only temporarily. It was just a matter of time before Maggie and Cordy, who were still in the lobby, whispering over in the corner, remembered Bess’s advice to talk to me about the murders. I hadn’t thought about the attack in hours, and now I realized how I’d compartmentalized the murders in one part of my brain, and the man’s hand holding my head underwater in another. Nielsen’s and Knightley’s murders I could talk about, but the attack on me was marked, Danger, Do Not Enter. “Shelby, I don’t want to talk to them.”
“Maybe go to that,” she said, pointing to a side door with a raised eyebrow.
* * * *
I grabbed a sweatshirt, my car keys and handbag, and blew Abby a kiss before slipping out one of our side doors into a playground filled with a pack of puppies supervised by Taylor Dalton. The young woman usually worked as a nighttime hostess taking care of boarding dogs, but had started picking up extra hours as a nanny, which is an employee in charge of the puppy playroom.
Turns out the stealth wasn’t needed, because by the time I chatted a few minutes with Taylor and got to my Jeep, the orchestra’s black bus was on Village Main Boulevard. Its turn signal did its job and indicated it would be making a left onto Savannah Road, the direction of downtown Lewes. Cordy and Maggie must have exited the lobby right after I had. Two cars separated me from the bus as we drove along the two-lane road. During the tourist season I inched along, but today we could drive at the speed limit, which started at thirty-five and decreased in seriously enforced increments as we neared the downtown historic district. They might have been headed to their hotel or to the beach, or a lot of other destinations. I had never thought about what musicians did when they weren’t on stage. Lady Anthea could have filled me in. My phone rang and the screen on the dash said it was her. “Hi!” I said. “What do musicians do in the daytime?”
“What?”
“I’m following the orchestra’s bus and I was trying to guess where they’re going.”
“They could be going to rehearsal,” she suggested. “Do you know where that will be?”
“No idea. We’re still on Savannah Road and we’ve passed all the hotels and the streets that lead to them, so if they are staying in Lewes, they’re not going to their hotel. One possibility is the press conference Bess Harper is holding on the beach. Or they could be going to her house.”
“All of them?” she asked.
“It’s a big house,” I said. “I just got my answer. They drove into the parking lot at Lewes Beach.”
The driver stopped the bus diagonally across several parking spaces in the row nearest the sand. I parked as far away from it as possible, at the street entrance, and continued my narration. “They’re all getting out.”
“My brother is asleep. I walked back to Buckingham’s. I’ll get Mason or Joey to bring me to the beach. I’d love to hear what they say.” The Prius we use for door-to-door service for pet parents who chose to have their dogs picked up and dropped off was available, but Lady Anthea’s driving would have to get a lot better before I could make that offer. “Wait, I believe Shelby needs to talk to you.”
I watched as the musicians filed off the bus. Margo, her phone to her ear, was first, followed by Cordy. The group congregated, circling Cordy, and seemed to be waiting for instruct
ions from her. Finally, the driver disembarked, hauling some odd-shaped aluminum equipment. He went to stand behind Cordy, never taking his eyes off her.
In the background I heard Shelby say, “Lady Anthea, I have a question for you. I have Bess Harper on the other line. She wants to talk to your brother. What should I tell her?”
“No!” I yelled.
“Tell her he’s resting and is not to be disturbed,” Lady Anthea told Shelby. Then I heard her say, “Mason, would you take me to the beach?”
“Why? Going surfing with Sue?”
She laughed, and I imagined her tapping her pearl choker, a gesture now familiar to us.
“Ahhh!” I jumped and tossed my cell phone into the back seat. John had rapped on my car door. “You scared me to death!” I said as I got out. When I retrieved the phone I saw Lady Anthea had already hung up.
John and I swung around at the sound of a car. The BMW driving from Bayview Avenue had a large, loud engine. Parking in a space by the entrance to the lot no longer seemed like a good idea. He pushed me behind his back and against the Jeep. The car made a sharp right turn onto Savannah Road, skidding, almost fishtailing, in the sand that coated the beach parking lot.
“Was that Bess Harper?” I asked from behind his shoulder. “She drives a white Beemer.” He was pressing against me one second and gone the next. With fluid and powerful movements, he ran to his car, taking the Lord’s name in vain a couple of times on his way. He folded his tall frame behind the wheel and was gone. From the crook of his neck I knew he was calling other officers. The sound of his siren traveled up the street and stopped within seconds when he pulled the car over. The BMW driver was toast.
I looked over at the orchestra and realized if Bess had called Buckingham’s looking for the duke, I should make myself scarce in case Maggie Bardot got the idea I could serve him up. I climbed back in the Jeep.
Meanwhile, Maggie and the bus driver were scouting spots to set up for the press conference. He lugged the metal contraption to one spot and then to another, impassively doing her bidding. The height of his load made it cumbersome, especially walking in the sand, and he didn’t seem a fit man, but his face was a blank. Ten or so paces onto the beach was considered and rejected. The two trudged back in the direction of the parking lot, but Maggie stopped in front of a white wooden bench, halting him with a hand outstretched to her side. They had a winner. The contraption turned out to be two metal sculptures of music notes. He unfolded each one once and then again. Including the stands, they stood six feet tall when he finished. He placed one on each side of the bench. Now and then a musician glanced over to check their progress. As frenetic as Maggie was, they were serene.