by Mary Daheim
Moody picked up the cigar and finished his drink. “It’s early by my clock. One, one-thirty? I’m usually just getting settled in at the table by now.”
“Maybe you can still find a game,” Judith suggested with what she hoped sounded like enthusiasm. “Oh, by the way—when Dr. Moss drove through last night, did he say anything to you?”
Moody shook his head. “Nope. I knew the poor old guy real well. I always let him cruise right by. Dirty rotten luck, him getting killed. Do they know who did it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Judith said, inching her way to the edge of the chair.
Moody stretched and yawned. “Maybe I will hit the hay. It’s been kind of a rough day, talking to the cops, being extra careful on my shift tonight. In fact, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me on this job since the night Charlie Ward got himself run over.”
“That’s right,” Judith said. “You would have been working at Sunset Cliffs then, too.”
The security guard stood up, his paunch bulging over a wide leather belt with a Longhorn buckle. “That was a mess. Poor Dr. Moss, he found Charlie out there beside the road. Mrs. Burgess was sick, and he’d come tearing over from the hospital to see to her, and about a quarter-mile up the public road by the golf course, there was Charlie, lying in the ditch like a pile of dirty laundry. I never seen Doc so upset.”
“I don’t blame him,” Judith said, also on her feet. “It must have been a shock.”
“It was one damned thing after another,” Moody murmured, swaying slightly. “I always figured it was some drunk coming from one of the taverns on the highway. Some people don’t know when to quit.” He took three steps and tripped over an ottoman.
“Maybe you shouldn’t drive,” Judith said, feeling guilty.
“Maybe I should,” Moody replied, picking himself up. “I sure as hell can’t walk.”
“Please,” Judith begged, “let me call a cab.”
Moody hesitated. “I got a better idea. I’ll get Fergie to come get me. I only live a half-mile from Sunset Cliffs.”
“But he’s on duty,” Judith protested.
“It won’t take fifteen minutes,” Moody insisted.
“Won’t he get in trouble for leaving the gatehouse untended?” Judith asked.
“Naw.” Moody wove his way out of the drawing room. “It’s late, it’s a weeknight, it oughtta be quiet.”
There was no point in arguing. Judith couldn’t wrestle a two-hundred-pound tub into submission. But she did wonder how often the gatehouse guards were derelict in their duty.
After Moody had been picked up by the other guard, Judith went back into the drawing room to empty the ashtray and collect the dirty glasses. The pizza box lay on the floor next to Moody’s chair. Judith was hungry. She decided to warm up the leftover pieces in the kitchen.
Ada Dietz was no longer at work, but Sarah Kenyon was sitting on one of the stools at the counter, drinking a cup of tea.
“You’re up late,” Judith said with a tired smile.
Sarah turned on the stool. “So are you. Don’t tell me you’re keeping a twenty-four-hour vigil now that Nurse Fritz has gotten sick.”
“No, I’m headed for bed after I have a snack. Care for some pizza?” Judith put the highball glasses in the dishwasher, then showed Sarah the box. “Tell me—what does the ‘F’ stand for?”
The housekeeper refused the pizza offer but studied the handwritten letter. “Oh. Is that anchovies?” She saw Judith nod. “Then ‘F’ is the menu code for Fisherman’s Friend. That’s how Bop marks the boxes—a different letter for each pizza type. ‘S’ is Sassy Sausage, ‘P’ is Pepperoni No Baloney, ‘A’ is All There Is and More, which is the works. I forget the rest.”
“What’s ‘M’?” Judith asked.
“Let me think—Mozzarella Bella.”
“There’s only one ‘M’? What about mushrooms?”
“There’s only one kind of pizza for each letter,” Sarah explained, looking somewhat puzzled at Judith’s line of questioning. “The mushroom pizza is something else. Really, I can’t remember them all.”
Judith put the two remaining pizza slices in the microwave. “That’s okay, it’s not important. I was just curious.”
Neither woman spoke while the microwave buzzed off the seconds. Then, as Judith put the pieces on a plate, she asked Sarah why she was keeping such late hours.
“I’ve been busy up until now,” the housekeeper replied. “In fact, I’m not done yet. I still have to pack.”
