“Absurd!” Henny trumpeted. “No blood. No evidence of a struggle. And why is he barefoot? I’ll tell you this, Posey, you’re an amusing beggar, but incompetent. Now do you have the gall to tell me you don’t intend to mount a full-scale search for Ingrid Jones?”
Posey ignored her and swiveled back to Ophelia. “Now, ma’am, we’ll be taking your statement and—”
“Posey, old chap,” Henny interrupted.
The circuit solicitor’s bulky shoulders wriggled with irritation. “Mrs. Brawley, go peddle your papers somewhere else. This is a Murder Investigation, and I have my duties.”
“One final query, my good man: Will you order a massive ground search for Ingrid Jones?”
“Of course not. But don’t worry, we’ll catch her. My men will be watching the coast. She won’t escape the law.”
Henny gave a judicious, all-for-the-Empire nod, swung about, and crossed to the latticed arch. She scanned it with a measuring eye, then began to climb, hand over hand. When she stood atop the quivering structure, she loudly announced:
“Calling all concerned citizens. I am hereby creating the Citizens Search for Ingrid Jones. We shall search in the woods, on the beaches, along the creek banks, and in the salt marshes. We shall not flag or fail. Citizens, unite!” And she lifted a clenched fist to the thin shouts of the astonished onlookers.
Annie was overwhelmed. Bulldog Drummond with overtones of the Former Naval Person.
SEVEN
Early Sunday morning
Annie moved restlessly, clinging to the remnants of sleep. Hot. She was damned hot. She crinkled her nose and sniffed. Hmm. Coffee. Bacon. Her nose twitched. Marsh mud in the sun.
Her eyes popped open. She looked up blankly at a dingy swatch of canvas rippling in a breeze. A piece of wood was gouging her in the small of the back, she seemed to be lying in a trough, and this was too narrow to be her bed. A cot, an old-fashioned cot.
Max. The wedding. Their wedding night—Oh, Lordy. It was Sunday morning, the first day of her honeymoon, but Ingrid was missing and their honeymoon would have to wait.
She flung back an Army-issue blanket—no wonder she was hot—struggled to get up, and promptly got hopelessly tangled in a drape of mosquito netting.
Memory returned in a flood. As the night waned, Henny had taken time out from her Bulldog Drummond routine to contact her chief lieutenant on the Broward’s Rock search and Rescue Squad, Madeleine Kurtz. Madeleine arrived with a cheery whoop of encouragement. She had glinty grey eyes, a foghorn voice, and stood a majestic six feet two. Henny and Madeleine set in motion the creation of a tent city. At their direction, Max and Duane unloaded a commandeered truck and laboriously erected on the dusty courtyard of Nightingale Courts what Henny proudly christened “Search Control Center.” Annie phoned until her fingers ached, rousting out the members of the Cha Cha Bowling League, the Professional Women of Broward’s Rock Island, the United Methodist Women, the Audubon Society, the Cultural League, the Triathlon Boosters, the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Association of Broward’s Rock, the Library Society the Broward’s Rock Municipal Hospital Volunteers, St. Francis of Assisi Altar Society, and half a dozen other organizations.
By the time the first mauve of sunrise streaked the eastern horizon, volunteers were arriving. In cars. On bicycles. Afoot. Many carried backpacks with survival gear, field binoculars, and compasses, wore no-nonsense swamp boots and could have passed for members of a Latin militia in their khakis and fatigue caps. Annie had blinked wearily in the daylight and stumbled past the arrivees toward a cot (Women’s Side) in the tent city. As she fell into a deep sleep, she heard searchers receive their instructions as the search got under way.
Now, as she struggled to disengage from the mosquito netting (yes, Virginia, mosquitoes still thrive and multiply and attack in the Lowlands of the Carolinas, and no, they do not carry malaria, according to the Health Department), she realized she was ravenously hungry—and where was her husband of one night?
She looked down at her crumpled cream silk blouse and blue linen skirt and thought ruefully of the elegant grey dress she’d intended to wear today when they traveled. But despite the fact she looked about as attractive as the mangled hairpiece Edmund had carried to his mistress in Charlotte MacLeod’s Something the Cat Dragged In, it was time to locate her new husband (on the Men’s Side, of course) and see how he’d survived what little had remained of their wedding night.
