MURDER at CRAWFORD HOUSE (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 3)

by Leslie Leigh

  "You up for a show?" asked Allie.

  "Anytime, sister."

  #

  "Oh God, oh...oh no!" Del's voice increased in volume and intensity. "It's happening again! Somebody help! Help!"

  "Good," whispered Allie, "more. Louder."

  Del took direction well. "Someone!"

  "Somebody, help!" yelled Allie.

  Larry Gordon came running in first, his face a mask of panic. "What is it?"

  "It's happening again!" said Del.

  "What is it? What's happening?"

  "We need more people!" cried Allie. "Get everyone in here! She's having a traumatic flashback."

  "Oh no!" cried Del. "They're coming! I know it!"

  "What is this?" said Larry.

  Allie spoke quickly and with authority. "Years ago, a couple of years after we graduated, Del was involved in a mild fender bender with a teenaged boy who was drinking and driving his father's car without a license. He was thrown in juvie hall. His friends vowed revenge against Del. They showed up at one of her performances and booed her off the stage."

  Larry looked puzzled. "Is that it?"

  "Oh my...here they come! Help!"

  "Look at her!" screamed Allie. "Does this look insignificant? The incident was obviously traumatizing. In times of great stress, the stress acts as a trigger and brings back the horror of that one performance."

  Del looked at Larry, her face twisted with horror. "Are they here? They’re here, aren’t they? You have to help."

  "We need more people in here. She needs to see the faces of old friends. Get everyone in here!"

  Larry ran out of the room to summon the rest of the guests.

  "Doing great," Allie whispered.

  "So are you," returned her friend. "But I swear to God, if you upstage me—"

  Allie shushed her. Larry was returning. Molly, Jürgen, and Rachel were following close behind.

  "...a sort of post-traumatic episode," Larry was saying. "She needs to see friendly faces."

  "The lights!" cried Del. "They’re so bright! So many teenaged boys!" Her face was beet red, and real tears began to flow. Allie was decidedly impressed.

  Allie waved her arms. "Everyone gather round. Smile. She needs to see smiles."

  The group did as she instructed. Allie smiled too. Del looked up at them, sniffling, her eyes puffy and wet, and looked as though she was trying to smile back.

  "Are you all real?" Del said.

  "We're real, sweetheart," said Jürgen.

  Del threw her head back. "The lights! They're burning my face off!"

  "She thinks they're spotlights," Allie said softly. She pointed to the ceiling. "Larry, shut these off."

  "That's my cue! Help! I can’t remember my lines!"

  "How long does this usually last?" asked Rachel Forrester.

  "I don’t know," said Allie. "Could be minutes, could be hours."

  "Hours?"

  "The times I've seen it, it's only lasted about fifteen minutes."

  "Well what are we supposed to do?" said Molly.

  "The lights!"

  "For Heaven's sake, Larry! Shut those lights!"

  Larry darkened the room. The clouded sun cast a gloomy set of shadows across the floor and on everyone's faces.

  Del's voice became a panicked rasp. "Where is everyone? Do you hear them? Teenage boys! So cruel! So very, very cruel!"

  "It's ok," said Jürgen. "We're your friends here. Nobody is heckling you."

  "Heckling me? Heckling me! I hear them! Yes! Oh, someone make it stop!"

  "I've never seen it this bad," said Allie. "She's got medicine for this upstairs, but she needs it prepared."

  "Prepared?" said Larry.

  "It's a tincture. You add it to boiling water."

  "Boiling!" cried Del. "My legs! They’re boiling hot! I see flames!"

  "I'll get her medicine and prepare the tincture," said Allie. "And I'll get her a cold compress while I'm at it. But I need you all to stay with her. Promise me you'll stay."

  "Stay! Stay! Don’t walk out on me! The boys! The boys!"

  "We're here," said Larry.

  Allie stood up and was about to walk off, when she turned around and said, "This is going to sound odd, but does anyone here know 'American Pie'?"