“Pack?” Judith stared.
Sarah never changed expression. Indeed, now that Judith was watching her closely, she noticed that the housekeeper looked pale, even haggard.
“Yes,” Sarah said in a dull voice, “my father and I are leaving on a six o’clock flight to Boston. There’s not much point in going to bed. It’s going on two already.”
Clumsily, Judith sat down on the other stool. “I don’t understand. Why are you leaving? How can you leave, with the homicide investigation still going on?”
“We’re leaving because we should have left thirty years ago,” Sarah said with bitterness. “We’re not coming back.”
“But…”
“As for how we can leave,” Sarah continued with a tight little smile, “we’re not suspects. My father is too feeble to have killed Dr. Moss, and I have an airtight alibi.”
“You do?” Judith couldn’t stop staring.
Sarah nodded. “Yes. I was upstairs in my room screwing the executive hosiery off of Wayne Burgess.”
Somehow, Judith managed to keep from falling off the stool. It wasn’t the revelation that shocked her so much as Sarah Kenyon’s blunt language. But Sarah wasn’t a blue-blooded aristocrat. She was a middle-class working woman, and despite being penned up in Creepers for most of her life, her job ensured that the outside world would rub off on her.
Or so Judith figured, but she was only partly right.
“It’s late, I’m tired, and I’ve kept up a façade for so long that I can’t stand it,” Sarah declared. “I don’t have to do that anymore. I’m leaving, and I should feel like the most liberated woman on earth. Unfortunately, I feel awful.”
“Why is that?” Judith asked, finally regaining her composure and no longer staring unabashedly at Sarah.
“It’s a long story,” the housekeeper said with a grim smile. “You’ve caught me with my defenses down, but holding everything in doesn’t matter anymore. It all began with my grandfather, Anthony Kenyon. He and my grandmother, Olivia, lived in Sunset Cliffs. They had a house about a mile from here that was known as The Chateau.”
Nibbling pizza, Judith leaned back against the counter and listened to the Kenyon saga. Anthony Kenyon had been a successful banker until the ’29 crash. He had lost everything, and committed suicide with his hunting rifle. Sarah’s father, Edward Kenyon, had been away at Bowdoin College at the time. He had to quit school and come home to help his mother, who had been forced to sell The Chateau and move into an apartment. Not only had Olivia Kenyon’s health declined after her husband’s death, but her mental condition had become unstable. She died exactly six years to the day of her husband’s suicide.
“My father had no brothers or sisters,” Sarah explained, her strong, attractive features looking bleak. “It was the Great Depression, and jobs were hard to find. He found work wherever he could, but it was a hand-to-mouth existence.”
In 1939, Edward married a woman named Frances Anderson, a clerk at the Belle Epoch department store. Despite the hard times that Edward had been through since his father’s death, he and Frances had been shaped by different worlds. Sarah was born in the spring of 1941, but the marriage was already foundering. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Edward joined the navy the next day.
“My father served in some of the most terrible campaigns in the South Pacific,” Sarah said, pouring herself another cup of tea. “He was wounded twice. I hardly ever saw him when I was small, and my mother had to work despite the
fact that she wasn’t in good health.”
When Kenyon was finally discharged in late 1945, he came home to a wife who was suffering from kidney disease and a daughter who was almost school-age. He’d hoped to take advantage of the GI Bill to finish his college education, but Frances’s medical expenses were piling up. She could no longer work, and jobs for veterans were scarce.
“Mom died two days after I started kindergarten,” Sarah recounted. “It was really strange—I’d grown up so far with only my mother, and then I was left with a father I scarcely knew.”
Judith was sympathetic. “The war took a horrible toll, and not just in battle casualties. I don’t think the younger generation has any idea what it was like.”
Sarah nodded agreement. “Anyway, at this point Dad was desperate. You see, he’d always blamed the Burgesses—Maxwell, in particular—for the family’s ruin. In the mid-1920s, my grandfather had made a huge loan to Maxwell Burgess so that Evergreen Timber could buy a vast parcel of forest land up near the Canadian border. Maxwell defaulted on that loan, and it helped bring on our family’s financial disaster. In Dad’s mind, he had not only lost both parents, but the house in which he was raised, his financial security, and a chance for a college education. Consequently, my father went to see Walter Burgess. Maxwell had just died, and his wife had been dead for several years.