The mosquito netting proved wilier than she. Finally, she dropped to the ground and rolled beneath it, thereby putting the finishing dusty touches to her costume.
She shaded her eyes against the brilliant morning sun. Ingrid would never have recognized Nightingale Courts. Yellow tape marked Cabin 3 as a Crime Scene (DO NOT ENTER). A television crew with minicams clustered around Madeleine, who stood statuesquely on an upended wheel-barrow and gestured vigorously toward the tent city. A long line of search volunteers inched by a field kitchen. So that was the source of those appetizing aromas.
Only the sternest sense of marital duty sent Annie in search of Max rather than directly to the end of the food line.
Wondering what sort of alarm might be raised if she strode boldly into the Men’s Side, she temporized and sidled along the outside, squinting to see through the mosquito netting.
He was in the third cot from the end, sleeping on his back with his arms and legs outflung. Estimating his size, Annie wondered if a queen would be large enough and perhaps she should change the order to a king for their new house. She’d never before thought in terms of permanently sharing a bed.
Max’s cot was the only one still occupied. With a wary look about, she dropped again to the ground, lifted the netting, and rolled under.
Using her hipbone to nudge him over, she perched on the edge of the cot and whispered, “Max. Hey, Max, wake up!”
One dark blue eye reluctantly opened and slowly focused on her. A flash of enthusiasm. An indistinguishable noise deep in his throat and two eager hands.
“Max! This is in public,” she hissed, fending him off.
An expletive, beginning with a letter early in the alphabet, was clearly distinguishable.
“Max!”
They made a disreputable pair as they sat at the end of the pier, throwaway mess plates balanced on their laps. Her blue linen traveling suit was crumpled and dusty, and Max’s trousers were snagged and stained. But their appearance was no more bizarre than that of Nightingale Courts.
From their vantage point, they could see the whole expanse of the inlet, the two cottages on the arm of land opposite, the glittering tin roof of Jerry’s Gas ’N Go, the assorted boats docked at the long piers that thrust through the marshland toward deeper water, the semicircle of cabins, and the huge, beige canvas tent. The tent dominated the courtyard. A milling throng eddied from the command post, a long table covered with maps and telephones, to the mess line.
Max poked unhappily at an extremely limp slice of bacon.
“Pretty good eggs,” she observed.
“Hmmph.” He gnawed disconsolately on toast coated with government-surplus peanut butter.
“The lady dishing up the grits said there would be a general meeting in about fifteen minutes.”
Max stopped gnawing long enough to glance toward the swarm of activity then he glanced toward the sun. Abruptly, he put the crust on his plate and placed the plate on the pier. “Annie—”
“No.” She shook her head decisively. “No, she isn’t dead. Max, she isn’t.” She felt a surge of confidence, a certainty. And she wasn’t just whistling Dixie. She was betting her chips on Henny and Henny’s long immersion in every facet of the mystery, from Dupin to Maigret. “No blood,” Annie said firmly. “No disarray. No body. Max, it wouldn’t make a bit of sense to kill Ingrid and take her body away. Why leave one body and take another?”
He played devil’s advocate. “The fact that she’s missing has convinced Posey she killed Jesse. Maybe that’s what was intended.”
“That won’t wash,” she said firmly. “If she’s never found, who’s going to believe she was guilty? This isn’t the day of Judge Crater. Why, the likelihood that she could escape to the mainland and not be spotted by anybody is just zilch. So, if she’s never found, it will prove she’s innocent, that she was murdered, too. They think the reason Judge Crater wasn’t found was because somebody murdered him. No, Ingrid has been kidnapped for a purpose, and it’s up to us—”
A tiny throat clearing, as delicate as the liquid call of a tree swallow, indicated an end to the honeymooners’ privacy. Laurel smiled winningly down on them.
Max pushed aside his plate and stood. “Mother?”
Annie scrambled to her feet, too, tugging at her wrinkled skirt with one hand and holding her plate with the other. She wondered if his astonishment was at Laurel’s presence (which would never astonish Annie, not here, not in Timbuctoo) or at her costume.