  "The song?" said Rachel.

  "Yes. It's Del's favorite. If you all sing it quietly to her, it will soothe her. I've actually done it before. It will help, trust me."

  The group looked at one another. It was Jürgen who began the chorus, in his shrill, trumpet voice. "Byyyye, byeeee..."

  The rest joined in reluctantly.

  "Yes!" cried Del. "You're drowning them out! Keep singing!"

  Allie had a lot of trouble keeping it together. She put a hand over her mouth as she padded away quickly.

  As she made her way toward the garden, she heard Del exclaim, "Keep singing! They're here! They're shouting! Sing louder!"

  She got to the kitchen and nearly collapsed in a paroxysm of laughter. Stress did this to Allie Griffin. She wasn't proud of it. But it really was genuinely funny.

  But now was time for grim business. Her laughter died away quickly, was choked away as she contemplated the task ahead of her.

  And she entered the greenhouse and turned on her cell phone flashlight.

  PART III

  1.

  "So what did you get?" asked Del.

  "That was amazing, by the way."

  "Piece of cake. I've had tougher roles and worse audiences."

  Once Allie had returned, and Del was sitting up, smiling, tearfully stroking the faces of those who'd surrounded and serenaded her, she took her friend by the arm and led her up to their room – under the pretense that she'd searched both women's luggage and their room thoroughly and had come to the conclusion that they'd forgotten to bring Del's mystery medication— declaring that bed rest was best for the time being.

  "At any rate, I get to stay in bed for the rest of the day, so there's that. So?"

  "So what?"

  Del grunted impatiently. "What did you get?"

  "Oh my! Yes! I got a notebook." She produced a pocket-sized notebook, complete with an elastic band to keep it shut and a miniature pen slipped into a leather sheath on the spine.

  "Was Brother Al a journalist or something? What gives?"

  "I thumbed through it real quick when I was down there. Best I could tell, it's mostly just reminders and little things like appointments and grocery lists. But I still have to go through it completely. A guy who writes things down this meticulously does so for one of two reasons: either he's obsessive-compulsive or he has a bad memory. I saw the way Brother Al undid his snowshoes: one at a time and very methodically. One by one he placed them against the house, straight and sturdy and neat. I also watched him a little during breakfast. He stirred his coffee for just a few seconds too long and there wasn't even any sugar in it, just cream. When someone left the cover off the sugar bowl, he lifted it and placed it back on. It was very natural for him to do all these things. I'm going with obsessive-compulsive, and that's good because it means he's thorough, if nothing else."

  "You're thorough if nothing else," said Del.

  "Thank you, darling. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to sit in my thinking spot, and you need to get some rest to recover from your episode."

  Del closed her eyes and Allie took a seat by the windows to thumb through Brother Al's journal.

  She had been right. The man wrote down everything. He had notes for appointments, grocery lists, and assorted jottings, but there were also quick notes there about things people had told him, meals he'd had, how many miles he'd walked. Some of it was poetic and descriptive, and some of it was bland and rudimentary. Allie felt a tinge of sadness as she came to realize that she held in her hands the wisps of someone's life, now gone.

  But here now was something odd. All this meticulousness, all the most careful documentation of every last bit of minutia in Brother Al's life, and here was a page torn o
ut.

  What should have contained Brother Al's last entry was missing.

  She went back downstairs and crept toward the drawing room. Everyone seemed to be gathered here still. That was one thing about a place where a dead body lay: people tended to avoid it. Feeling emboldened by this fact, she crept back toward the greenhouse.

  She put herself in the shoes of the killer, coming across the result of his or her work. Seeing Brother Al's body lying just inside the door now made her shudder. There was something about the isolation of it that tugged at her. So here she was, the killer, having just removed a vital piece of evidence from the body. Hide it in the greenhouse? No. The killer would want to get it as far away from the body as possible, but not so far as to take him or her so completely out of the way as to appear conspicuously absent. And expedience was key. The longer you hold on to a piece of evidence, the greater the risk you take. So, where would she herself stash a piece of paper torn from a pocket-sized journal?