“Dad demanded—not asked—that he be given a job,” Sarah continued with a faint smile. “Because of old Mr. Burgess’s death, the family was in the middle of a staff upheaval, and Walter Burgess offered Dad the position of butler. He was insulted at first, but then he set out his conditions. He would accept the job if the salary was double what other butlers were being paid, and if I could live with him at Creepers. To his surprise, Walter agreed. Then Leota stepped in, and said that when it came time for my father to retire, he and I should have the cottage out on the grounds. Mrs. Burgess has a conscience, or at least a sense of justice, I’ll say that for her. The problem was that my father never wanted to retire. He actually likes being a butler. It’s his little joke on the world, bowing and scraping to the nabobs, and knowing inside that he’s as good as they are.”
“Interesting,” Judith murmured, and meant it. People’s stories always fascinated her. “So what convinced your father to give it all up now?”
“Me.” Sarah set her teacup down with emphasis. “I have to get away. Because of Wayne.”
“But I’ve heard that he and Dorothy may be divorcing,” Judith noted.
“It’s not as simple as that.” Sarah sighed. “Wayne and I fell in love when he was twenty-one and I was seventeen. We’d been raised together, and while I wasn’t part of the family, I was part of the household. Do you see the difference? And the affinity?”
Judith did. She could picture the young Sarah joining in the games, sharing the secrets, swimming in the pool, playing on the tennis courts—but never really belonging.
“It wasn’t puppy love,” Sarah asserted. “Wayne had dated a number of girls by then, mostly debutantes his mother presented to him. I’d had a boyfriend when I was sixteen, a fellow I’d met in high school. We were pretty serious for a while. I was old for my age, probably because of never having had a two-parent family or much of a real home.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “And then, one June morning, Wayne came home from college for the summer. It was like I’d never seen him before. He wasn’t a boy, he was a man. He told me later he had a similar reaction—I was all grown up and looked like I’d been waiting for him my whole life.”
Judith smiled softly. “I can practically see it. What happened?”
Sarah’s mouth turned down. “What you’d expect. By the end of the summer, we wanted to get engaged. His parents wouldn’t hear of it. Mrs. Burgess felt rather bad about it, I think, but she held firm with Mr. Burgess. I simply wasn’t suitable.”
“But your family had originally lived in Sunset Cliffs,” Judith pointed out.
“Of course. But I hadn’t, except as a servant’s daughter. I was the granddaughter of a man who committed suicide because he’d been ruined financially. I might have had better luck if I’d been a rollerskating carhop from out on the highway.”
“So Wayne ended up with Dorothy,” Judith remarked.
“Yes, but not right away. Wayne hadn’t finished college, so he went off again in the fall, and I tried to get over him. But when he returned for the holidays, nothing had changed. Nothing ever did, not even after he married Dorothy.” Sarah gave Judith an ironic glance. “Most people would scoff, but you absolutely cannot kill true love. You can stuff it in the closet, lock it in a vault, bury it in the backyard—but it’s still there no matter how many years and how many obstacles keep you apart.”
“I know,” Judith said softly, thinking of the quarter-century without Joe and how time had changed nothing between them. “I know all about that.”
Sarah surveyed Judith with interest. “Yes. Yes, I think you do. Maybe that’s why I’m telling you all this. But what it comes to now, even though Wayne and I have continued our affair off and on for all these years, is that I won’t be part of the reason he and Dorothy end their marriage. I’ve never married, but I consider the union sacred. If I leave Creepers, and five years from now Wayne is free and asks me to marry him, I might consider it. But this is all wrong now. Wayne’s having terrible business problems, Dorothy’s hell-bent on divorce, we’ve had a murder at Creepers—everything’s a mess. Dad is unhappy with my decision, but I won’t leave him behind. He’s so frail, and I’d worry about him constantly. We have distant cousins in Boston, and there’ll be an entire continent between us and this place. We’re going, and that’s it.”