As always, Laurel was radiantly lovely. Her chiseled patrician features were aglow with good health and good cheer; her vividly blue eyes glistened with love for her fellow human beings. (And if those same blue eyes had a slightly spacey air to Annie, she put it down to uncharitableness on her part and quickly thrust the thought away.)
But Laurel’s apparel was unusual, even for a woman who always matched her dress to her mood, with the infinite variety that implied.
A piece of dark brown cord cinched an absolutely plain, oatmeal-colored robe to Laurel’s nineteen-inch waist. Simple leather sandals completed her attire.
No adornments. No jewelry. No scarfs. No hose. Not even a single button.
Annie knew that in a similar get-up, she would be about as alluring as Bertha Cool.
Laurel was stunning.
However, a tiny frown marred that smooth, aristocratic brow. “Maxwell, dear boy,” his mother said hesitantly, “I wouldn’t, of course, interfere in your honeymoon plans in any way. May I say, however—and I’ve enjoyed five honeymoons, my sweet—that I do believe this”—and her spread hand (no rings today) indicated the rackety wooden pier and the exposed mudflats of the salt marsh, steaming beneath the sun—“is carrying rustic simplicity to an extreme.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” her son said fervently.
“Oh, of course, of course. You and dear Annie have interrupted your plans to help search for Ingrid. I understand—and I applaud you both…. However, perhaps you dear children might take time this morning to—uh—freshen up.”
If Annie had felt like Edmund’s bedraggled trophy earlier, she now felt like a skunk-struck inhabitant of Joan Hess’s Malice in Maggody.
“Sometime this morning, maybe. But we have to hang around now for the general meeting.” At Laurel’s look of inquiry, he explained Henny Brawley and Madeleine Kurtz’s formation of the Citizens Search for Ingrid Jones and the mobilization of Broward’s Rock.
“That’s very good.” Her tone was the kind used by an indulgent adult admiring a child’s mud pie.
Max quirked an eyebrow. “What else can we do?”
“I believe a physical search must, of course, be undertaken. But to combat evil requires intense mental concentration, and, of course, those of us who embrace an unlimited view of human achievement have recourse to other and more ethereal means.” She beamed at them. “Ophelia and I have dedicated ourselves to this task—and I have no doubt but that we shall succeed.” That winning smile. “I always succeed.” It was said not with pride but with utter confidence.
It gave Annie the willies. God only knew what Laurel would take it in her head to attempt.
Max scented danger, too. His handsome face looked a little haggard.
“Mother, what are you up to? And how did you get mixed up with that dingbat?”
“My dear, Ophelia is not a dingbat. She is, indeed, a gateway to the beyond. But there’s no time—” From the courtyard came a repeated clang. Annie peered around Max and saw Madeleine’s substantial form now teetering atop the latticed arch, one arm industriously striking a pie tin with a metal spoon. “… for me to entrust you with the many and various avenues to enlightenment available to those who open their minds and hearts to the unseen but vigorous impulses which stream from the universe. In fact, I must rush.” She turned to her daughter-in-law. “Annie, I need a key to the store.”
The leap from the philosophical to the practical was too abrupt for Annie’s earthbound mind. “Uh, what?”
“Death on Demand. Where may I find a key?”
Laurel excelled at non sequiturs. From the universe to the store in one mighty bound—what else was new?
The query reminded Annie that something else was askew. Because Ingrid, of course, had agreed to manage Death on Demand while Annie and Max honeymooned.
“The store!” Max exclaimed. “Annie, what will we do?”
“Keep it closed, I guess. I mean, we can’t worry about that while we’re looking for Ingrid.”
Laurel clapped her hands. “Aha, the fates direct us when we are too blind to see.”
Annie eyed her cautiously. Had it finally happened? Had Laurel’s precarious mental balance tipped?
But her mother-in-law’s smile was serene and blinding. “I’ll take charge of the store. You needn’t give it a thought. It’s the perfect place for Ophelia and me to harness our energies and focus upon Ingrid. Now, Annie, I’m sure Ingrid has some personal effects at the shop. A favorite cup, perhaps? A compact? A sweater?”