  The closest room to the greenhouse was the library. She crept in and looked around.

  Come on Allie, think. She chewed her bottom lip. She turned over an ashtray on a table beside a red leather chair. Nothing. She went to the shelves and ran her fingers along the spines. She loved this feeling. How could she not? She loved books. It was like running one's fingers along the cheek of a loved one.

  Don’t get caught up in the titles, she told herself with some amusement. You’re not here to browse.

  Several framed paintings adorned the walls. She recognized one: one of Monet's studies of water lilies. But it wasn't that one that interested her. It was the one next to it. An obscure painting, tiny compared to the Monet. It was of a woman gazing out the window of a Victorian-era house. It would seem out of place here were it not for the color scheme, which harmonized beautifully with the Monet piece. True, it was Victorian-era, as was the house it hung in. But it looked odd. Looking closely at it, she saw why.

  It had been matted to fit the frame. And the painting was sunk ever so slightly within the borders of the matting. Looking even more closely, the light patina of dust that normally accumulates around the frames of paintings that have hung for a while was there, but it looked as though it had been partially wiped away by fingers. She ran her own finger alongside one of the marks. There seemed to be no difference between this new mark and the ones that were already there, indicating that the old ones were made recently, with not enough time for a new layer of dust to accumulate.

  Her heart pounding, she lifted the painting off the wall and turned it over. She undid the latches carefully and lifted off the backing.

  A tiny piece of folded paper fell to the floor.

  Trembling still, she replaced the back of the picture and hung it up again, just as hastily as the person who'd disturbed it before her must have done.

  Picking up the paper, she recognized it immediately as the torn page from Brother Al's journal. She pocketed it and went back to her nice, safe room.

  #

  There were three entries. The first couple of letters from each entry were re-drawn, indicating that they had been drawn at three different times. She herself had experienced that when using a favorite pen over and over again in a diary. The ink of certain inexpensive pens – or novelty pens such as the one used with Brother Al's journal, tends to dry in between usages. You have to scribble a bit to get them working, or you live with the fact that all the first couple of letters in a new entry are going to be broken. Knowing Brother Al as she did now, she knew he would have obviously felt the need to go over the unfinished letters.

  The entire page read thusly:

  Death at Crwfrd Met Allie Griffin Thnksmthngwrng.

  Spk w/L

  Htrd 4 hm.

  Hrtattk? Or psn?

  This was indeed strange. Every other entry in the journal had been written out in longhand; even characters, full punctuation, no omission of letters. This page before her, Brother Al's last entry, was written with a shaking hand, as if scribbled in haste and with an eye toward concealment. She now had a code on her hands.

  The first entry was easy: Death at Crawford House. Met Allie Griffin. Think something wrong. The latter sentence was either his sensing something was wrong – i.e. out of the ordinary – or his sensing that she thought there was something wrong.

  The second entry was difficult. She got, Spoke with L– Larry. But the rest was a jumble. What was Ht? Heart attack? And rd? And then 4 hm. For him? Maybe.

  She studied the characters, written quickly, shakily. Even when done so, the writer's OCD still overpowered him to control certain aspects of the entries, such as the re-drawn letters. But here was something written so quickly that one aspect of it escaped his meticulous attention: The space in between words.

  Brother Al tended to write very neatly and evenly spaced. The space between Ht and rd looked a little different than the rest of the spaces between words. So Allie put them together. Htrd.

  Hatred.

  For him.

  She reread the third entry. Hrtattk? Or psn? The missing vowels virtually jumped out at her: Heart attack? Or poison?

  One thing was certain. Brother Al died in much the same manner as Bertie. Likely by the same hand and with the same type of weapon: poison.

  Another thing was certain: She had to confront Larry Gordon once again.

  2.