“Does Mrs. Burgess know?” Judith asked.
“No,” Sarah replied, getting up from the stool. “I stopped by her suite earlier this evening, but I just couldn’t work up the nerve to tell her. She’s had a rough time of it lately. Anyway, I’ve left a letter explaining everything. I hate leaving the family in the lurch, but if I give notice and wait for my replacement, I might change my mind. I can’t do that.”
“I understand,” Judith said simply. “I wish you and your father the best of luck. By the way, you mentioned that he came here at a time of staff upheaval. Were all those changes made only because Maxwell Burgess had just died?”
“That’s what I always heard,” Sarah said, looking mildly surprised. “But I was just a little kid when Dad and I moved in.”
“What did you ever hear about Suzette?” Judith asked.
Sarah broke into a grin. “Suzette, the Creepers ghost. She was a nanny to Peggy and Wayne. There was some kind of scandal, I think. They were never sure what it was because they were both so young. In fact, it happened not long before their mother died. You can imagine for kids who were say—three, in Peggy’s case, and Wayne wasn’t yet two—that scandal didn’t mean much to them. In fact, Wayne doesn’t remember his real mother at all. In some ways, I think we were drawn together because we’d both lost our mothers so young.”
“Suzette was French, right?” Judith said, not wanting to get sidetracked.
“French-speaking,” Sarah replied. “She was Haitian.”
Judith recalled the coin. “Was she black?”
“I believe most Haitians are,” Sarah said dryly.
“Yes, of course.” But Judith’s mind had raced ahead. “You don’t know what happened to her?”
“No. The kids used to tell each other terrible tales about her. Voodoo and all that. I used to feel sorry for Beverly, because they were always trying to scare her to death. For all I know, Suzette quit in a huff and went to work for the Boring Airplane Company.”
Judith smiled at the suggestion. But she didn’t believe it.
“I’ve got to pack,” Sarah said. “I feel better. Thanks for hearing me out. Maybe, since I’m about to turn my back on all this, I needed to tell my story.”
“I was glad to listen to it,” Judith said. “I think you’re very brave.”
“Am I?” Sarah gave Judith a half-smile. “Or am I a coward? By the way, that was you and your cousin who came into the game room today, wasn’t it?”
Judith grimaced. “Yes. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was our farewell fling. The rest of the leave-taking is mundane. Now I’ll have to find some suitcases.”
Sarah disappeared into the hall. No doubt she’d find suitcases easily enough, Judith thought. The problem was that Sarah Kenyon was carrying more baggage than one person should bear.
SEVENTEEN
SO MANY THINGS were darting around in Judith’s brain that she thought she’d have trouble getting to sleep. At precisely two A.M. she switched off the bedside lamp and climbed under the covers. Renie was just a mound in the bed, dead to the world. Judith envied her cousin’s ability to sleep so soundly.
The next thing she knew, it was ten minutes after nine. Renie was still a mound in the bed. Hurriedly, Judith got up and headed for the bathroom. After a quick shower, she went into the sitting room and called Joe.
Arlene Rankers answered the phone. “Goodness, Judith,” she said in a breathless voice, “I’m just serving the last batch of guests. Can you call back later?”
“Where’s Joe?” Judith asked.
“Joe?” Arlene said in a voice that sounded as if she’d never heard of him.
“Where did he go?” Judith persisted.
“I’ve no idea,” Arlene said crisply. “Call me back. The scrambled eggs and ham are about to scorch.”
Vexed, Judith clicked off, then dialed her mother’s number. As usual, Gertrude didn’t answer until the ninth ring.
“Where are you now?” her mother demanded in a crabby voice. “Pismo Beach?”
“Of course not, Mother,” Judith said. “Why would I be in Pismo Beach?”
“Because somebody on TV is from there,” Gertrude said illogically. “It sounds like the kind of place you’d go.”
“I’m out in the north end of town,” Judith responded. “Renie and I are staying with friends.”
“That’s dumb,” Gertrude grumbled. “Why would you stay with friends in the north end when you can be with your family in your own house? Or,” she asked, a sly note creeping into her voice, “are you and Lunkhead separated?”