Coffee at Death on Demand was served in white pottery mugs inscribed in bright red script with the names of landmark titles in the genre. Ingrid’s favorite was The Clue (the first Fleming Stone book by Carolyn Wells) and she jealously guarded it from use by the G.P. (general public).
A little blankly, Annie offered, “You’ll find Ingrid’s cup in the bottom left-hand drawer behind the cash desk. And she keeps some other personal things in there.”
“Good. Good. And the key to the store?”
Keys. Keys. “Vince Ellis at the Island Gazettes keeping one. I don’t know where Ingrid’s are, and I think mine are in the drawer of the telephone table at the tree house.”
“Vince will be fine. That’s very convenient, since the Gazette offices are so close to the store.” Laurel nodded complacently. “Everything works out for those who seek. That is the first byword of Harmonic Convergence, and the principle I always attempt to impart. Take care, my dears.” The oatmeal-colored robe flared above her trim ankles as she turned.
From the courtyard, Madeleine’s tattoo on the pie tin reached a crescendo.
Max looked at Annie, then after the departing form of his mother. “Laurel,” he called, “where are you going? What are you going to do? And why are you wearing that funny outfit?”
“In the fullness of time,” Laurel caroled reassuringly over her shoulder.
Annie sighed.
* * *
“Hey, Annie, Max, wait up a sec!” The pier quivered as Alan Nichols clambered up the ladder. He was still in navy blue warmups, and his looked slept in, too, but Annie noticed how admirably they molded to his muscular body. After all, she might be married, but she wasn’t blind. Alan’s curly chestnut hair was tangled, and he had shaved hurriedly, nicking his chin, but that didn’t diminish his attractiveness, although he emitted a strong scent of evergreen. Annie had never been enchanted by men who used after-shave. His cheery blue eyes flashed an admiring message at Annie. He was that kind of guy. However, he greeted them dolefully. “Any word?”
Their faces told him.
He reached out and solicitously squeezed Annie’s arm.
Max surveyed Alan with barracuda-like intensity. Just so might Selwyn Jepson’s Billy Bull have eyed James Belsin when he made clear his interest in Eve Gill. Which was somewhat flattering. However, just because she was a married woman didn’t mean every man she met had to treat her like a mother superior! She’d have to have a little talk with old green eyes.
Alan gave her another pat, then smothered a yawn. “I crashed a couple of
hours ago, had to get some sleep. I thought maybe—” He looked past them toward the courtyard, then gaped in astonishment. “What the hell is going on?”
Annie explained. “Henny Brawley—you know her—she runs half the groups on the island, including the Broward’s Rock Search and Rescue Squad. She’s called out her forces and put Madeleine Kurtz in charge of a foot-by-foot search. Come on, I think Madeleine’s going to make some announcements.”
Annie discarded their breakfast plates in a trash bucket and the three of them joined the milling searchers. Madeleine, still balanced atop the arch, opened her address:
“Fellow citizens, greetings on behalf of Henrietta Brawley, director of Broward’s Rock Search and Rescue Squad, and myself, Madeleine Kurtz—” She drew herself to her full height. Annie held her breath, but the arch continued to stand, I am honored to have been chosen by Henny to direct our all-citizen search for Ingrid Jones, who was ruthlessly abducted from her home last night. Promise to give the search my all. Henny regrets she can’t be here in person. Busy investigating murder which occurred last night in Ingrid Jones’s cabin. Henny requests assistance of all citizens. Anyone with any information as to the activities of the victim, Mr. Jesse Penrick, in days preceding his death, should convey that information to Mrs. Brawley post haste.” Her foghorn voice gave a Gothic urgency to her message, investing each phrase with sense of mystery and intrigue. “Even tiniest facts may have untold import. Messages may be left at the command table.”
Annie glanced at the listeners and saw several delving into knapsacks or pockets for writing material. She quirked an eyebrow at Max and whispered, “Henny is about to harvest a gigantic flood of irrelevant information. She’s lost her marbles. This sounds more like Inspector Fox than Bulldog Drummond.”
Max grinned. “Maybe she’s found Bulldog’s heartiness a bit of a strain.”
Honeymoon With Murder Page 5