  Larry Gordon was the textbook example of a nervous man. He sat in one of the library's red leather chairs, and Allie sat across from him. She watched the man constantly trying to keep his mouth from drying by sipping compulsively from a tumbler of water in one hand, while the other hand drummed on his lap. He fidgeted and shifted in his seat, he kept looking out for other people to come walking in, and he spoke in hushed tones and his eyes darted around the room.

  "I don’t need this. I don't need it and I don’t want it."

  Allie had just finished telling him about what she suspected. She hadn’t named names. She merely hinted that she was sure that someone in the house had murdered both parties.

  "No one needs this, Larry."

  He was silent for a long time. Then he leaned forward, whispering carefully. "I told Brother Al that I suspected my wife of poisoning Bertie."

  She tried to keep herself composed. "Ok."

  He breathed heavily. "I told him I had no evidence. That maybe there was poison somewhere in the house. Then I told him about something I never told you."

  She leaned forward.

  "I said that the argument between Molly and Monsieur Michaud had to do with her taking one of his pots."

  She waited for more, and then said, "Ok."

  "That's it. He said one of his pots was missing and accused her of taking it. A small saucepan."

  "Ok. Did she?"

  Larry shrugged. "Who knows? But I had to defend her. I didn’t want to, but I had to."

  He sat back in his chair and let out a long, hard groan. "I think she used that saucepan to prepare the poison, whatever it was. How she may have administered it I don’t know."

  "Do you have any idea why she would do it? To Bertie I mean."

  The next words he said threw her for a loop. "Bertie was in love with her."

  Allie sat back. "Wow. Wow. That's all I can say."

  "Obviously the feeling wasn't mutual. But I have a feeling he was blackmailing her. He's an odd, eccentric person." He paused, staring at her as if weighing the option of whether to tell her more, and then said, "He was a criminal, technically. Did you know that?"

  "No," Allie lied. She felt awkward about letting people know how soon she had begun investigating Bertie's death, and how far she'd gotten doing it.

  "Well, he was. He told us one night after one too many glasses of wine. The police were keeping an eye on him. He was bringing in antiques from all over the world, many of which were known to have been stolen. He was a sort of middle man, selling the stolen goods and keeping some of the money for his role in the operation."

  "How long ago was it
that he confessed this?"

  "Oh, very recently. I'd say two weeks ago. The next day he called me in a panic, only I was at work so he called Molly. He remembered what he'd told us and begged her not to say anything. They got into it over the phone. All the bad blood between them came out. Molly threatened to call the cops. Bertie completely lost it and said if either one of us told anyone, he'd kill us. I didn’t believe him, and I still don't. But Molly did. And that's the real reason why she was angry at me for inviting him."

  Allie put her head into her hands and sighed. "Oh Larry, why didn’t you just tell me all this in the first place?"

  "Because I wasn't sure. I'm not about to go and accuse my wife of cold-blooded murder right off the bat. I still don’t know if she did it. All I'm saying is that the bad blood was there, and that, in her mind at least, there was a reason to kill him."

  "And Brother Al for looking into it."

  "Precisely."

  "And now me, were she to find out that I was looking into it."

  "I hate to break it to you, but she already knows you’re looking into it. Why do you think she's so hostile toward you?"

  "Well, I'll just have to be careful then. We're stuck here, right? The phones are out. We're stuck until someone can get through. I just have to be careful."

  Larry spoke slowly and deliberately. "Be very careful."

  3.

  "If you were going to hide something, where would you hide it?"

  "You're thinking out loud again," said Del.

  "No, I'm actually asking a question. Where would you hide something?"

  "Alright, I'll play along. It depends on what that something is."

  "Something small. Like a pack of breath mints, or breath strips – you know, the kind that melts on your tongue."

  "Ah, now I get it. We're on the breath mint thing again."

  "Actually, breath strips are better because they're easily resealable and you can access the whole package at once; where with mints, you have to take each one out if you wanted to poison the whole package. Anyway, where would you hide it?"

  "Ok, well, the first choice would be to hide it in plain sight, I guess."